ABSTRACT
This chapter’s topic is political liberalism. Its main thesis is that Contractarianism, as it has been defended thus far, implies a version of political liberalism, namely the view that all the role obligations possessed by the state’s agents are grounded in the state’s purposes. (Importantly, this implies that none of them are grounded in the moral facts.) This is an extremely weak version of political liberalism in virtue of the fact that it lacks a neutrality thesis, whereas neutrality is generally held to be the heart of political liberalism. This version of political liberalism is so weak, in fact, that it gives political perfectionists most of what they want. Having laid out this version of political liberalism, the chapter goes on to explain what’s wrong with political perfectionism. In so doing, it further develops the vision of role morality introduced in earlier chapters, focusing especially on the need for an adequate theory of abuse of office. The latter parts of the chapter introduce and partially answer a longstanding objection to contractarianism: the claim that the theory cannot countenance the idea that the state should secure distributive justice.
