ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the concept governs moral as well as political judgment. The liberal theorists will be seen to offer a form of moral skepticism. The chapter presents the concept of human nature and experience underlying this form of moral skepticism. The relationship between liberal practice and theory is complex. Philosophic liberalism cuts across the boundaries of various practical political agendas; similarly, the practice of modern liberal politicians is rooted in various political theories. A thin theory is committed only to the notion of persons as framers of a conception of the good life, as loci of arbitrary preferences. Each individual's personal history recapitulates to some extent the culture's history, the rediscovery of the cultural, social, and personal assumptions which give rise to standards of judgment. John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, two of liberalism's most thoughtful and influential contemporary exponents, rely on the notion of institutional neutrality as a basis for liberal theory.
