I MILL: A “COMPREHENSIVE” DEFENSE OF LIBERAL NEUTRALITY?

In an important essay Charles Larmore tells us that

On Larmore's influential reading, Mill defended what we might call first-level neutrality: Millian principles determining justified legal (and, we might add, social) intervention are neutral between competing conceptions of the good life. However, Larmore insists that Millian neutral political principles do not possess second-level neutrality: they do not have a neutral justification. “The problem with Mill's value-based defense of liberalism,” Larmore holds, is that because the value of individuality is “far from uncontroversial,” Mill's case liberalism is open to reasonable objection. In contrast Larmore and, of course, John Rawls, seek to develop a “political liberalism” that defends liberal neutrality without appeal to a “general ‘philosophy of man’ or a ‘comprehensive moral ideal.’” The justification of liberal principles “must be acceptable by reasonable people having different views of the good life, not just those who share, for example, Mill's ideal of the person.” Liberals, argues Larmore, need “a neutral justification of neutrality.”

This chapter challenges this widely accepted view of Mill as presenting a “comprehensive” defense of liberalism, to be sharply contrasted with the “political liberalism” of Larmore and Rawls.