Poliittinen liberalismi, yksilön oikeudet ja ’hyvä elämä’

Authors

• Sirkku Hellsten

Abstract

The social and economic changes in world affairs have issued new challenges for the liberal political theory as well as for the Western European democracies based on liberal values. The recent economic recession has raised the question of the just distribution of dwindling economic resources. On the other hand, European economic and political integration has raised the questions of multiculturalism and tolerance as well as the problems of arising nationalism. The article shows why the liberal political theory fails to answer these acute social challenges but rather creates more problems on its own. The author argues that when political liberalism, particularly as presented in John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, attempts to give up on teleology and set metaphysics aside, it leads to internal contradictions and nullifies its foundation. Thus, instead of promoting the values of equality, tolerance, and the individual’s moral autonomy, political liberalism can also be used to justify actual social and material inequality, intolerance and moral indifference. Only if political liberalism explicated its implicit perfectionist assumptions about the good life and human potential that is to be actualized in order to reach moral and political autonomy, could it give a normative social ideal and show a direction in solving contemporary social problems.