Liberal Neutrality

Andrew Reeve, Robert Goodin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429823541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in 1989 Liberal Neutrality approaches the recommendation of neutrality by confronting the abstract prescription (that we should be neutral) with the implications for particular people and institutions. This not only identifies what neutrality involves logically, but also exposes the practical difficulties that may be encountered in pursuing it. In some cases, such close examination shows that neutrality is not desirable, and in others that it is attainable only within certain limits. Although neutrality has become a fashionable term in political theory, this is the only volume to subject the idea to systematic scrutiny. It will be useful not only to specialists in diverse disciplines – political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, lawyers and educationalists.

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Liberalism and neutrality

Robert E. Goodin and Andrew Reeve

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The discussion of ‘neutrality’ as a – much less the – defining characteristic of liberalism is a fairly recent development. One of our contributors dates it, with a precision that is not altogether spurious, to 1974. Earlier liberals may well have been less concerned to identify the ‘true core’ of liberalism, and they may well have been less expansive on the merits of the notion of neutrality in that regard, than contemporary authors are. Still, liberals have long been keenly aware of something very closely akin to the virtue of neutrality on the part of the police, the judiciary and the military: unless they dispense justice without fear or favour, liberal theory in practice simply does not work.¹ Thus while it is only in the last decade or so that the term has come into particular focus as a general issue, apparently similar notions have long figured largely in recognizably liberal political discourse.

This volume sets out to explore what exactly is involved in the idea of neutrality as it is deployed in liberal political thought. One question addressed, given this background, is whether anything new is being said by those who employ the concept of neutrality, or whether this is simply another example of new wine in old bottles. ‘Neutrality’ may be no more than recent terminology for ideas with a longer pedigree; hence we will naturally need to trace its relations with similar concepts. The essays presented here locate neutrality by reference to ideas like impartiality, even-handedness, absence of bias, equality of treatment, and indifference.

Whether a concern with neutrality is a defining characteristic of liberalism is a question to be addressed shortly. It is, however, undeniable that both critics and defenders of liberalism as a political ideology have focused on neutrality and cognate notions. Those who see neutrality as a virtue have associated it with intellectual honesty in relation to unsettled issues, with tolerance of those with different ideas, with the accommodation of a variety of values or lifestyles, with securing the conditions of intellectual or material progress, and with providing for the equal rights of citizens. Those who have seen the commitment to neutrality as a weakness have claimed that it masks vacillation, the absence of intellectual or political courage, an unwillingness to make hard decisions and difficult choices, an abdication of responsibility, and an indifference to the actual fate of the individuals whom it makes a formal claim to cherish.² This is, no doubt, one reason for John Stuart Mill’s fierce denial that neutrality, at least in the sense of ‘no coercive interference’, was in any way connected with indifference to the faults of individuals, and thus with their well-being.³

I.A

At least some of the disagreement about the value of neutrality results from a pair of connected problems. The first is that ‘neutrality’ can be associated with a number of other concepts which have an evaluative element. As we have seen, two such notions are ‘equal treatment’ and ‘indifference’. Obviously, it would not be surprising if those who relate neutrality to the achievement of equal treatment find it more valuable than those who interpret it as indifference. This problem is exacerbated by the ubiquity of the idea of neutrality. It has been invoked in a variety of contexts, from prescriptions about the proper use of state power, to requirements placed on state officials, to recommendations to scientists, teachers and journalists, to support for the value of market institutions. Both the meaning of neutrality, and the practical consequences of adopting it, may be expected to alter with the context in which it is invoked. As a result, one source of disagreement about the value of neutrality may well be failure to specify this context.

It is therefore helpful, in assessing arguments about neutrality, to ask who or what is to be neutral, and what they are supposed to be neutral about, and what objective their neutrality is supposed to secure. Such a protocol draws attention to a number of important ‘variables’ in the specification of neutrality. It also helps to diagnose the sources of disagreement and the difficulties of conceptual clarity in this area.

Using such a three-part formulation of the notion of neutrality will not only lead to a more precise specification of the context and of why neutrality is thought to matter in that particular area. It will also bring out some other problems.

First, if we look at who or what is supposed to be neutral we shall find the prescription varying over individual agents (for example, a teacher or civil servant), institutions in a conventional sense (for example, the civil service), and networks of practices which involve individuals, institutions, and complexes of social relations (for example, science). Clearly, the senses in which these individuals, agencies and practices can be neutral, and the point of proposing that they are or should be, will need to reflect the different sorts of analysis needed to deal with individual agents, institutions and practices.

Second, although it is obvious that liberal neutrality is directed in some way at the well-being of citizens, the immediate object of neutrality may not be concrete individuals. For example, neutrality towards ideas in education, or neutrality towards interpretations of events in journalism, is not so immediately directed towards individuals as are the requirements of state neutrality. To be sure, the point of the neutrality in question must be some contribution to the quality of citizens’ lives. But equally, the content of the requirements of neutrality must reflect what it is to which neutrality is directed. Again, even if individuals are the direct object of concern, what aspect of their individuality is at issue? Their interests, their welfare, their self-esteem, their rights are all plausible candidates.

Third, the formulation asks what good neutrality is supposed to secure. Here it is worth isolating two issues. In the first place, this formulation presupposes that neutrality is an instrumental value, that it does not have the same status as the goals it is designed to secure. Its value is therefore parasitic on those goals. If the neutrality of a judge is instrumental in securing justice, then it is valuable because just outcomes are valuable. This helps dispel some of the wariness about liberal neutrality that clearly follows from a suspicion that an instrumental (rather than fundamental) value is being put at the centre of the stage.

I.B

This leads to the second issue. Neutrality in different contexts plausibly aims at different goals: truth, progress, and justice are amongst them. The value of neutrality can then be contested for two quite different reasons.

On the one hand, there can be reasonable disagreement about the substantive value served – particularly how valuable it is in the light of other liberal commitments. This point is connected to one of the central features of liberalism, a concern to allow individuals to pursue their own views of the good, to which we shall return shortly. On the other hand the value of neutrality can be contested on the much more empirically grounded claim that, even where it exists as the theory requires, it does not in fact secure the good which it is allegedly (instrumentally) aimed at. This may be because of countervailing considerations in the social system, or because of institutional considerations not properly absorbed into the abstract theory.

II

Let us now turn to the place of neutrality in liberalism. It is notoriously difficult to discuss the content of a political ideology like liberalism. All approaches suffer from some methodological defect.⁴ Nevertheless, since neutrality is at least a candidate for consideration as one of its defining values, especially since both proponents and critics of liberalism give it such emphasis, it is worth asking about its status in relation to liberalism generally.

We have already acknowledged that the present ubiquity of the terminology does not (necessarily) entail any novelty in the ideas presented. It is one objective of this volume to address this issue. We have also argued that neutrality is an instrumental value, rather than a fundamental one; and on the face of it this would seem to defeat its claim to be central to liberalism. It is odd, it might be argued, to regard a ‘second level’ commitment as in any way a defining feature of a political ideology.

But perhaps this argument goes too quickly. First, both the concern to allow individuals to pursue their own view of the good life, mentioned earlier, and a commitment to an open-ended plurality of values suggest that liberalism aims to achieve what individuals value: and while this notoriously leads to difficult judgements and assorted social dilemmas, when values are incommensurate or when one version of the good life clashes with another, it also suggests that the distinctiveness of liberalism is unlikely to be captured by a shortlist of value commitments. Plainly, we shall want to recognize that liberals, both historically and at the present day, value liberty, justice, the welfare of citizens, and so on. But so do many non-liberals. These commitments are not themselves distinctively liberal.⁵

The argument just presented is far from novel. A recognition that the liberal is not necessarily distinctive in the values he or she holds leads easily enough to a ‘second level’ concern: is there something distinctive about the means the liberal favours to secure those goals, or their ranking? Hence essays on liberalism are led to focus on the way in which liberals have thought the goals might be secured. The obvious methodological difficulty of this is that writers who thought of themselves as liberals, or who were perceived by their critics to be so, have not agreed on the best approach. Partly, of course, this reflected their particular historical context. It is not surprising, for example, that threats to freedom were first perceived in oppressive government and religious intolerance, and only more recently in economic organization, private power and public opinion. All this makes a consensus on ‘the best approach’ rather chimerical. Nevertheless, such essays examine a commitment to private property and the market, to individual rights, or to liberty (often by contrast with welfare or equality) in an attempt to locate the distinctiveness of liberalism.⁶

It is not being claimed that neutrality will provide the answer in this search for a second-level commitment which truly reflects the special features of the liberal position. There are good reasons to suppose that that particular holy grail will remain elusive. What is claimed, though, is that whether we start at the first or second level of discussion, we shall quickly run into neutrality in various contexts. In addition, we can see that other candidates for the role of definitive value commitments will bring up issues of neutrality. Let us take these points in turn.

If we start from value pluralism and the commitment to allow individuals to pursue their own views of the good life, we encounter problems of agnosticism about how values should be made commensurate, how legislation should be constructed to facilitate the realization of these commitments, and how the state should conduct itself to recognize the equal worth of conceptions of a valuable life. These issues involve the neutrality of the state, addressed by Peter Jones in Chapter 2, and the neutrality of legislation, examined by Jeremy Waldron in Chapter 4.

If we begin from the institutional commitments associated with liberalism, we shall equally encounter problems of neutrality. For example, the market has been favoured by some liberals as a device which secures the dispersal of power and which is in some sense neutral between individuals. The meaning and limits of this claim are explored by A. T. O’Donnell in Chapter 3. Similarly the liberal theory of the state relies upon the notion that state power is indifferent to the substantive commitments of particular individuals (although, of course, there may be a filter on the legitimacy of those commitments deriving from the need to reconcile different conceptions of the good life). In such a theory, the neutrality of the civil service is obviously crucial. The assertion that political power is available to all who establish a legitimate claim is not compatible with collective administrative bias. Adrian Ellis explores the tensions between the claims of neutrality and those of loyalty in the civil service, in Chapter 5.

Again, there is an aspect of liberal thought which stresses progress or amelioration as an end of our associative endeavour. This progress could be moral, material, or cognitive. Hence liberals have been concerned with the emergence of truth through dialogue and controversy. They have thought of knowledge as something to be valued either for itself or for its contribution to the improvement of the human condition. The neutrality of science, discussed by Hugh Ward in Chapter 8, has, therefore, been hotly contested by liberals and their radical critics. Equally, liberals have relied upon education to produce both the sort of citizen upon which the political ideology relies, and the opportunity to promote or support individual conceptions of the good life. Coupled to its commitment to value pluralism, to diversity of ways of life, this reliance leads to particular injunctions to the teacher. The coherence of these proposals is Peter Gardner’s topic in Chapter 6. Since the dissemination of information is part of the educative process for a concerned citizenry, and since progress is thought to rely on the proposal and defence of opinion, the presentation of news and information is equally vital. Ken Newton discusses the neutrality of the media in Chapter 7.

Finally, if we examine other candidates for the role of the focus of distinctiveness, we shall find that they lead us back to neutrality. For example, some assessments of liberalism have given a central place to the value of autonomy. A concern with autonomy, with self-determination, immediately requires the insulation of the individual from certain sorts of interference and external pressures. The value of autonomy is intimately linked to that of a self-chosen conception of the good life, and suggests the same prescriptions about the use of political (and even social) power and influence.

All this points to the need to investigate neutrality both in specific contexts and in the social and political system as a whole. That is the aim of this collection of essays. The problem of aggregation, of moving between specific contexts and the system as a whole, is the subject of the concluding essay. But there are a number of questions which need to be answered in each context, which provide the themes common to the particular essays. First, what has neutrality been taken to mean in this context? What else might it involve? Second, given that conception of neutrality, is the ideal coherent? And, if it is, can it be put into practice? Finally, given that meaning and those practical implications, is it something which we should value?

A number of reasons for disagreement about the value of liberal neutrality were identified earlier. Still more arise in connection with these issues. First, neutrality, whether at the level of the disposition of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Liberalism and neutrality
• 2 The ideal of the neutral state
• 3 The neutrality of the market
• 4 Legislation and moral neutrality
• 5 Neutrality and the civil service
• 6 Neutrality in education
• 7 Neutrality and the media
• 8 The neutrality of science and technology
• 9 Do neutral institutions add up to a neutral state?
• About the contributors
• Index