Croatian Journal of Philosophy 10 (29):147-155 (2010)
|Abstract||For some contemporary liberal philosophers, a huge
concern is liberal neutrality, which is the idea that the state
should be neutral among competing conceptions of the moral good
pursued by the people. In The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz
argues that we can neither achieve nor even approximate such
neutrality. He shows that neutrality and fairness are different
ideas. His notion of neutrality is stricter than John Rawls's
and Ronald Dworkin's. Raz shows that both helping and not
helping can be neutral or non-neutral, thus neutrality is
chimerical. Wojciech Sadurski's appeal to rational expectations
does not necessarily tell us which action is neutral.
Distinguishing between comprehensive and narrow neutrality, Raz
also claims that only the former is a proper response to
conflicts. Sadurski criticizes it, claiming that conflicts are
comprehensive in a sense which does not deny the adequacy of the
narrow neutrality. In reality, however, it is al