Liberal Integrity

On April 2, 2015, members of the militant Islamicist group, al-Shabab, murdered 148 people at Garissa University College in eastern Kenya. The putative motive was retaliation for acts by Kenya's security forces in Somalia, but many of the victims were Christian students who were identified and killed because they could not quote verses from the Koran. Such religiously-inspired slaughter seems almost a weekly occurrence these days, and it drives home the troubling implications of a lack of political pluralism and tolerance. Liberal democracy has a global fight on its hands, and how it defends itself both morally and materially will determine success or failure. In this essay, I examine and applaud Lenn Goodman's distinctive case for democratic virtue. I find his account of liberal integrity a more substantive and reliable guide to public life than various pragmatic and post-modern alternatives. Especially in this era of terrorism, Rawlsian fairness is not enough to sustain the right or the good

Civic virtue · Democracy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Liberal democracy · Liberalism · Militant · Pluralism (philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Terrorism · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · War, Ethics, and Justification