2016 Articles

From Political Liberalism to Para-Liberalism: Epistemological Pluralism, Cognitive Liberalism and Authentic Choice

al-Gharbi, Musa

Advocates of political liberalism hold it as a superior alternative to perfectionism on the grounds that it avoids superfluous and/or controversial claims in favor of a maximally-inclusive approach undergirded by a "free-standing" justification for the ideology. These assertions prove difficult to defend: political interpretations of liberalism tend to be implicitly ethnocentric; they often rely upon a number of controversial, and even empirically falsified, assumptions about rationality and can much more effectively accommodate the illiberal challenge.