The role of civic virtue in egalitarian liberalism

Abstract

Critics with egalitarian liberalism usually maintain that civic virtue is an essential element for implementation and stability of social goods like social justice. They usually argue as well that egalitarian liberalism neglects the importance of civic virtue and that, as a consequence, egalitarian liberal goals are either unachievable or unstable. In this paper I assume that civic virtue certainly is an essential element for implementation and stability of social goods like distributive justice. However, I argue that egalitarian liberalism has no problem to recognize this, so criticism in this sense is wrong. Egalitarian liberal state must promote each civic virtue necessary for achieving and/or stabilizing social justice with the only limit given by priority of right over good. Throughout this paper I expose the rawlsian concepts of reasonable pluralism, overlapping consensus among reasonable comprehensive doctrines and neutrality of state, and I try to clarify the role of civic virtue in this theoretical framework.