Offers a compelling vision of how to achieve and conduct a liberal but democratic society through the ideal of Neutrality--between people and ideas of the good--and using the tool of Neutral dialogue.

Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.

Voting Institutions Justifications Notes.

Many of our inherited civic institutions are dead or dying. We need an ambitious reform program to revive democratic life. This essay advances a four-pronged “citizenship agenda”: a campaign finance initiative granting each voter fifty “patriot dollars” to fund candidates and political parties of his or her choice; a proposal for a new national holiday, Deliberation Day, held before each national election, enabling citizens to deliberate on the merits of rival candidates; a system of federally financed electronic news-vouchers to permit (...) professional journalism to survive the destruction of its traditional business model; and a new form of citizenship inheritance, which provides $80,000 to all Americans as they start off life as adults. Working with collaborators, I have developed each of these initiatives at book length. This essay suggests how the “citizenship agenda” yields a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. (shrink)

Professors Ackerman and Alstott contrast their proposal for stakeholding with Philippe Van Parijs’s proposal for a universal basic income. InThe Stakeholder Society, Ackerman and Alstott proposed that the federal government give all U.S. citizens an $80,000 grant as they reach adulthood. The program’s revenue cost is to be funded by an annual wealth tax of 2 percent and a “payback” requirement at death. Although stakeholding and basic income share common foundations in liberal political theory, Ackerman and Alstott discuss the principled (...) and practical advantages of stakeholding and introduce Tony Blair’sU.K. proposal forChildren’s Savings Accounts, which shares important features with stakeholding. (shrink)

I hope to persuade Charles Fried to think again about his developing views on distributive justice. Since I live at a certain remove from Cambridge, the best I can offer is a hypothetical dialogue with an imaginary person whose views seem, to me at least, of a Friedian inspiration. My central question deals with the way Fried establishes his rights to things he candidly concedes he does not deserve. To present my problems, I shall begin with a simpler case than (...) those – involving kidneys and talents – that Fried makes central to his discussion. Rather than starting with these rather special goods, I find it clarifying to focus first on more garden variety commodities – which, to emphasize their character, I shall call apples. (shrink)

Comment un État constitutionnel peut-il faire face aux menaces terroristes d’une façon qui soit compatible avec son engagement démocratique, les droits fondamentaux et l’état de droit? En pleine opposition tant avec les arguments juridiques avancés par l’administration Bush qu’avec la thèse selon laquelle les menaces et les défis posés par le terrorisme peuvent être gérés dans le cadre constitutionnel et réglementaire actuel, Bruce Ackermann rejette la caractérisation du 11 septembre comme le début d’une « guerre » tout autant que quelque (...) chose qui pourrait être traité comme un crime ordinaire. Sur le terrain prescriptif, Bruce Ackermann appelle à des mesures qui relèvent de la « Constitution d’un état d’urgence ». La loi-cadre qu’il appelle de ses vœux doit garantir que les institutions de l’État soient bien équipées pour faire face à cette menace et que les pouvoirs conférés ne soient pas utilisés pour anéantir les droits fondamentaux et les libertés. Bruce Ackerman pense notamment que le pouvoir du Gouvernement de déclarer l’état d’urgence doit rapidement être endossé par le Congrès mais aussi qu’un système dit d’escalateur supermajoritaire doit rendre de plus en plus difficile de l’obtenir. (shrink)