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Coercive redistribution and public agreement: re-evaluating the libertarian challenge of charity
In this article, we evaluate the capacity of liberal egalitarianism to rebut what we call
the libertarian challenge of charity. This challenge states that coercive redistributive
taxation is neither needed nor justified, since those who endorse redistribution can
give charitably, and those who do not endorse redistribution cannot justifiably be
coerced. We argue that contemporary developments in liberal political thought render
liberalism more vulnerable to this libertarian challenge. Many liberals have, in recent
years, sought to recast liberalism such that it is more hospitable to cultural, religious,
and ethnic diversity. This move has resulted in increased support for the claim that
liberalism should be understood as a political rather than comprehensive doctrine, and
that liberal institutions should draw their legitimacy from agreements made among
members of an appropriately conceived deliberative community, rather than from
controversial liberal principles like individual autonomy. We argue that, while this
move may indeed make liberalism more compatible with cultural diversity, it also
makes it more vulnerable to the libertarian challenge of charity. Not all versions of
liberalism are troubled by the challenge, but those that are troubled by it are
increasingly dominant. We also discuss G. A. Cohen’s claim that liberal equality
requires an ‘egalitarian ethos’ and argue that, if Cohen is right, it is difficult to see
how there can be an adequate response to the libertarian challenge of charity. In
general, our argument can be summarised as follows: the more that liberalism is
concerned accurately to model the actual democratic wishes and motivations of the
people it governs, the less it is able to justify coercively imposing redistributive
principles of justice.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Critical Review of International Social and Political PhilosophyVolume
13Issue
(1)Pages
91 - 114Citation
CHAMBERS, C. and PARVIN, P., 2010. Coercive redistribution and public agreement: re-evaluating the libertarian challenge of charity. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 13 (1), pp. 91-114.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2010Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy on 25-03-2010, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13698230903326281.ISSN
1369-8230eISSN
1743-8772Publisher version
Language
- en