How “political” is Quong’s political liberalism?
In this short paper I ask to what extent the sharp contrast between the 
 political and the comprehensive, on which political liberals such as Rawls 
 and Quong place primary emphasis, caters to a truly “political” conception of 
 liberalism. I argue that Quong’s own take on this point is more distinctively 
 “political” than Rawls’s, in that it assigns far less weight to citizens’ 
 comprehensive doctrines. Indeed, I suggest that Quong’s exclusion of 
 comprehensive doctrines (exemplified by his worries about an “overlapping 
 consensus”) has more radical implications than Quong himself seems to think. 
 In doing so, I offer a streamlined version of Quong’s critique, which 
 encompasses two more or less direct criticisms of Rawls’s doctrine of the 
 overlapping consensus. I will call them the “sincerity objection” and the 
 “liberal objection”.
The Place of Comprehensive Doctrines in Political Liberalism: On Some Common Misgivings About the Subject and Function of the Overlapping Consensus
In this paper I argue that Rawlsians have largely misunderstood the idea of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, thereby failing to delineate in an appropriate way the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism. My argument rests on two core claims. The first claim is that (i) political liberalism is committed to three theses about the overlapping consensus. The first thesis concerns the subject of the overlapping consensus; the second thesis concerns the function of the overlapping consensus; the third thesis explains how the overlapping consensus can serve its function in accordance with political liberalism’s commitment to epistemic neutrality. The second claim on which my argument relies is empirical: (ii) Rawlsians typically deny at least one of the three theses to which political liberalism is committed. Based on (i) and (ii), I conclude that Rawlsians have hitherto provided unconvincing accounts of the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism.
Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?
By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.