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choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm
existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and then earn
moral merit.
Freedom is a precondition of personal virtue, of doing the morally right
thing, rather than a virtue in itself. And unless liberal capitalist society can
also claim for itself the achievement of fostering personal virtues, it will
lack moral standing. The prominent older versions of classical liberalism,
therefore, rested mainly on non-moral defenses of the system. And to date
all prominent attacks on classical liberal institutions stress this point.
So the main reasons for the superior reputation of the positivist
approach is that a lot of people have had great confidence in science. Even
in our time, when popular discourse is filled with references to ethics, fam–
ily values, the cowardice of terrorists and so forth, many academic
intellectuals who support classical liberal ideals would not defend the posi–
tion that there are objective moral or ethical truths.
Certain classical liberals, such as Richard Posner, have even embraced
Richard Rorty's solidarist-relativist philosophical stance. And if we
include among liberals the left-leaning welfare statists who do not quite
wish to give up on some of liberalism's key ideas it is not difficult to see
that their meager normative framework is closer to positivism than many
realize. Rawls, for example, champions the intuitionist approach to ethics
and by denying any significant role to free will, has no room for praise and
blame within his moral framework.
This means that some of the very prominent defenders of the free
society, whether in its pure libertarian or watered-down welfare statist ver–
sion, have been and still are skeptical of making a moral case for their
system on anything but an intuitive, subjective basis, one that clearly has no
other implication than that the proponent prefers it.
For several centuries
bona fide
morality or ethics-as distinct from
mere value theory-had been unseated from its prominence as part of
humanistic studies. From ancient Greece until the Middle Ages, morality
had been taken seriously, albeit often as a means to prepare people for the
afterlife. The notion that human beings are the sort of creatures who can
make choices between right and wrong, that they have the responsibility to
do the right thing, and when they do wrong, they are blameworthy for
this-had been very prominent in Augustine, Aquinas and even Ockham.
It
had been incorporated into broad teleological cosmology and meta–
physics wherein the issue of what purposes or goals we ought to pursue
made good sense. Later, however, human beings were seen by many as an
utterly unique phenomenon-a hybrid of divine and mundane substance-
