Taking Aristotle seriously in liberal democracy

Abstract

This paper replies to Randall Curren’s review of my book, Against Aristotelian Character Education. I argue that Curren’s response leaves the book’s central dilemma untouched. First, I argue that liberal freedom and equality place demands on compulsory public education that extend beyond avoiding indoctrination and preserving students’ capacities for independent judgment. Liberal legitimacy also requires that the state exercise its coercive educational authority in ways that leave citizens holding different reasonable comprehensive doctrines equally free to pursue their own ways of life. Either public education remains sufficiently liberal that it cannot reliably cultivate Aristotelian virtue, or it succeeds in cultivating those virtues by relying on a conception of flourishing that liberal legitimacy forbids the state to privilege. Second, I argue that attempts to reconcile Aristotelian character education with liberalism continue to depend upon separating the Aristotelian virtues from the distinctively Aristotelian evaluative outlook from which they derive. I examine two strategies suggested by Curren’s review and argue that neither succeeds. Either the educational ideal retains its distinctively Aristotelian character and fails to satisfy the demands of liberal freedom and equality, or it satisfies those demands only by ceasing to preserve what is distinctively Aristotelian about the theory itself.