of course, create a divide within human psychology between moral autonomy and
political subjectivity.Kant and liberalism
The rights-based tradition of liberalism has sometimes been characterised as entailing
the priority of the right over the good. These terms are attributed to Kant, but the
precise definition was given by moral philosopher David Ross. He defined the right
as ‘that which is obligatory’ and the good as ‘that which is worth pursuing’ (Ross,
1930: 3). There are many different forms of goodness: aesthetic evaluation, friendship
and the pursuit of truth are but a few. Kant’s political theory can be categorised as
‘right based’ because the purpose of the state is not to realise goodness but to ensure
that people respect each other’s rights. The ‘right’ – note the singular – is the name
Kant gives to the coexistence of individual rights. A political consequence of the
priority of the right over the good is that the state’s functions are limited.
If the state is only justified insofar as it protects individual rights it cannot have
purposes of its own which are independent of that function. Michael Oakeshott,
whose work draws on liberal and conservative thought, makes a useful distinction
between the state, or political community, as an enterprise associationand as a civil
association. In an enterprise association people have a shared project, and the state
acts as an agent to realise that project. Such a project might be theological in
character, but it could also be secular. For example, the attempt to create an ‘equal
society’, where equality is an end in itself, would constitute an enterprise. Oakeshott
argues that a political community is a civil association of individuals with disparate
aims, and the state works to permit the continuation of that association: the
association has no ends of its own (see Chapter 9).Utilitarianism
Utilitarians hold that political institutions function to increase the overall level of
welfare – or utility – of a society. At first sight this appears fundamentally opposed
to rights-based liberalism, and indeed to contractarianism: utility maximisation
implies that there is a thing called ‘society’ which has aims over and above those
of individuals, or that the aims and interests of individuals are subsumed in ‘society’.
While there are tensions between utilitarianism and rights-based liberalism, and
much of the debate within the liberal tradition is between these positions, there are
shared historical roots, such that they are both clearly part of the liberal tradition.
Furthermore, in the twentieth century revisions to utilitarian theory have had the
consequence of closing the gap to some degree between utilitarianism and rights-
based liberalism.
The claim that utilitarianism entails the maximisation of utility requires
elaboration: what is utility? How do we maximise it? What does utilitarianism
actually require of individuals? Different utilitarian thinkers have defined utility in
different ways: Jeremy Bentham defined it as happiness, John Stuart Mill as pleasure,
G.E. Moore as certain ideal states of mind. All of these definitions conceptualise186 Part 2 Classical ideologies