I am ambivalent toward contemporary liberalism. On the one hand, I believe that many of today's liberal thinkers are waging a necessary and courageous battle on behalf of certain vital but embattled Enlightenment attitudes – attitudes that include a willingness to abstract away from differences of background and culture to defend universally applicable standards of fairness and right; a commitment to such familiar liberal values as civility, toleration, and respect for others; and, most important, a confidence in the power of reason to resolve our disagreements. Without such confidence, we are at the mercy of the postmodernist tendency to reduce all political and intellectual disagreement to so much jockeying for power and advantage, and to regard the exchange of ideas as a continuation of war by other means. We are, I think, all indebted to those who resist this corrosive trend.

But, at the same time, contemporary liberal thought has taken a turn I find deeply problematic. For some important reason – I am honestly not sure what – many liberals have concluded that reason's scope is drastically limited. Though still confident about our ability to reach universally applicable conclusions about justice and rightness, these thinkers are much less sanguine about the prospects for reaching reasoned conclusions about goodness or value. There is, in their view, some sort of important asymmetry between what reason can hope to show us about what persons are morally obligated to do and what it can hope to show us about how it is best to live.