Professor Robert George: ‘Why Liberal Secularism Fails,’ and what he proposes instead

Professor Robert George of Princeton delivered the Frederick R. and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence at the Library of Congress, arguing that contemporary liberal secularist theories fail to provide an intellectually secure foundation for fundamental rights and liberties.

George opened by acknowledging the liberal tradition’s contribution to civil liberties — freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and due process — but said those achievements do not resolve a deeper problem. “Any critic of liberal moral and political thought who aspires to be in the least fair‑minded must begin with a forthright acknowledgment of the genuine contributions of the liberal tradition to the identification and protection of valuable human liberties,” he said, before adding that liberal secularism lacks a satisfactorily normative grounding for them.

The lecture reviewed major modern defenses of liberal neutrality and public reason. George described the central claim he attributes to that tradition: the political order should not base law or policy on contested comprehensive doctrines about the human good. He used the examples Rawls and others have discussed — how to define marriage, pornography, abortion, assisted suicide and recreational drugs — to show how anti‑perfectionist doctrines seek to exclude contested moral claims from public justification.

But George argued that exclusion is often impossible in practice. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s distinction between morality and ethics and on what the speaker cited from Rawls’s work, he said questions such as who counts for legal protection (for example, whether embryonic or severely cognitively impaired human beings are entitled to legal protection) are themselves moral judgments that cannot be relegated to purely private ethics. “You can’t decide who counts without taking a stand,” he said, and that stand, he argued, is unavoidable in lawmaking.

He examined Ronald Dworkin’s account of moral independence and Joseph Raz’s perfectionist liberalism. George said he sympathizes with Raz’s emphasis on autonomy as valuable, but he rejected the idea that autonomy is intrinsically preeminent. Through thought experiments contrasting autonomous wrongdoing and lives preserved by wrongful means, George argued autonomy is often a condition for realizing deeper goods — friendship, truth‑seeking, virtue — rather than the highest good in itself.

Still, George warned, rejecting liberal secularism must not be conflated with endorsing illiberal alternatives. He criticized contemporary “post‑liberal” movements that, in some strands, call for sharply expanded state power over religion or speech, and said protecting civil liberties remains essential for truth‑seeking and flourishing civic institutions.

In a short question-and-answer period, an audience member from Princeton asked whether secular liberalism still dominates political thought. George replied that while the academy once heavily favored liberal secularism, those views have lost their exclusive ascendancy; intellectual currents are more diverse and extremes on both left and right pose new dangers to constitutional liberties.

The lecture closed with the speaker’s appeal to begin normative political reasoning from authentic human goods — what he described as a pluralistic perfectionism that protects liberties while grounding them in the intrinsic value of certain goods. The event concluded with brief acknowledgments and an invitation to refreshments.

George’s talk drew from a long intellectual history (he cited writers and doctrines associated with Rawls, Dworkin, Habermas, Raz and Mill) and aimed to move the debate about rights and liberties toward a moral‑realist foundation while affirming the practical importance of civil‑liberties protections.