Political Friendship and the Good Life. Two Liberal Arguments against Perfectionism

The main topic of the book is the fascinating link between an acceptable concept of the political whole and its legal and moral implications. Once this problem is squarely faced, we find that familiar categories like “happiness” and “friendship” are, at the same time, both necessary and dangerous, both crucial and elusive. In order to make the case against the so called “legal enforcement of morals”, and to grasp the complex relationship between law and morality from a liberal point of view, it is not enough to reject a pattern of happiness, or of human flourishing, from which normative instructions for men and women are drawn, - it must be also recognized that the integration of individuals into comprehensive groups, as well as into the political whole itself, is not the only valuable option. The value of a relative lack of integration, a “right to unhappiness”, proves in the end to be the factor that makes possible the fragile but decisive moral primacy of liberal societies.