This book begins where a previous one ended. In the conclusion to Morality, Politics, and Law I wrote:

One's basic moral/religious convictions are (partly) self-constitutive and are therefore a principal ground--indeed, the principal ground-of political deliberation and choice. To "bracket" such convictions is therefore to bracket--to annihilate--essential aspects of one's very self. To participate in politics and law . . . with such convictions bracketed is not to participate as the self one is but as some one--or, rather, some thing--else.

Because they are the principal ground of political deliberation and choice, one cannot--least of all in a morally pluralistic society like our own--insulate such convictions from challenge. Politics, then, in a morally pluralistic society, is in part about the credibility of competing conceptions of human good. Political theory that fails to address questions of human good--questions of how human beings, individually and collectively, should live their lives--is, finally, vacuous and irrelevant.

. . . [S]uch questions cannot be bracketed, though, of course, they can be ignored or repressed. Questions of human good--and in particular the deep question of what it means to be authentically human--are too fundamental, and the answers one gives to them too determinative of one's politics, to be marginalized or privatized. . . .

If one can participate in politics and law--if one can use or resist power--only as a partisan of particular moral/religious convictions about the human, and if politics is and must be in part about the credibility of such convictions, then we who want to participate, whether as theorists or activists or both, must examine our own convictions self-critically. We must be willing to let our convictions be tested in ecumenical dialogue with others who do not share them. We must let ourselves be tested, in ecumenical dialogue, by convictions we do not share. We must, in short, resist the temptations of infallibilism. . . . If necessary we must revise our convictions until they are credible to ourselves, if not always or even often to our interlocutors. We must be willing to lend credibility to our convictions by being faithful to them in our lives and not merely in our polemics and our posturing. We must bring our convictions to bear as we use or as we resist power. We must resist and seek to transform a politics that represses, by marginalizing or privatizing, questions of human authenticity. ⁴

In this book, after commenting critically on some other, prominent approaches to the problem of the proper relation of morality

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