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 brack-
eted 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 be-
ings, 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 par-
ticular 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 tempta-
tions of infallibilism. . . . If necessary we must revise our convic-
tions 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, promi-
nent approaches to the problem of the proper relation of morality

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