This chapter examines the externally constrained dialogue of liberalism, particularly as defended by Bruce Ackerman, and its reliance on a cogent defense of the priority of right. While we may indeed find that such a defense is plausible, and see that there are strong pragmatic motivations for citizens to draw a right/good distinction, Ackerman's solution to the problem of justice and dialogue must be criticized for the degree of abstraction employed in its theoretical devices. As a result, the constraints generated in this model possess only a dubious justifiability.

Ackerman can also be challenged for having succumbed to a tendency, perhaps more marked among liberals than among other theorists of justice, to overdetermine the decision-making of justice. That is, instead of stopping short with a defensible clearing of dialogic space, and letting the citizens themselves decide what rules are just, Ackerman (like Rawls, Nozick, and others) wants to work out, in some detail, a set of justified rules. I suggest that a late revision of his general theory is effective in overcoming some of these shortcomings, in particular by outlining a more voluntaristic view of the moral . . .