Constitutional Liberty, Dignity, and Reasonable Justification

Constitutional Liberty, Dignity, and Reasonable Justification

Description

American constitutionalism rests on both a political theory of legitimate government and a constitutional theory of political power. The political theory, derived from John Locke, offers and account of the conditions on the legitimate exercise of any form of political power. The constitutional theory offers structures for the exercise of political power that, in light of the propensities of our political psychology, tend to render the exercise of political power consistent with the conditions of Lockean legitimacy. Such a public enterprise of political and constitutional theory and political science has, of course, a rich history; and reflection on that history—so prominent in American constitutional interpretation today—notably feature the attempt better to coordinate the demands of the political and constitutional theory. To name only the most dramatic example, the Reconstruction amendments play the central role they do in our constitutional understanding because they address concurrently intolerable defects in both the political and constitutional theory of the 1787 Constitution (it tolerated, indeed entrenched and protected, a form of political power—slavery—that was illegitimate and its resulting defects in constitutional structure gave powerfully effective political expression to the pathology of political power we call racism). This essay examines the relationship between political and constitutional theory as a historically continuous enterprise centrally motivated by the concern to identify and give expression to values of human dignity through constitutional protections of inalienable human rights and a discourse of reasonable justification for political power appropriate to a polity that treats persons with the dignity required by respect for their moral personality. Constitutionalism is, so I will argue, a kind of generalization of the argument for the limitation of political power required by the respect appropriate to treating persons as bearers of rights, a self-correcting interpretive practice acutely sensitive to the cumulative lessons of history about both abuses of human rights and the ways in which such abuses may be corrected. My argument begins with Locke’s argument for religious toleration and the political theory he generalized from that argument, and then turns to American constitutionalism itself and the conception of reasonable justifiability to all that it imposes of the exercise of political power. The early historical focus of this essay is not of merely antiquarian interest. It is meant to be illustrative of the central motivations of American constitutionalism, namely, a historically informed reflection on both fundamental political deprivations of human rights and constitutional structure more likely to limit such abuses. A constitutional tradition, understood to be so motivated, must be critically sensitive to new insights into further such abuses and constitutionally principled ways to rectify them. The very interpretive integrity of the project of American constitutionalism thus unites a remarkably conservative and progressive public tradition of respect for inalienable human rights. The few great justices who have graced the Supreme Court of the United States throughout its long, noble and sometimes ignoble history have been those, of whom Justice William Brennan was clearly one, whose interpretive practice spoke brilliantly and profoundly with such integrity to the public conscience of the American people. Will our constitutional generation, whose youth profited from such a teacher, be worthy of the interpretive responsibilities of freedom?

Source Publication

The Constitution of Rights: Human Dignity and American Values

Source Editors/Authors

Michael J. Meyer, William A. Parent

Publication Date

1992

Constitutional Liberty, Dignity, and Reasonable Justification

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