My overarching aim in this book is to elaborate and to defend an account – an understanding – of the political morality of liberal democracy. By “political” morality, I mean the moral convictions and commitments that govern decisions about what laws to enact (or to maintain on the books), what policies to pursue, such as:

• Should we retain capital punishment – or abolish it? (By “we,” I mean here “we the citizens of a liberal democracy, acting through our elected representatives.”)

• Should we ban abortion – or permit it?

• Should we ban physician-assisted suicide – or permit it?

• Should we refuse to extend the benefit of law to same-sex unions – or should we create civil unions for same-sex couples, and if so, should we call such unions “marriages”?

• Should we affirm, as a fundamental human right, freedom from severe poverty?

And so on. (I discuss abortion and same-sex unions in Chapters 7 and 8.) Such questions are not just moral questions, but they are, in part, moral questions: questions about what is morally right or morally wrong for us to do or not to do. And the political morality of liberal democracy, as I explain in this book, bears directly on such questions.

This book is my contribution to the Christian Jurisprudence Project, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Law School.