Galston’s dilemmas and Wisconsin v. Yoder

Abstract

William Galston posed two dilemmas about parental rights and education in Liberal Purposes.The first of these arises from conflict between the proper ends of civic education in a liberal society and the values that some parents will want to honor in the way they rear their children; the second arises from conflict between how the basic interests of the child are understood by the wider society and the dissident views of some parents. Galston’s approach to the dilemmas strongly emphasized deference to parental choice. Galston returns to these dilemmas in his recent Liberal Pluralism and endorses the approach he had earlier defended within the context of a theory of the ethical foundations of liberal politics. He uses the US Supreme Court’s decision in Wisconsin v.Yoder as a test case for his argument. This article offers an internal critique of Galston’s treatment of the two dilemmas in Liberal Pluralism and finds it unsatisfactory in some respects.