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model of human experience embodied by the act of making (projecting the eidos or idea
of self onto the material world) becomes the metaphysical foundation of philosophy.
Here the self-consciousness or soul of the person expresses itself, its freedom, by acting
on the world based on knowledge of that world. The idea that the self should be seen as
molded rather than molder, constituted by the material world through conformity to
social practices of ethical consumption appears in contrast as a less free and less authentic
way of being.
In the liberal tradition, this is expressed in two ways. First, there is rationalism,
in which the self expresses its sovereignty through scientific contemplation of the world
that reveals the transcendent truths of the natural world. This move leads to the
rationalist theories of justice such as Rawls’s justice as fairness, utilitarianism, and Kant’s
deontology. Its most fundamental contribution to the history of thinking is to rehabilitate
the passions and desires from being the core problem of moral knowledge (they must be
transcended because they are sin or an obstacle to achieving the really good) to being the
basis of moral knowledge (individuals become conceptualized as bundles of passions
seeking to rationally satisfy desire). The liberalism of Hobbes, Locke and Hume
(especially) defines human beings fundamentally as consumers and leads to theories of
justice oriented to specifying abstract formulas for satisfying consumption (MacIntyre
1988, 267, 269, 295, 298, 300-301, 313-313, 338-9, 347). Since the desires of
individuals-as-consumers become a priori, the basic metaphysical conception of human
beings, liberal justice resists thinking about how those desires are and should be shaped
by certain notions of ethical consumption. Indeed, placing the right before the good (i.e.
the “radical emptying, evacuation” of any “empirical contingent” considerations of the
good in Kantian formalism) is the touchstone of liberal thinking (Rawls 1971, 446-452;
i ek 1993, 221).
The second strain of liberalism is producerism, placing the creative act of
production at the center of philosophy. While the rationalism of liberalism preserves and
expresses the aristocratic elements of Plato’s vision of man as an abstract thinker,
producerism is a literal expression of the idea that justice is a techne, modeled on the
knowledge of craft. In Locke, producerism is the core of his theory of property.
According to Locke, when a person mixes his labor with some material in the state of
Convention