Zhuoyao Li – författare

This book contributes to both the internal debate in liberalism and the application of political liberalism to the process of democratization in East Asia. Beyond John Rawls’ original intention to limit the scope of political liberalism to only existing and well-ordered liberal democracies, political liberalism has the potential to inspire and contribute to democratic establishment and maintenance in East Asia. Specifically, the book has two main objectives. First, it will demonstrate that political liberalism offers the most promising vision for liberal democracy, and it can be defended against contemporary perfectionist objections. Second, it will show that perfectionist approaches to political Confucianism suffer from practical and theoretical difficulties. Instead, an alternative model of democracy inspired by political liberalism will be explored in order to achieve a multivariate structure for citizens to come to terms with democracy in their own ways, to support a neutral state that ensures the establishment and stability of democracy, and to maintain an active public role for Confucianism to prevent it from being banished to the private sphere. This model represents a more promising future for democracy in East Asia.

This book contributes to both the internal debate in liberalism and the application of political liberalism to the process of democratization in East Asia. Beyond John Rawls’ original intention to limit the scope of political liberalism to only existing and well-ordered liberal democracies, political liberalism has the potential to inspire and contribute to democratic establishment and maintenance in East Asia. Specifically, the book has two main objectives. First, it will demonstrate that political liberalism offers the most promising vision for liberal democracy, and it can be defended against contemporary perfectionist objections. Second, it will show that perfectionist approaches to political Confucianism suffer from practical and theoretical difficulties. Instead, an alternative model of democracy inspired by political liberalism will be explored in order to achieve a multivariate structure for citizens to come to terms with democracy in their own ways, to support a neutral state that ensures the establishment and stability of democracy, and to maintain an active public role for Confucianism to prevent it from being banished to the private sphere. This model represents a more promising future for democracy in East Asia.

This book develops a pluralistic political theory that reinterprets John Rawls’s proviso as a framework of justification capable of sustaining legitimacy amid deep reasonable pluralism and the rise of artificial intelligence. Part I reconstructs the distinction between morality and ethics in contemporary political philosophy and argues that the right to reciprocal and general justification grounds a freestanding but non-metaphysical account of political legitimacy. Part II brings this framework into dialogue with Confucian political thought, showing how a modified proviso can underwrite a non-meritocratic and pluralistic Confucian democracy, while also accommodating hybrid constitutional orders and maintaining global justice. Part III extends the same justificatory structure to the technological domain, proposing an expanded proviso as a normative architecture for the design, adoption, and regulation of artificial intelligence systems in democratic societies. Across these three parts, the book comparatively advances a pluralistic political theory at the intersection of ethics, politics, and artificial intelligence, showing how justificatory practices can be extended from liberal democracy to Confucian traditions and algorithmic governance to prepare democratic institutions for an increasingly technologically mediated future.