This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 31st, 2011. I'm Kayla Brown.

Communitarians challenge classical liberalism on the basis that our preferences may not be good enough,

and that classical liberalism does nothing to elevate our gosh likes and dislikes.

Mark Pennington argues that communitarians are hopelessly romantic.

He talks about challenges to classical liberalism in his book,

robust political economy.

He spoke at the Cato Institute March 8th.

Communitarians challenge classical liberalism

on the grounds that we shouldn't evaluate institutions on their capacity

to respond to or to satisfy given individual preferences. On a communitarian view, we should evaluate institutions in terms of whether or not they have the capacity to challenge the preferences that individuals have.

What they're getting at here is the notion that liberalism

lacks any account of how we can elevate people's preferences, how we can

encourage people or educate them to have a more informed or enlightened set of preferences

to the ones that they currently happen to have.

Now this is a particular concern if you believe that the existing set of individual preferences are

based on various prejudices which can exclude various sections of the

population whether it's prejudices to do with race, gender, sexual orientation, or any of those other sorts of issues.

On a communitarian view, democracy is better placed than the market to challenge irrational or prejudiced preferences that people

may have, precisely because it's based on majority rule.

On a communitarian view, people's preferences

should have to be justified to the majority

before they can be put into practice.

...