Published 1996-05-01
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Abstract
Fishkin claims that the three liberals principles concerning assignment of social positions (family autonomy, merit and equal life chances) constitute a "trilemma": the realization of any two of these principies precludes the realization of the third. In this paper, I try to prove that this is the case, only if these principies are interpreted in an extreme way. Liberalism, however, has strong reasons to reject such interpretation of each of these principies. Moreover, these reasons are independent from the question of whether their conjunction may be conflictive or not. If we assume moderate versions of the principies (as I claim liberalism would), the trilemma disappears or, at least, becomes much weaker.