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• Liberalism emerged historically as a means of enabling fruitful cooperation among people of divergent backgrounds and belief systems.
• Liberal norms were discovered, not invented, through a process of social evolution. Forgetting this can lead one to overestimate our ability to redesign society, even along more libertarian dimensions.
• Nonetheless, once liberal ideas are abstracted from their pragmatic origins, they become free standing values which can inform and motivate institutional reform. This is the core of liberal social justice.
• Reason plays an essential role in supporting liberal norms, as seeing their mutually advantageous character requires suppressing our non-cognitive, tribal urges. We do this in part through perspective taking, and in part through dialogue and persuasion, as these engage our reasoning faculty.
• Liberal social justice is about much more than just protecting negative rights. It’s also about insisting our institutions show neutrality to conflicting worldviews and ways of life, that our law be non-discriminatory, and our civil rights non-exclusive.
• Experts play a vital role in liberal democracy, not just qua experts, but as mutually agreeable third-party decision makers.
• Nationalism is not inherently in tension with liberalism, especially if one’s national identity is founded on encompassing values like efficiency, liberty, or multiculturalism.
• Yet nationalism can be a hindrance to liberalism if it pits groups against each other, and comes at the expense of forging international peace and cooperation.
• International treaties and multilateralism are not to be conceded as automatic encroachments on sovereignty. Like liberal constitutions, they exist to enable positive-sum relationships.

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