Perhaps what we need is a guide to being perplexed. Liberals, Shklar suggested, must maintain a condition of earnest perplexity, of skepticism toward what seems virtuous and concern about the multiple, contradictory dangers that we face. For liberalism to survive, Shklar warned, we will have to maintain a sharp-eyed fear not only of physical violence on the part of the state, but also the spiritual perversions of today’s Puritans. We must be afraid, above all, that our disgust with these cruelties may lead us to abandon the moral life entirely, beckoning a new barbarism. To fear and fight these three dangers all at once will not be easy. Indeed, Shklar acknowledged, “liberalism imposes extraordinary ethical difficulties” by requiring us to fight on so many fronts, to accept perplexity as a constant condition, to fear the subtle transformations by which virtues become vices and victims become torturers. But “no one has ever promised us an effortless moral life.”

It may seem that our form of government is not conducive to the moral life on which its survival depends. Liberal democracies are not good places to find good people, Shklar warned. Their citizens are habituated into “self-assertive vices” of acquisitiveness, selfishness, and cowardice. But only in a free society can people have any opportunity for developing an ethical character, without having to bow before the “pious cruelties” and “massive dishonesty” of regimes that impose a vision of the common good on their inhabitants. Provided, that is, our characters are not warped by the moral cruelty of liberalism’s misguided humanitarians.