“Do you happen to think that political philosophy is objective, while personal ethics is subjective?”
No. This gives an outline really.
"Rasmussen and DenUyl are not satisfied. The view just canvassed confines ethics to rules that apply to everyone. Questions about the good life have no objective answers: here mere preferences reign supreme. In brief, the right is prior to the good:
“The general tendency has been to consider the good as essentially privatized and the right as universalized. The good. . .has come to be regarded as the object of one’s own interest, the object of one’s desires, or those things one regards as beneficial. It is said to stand in contrast to what one may do with any right. What one may do by right is what is allowed to, or demanded of, or required by, all agents equally and universally. . .there is an inevitable tendency in the distinction between the good and the right to deprecate the moral nature of the good to the enhancement of the right. In other words, what is impartial and universal tends to take precedence over goods, which are, almost by definition now, partial and particular.”(pp.22, 26)
They defend instead an Aristotelian view. The good for a person does not consist of his whims and desires, whatever they may be—far from it. Rather, each person has a natural end or function: his leading a flourishing life. This view, which they term perfectionism, “holds that eudaimonia [happiness or flourishing] is the ultimate good or value and that virtue ought to characterize how human beings conduct their lives.”(p.111)
Does not a problem at once threaten them? They deny that the good life reduces without remainder to preferences: the good is objective. Yet they are also favor a political system in which people are free to act as they please, so long as they do not initiate or threaten force or fraud. But are there not many actions that fall within these bounds that an objective ethics would condemn? Suppose that I spend most of my days drinking myself into a stupor. I threaten no one with force, but surely I am not living in accord with my Aristotelian natural end. I am doing what is objectively wrong: how then can I have a right to do it?
Many supporters of natural law view matters exactly as these questions suggest. There can be no right to violate the demands of morality. Thus, Heinrich Rommen, a distinguished historian of natural law, remarked that rights are: “the sphere of right that is ‘given’ with the nature of a person.”(p.64) Your rights are defined by your duties, and there cannot be a “right” to do what is wrong.
The authors answer with their key thesis: The mandates of personal ethics do not directly determine the nature of political arrangements. Liberalism is not “a ‘normative political philosophy’ in the usual sense. It is rather a political philosophy of metanorms. It seeks not to guide individual conduct in moral activity, but rather to regulate conduct so that conditions might be obtained where moral action can take place. To contrast liberalism directly with alternative ethical systems or values is, therefore, something of a category mistake.”(p.34)
The combination of an objective personal ethics with a political system of freedom is, then, logically consistent. But why should we adopt it? Why not, rather, enact a political system whose metanorms require that people conform to their objective end?
The authors’ version of ethics excludes this suggestion. They embrace “individualistic perfectionism.” There is no fixed pattern to which every individual, in his pursuit of eudaimonia, must conform. Rather, “the generic goods and virtues that constitute human flourishing only become actual, determinate, and valuable realities when they are given particular form by the choices of flesh-and-blood persons. The importance or value of these goods and virtues is rooted in factors that are unique to each person, for it is not the universal as such that is valuable. . . Human flourishing is not simply achieved and enjoyed by individuals, but it is individualized.”(pp.132-33)"