However effective Quine's dismantling of Kant's analytic- synthetic distinction (arguing that it's all just semantics)– liberal political activism, which seeks to remove any conception of "the good life" from political discourse, does essentially the same with such antipodal linguistic inanities as "neutral values." This common phrase, devoid of even the most basic reason and ration-ality, makes a mockery of those who employ it, especially since they're the very ones who seek to root public policy in, of all things, reason and rationality (as opposed to a religious or a transcendent morality).

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "value" as "a principle, standard, or quality considered worthwhile or desirable." Thus "values," as a subject, even in the most pared-down and appendage-free form, contains in its complement adjectives such as "worthwhile" or "desirable," words that become nonsensical, if not self-contradictory, when "neutral" is placed among them. What's more, "worthwhile" can modify "values," "desirable," and (if the definition of "values" is expanded) "despicable" can too without invalidating the essential integrity of the noun. But the moment "neutral" is applied, the philosophical bankruptcy (not to mention the logical conundrum) of those who espouse it appears.

Values cannot be neutral, any more than a square can have two unequal sides; the moment it does, it's no longer a square. The moment you apply "neutral" to "values," they're no longer values. The whole thing vanishes, as when matter and anti-matter collide.

Not only is the phrase self-contradictory, but the motive that promotes it refutes the concept itself. To advocate a "neutral values" model for a democratic government is to advocate a definite conception of what some people deem worthwhile or desirable, hardly a "neutral" endeavor. Thus, apart from the internal linguistic paradoxes, application of the principle negates the principle itself (the only way "neutral values" can have any coherence is to interpret its meaning as "all public policy values are neutralized–except our own").

Perhaps Ronald Dworkin best expressed the inherent inconsistency of the idea when he wrote that government "must be neutral in one particular way: among conceptions of the good life. Whatever we may think privately, it cannot count as a justification for some rule of law or some political institution, that a life that included reading pornography or homosexual relationships is either better or worse than a life of someone with more orthodox tastes in reading and sex."

Dworkin's position is self-negating, logically impossible, and hypocritical. Why does Dworkin claim that private views about moral issues have no "justification for some rule of law or some political institution," and that government should be "neutral" regarding questions of "the good life"? Because that's his private view of "the good life."

Dworkin isn't advocating government neutrality; on the contrary, he's advocating that government take a distinct moral stance, one that places individual liberty over certain other moral views. "The assertion of the priority of liberty within a pluralistic democracy," wrote Ronald Theimann, "may indeed be a defensible claim, but it in no way implies the notion of governmental 'neutrality.'"

Catholic moral theologian David Hollenbach brilliantly summarized the liberal political moral vision with the phrase, "the priority of the right over the good." Pornography might not be good, but the right to produce and ogle it takes precedence; hence "the priority of the right over the good."

Yet the "priority of the right over the good" is really the "priority of the good," in this case "the good" being "the right."

Those who advocate the right to posses pornography or to practice homosexuality take as much of a moral stance as do those who disparage that "right." Laws permitting both practices are no more neutral or less moralistic than laws banning them. Dworkin is just as moralistic as James Dobson, the only difference being that Dobson admits it, while Dworkin hides under a veil of "neutrality" that supposedly places him beyond "good and evil."

But no one gets beyond "good and evil." Even hard-core "text-ualists" such as Bork and Rehnquist (and to a degree Scalia)–by claiming that judges shouldn't assert their moral values into the Constitution but simply stick to the text–are nevertheless asserting their moral values, in this case the values being the moral notion that the original intent of the framers is the best way to interpret the Constitution, as much an expression of moral preference as are the rights and freedoms derived from the penumbral emanations from the text itself.

Amorality, even moral neutrality, is impossible for beings capable of moral judgments. Even Nietzsche–with all his syphilitic utterances about slave morality, the uebermensch, and breaking law codes–had ultimately staked out a moral stance. We're trapped by the inevitability of moral posturing, as if in wandering in an Escherian labyrinth in which there's no up or down, in or out.

Wrote Thomas Nagel, "Even a 'subjective-seeming solution to this problem–like the answer that there are no universal standards for determining what we should do, and that each person may follow his own inclinations–is itself an objective, universal claim and therefore a limiting case of a moral position."

In the end, it's always the "good" that has priority, and always the "good" that should be the foundation of government. Thus, how essential that the "good" really be the Good.