Abstract
May a government attempt to improve the lives of its citizens by promoting the activities it
deems valuable and discouraging those it disvalues? May it engage in such a practice even when
doing so is not a requirement of justice in some strict sense, and even when the judgments of
value and disvalue in question are likely to be subject to controversy among its citizens? These
questions have long stood at the center of debates between political perfectionists and political
neutralists. In what follows I address a prominent cluster of arguments against political perfec-
tionism—namely, arguments that focus on the coercive dimensions of state action. My main
claim is simple: whatever concerns we might have about coercion, arguments from coercion fall
short of supporting a thoroughgoing rejection of perfectionism, for the reason that perfectionist
policies need not be coercive. The main body of the paper responds, however, to several neutra-
list challenges to this last claim.