Liberal Neutrality: Treating Citizens as Free and Equal

What does it mean to treat citizens as free and equal given their cultural differences? This book argues that the state ought to be neutral. Treating citizens as free requires justificatory neutrality. Treating citizens as equals requires the state to grant its citizens equal political rights and also to ensure that these rights have "fair value". Given the danger that cultural bias undermines the equal standing of citizens, the state has to ensure procedures of political decision making that are able to take the different values and beliefs of its citizens into account. Only this two-fold understanding of liberal neutrality safeguards that the formally equal political rights of citizens also have fair value.