Those who continue to defend free markets , such as Friedrich Hayek and Robert Nozick, are now called classical liberals or libertarians , as opposed to welfare liberals or liberal egalitarians, such as Rawls and Dworkin. A major challenge for liberal philosophers has been to explain why individual freedom should have priority over competing values such as community or perfectionism . It is often assumed that the defence of liberalism must ultimately rest on some form of subjectivism or scepticism about values. If people's values are merely subjective preferences, lacking any rational or objective basis, then there is no justification for the state to prefer some ways of life over others. Very few liberals have actually endorsed this subjectivist argument, although it is commonly attributed to them by critics.
Subjectivism provides a weak defence of individual freedom.
For one thing, it conflicts with the way most people understand the value of their own lives, since we typically assume that some ways of leading our lives are intrinsically better than others. Moreover, if subjectivism were true, it would leave liberal values equally without rational foundation. When liberals argue that a state which upholds individual rights and equality of opportunity is better than a totalitarian or caste society, they view this as a rationally defensible moral belief, not simply as their subjective preference. But if claims about rights and justice are rationally defensible, then so presumably are claims about the value of different conceptions of the good. As a result, most liberals have sought to defend freedom of choice without denying that the worth of different conceptions of the good life can be rationally evaluated.