Rawls, Reciprocity and the Barely Reasonable

Utilitas 26 (1):1-22 (2014)
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Abstract

The concept of the reasonable plays an important role in Rawls's political philosophy, but there has been little systematic investigation of this concept or of the way Rawls employs it. This article distinguishes several different forms of reasonableness and uses them to explore Rawls's political liberalism. The discussion focuses on the idea, found especially in the most recent versions of this theory, of a family of liberal conceptions of justice each of which is regarded by everyone in a polity as reasonable, even if only barely so. The idea of such a family is central to Rawls's notion of reciprocity and the view of political cooperation associated with it. This article questions whether the concept of the reasonable can play the role that Rawls intends

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Christopher McMahon
University of California at Santa Barbara

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

The Law of Peoples.John Rawls - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (203):246-253.
Truth and public reason.Joshua Cohen - 2008 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (1):2-42.

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