In Political Liberalism, Rawls emphasizes the practical character and aims of his conception of justice. Justice as fairness is to provide the basis of a reasoned, informed and willing political agreement by locating grounds for consensus in the fundamental ideas and values of the political culture. Critics urge, however, that such a politically liberal conception of justice will be designed merely to ensure the stability of political institutions by appealing to the currently-held opinions of actual citizens. In (...) order to evaluate this concern, I suggest, it is necessary to focus on the normative character of Rawls's analysis. Rawls argues that justice as fairness is the conception of justice that citizens of modern democratic cultures should choose in reflective equilibrium, after reflecting fully upon their considered judgments regarding justice. Since judgments in reflective equilibrium are grounded in considered judgment, rather than situated opinions, I argue that the criticism fails. Key Words: justification • objectivity • political liberalism • Rawls • reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes briefly what John Rawls meant by stability, the role it plays in Theory of Justice (TJ), and the outline of his main strategies for showing that a well‐ordered society based on his principles of justice would be relatively stable. It presents comments on Rawls's use of developmental moral psychology in support of his claim that societies based on justice as fairness would be relatively stable. The chapter discusses Rawls's conception of self‐respect, its role in (...) his arguments for justice as fairness, and whether it is subject to a certain Kantian objection that echoes in our contemporary political culture. It argues that if Rawls's turn to an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines as the basis of stability in Political Liberalism (PL) was well motivated, then why not quietly bypass the earlier work on a sense of justice and self‐respect simply as an acknowledged failure. (shrink)

Philippe van Parijs (2003) has argued that an egalitarian ethos cannot be part of a post- Political Liberalism Rawlsian view of justice, because the demands of political justice are confined to principles for institutions of the basic structure alone. This paper argues, by contrast, that certain principles for individual conduct—including a principle requiring relatively advantaged individuals to sometimes make their economic choices with the aim of maximising the prospects of the least advantaged—are an integral part of a Rawlsian political (...) conception of justice. It concludes that incentive payments will have a clearly limited role in a Rawlsian theory of justice. (shrink)

This essay applies the principle of justice as fairness to the issue of same-sex marriage. I will outline Rawls’s theory of justice, including the original position and the veil of ignorance as the means by which choosers craft a just state. In considering whether same-sex marriage should be permissible, I argue that a just society, formulated in the Rawlsian context of justice as fairness, should allow them. I assert that gays and lesbians do count as equal citizens because they possess (...) the minimum requirements of the capacity for a sense of justice, a conception of the good, and the ability to be cooperating members of society. Furthermore, within the original position gays and lesbians will be represented because choosers do not know their sexual orientation because it is one of the individual characteristics that are withheld behind the veil. Since the choosers do not know their sexual orientation, they will be unable to use that information in their construction of what counts as a just state comprised of free and equal citizens. Because the family, and the institution of marriage as a primary manifestation of the family, is one of the major social institutions within the basic structure, limitations must be carefully scrutinized. (shrink)

Though John Rawls's treatment of stability has received less attention than other parts of his work, it promises help in understanding how liberal institutions can reproduce themselves under non-ideal conditions like ours. But stability in Rawls's sense seems to depend ineliminably on society's justice, and Gerald Cohen powerfully criticized the connection Rawls drew between the two. Cohen contends that stability is ‘alien’ to justice rather than conceptually connected to it. It is therefore a consideration that should be (...) studied separately. If we are to draw on Rawls's treatment, it needs to be defended against Cohen's critique. I argue that it can be. The defense depends upon establishing a conclusion that Cohen thought inconsistent with Rawls's theory and that might have discomfited Rawls himself: that the arguments he offered for the stability of a just society were more limited and tentative than he acknowledged. Locating those limits has two valuable payoffs. It sheds light on some of the more obscure and difficult, but neglected parts of Rawls's work. More important for our current political moment, it shows the points at which unjust societies such as our own need to be shored up. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose an interpretation of John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples that puts the stability of liberal societies as the central organizing idea of its principles. I start by critically examining other interpretations currently found in the literature. I observe two characteristics of Rawls’s conception of stability from his political turn: stability for the right reasons and in the right way. In the main body of the essay, I argue that the absence of a global egalitarian (...) principle is compatible with the stability of liberal peoples, that the toleration of decent peoples is conducive to the stability of liberal peoples, and that the universal enforcement of human rights and assistance to burdened societies are rationally required for the stability of liberal peoples. I clarify the meaning of the centrality of peace and stability, and explain why it is not conspicuous but still unsurprising given Rawls’s personal history and the development of his theory of international justice. I conclude by suggesting how the stability interpretation paves the way for further extensions of Rawls’s theory of justice and assessing the practical value of The Law of Peoples. (shrink)

The paper analyzes Rawls's moral psychology and the claim that a just society must foster a sufficiently strong sense of justice. When Rawls investigates the development of the sense of justice under a just basic structure, he tacitly narrows down the focus: he only demonstrates the development of a sense of justice on the premise that all members of society are already in possession of a full-fledged sense of justice, save the one individual under investigation. This begs the question, (...) largely presupposing what needs to be explained, namely, how citizens at large develop a sense of justice. Rawls's narrowing of perspective leads to distortions in the analysis of stability, particularly with regard to a property-owning democracy. However, in lesser known parts of his work, Rawls offers clues for a more plausible account. Here, the idea is that institutions must be structured such that they enable all of us to nurture the sense of justice of each of us. With this idea of collective self-transformation in place, it becomes clear that economic institutions must be broadly democratized because of their profound educational role. Thus, the choice between a property-owning democracy and liberal socialism falls more strongly upon the latter. (shrink)

This chapter sets out John Rawls’s conception of autonomy and considers the role that it plays in his thought across A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. I suggest that one distinctive but overlooked feature of this conception is that it takes seriously the threat to autonomy that arises from how individuals are shaped by their social and political institutions. After setting out this conception and tracing its connections to wider discussions of autonomy, I argue for (...) two main conclusions. First, that despite appearances to the contrary, Rawls’s autonomy-based commitments are broadly speaking consistent across his two main works. Second, that these autonomy-based commitments are not in fact disbarred from playing a grounding role in Political Liberalism. On the contrary, I suggest that Rawls’s conception of autonomy motivates his aim of finding principles of justice that can be stable, and that this in turn illuminates his later commitment to a political liberalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a new principle of background justice should be added to Rawls’s Law of Peoples because climate change is an international and intergenerational problem that can destabilize the Society of Peoples and the well-ordered peoples therein. I start with explaining the nature of my project and Rawls’s conception of stability. I argue that climate change poses a realistic threat to the stability of climate-vulnerable liberal peoples and as a result undermines international peace and security. (...) Despite the uncertainties due to the complexity of the climate system and about the resilience of liberal societies, liberal peoples’ fundamental interests in just basic institutions and national security call for the adoption of a precautionary principle. Rawls’s own principles are, I argue, inadequate to solve the stability problem from climate change. Still, his framework provides the theoretical resources to develop a new extension. I propose a new Rawlsian principle of international, intergenerational justice that guarantees the environmental background conditions under which well-ordered peoples can sustain their basic structure over generations and sketch the principle’s institutional implementation. I conclude with the theoretical and practical significance of this extension of Rawls’s theory. (shrink)

롤즈(John Rawls) 사후 발견된 「나의 종교에 대하여」(1997)라는 글과 프린스턴 도서관에서 찾은 롤즈의 학부 졸업 논문 『죄와 믿음의 의미에 대한 짧은 탐구『(1942)가 묶여 2009년 단행본으로 출판되면서 롤즈의 정의론과 종교의 관계가 무엇인지에 대한 학계의 관심이 다시금 높아졌다. 이런 관심에도 불구하고 롤즈 정의론의 도출과 정당화 과정에서 종교적 포괄적 교설이 어떤 역할을 하는지 여부에 대해서는 체계적인 논의가 제시되지 못해 오해와 왜곡이 계속되고 있다. 따라서 본 논문은 롤즈의 공적 이성(public reason) 논의를 중심으로 정의론에서 종교의 의미와 역할이 무엇인지를 규명하고자 한다. 본 논문의 분석에 따르면, 롤즈 정의론에서 (...) 종교는 배타적 견해, 수용적 견해, 넓은 견해의 발전 과정을 통해 점진적으로 수용되었으며, 이를 통해 정의론은 이론 도출을 위한 토대를 마련하였고 정당화 과정에서 안정성을 확보하였다. 이러한 규명은 롤즈 정의론을 보다 잘 이해하도록 도울 뿐만 아니라, 추후 새로운 정의론과 정치철학을 모색하는 기획에 있어서 종교가 어떤 역할을 해야 할지에 대한 시사점을 줄 것으로 기대한다. (shrink)

The social contract approach to the study if institutions aims at providing a solution to the problem of compliance with rational agreements in situations characterized by a conflict between individual rationality and social optimality. After a short discussion of some attempts to deal with this problem from a rational choice perspective, we focus on John Rawls's idea of 'sense of justice' and its application to the explanation of the stability of a well-ordered society. We show how the relevant (...) features of Rawls's theory can be captured by a behavioral game theory model of beliefs dependent dispositions to comply, and we present the results of two experimental studies that provide support to the theory. (shrink)

In the center of the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle elliptically characterizes political justice as a form of reciprocal rule that exists between free and equal persons pursuing a common life directed toward self-sufficiency under the rule of law. My dissertation analyzes Aristotle's thematic treatments of political justice in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics in order to elucidate its meaning, clarify its relationship to the other forms of justice that he also discusses, and compare it to contemporary neo-Aristotelian (...) accounts of justice. ;The first chapter examines the unclear and disputed passages of Ethics V.6--7 and explains why Aristotle discusses political justice in his ethical treatise. The second chapter makes use of Aristotle's juxtaposition of political justice to household justice on the one hand and despotic justice on the other hand in order to explicate the necessary conditions of political justice, namely, freedom, equality, commonality, self-sufficiency, and the rule of law. To make sense of these concepts, the chapter explores such topics as Aristotle's understanding of the household, his notion of the self and his political criticisms of Socrates. The third chapter examines political justice or reciprocal rule in the Politics in order to understand how political justice can be both a human virtue and an institutional arrangement of offices. The fourth chapter offers a critique of Fred Miller's reconstruction of Aristotelian natural rights. Although Miller is correct to say that Aristotle recognized and understood "rights claims," he is mistaken in claiming that they are an integral part of Aristotle's practical philosophy. Aristotle understood the problems for political compromise posed by rights conceived as "trumps," and he rejects rights as philosophically fundamental on the grounds that they are an inadequate solution to both the political problem of justice and the stability of flourishing political institutions. (shrink)

This work scrutinizes different elements of a philosophical disagreement about the understanding of justice between John Rawls and Gerald Cohen. Rawls uses the original position device where representative members of society hypothetically meet to select the best principles for their social cooperation. More convincing seems Cohen s conceptual analysis method which proposes an unveiling of the concept of justice in order to judge what is just.".

Rawls addresses the problem of the stability of his conception of justice by arguing that it could become the focus of an “overlapping consensus,” in which individuals with diverse moral, philosophical, and religious views all accept the Rawlsian conception for different reasons. Using the example of Christian fundamentalists, I show that, subject to constraints that Rawls himself delineates, no such consensus is possible.

This article assesses Frank I. Michelman’s constitution-centered and proceduralist interpretation of Rawls’ conception of political legitimacy and argues that it merits attention because it highlights the institutional aspects of Rawls’ understanding of political legitimacy for constitutional democracies. However, the article also questions Michelman’s interpretation of Rawls’ ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ (LPL) and the later ‘idea of political legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity’ (ILBR). As Michelman rightly points out, for the exercise of political power to be legitimate in (...) a constitutional democracy, it must be in accordance with a constitution that is itself legitimate or reasonably acceptable to free and equal citizens. Yet, the article argues that Rawls’ two legitimacy formulations are attempts to make an additional point: Namely that when democratic citizens exercise political power in ‘the fundamental political issues’, or in issues that shape the basic justice of society or the essentials of the constitution itself, they must respect the ideal of public reason – or ensure themselves and other citizens that their exercise of political power is in accordance with the underlying basic political-moral ideas of persons and society that make the constitution itself acceptable to them. The LPL and the ILBR are conceptions of political legitimacy, not in the sense of setting up a criterion for when a specific law is legitimate, but in the sense of outlining civic or “office-specific” constraints that citizens and public officials must put on their reasoning and exercise of political power in the fundamental political issues for the practice of a constitutional democracy to be legitimate, or well-ordered, reasonably just, and stable for the right reasons – in the long run. The article also discusses why Rawls saw the need to reformulate the LPL, and how the later ILBR assigns a new significance to citizens’ actual use of public reason and their intersubjective deliberation. (shrink)

John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that ‘justice as fairness … is likely to have greater stability than the traditional alternatives since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology'. In support, he presented a psychology of moral development that was informed by a comprehensive liberalism. In Political Liberalism, Rawls confessed that the argument was 'unrealistic and must be recast'. Rawls, however, never provided a psychology of moral development informed by a specifically political liberalism, leaving (...) it at a disadvantage with respect to comprehensive liberalism itself. I argue that no coherent account is available. But, because Rawls’s Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, along with its implied stricture against 'indoctrination in the pejorative sense', is a creature of ideal rather than non-ideal theory, the deficiency is far less significant than many would assume. (shrink)

Justice makes demands upon us. But these demands, important though they may be, are not the only moral demands that we face. Our lives ought to be responsive to other values too. However, some philosophers have identified an apparent tension between those values and norms, such as justice, that seem to transcend the arena of small-scale interpersonal relations and those that are most at home in precisely that arena. How, then, are we to engage with all of the values and (...) norms that we take to apply to us? In this article, I discuss one way that we might hope to resolve the tension and its relation to John Rawls's `basic structure restriction'. The prospect of resolution is offered by the idea of a `division of moral labour', according to which the pursuit of certain values is assigned to institutions and not to individuals. According to Rawls's basic structure restriction, principles of justice are applicable only to the institutions of the basic structure of society. The possibility of a connection between the division of moral labour and the basic structure restriction readily suggests itself. Taking G.A. Cohen's well-known `incentives' critique of the basic structure restriction as a starting point, I consider five ways in which that restriction might be defended by appeal to the division of moral labour. I conclude that none of these defences succeeds, for none convinces that the conditions in which it makes sense to apply the division of moral labour idea obtain for Rawls's conception of distributive justice. Although the division of moral labour is an attractive proposal, it can do no work in a Rawlsian context. Key Words: Cohen • distributive justice • egalitarian ethos • equality • Rawls. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls’s first argument for the inherent stability of a well-ordered society seeks to establish that citizens of such a society would come to share the same or similar senses of justice. In his late work, Rawls significantly revised his second argument for stability, but he repeatedly pronounced himself satisfied with the first. However, the pluralism that so drastically reoriented Rawls’s mature theory also creates destabilizing forces absent in Theory. These destabilizing forces suggest that a (...) shared sense of justice among citizens will be more difficult to achieve. This paper examines Rawl’s late theory in detail to reconstruct how Rawls, despite his stated satisfaction, addressed the destabilizing effects of pluralism through revisions to his first argument for stability. It argues that in his late theory Rawls no longer claims that a well-ordered society could achieve inherent stability. Instead, a more fragile stability is achieved through a disciplined commitment to publ... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Republicanism of Rawls's Liberalism: An Open Question Property‐Owning Democracy Justice and Stability Tocqueville on the Ills of Democratic Personality The Republican Response Some Objections Conclusion: Lessons for Republicans and Liberals References.

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS. -/- The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: (...) there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into an unpalatable moral relativism on which there is no non-arbitrary basis between a justice that underwrites forms of domination such as slavery and a justice that condemns such forms of domination is equally powerful and compelling. I show that there is a way to harmonize both views that is subject to empirical test. -/- First I show that the most widely accepted and influential formulation of liberal justice, John Rawls' Justice as Fairness, in. e.g, A Theory of Justice, cannot avoid the relativistic challenge because it would not be accepted, as a matter of sociological fact, by real people in a divided society once the "veil of Ignorance" is removed and real people step out from the Original Position. To put it differently, different reflective equilibria are inevitable in a divided society. Given the weight that Rawls properly puts on the realizability of a conception of justice and its stability in practice, this is a fatal objection. There can be no divided society that is "well ordered" in Rawls' sense, governed by a shared conception of justice and known to be so governed. -/- I then turn to the most powerful statement of the CLS view, Milton's Fisk's relativistic account in The State and Justice. For Fisk, justice is a compromise between what the dominant groups can compel and what the the subordinate groups will acquiesce to., There is no one such compromise in any given situation, so the account is in that sense relativistic, but more deeply, it is relativistic in that it offers no non-arbitrary, non-question begging way to choose between the official justice of, e.g., a slaveholding society and and the radical justice of the slaves, which has no place for slaveholders as a group or slavery as an institution.All that Fisk can offer is an arbitrary existential choice: I'm with the slaves. (Or the slaveowners.) Most of us would find this disconcerting or even unacceptable. -/- I show that Fisk's general sort of account can be modified to allow for an non-arbitrary choice. Given general facts about human nature, societies based on domination will produce resistance that over the long run will diminish or eliminate various forms of domination. Through a sort of ratchet effect, rights won will be hard if not impossible to reverse. Societies embodying forms of domination can therefore be compared on dimensions of stability: the more domination, the more resistance, and the less stability. Such societies are inferior on the dimension of justice to more emancipatory society on the terms of both kinds of justice, official and radical. -/- This is not question begging because regimes of domination incorporate stability no less than more emancipatory social orders. The choice between official justice embodying domination and radical justice that does not is not arbitrary because it is based on a shared commitment to long term stability. This offers an empirical test of which social orders are more justice, and a prediction that over time, domination will tend to decrease. (shrink)

Professor Nathan’s goals in this short work are to describe the various senses of "just," to classify the ways in which the moral assessments of actions depend on conception of justice, to explain the logical and psychological factors which affect the popularity of various views of justice, and to explore the political implications of egalitarianism. He contends that there can be as many senses of "just" as there are standards which can be intelligibly used for deciding what makes one (...) state of affairs more valuable than another. For example, in deciding which punishment is appropriate for a crime, an indefinite number of criteria can be used, and, so, a punishment may be just in some senses and unjust in others. The moralist’s task is to establish the sense of justice that is proper to use in a given circumstance. Although Nathan does not defend any view of justice, he does criticize several historically important views. He contends that retributive or desert-dependent views of justice lead to inconsistent results or attach importance to emotionally irrelevant considerations. The final chapter distinguishes various egalitarian views and traces some of the implications of these views for a moral assessment of capitalism. An appendix, which was written prior to the publication of John Rawls’ recent influential book, provides a short analysis of Rawls’ theory of justice. Although Professor Nathan makes a number of valuable distinctions, his book is far too concise and would have benefited from the use of more examples and the elimination of some of his specially devised jargon.—M.G. (shrink)

This article argues that Honneth’s ‘plural conception of justice’, founded on a theory of recognition, does not succeed in distancing itself from Rawls’ liberal theory of justice. The article develops its argument by evaluating three major objections to Rawls’ liberalism raised by Honneth in his recent articles on justice: namely, first, that the parties responsible for choosing principles of justice are too individualistic and their practical reasoning too instrumentalist; second, that by taking as its ‘object-domain’ the negative liberty of (...) persons, Rawls’ theory fails to promote the actual realization of liberty; and finally, that Rawls’ method of principle justification undermines the ‘priority’ of its Kantian ‘formality’ by presupposing a substantive commitment to a conception of individual good. Arguing that Honneth’s interpretation of Rawls’ theory contains important errors, the article concludes that both theories share the basic intention of securing for all citizens the material and institutional conditions for the actualization of otherwise merely formal liberties or, in Honneth’s terms, mutual self-realization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Rawls's Originary Theory of JusticeEric Gans (bio)The fundamental thesis of generative anthropology is that the principal concern of human culture is and has been from the outset to defer the potential violence of mimetic desire. To this mode of thought, constructing a model of the good society in any but the general terms of "exchange" and "reciprocity" is unfaithful to the human community, whose operations have been (...) from the beginning beyond the grasp of any individual mind within the society, and in which since the rise of the market system we participate largely unmediated by ritual. Rather than providing a template for the "good society," originary thinking provides a touchstone for ethical progress: act so as to contribute to reciprocal exchange, negatively, by aiding those who need help to participate in the exchange system more fully, and positively, by creating new foci of desire that enrich the system of exchange, the circulation of desire and satisfaction. The result of these acts is to reduce or "defer" resentment, negatively, by removing grievances, and positively, by creating new opportunities for recycling resentment into productive activity.These precepts notwithstanding, the "moral model" of reciprocal exchange, as exemplified in the exchange of signs around the sacred center in the hypothetical originary event, provides the basis for a recurrent temptation to create utopias. The theoretical gesture of measuring a given social order against a moral ideal is an extension of the moral intuition we apply in judging all human actions; whatever our degree of resignation, we cannot help but resent any suggestion—even when it is "objectively" false—that we have been victims of a failure of reciprocity. Both the theory and the personal intuition are direct descendants of the originary exchange of representations, as are the moral "theories" that are explicitly grounded in the sacred. Abstract moral theorizing must ultimately appeal to either transcendence or intuition, and the appeal to the former differs only in its rhetoric from the appeal to the latter.Finally, these "timeless" reflections must be situated in history. Determining the proper relationship between universal morality and historically [End Page 149] particular ethics poses a particularly acute problem in the postmodern era. The question that has remained with us since the end of World War II is how to overcome the paralysis of Auschwitz—how to acknowledge the necessary deferral of reciprocity without condoning genocide. If we hold history's institutions to the touchstone of the moral model, they will always be found wanting, yet this historical experience tells us that if we do not so hold them, anything is possible. The fact that accusations of Nazism (or "fascism") continue to be made today—notably against Israel itself—is a sign that the moral dilemma has not yet been resolved. But unlike metaphysical thought, originary thinking takes the Holocaust as a sign not of the need to construct a social model that will resolve this dilemma, but of the inappropriateness of confronting it directly. Making the world a better place not only does not require but is in fact incompatible with a prior image of the world made good.The most serious attempt by mainstream Anglo-American social thought to grapple with this postmodern quandary is that of the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002), whose A Theory of Justice (1971) remains the era's most important work of moral philosophy. To sum up in my own terms Rawls's basic idea: if we imagine ourselves in an "original position" when society has not yet come into existence, so that our (future) place in it is hidden from us by a "veil of ignorance," then we will be able to agree on the criteria of a good society, since our uncertainty will convince us all equally of the necessity to protect ourselves from unfairness in the event we are assigned one of society's less desirable roles. We may then accept this imaginary agreement, unbiased by the participants' knowledge of their eventual social role, as universal humanity's most just arrangement. Rawls considers that under these conditions any inequality in the overall distribution of social goods can be justified only if it produces a margin of... (shrink)

John Rawls's influential theory of justice and public reason has often been thought to exclude religion from politics, out of fear of its illiberal and destabilizing potentials. It has therefore been criticized by defenders of religion for marginalizing and alienating the wealth of religious sensibilities, voices, and demands now present in contemporary liberal societies. In this anthology, established scholars of Rawls and the philosophy of religion reexamine and rearticulate the central tenets of Rawls's theory to show they in (...) fact offer sophisticated resources for accommodating and responding to religions in liberal political life. The chapters reassert the subtlety, openness, and flexibility of his sense of liberal "respect" and "consensus," revealing their inclusive implications for religious citizens. They also explore the means he proposes for accommodating nonliberal religions in liberal politics, developing his conception of "public reason" into a novel account of the possibilities for rational engagement between liberal and religious ideas. And they reevaluate Rawls's liberalism from the "transcendent" perspectives of religions themselves, critically considering its normative and political value, as well as its own "religious" character. _Rawls and Religion_ makes a unique and important contribution to contemporary debates over liberalism and its response to the proliferation of religions in contemporary political life. (shrink)

In this article I examine the importance of self-respect in the justification of Rawls’s theory of justice. First, I present two elements that are part of the contemporary debate on self-respect as a form of self-worth—namely, moral status and merit. Second, I specify the bases that support self-respect within A Theory of Justice. Finally, I discuss at length the function of self-respect in justifying the principles of justice. This inquiry implies an analysis of the relationship between self-respect and the component (...) parts of the two principles of justice: basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle. I also explore the connection between self-respect and the sense of justice in light of the stability argument, and how the relationship between the two is important for achieving social stability. (shrink)

Marxism as a normative position is critical of liberalism. However, the problems of justice and alienation that Marxism draws attention to can be solved by liberalism without the implementation of a Marxist political project. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the thesis that Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach (one of the versions of political liberalism) is a more inclusive and rational method of theorizing about the basic principles of justice than Marxism. By analyzing Elizabeth Anderson's theory of liberal egalitarianism (...) "democratic equality", I show that some of Marxist approaches that (1) do not deny the existence of justice and (2) are concerned with the problem of alienation, can apply the arsenal of the moral theory of political liberalism to solve these problems. I also criticize Rawls's and Nussbaum's theories of political liberalism for their procedural vagueness and non-inclusive theory of justice. I present an outline of my position, which I propose to call «extended political liberalism» (hereafter EPL). EPL is currently represented by two arguments: 1) the paideia argument and 2) the argument of the interdependence of the good and the right. The first allows talking about the actual implementation of basic rights and freedoms only when citizens are aware of them and have the opportunity to change their views regarding the personal conception of the good. This is impossible without qualitative basic education. Also, one of the central concepts of EPL is presented within the framework of Paideia's argument - the interpretation of the political conception of justice. Because of this concept, it makes sense to talk about the possibility of citizens' reflection on the reconciliation of the current political conception with the personal conception of the good. This can also be done through the analysis of other conceptions of the good. The second argument is a continuation of the first, appearing as a theoretical mechanism that allows supplementing the existing political conception in case of serious social changes. In conclusion, if we take into account the advantages of the capabilities approach and my criticism of its weaknesses, then a theoretical position will emerge that is quite acceptable to some representatives of Marxism. Moreover, the latter will not have to give up their basic beliefs. The peculiarity of my concept presented in this text is that it is not so much a critique of Marxism as an analysis of the basic normative judgments of political liberalism, with which some Marxists can agree. With this article, I also want to illustrate the strengths of such a concept and point to its prospects for further attempts to interpret the political conception by other normative positions. (shrink)

Within the framework of the contemporary discussions of the presuppositions of democracy, the author of this paper poses the question whether discussing justice primarily from the social rather than the personal aspect and level is, perhaps, more appropriate. This ties in with the question of the primary object of justice – is justice the trait of social institutions or individuals? Thus the question of what kind of justice matches democracy. The author explicates this network of questions through three underlying (...) models of the theory of justice – Plato, Aristotle and Rawls’s model. Plato’s model is about the realisation of a good life in a political community in view of the idea of justice that one should do that which is proper to one. Aristotle’s understanding of justice sets forth from a systematic analysis of the concepts that differentiate between the levels of general and particular justice. Rawls’s model of distributive justice rests on the mechanism of the forces of the institutional functional frameworks in well-organised societies. The author’s conclusion is that both forms of justice correspond well to the realisation of democracy. It is best when one’s personal disposition to justice provides strength and support to the social institutions of democracy. Without an adequate institutional framework there is, most certainly, no democracy. Without the personal support of citizens, which issues from fundamental consent, democracy can neither be sustained nor developed. In a democratic system, the private sphere of citizens cannot be fully separated from their public actions. Democracy always and necessarily contains in itself some of the political ideals, which citizens cannot, in their worldviews, relate to neutrally. The questions of the institutional and political shaping of relations, and the questions of the good and just life should be in the interest of the citizens. If they do not accomplish their democratic ideals through their own belief and virtue, then there is no substance that would shape identity for a just system of social institutions. If they do not relate to it as to their own common sense and good to be preserved, democracy has no prospects. (shrink)

Marx and Rawls seems to have a very different concept of justice. Marx argued that the concept of justice functions in the performance of the dominant ideological mode of production required for the conduct, as universally binding legal code. Rawls is argued that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, its law may be recognized by all such people: they are fair and reasonable to discuss the issue is how to equitably divide among themselves the burden of social (...) cooperation and interests. Although embodied in Marx and Rawls an important difference between the various positions still exist, but I believe that the concept of justice is obviously two different positions, is able to reconcile. Despite the different effects of Hegel and Kant, Marx and Rawls's view can still show the same place. In a clear political concept of justice, Rawls believes that acceptable principles of justice, must be in the social system can be implemented. This led to his "Kantian constructivism", close to Hegel's view, at this point, Marx laid him on the universal, social rejection of a priori principles of justice. I believe that both Marx and Rawls are asked, and what can be seen as a social system to achieve the principles of justice as fairness. However, during which there are two important differences. First, Marx's vision, seems to be a Hume and Rawls beyond the so-called "environmental justice" society, while Rawls , the social environment beyond the justice is utopian. Secondly, Marx believed that, as the social basis of market relations should be exceeded, because the relationship between these markets to include the producers of natural and social process of production of the products of labor and social alienation. Although environmental justice in the society beyond the market's demise may be, Rawls was declared to be a just solution in the competitive demands of any society, the demise of the market are not. I believe that, if Marx's rejection of the market, as a fundamental denial "commodity fetishism", then the position of Marx and Rawls will be able to reconcile. The author concludes that, in addition to Marx's concept of the future classless society with the ideal ingredients, capitalism and the market in the concept of justice, Marx and Rawls's position is very close. Man and Raids appear to have quite different views at justice. Marx claims that the concept of justice functions ideologically to represent conduct required by the prevailing mode of production as universally binding imperatives. Rawls claims that justice is the first virtue of society, whose principles may be agreed to by all persons who impartially and rationally deliberate on the issue of fairly dividing the burdens and benefits of social cooperation. I argue that these apparently different positions on justice can be reconciled, although important differences between the standpoints of Marx and Rawls remain. Despite the differing influences on them of Hegel and Kant, the views of Marx and Rawls can be shown to converge. In proposing an explicitly political conception of justice, Rawls argues that acceptable principles of justice must be realisable in social institutions. This brings his' Kantian constructivism 'closer to the Hegelian view, on which Marx bases his rejection of universal, socially transcendent principles of justice. I argue that both Marx and Rawls can be seen as asking what social institutions can realise principles of justice as fairness. Nevertheless, two important differences remain. Marx seems to envisage a society which transcends the 'circumstances of justice', as specified by Hume and Rawls, whereas Rawls a society beyond the circumstances of justice as utopian. Secondly, Marx claims that market relations should be transcended as the basis of society, since they inherently involve alienation of producers from the social process of production and from the product of their social labour. However, while elimination of markets might be possible in a society that transcends the circumstances of justice, Rawls claims that it is not possible in any society where a fair resolution of competing claims is necessary. I argue that the positions of Marx and Rawls can be reconciled if we take Marx's objection to markets as fundamentally an objection to the 'fetishism of commodities'. I conclude that, apart from the utopian element in Marx's conception of a future classless society, the positions of Marx and Rawls on the justice of capitalism and the market are quite close. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen argues that John Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society as the exclusive subject of social justice is misguided. I argue that two understandings of the notion of basic structure seem to be present in the literature, either in implicit or in explicit terms. According to the first, the basic structure is to be equated with a given set of institutions: if they endorse the right principles of justice, the basic structure of society is just; (...) According to the second, a society has a just basic structure if and only if its institutional web manages to realize the relevant principles of justice as well it can. In, the institutional structure is not a given: different social circumstances call for different institutional solutions in order to achieve a just basic structure overall. The first part of the paper make a case for, and explores some of its normative implications. The second part asks which consequences this understanding may have for the idea of a global basic structure. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen is famous for his critique of John Rawls’s view that principles of justice are restricted in scope to institutional structures. In recent work, however, Cohen has suggested that Rawlsians get more than just the scope of justice wrong: they get the concept wrong too. He claims that justice is a fundamental value, i.e. a moral input in our deliberations about the content of action-guiding regulatory principles, rather than the output. I argue here that Cohen’s arguments for extending the (...) scope of justice equivocate across his distinction between fundamental principles of justice, i.e. principles that tell us what justice is; and regulatory principles of justice, i.e. principles that tell us what is required of us, all things – including justice – considered. Though Cohen initially had the regulatory sense of the word ‘justice’ in mind when critiquing the basic structure restriction, his replies to the problem of demandingness presuppose his own, fundamental sense of the word ‘justice’. The upshot is that he escapes demandingness at the cost of sacrificing regulatory justice’s capacity to provide clear guidance. I conclude by considering Peter Singer’s efforts to deal with demandingness in his own work on global poverty. Since Singer manages to deal with demandingness without giving up clarity, his work is a good a place to start in the search for regulatory principles that are suitable for the context of personal choice. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude toward envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy poses to political stability. Yet he also briefly discusses the kind of envy that individuals experience toward their social peers, which he calls particular envy, and which I refer to as peer envy. He quickly concludes, however, that particular envy would not present a serious risk to the stability of his just society. In this article, I contest (...) this claim by arguing that the principles that structure Rawls’s ideal society are likely to exacerbate particular envy to a politically risky extent. Section 1 reconstructs his account of envy, giving special attention to his belief that competition kindles envy between peers. Section 2 then examines the way in which Rawls often endorses rivalry within the body politic. I argue that the society governed by justice as fairness is, on account of this rivalry, likely to generate a politically problematic degree of particular envy. In Section 3, I invoke ancient Greece as an example of a society that was, as a result of its intense competitiveness, often imperiled by dangerously elevated levels of peer envy. I then survey the key institutional mechanisms by which the ancient Greeks sought to manage this hazardous emotion. It turns out, however, that most of these mechanisms would be unavailable to Rawls insofar as they starkly contravene his principles of justice. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society that fosters rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

This article makes the case for a specific variety of what we call Collective Capital Institutions (CCIs), by returning to the idea of Wage-Earner Funds (WEFs) – a 1970s Swedish policy proposal designed gradually to shift ownership and control over parts of the economy to democratically controlled institutions. We identify two attractive rationales in favour of such a scheme and argue that both can fruitfully be transposed to the current worldwide economic situation. The egalitarian rationale is that WEFs (...) could help in the pursuit of equality by giving a wider set of people a stake in collectively owned companies and a right to their profits. The democratic rationale is that WEFs redistribute not only these profits, but also the power over economic decisions made within companies. We then contrast such schemes for collective capital ownership with the similar but much more privatised proposals set out in, for instance, John Rawls's idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’. We argue that CCIs ultimately are more likely to contribute to the development of the ‘sense of justice’ within society that is needed for a stable just society. We conclude that CCIs deserve a great deal more exploration in academic and political discussions of egalitarian economic systems. (shrink)

It has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at (...) the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

What would it mean for the institutions of finance to be democratized? I explore this question from a broadly Rawlsian conception of justice. In the first part of the paper I outline Rawls’s theory of justice. In the second part I briefly review what Rawls had to say about justice in the economic sphere. Notably, he thought that his conception of justice can only be realized in either “Property-Owning Democracy” or “Liberal Socialism.” I briefly explore the nature (...) of these two “regimes,” before turning my attention to the institutions of finance, and in particular banking. In the third part I discuss the role of finance in contemporary liberal democracies, the social and political power that private banks are endowed with in such societies, and what problems this engenders from the perspective of justice. In the fourth part I argue that, among other things, the democratization of finance would entail wide dispersal of power and control over decisions about finance and investment. In the fifth and final part of the paper, I argue that there are reasons to believe that both of Rawls’s just economic regimes would fail with respect to the distribution of power and control in the economy. (shrink)

In this article I present two possible interpretations of Rawls’s assertion in A Theory of Justice that human beings have a desire to express their nature as free and rational. My reading hinges on different accounts of the Kantian conception of the person and of the Aristotelian principle and its companion effect. According to the first interpretation, this desire is a kind of natural predisposition inherent in all persons irrespective of the society in which they live. It has a (...) universal and ahistorical aspect. The second interpretation sees our free and rational nature as an ideal that we strive to fulfill. This ideal appeals only to citizens of modern liberal democracies and entails a more qualified universalism. I argue that there is strong textual support for both interpretations but the second one is more consistent with the methodological framework of justice as fairness. (shrink)

Threats to the stability of liberal democracies are of obvious contemporary import. Concern with stability runs through John Rawls’s work. The stability that concerned him was that of fundamental terms of cooperation. Rawls long believed that the terms which would be stable were his two principles, but he eventually conceded that even a well-ordered society was more likely to be characterized by “justice pluralism” than by consensus on his own conception of justice. Contemporary liberal democracies, too, are divided about (...) what justice demands. I believe Rawls’s treatment of stability can help us understand the conditions under which fundamental terms of cooperation can be stable under non-ideal conditions such as ours. But because Rawls never worked through the consequences of his concession, his view needs to be developed before we can draw on it. Rawls’s treatment makes use of elementary game theory. Thus in _Theory of Justice_ he said -- and in _Political Liberalism_ he implied -- that stability would result from citizens with a sense of justice “playing” strategies which combined for what was, in effect, a Nash equilibrium. I argue that his concession requires a new conception of stability and implies that Rawls cannot appeal to a Nash equilibrium to show how stability would be maintained. His concession therefore forces open a troubling gap in his analysis. I fill that gap by proposing a weaker equilibrium concept that serves Rawlsian purposes. I conclude with what this project suggests for challenges facing the fragile liberal democracies of our own time. (shrink)

We analyse solidarity as a mixture of social justice on the onehand and a set of cultural values and ascriptions on the otherhand. The latter defines the relevant sense of belonging togetherin a society. From a short analysis of the early stages of theDutch welfare state, we conclude that social responsibility wasoriginally based in religious and political associations. In theheyday of the welfare state, institutions such as sick funds,hospitals or nursing homes became financed collectively entirelyand became accessible to people (...) of all denominations. Solidaritywas transformed in a more general category, related to the statusof Dutch citizenship. Responsibility was transformed tocollective responsibility.Financial pressures on the Welfare State have resulted in adebate on choices in health care and in a number of systemreforms, so far relatively small. In the surrounding discourse,justice was linked to private responsibility. Both fromgovernment officials and from participants in the societaldebate, moralistic overtones could be heard concerning the threatof overburdening of the health care system by citizens.In this paper, we develop a concept of reflexive solidarity thatlinks elements of social justice to conceptualisations ofresponsibility that address policy makers and health careinstitutions as well as citizens, in their role of carereceivers. A short analysis of the phenomenon of personal budgetsin care services should prove that our concept of reflexivesolidarity is not empty. Linked to, but beyond the concept ofjustice, issues of social responsibility can be addressed withoutmoralistic overtones. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Forms of Property‐Owning Democracy What Is Stability? Why Does It Matter? The Sense of Justice Participation in Public Life Three Distinctive Features of Rawls's View Democratic Corporatism and Participation Objections Conclusion References.

Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between Rawls’s original position and Habermas’s principle, neither of which is germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and his is confined to (...) the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by ‘comprehensive doctrine’. Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law ‘morally freestanding’, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and natural law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Habermas’s mature theory contains conflicting claims about the relation between morality and democratic legitimacy. So there is at least one important sense in which Rawls’s charge of comprehensiveness is made to stick against Habermas’s conception of democratic legitimacy, and remains unanswered. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls, is widely regarded as the most important twentieth-century work of Anglo-American political philosophy. It transformed the field by offering a compelling alternative to the dominant utilitarian conception of social justice. The argument for this alternative is, however, complicated and often confusing. In this book Jon Mandle carefully reconstructs Rawls's argument, showing that the most common interpretations of it are often mistaken. For example, Rawls does not endorse welfare-state capitalism, and he is (...) not a 'luck egalitarian' as is widely believed. Mandle also explores the relationship between A Theory of Justice and the developments in Rawls's later work, Political Liberalism, as well as discussing some of the most influential criticisms in the secondary literature. His book will be an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to engage with this ground-breaking philosophical work. (shrink)

The present exposition has the following structure. In the first part,, I will synthetize some of the criticisms of Rawl’s conception of subject, or self; in the second part, I will scrutinize a 1963 paper by Rawls entitled “The sense of justice”, and hope to show, on the basis of this text, that one cannot say that the Rawlsian moral being is a being without flesh, blood or life, as critics have suggested, following in the footsteps of criticism from (...) Hegel to Kant; third, I will examine excerpts of TJ that deal, directly or indirectly, with the concept of subject; finally, I will look at papers published after TJ that may be relevant to the present topic. (shrink)

This article attempts to challenge those contemporary philosophical approaches to justice (and this is the majority of them) which ascribe to the notion of justice a dominant role within ethics and political philosophy. In the first section, this overestimation of justice is traced back to J.S. Mill (and to John Rawls). After having pointed out some of the essential features of the Millian (and Rawlsian) concept, I show how far these attributes are away from what we (in our everyday language) (...) mean by the word ‚justice’. Finally, I try to spell out what might be more plausibly seen as the focus of our shared moral intuition, and to highlight to which extent there is an overlap with our common idea of justice. (shrink)

A collection of 17 essays on Kantian moral theory and practical ethics, including papers on autonomy, human dignity, utopian thinking, O'Neill and Rawls on constructivism, tragic choices, philanthropy, conscientious object, suicide, respect, self-respect, and an ideal attitude of appreciation beyond art, nature, and gratitude. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations for Kant’s Works INTRODUCTION PART II: KANT AND KANTIAN PERSPECTIVES (1) The Groundwork (2) Kant on Imperfect Duties to Oneself (3) Kantian Autonomy and Contemporary Ideas of Autonomy (4) Rüdiger Bittner on Autonomy (...) (5) Kantian Perspectives on the Rational Basis of Human Dignity (6) In Defense of Human Dignity (7) The Kingdom of Ends as an Ideal and Constraint on Legislation (8) Kantian Ethics and Utopian Thinking (9) Varieties of Constructivism PART II: PRACTICAL ETHICS (10) Human Dignity and Tragic Choices (11) Duties and Choices in Philanthropic Giving: A Kantian Perspective (12) Killing Ourselves (13) Conscientious Conviction and Conscience (14) Stability, A Sense of Justice, and Self-Respect (15) Two Conceptions of Virtue (16) Beyond Respect and Beneficence: An Ideal of Appreciation (17) Ideals of Appreciation and Expressions of Respect REFERENCES INDEX . (shrink)

G. A. Cohen argues that Rawls’s difference principle is incompatible with his endorsement of incentives inequality—higher pay for certain professions is just when that pay benefits everyone. Cohen concludes that Rawls must reject both incentives inequality and ‘institutionalism’—the view that egalitarian principles, including the difference principle, apply exclusively to social institutions. I argue that the premises of Cohen’s ‘internal criticism’ of Rawls require rejecting two important parts of his theory: a ‘subjective circumstance of justice’ and a ‘shared conception (...) of justice’. These are important parts of Rawls’s ‘constructivism’. Constructivism is the view that a conception of justice is the solution to a practical interaction problem and is solved in part by examining the facts of the problem. Thus, an upshot of my arguments is that this Cohen/Rawls dispute reduces to another dispute over ‘constructivism’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Justice and the General Will:Affirming Rousseau's Ancient OrientationDavid Lay WilliamsThere is much confusion about how to characterize the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His thought has at various times been related to such dissimilar thinkers as Plato and Hobbes. From Plato he is said to have acquired his affinities for community and civic virtue. And one does not have to look too hard to find his praise for the great (...) sage of the Academy: "Plato only purified the heart of man."1 He was often eager to affiliate his ideas with those of antiquity. He yearned for modern society to rekindle the flames of a once-great civilization. "[W]hat keeps us [the moderns] from being men like them [the ancients]? Our prejudices, our base philosophy, and the passions of petty self-interest, concentrated together with egoism in all hearts by inept institutions in which genius never had any share."2 Despite his obvious admiration for the perceived greater ideas of the past, however, Rousseau also expressed some skepticism. James Miller has suggested that he held Plato's theory of the Forms to be unsustainable.3 Allan Bloom has likewise argued that Rousseau's "teaching is not... a revival of those of Plato.... If he admires the practice of antiquity, he does not accept the theory."4This has led many to argue that Rousseau is best understood as student of Thomas Hobbes. Roger D. Masters, for example, has suggested that "Rousseau's principles of political right can... be best described as a reformulation [End Page 383] of Hobbes' conception of the social contract."5 Arthur Melzer also argues, "The purpose of the doctrine Rousseau elaborates in the Social Contract is essentially the same [as Hobbes']."6 This view is argued on the grounds that the General Will is a positive or arbitrary standard, functioning as the primary principle of Rousseau's constructive political program. Yet the vision of Rousseau as a Hobbesian or modernist also merits skepticism. While he employs a social contract, as does Hobbes, he explicitly rejects traditional forms of positivism. "What is good and conformable to order is so by the nature of things and independently of human conventions."7 Whatever one might say about such passages, it at least raises the possibility that Rousseau is no modernist in the Straussian sense of defining Justice as human agreement.Much of what contributes to the conflicting interpretations of Rousseau can be attributed to different understandings of the relative priority and relationship of two central concepts in his writings. One of these is the well-discussed notion of the General Will. The dominant fashion is to read the General Will as a conventional substitute for natural law or transcendent Ideas. According to this reading, the General Will is grounded on nothing more than consent and functions as the first principle of all legitimate political societies. The other term central to Rousseau's program is the far less discussed but equally important concept of Justice. Little has been written on his understanding of Justice and, for that matter, he himself rarely discussed it explicitly. But it, too, could also be considered a primary principle. While it would be foolish to dismiss the importance of the General Will to Rousseau, it would be equally problematic to explore it independently of his Idea of Justice. The question in understanding his work is which of these two principles—the General Will or Justice—is primary or fundamental. If it is the General Will, a case can be made that the Straussians are right, and Rousseau is a positivist. If Justice is prior, on the other hand, then there is reason to believe that he was something much different.I argue that the positivist reading of Rousseau is flawed. Indeed, my thesis is that he is among the greatest and most thorough Platonists of the modern era.8 His rejection of Hobbes is not merely rhetorical. In fact, it represents the [End Page 384] true impetus of his social contract. This contract is designed explicitly to counter Hobbesian positivism. In the same way that Plato responds to Protagoras' positivism with his theory of the Forms, Rousseau responds to Hobbes... (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of the role that the idea of fraternity plays in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Many commentators, G.A. Cohen for example, have taken as their target the role of fraternity in understanding the difference principle. The article highlights the neglected connection between Rawls’s principle of fraternity and the role of sentiments in A Theory of Justice. I focus, in particular, on the third part of A Theory of Justice, which has received less attention in (...) the secondary literature. The main idea put forward is that, contrary to what his egalitarian critics contend, the Rawlsian conception of fraternity constitutes the most plausible version of this political ideal: one which is properly egalitarian. (shrink)

Global justice or the lack thereof has internal connections with global poverty. Global justice is an ideal pursuit of cosmopolitanism, which regards basic human needs as its rightful object. The right to life, from the point of view of global justice, is the most fundamental in the list of Human Rights. International anarchy and the current international economic order, however, cast a utopian shadow on the realization of this right when we consider the de facto institutions and the ostensible (...) goal of impartial love for everyone. Humanitarian aid is another approach to the problem of contemporary global poverty. Its difficulty lies first in people’s different conceptions of obligation and donation. They consider the former as duty while the latter is seen to lie beyond the call of duty. Second, in terms of a correlation between right and duty, since everyone has the right to life, the duty falls accordingly upon organizations or individuals. Meanwhile, donation as duty is not perfect obligation, thus is not compulsory either. Finally, international humanitarian aid is constrained by nationalism and partial love. Hence, in the light of either government or individual, the humanitarian aid approach is beset with challenges. Global justice has gained academic importance worldwide since John Rawls’ later works. By contrast to domestic justice, it is a theory of justice that proposes to include all human beings. Global justice stands for a kind of utopian justice in regard to both the institutional path and the humanitarian aid approach. I shall examine the theory of global justice under these two aspects. (shrink)

According to Rawls, the principles of justice are principles that determine a fair resolution of conflicts of interest among persons in a society. “A set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares” (p. 4). Different interpretations or conceptions of justice fill out this core concept; a theory of justice seeks a best conception. Justice takes priority over other normative claims—as (...) Rawls states, justice is the “first virtue of social institutions.” The principles of justice are principles to regulate what Rawls calls the “basic structure of society,” that is, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation” (p. 6). Why focus on the basic structure? “The basic structure is the primary subject of justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start. The intuitive idea here is that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply” (p. 7). (shrink)

The author proceeds from empirical basis to show how far the two Rawls's principles of justice can be implemented in Africa. Positions not only of Rawls but also of other philosophers are presented, reconstructed and commented. They are also opposed with critiques and other theories, so that the appropriate position for Africa can be explained. The author comes to the conclusion that the fundamental liberties are still in the making in Africa. A long colonial past and Aparthied have deprived (...) Africa from its blossoming. However, a groping democracy of full hope is pointing ahead. So that freedom and democracy gain more room the author suggests the establishment of federalism based on ethnic groups. To speak of democracy and freedom without a substantial economic support seems illusive. In order to improve the lot of the least advantaged the author proposes betterment of education and health. (shrink)

Under the influence of concerns about sustainability, health system reforms have targeted institutional designs and have overlooked the role of socio-political factors like solidarity—a concept that is generally assumed to underpin the redistributive health system. The purpose of this research is to investigate users’ perceptions of the National Health Insurance as a system, their senses of solidarity and their views on the sustainability of the system in Taiwan. Using the descriptive ethics approach, qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with typical case (...) sampling of 17 participants in the Taipei Metropolitan. The framework approach was used to analyze the interview transcripts. The research finds that despite great differences between users’ perceptions of the NHI, most users could share a notion of mutual relationship among each other. Three types of reasons are used to justify the obligations of mutual aid imposed by the NHI. These reasons are embedded within divergent conceptions of solidarity. The research also finds that government’s performance, the stability of decision-making and users’ personal experiences engaging with the system are important conditions for the users’ supportive attitude toward the system. Solidarity is a plausible concept in sustaining a non-Western social health insurance such as Taiwan’s NHI. (shrink)