Rawls on Distributive Justice, Misc

The “property question” is the constitutional question whether a society’s basic resources are to be publicly or privately owned; that is, whether these basic resources are to be available to private owners, perhaps subject to tax and regulation, or whether instead they are to be retained in joint public ownership, and managed by democratic processes. James Madison’s approach represents a case in which prior holdings are taken for granted, and the property question itself is kept off of the political agenda. (...) By contrast, John Rawls approach abstracts from any actual pattern of holdings, while putting the property question on the political agenda, but at a particular place. This paper compares and contrasts the two approaches. (shrink)

In a section of his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia entitled “Macro and Micro,” Nozick makes objections of a certain kind to Rawls. In this paper, I draw attention to a macro and micro objection that scattered material in that book entails.

In this paper, I present an obstacle to realizing John Rawls’s system of justice. The basic liberties have lexical priority, but they risk undermining fair equality of opportunity, because freedom of speech allows us to spread false prejudices. I present the obstacle through a pastiche of a notable fiction writer from the Indian sub-continent.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

School boosters are tax-exempt organizations that engage in fundraising efforts to provide public schools with supplementary resources. This paper argues that prevailing forms of school boosting are defeasibly unjust. Section 1 shows that inequalities in public education funding in the United States violate John Rawls’s two principles of domestic justice. Section 2 argues that prevailing forms of school boosting exacerbate and plausibly perpetuate these injustices. Section 3 then contends that boosting thereby defeasibly violates Rawlsian principles of nonideal theory for rectifying (...) injustice. Thus, boosting should be presumptively either made illegal or substantially reformed. Finally, Section 4 responds to potential objections. (shrink)

Liberalism is often claimed to be at odds with feminism and critical race theory (CRT). This article argues, to the contrary, that Rawlsian liberalism supports the central commitments of both. Section 1 argues that Rawlsian liberalism supports intersectional feminism. Section 2 argues that the same is true of CRT. Section 3 then uses Young’s ‘Five Faces of Oppression’—a classic work widely utilized in feminism and CRT to understand and contest many varieties of oppression—to illustrate how Rawlsian liberalism supports diverse feminist (...) and CRT projects, and why it may be critical to achieve solidarity between feminism, CRT, and Rawlsian liberalism. Finally, Section 4 responds to five objections. (shrink)

John Rawls raises three challenges – to which one can add a fourth challenge – to an impartial spectator account: (a) the impartial spectator is a utility-maximizing device that does not take seriously the distinction between persons; (b) the account does not guarantee that the principles of justice will be derived from it; (c) the notion of impartiality in the account is the wrong one, since it does not define impartiality from the standpoint of the litigants themselves; (d) the account (...) would offer a comprehensive, rather than a political, form of liberalism. The narrow aim of the article is to demonstrate that Adam Smith's impartial spectator account can rise to Rawls's challenges. The broader aim is to demonstrate that the impartial spectator account offers the basis for a novel and alternative framework for developing principles of justice, and does so in the context of a political form of liberalism. (shrink)

The ‘liberal-communitarian’ debate arose within anglophone political philosophy during the 1980s. This essay opens with an account of the main outlines of the debate, showing how liberals and communitarians tended to confront each other with opposing interpretations of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1999; originally published in 1971) and Political Liberalism (2005; originally published in 1993). The essay then proceeds to discuss four forms of ‘liberalism after communitarianism’: Michael Freeden’s account of liberalism as an ideology; Joseph Raz and Will Kymlicka’s (...) perfectionist liberalisms; the liberalism of value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams; and Judith N. Shklar’s liberalism of fear. It concludes with the suggestion that there are times when liberals of every kind should set aside their ideology, even if only temporarily, in order to listen to their interlocutors with truly open minds. (shrink)

Many of us assume that all the free editing and sorting of online content we ordinarily rely on is carried out by AI algorithms — not human persons. Yet in fact, that is often not the case. This is because human workers remain cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than AI for performing myriad tasks where the right answer turns on ineffable contextual criteria too subtle for algorithms to yet decode. The output of this work is then used for machine learning (...) purposes to generate algorithms constructed from large data sets containing thousands of correctly coded observations. The fact that ghost workers are treated as consumers distorts the basic logic of the employment relationship, effectively placing the worker-as-consumer in the worst of both worlds, in which they hold the legal rights of neither group. This puts them in a regulatory limbo position in which they have little or no protection, control, or guarantee of return on investment. This is because the platforms that facilitate ghost work have orchestrated a three-way virtual relationship that absolves all parties of responsibility, while placing nearly all the risks and opportunity costs squarely on the shoulders of the workers. As a result, we believe such a work arrangement as it stands, does not uphold basic standards of Rawlsian justice as fairness. (shrink)

This article focuses on the challenge of determining the relative weight of domestic and global justice demands. This problem concerns a variety of views that differ on the metric, function, scope, grounds and fundamental interpretation of justice norms. I argue that domestic and global economic justice are irreducibly interdependent. In order to address their exact relation, I discuss and compare three theoretical models: (i) the bottom-up-approach, which prioritizes domestic justice; (ii) the top-down-approach, which prioritizes global justice; and (iii) the horizontal (...) framework, according to which both domestic and global principles pose equally stringent demands that are to be implemented horizontally, without attributing a simple priority to one over the other. I argue that the third model represents the best overall framework, although more complex normative criteria need to be elaborated on the basis of this approach, affecting issues such as justice in climate change mitigation and adaption, development cooperation, trade, finance, taxation and immigration. (shrink)

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing on an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ (...) account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier. (shrink)

According to Philip Pettit, we should understand republican liberty, freedom as ‘non-domination,’ as a ‘supreme political value.’ It is its commitment to freedom as non-domination, Pettit claims, that distinguishes republicanism from various forms of liberal egalitarianism, including the political liberalism of John Rawls. I explain that Rawlsian political liberalism is committed to a form of non-domination, namely, a ‘political’ conception, which is: (a) limited in its scope to the ‘basic structure of society,’ and (b) ‘freestanding’ in nature (that is, compatible (...) with the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’). I show that the political conception of non-domination is an integral part of political liberalism through an exploration of the kind of citizenship education that political liberalism mandates for all students. Such an education would impart to future citizen the skills and knowledge necessary for them to realize republican freedom vis-à-vis their political institutions, their workplaces, and, by means of an enforceable ‘right of exit,’ the various associations to which they might belong. (shrink)

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

Abstract: This paper restates the thesis of 'The Requirements of Justice and Liberal Socialism" where it was argued that liberal socialism best meets Rawlsian requirements of justice. The recent responses to this paper by Jan Narveson, Jeppe von Platz, and Alan Thomas merit examination and comment. This paper shows that if Rawlsian justice is to be met, then non-personal property must be subject to public control. If just outcomes merit the public control of non-personal property and this control is not (...) utilized, then justice has been subordinated to the objectively less important institution of private property. (shrink)

Interest in the nature and importance of ‘childhood goods’ recently has emerged within philosophy. Childhood goods, roughly, are things that are good for persons qua children independent of any contribution to the good of persons qua adults. According to Colin Macleod, John Rawls’s political conception of justice as fairness rests upon an adult-centered ‘agency assumption’ and thus is incapable of incorporating childhood goods into its content. Macleod concludes that because of this, justice as fairness cannot be regarded as a complete (...) conception of distributive justice. In this paper I provide a political liberal response to Macleod’s argument by advancing three claims. First, I propose that political liberalism should treat leisure time as a distinct ‘primary good.’ Second, I suggest that leisure time should be distributed via the ‘basic needs principle’ and the ‘difference principle’ for all citizens over the course of their complete lives, including their childhoods. Third, the provision of leisure time in this way supports the realization of childhood goods for citizens. (shrink)

The common conception of justice as reciprocity seemingly is inapplicable to relations between non-overlapping generations. This is a challenge also to John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. This text responds to this by way of reinterpreting and developing Rawls’s theory. First, by examining the original position as a model, some revisions of it are shown to be wanting. Second, by drawing on the methodology of constructivism, an alternative solution is proposed: an amendment to the primary goods named ‘sustainability of (...) values’. This revised original position lends support to intergenerational justice as fairness. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has considered the requirements of justice and economic regimes in the work of John Rawls. This work has not delved into the requirements of justice and liberal socialism as deeply as the work that has been done on property-owning democracy. A thorough treatment of liberal socialism and the requirements of justice is needed. This paper seeks to begin to fill this gap. In particular, it needs to be shown if liberal socialism fully answers the requirements of justice better (...) than property-owning democracy. It will be argued that liberal socialism does significantly better in realizing the two principles. This paper has the following structure, first, an overview of Rawls' position on economic regimes, capitalism, and the requirements of justice will be presented. In particular, how the two principles work in tandem to meet the demands of distributive justice will be considered. Second, a review of property-owning democracy will be conducted. Finally, liberal socialism will be examined and discussed as an economic regime that answers the requirements of justice more fully. (shrink)

Most philosophers recognize that sometimes particular individuals have to be grateful to others who have benefited them in a way that provides reasons for treating them in a differential way. In the same way, I argue, there are cases in which society as such benefits from the actions of a person, which gives rise to collective duties of gratitude that must be expressed at the political and socio-economic levels. The political concern about merit should not be merely instrumental, but also (...) moral: a society cannot be just if it disregards its collective duties of gratitude. I criticize Rawls’ famous Natural Lottery Argument showing that it relies on a problematic understanding of the notion of moral responsibility and develop some considerations on the role that gratitude should play when designing both public institutions and policies. (shrink)

Some theorists—including Elizabeth Anderson, Gerald Gaus, and Amartya Sen—endorse versions of 'public reason' as the appropriate way to justify political decisions while rejecting 'ideal theory'. This chapter proposes that these ideas are not easily separated. The idea of public reason expresses a form of mutual 'civic' respect for citizens. Public reason justifications for political proposals are addressed to citizens who would find acceptable those justifications, and consequently would comply freely with those proposals should they become law. Hence public reasoning involves (...) 'local ideal theorizing': the justification of political proposals includes their consideration and evaluation under conditions of compliance with them by the citizens to whom those justifications are addressed. Local ideal theorizing, moreover, can lead to 'full ideal theorizing', wherein citizens outline and evaluate an amended version of their society’s 'basic structure'. This argument is illustrated by some recent empirical work on inequality within the United States. (shrink)

Holt argues that Rawls’s first principle of justice requires democratic control of the economy and that property owning democracy fails to satisfy this requirement; only liberal socialism is fully democratic. However, the notion of democratic control is ambiguous, and Holt has to choose between the weaker notion of democratic control that Rawls is committed to and the stronger notion that property owning democracy fails to satisfy. It may be that there is a tension between capitalism and democracy, so that only (...) liberal socialism can be fully democratic, but if so, we should reject, rather than argue from, the theory of democracy we find in justice as fairness. (shrink)

The Buddhist denial of the world seems hard to defend if it is confronted with empirical data. Surveys on subjective life satisfaction consistently report that the majority is satisfied with their lives. Is the desire to escape from the cycle of rebirth a sign of risk-aversion or even irrationality? How would an impartial observer evaluate the world? -/- An impartial view is achieved by interpreting the surveys on life satisfaction as probability distributions for life’s risks and chances. It turns out (...) that there is no indisputable metric for measuring risks and no reliable forecast. Given this uncertainty the denial of the world cannot easily be dismissed as being irrational. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Brief thoughts on why Rawls' "fictional" veil of ignorance is in fact real and why social morals and self-interest thus converge.

En este trabajo desarrollo un modelo normativo sobre la obligación de continuidad de tratamiento beneficioso hacia los sujetos de investigación desde la perspectiva de la justicia social o distributiva, inspirado en la teoría de la justicia de John Rawls. Llamo a esto, el modelo de reciprocidad democrática. La idea original del modelo de reciprocidad democrática es defender que la obligación de continuidad de tratamiento beneficioso tiene como derecho correlativo el derecho a la salud. Así, dentro del marco rawlsiano, argumento que (...) las razones morales que dan peso a la obligación de continuidad de tratamiento beneficioso son, indirectamente, el principio de igualdad equitativa de oportunidades y, directamente, el derecho de justicia y/o el principio de equidad que se aplican a los miembros de una sociedad entendida como un sistema de cooperación social. (shrink)

Robert Nozick initiated one of the most inspired and inspiring discussions in political philosophy with his 1974 response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia to John Rawls’s 1971 account of distributive justice in A Theory of Justice. These two works have informed an enormous amount of subsequent, especially liberal, discussions of economic justice, where Nozick’s work typically functions as a resource for those defending more right-wing (libertarian) positions, whereas Rawls’s has been used to defend various left-wing stances. Common to these discussions, (...) as found in politics generally (where similar kinds of arguments frequently are used to defend right and the left-wing policies and conclusions) is that they end in rather stubborn stalemates: the right defending minimal states while the left defends more extensive states. Interesting, too, is that both Nozick and Rawls take themselves to be consistent with, inspired by, and furthering Kant’s freedom project in the development of their own theories of justice. In this paper, I start by outlining the structures of these debates with an emphasis on the original disagreements between Nozick and Rawls. I then show how neither theory actually employed Kant’s own theory of justice, but rather drew on or out (presumed) implications of his ethical theory. In the final sections, I argue that if Nozick and Rawls had instead used Kant’s theory of justice and not his ethics, not only would their individual theories have been stronger, but they could have found ways of overcoming the unproductive stalemates that characterize their own as well as subsequent related discussions of economic justice as we currently find them in much scholarly and contemporary political debate. (shrink)

En este artículo defiendo que la concepción rawlsiana de la justicia distributiva va más allá de los márgenes de la justicia asignativa y que esta presenta buenos argumentos para hacer frente a las demandas de reconocimiento. Para alcanzar este objetivo, en primer lugar muestro que algunos críticos del paradigma liberal distributivo malinterpretan la concepción de la justicia distributiva elaborada por Rawls y reducen su finalidad a un mero reparto de bienes. Al hacer lo anterior, ellos no logran comprender la dimensión (...) moral de la propuesta rawlsiana, propuesta firmemente asentada en la idea de reconocimiento. En segundo lugar, analizo la relevancia que tienen las nociones de reconocimiento recíproco y autorrespeto en la teoría de la justicia de Rawls, para finalmente mostrar cómo a partir de ellas se puede reinterpretar la finalidad de la justicia distributiva e incluir las demandas de reconocimiento. (shrink)

Some key political challenges today, e.g. climate change, are future oriented. The intergenerational setting differs in some notable ways from the intragenerational one, creating obstacles to theorizing about intergenerational justice. One concern is that as the circumstances of justice do not pertain intergenerationally, intergenerational justice is not meaningful. In this paper, I scrutinize this worry by analysing the presentations of the doctrine of the circumstances of justice by David Hume and John Rawls. I argue that we should accept the upshot (...) of their idea, that justice is context sensitive, even if this at first sight seems to invalidate intergenerational justice. On the basis of moral constructivism, I subsequently provide a fresh reading of the doctrine according to which it conveys the idea that justice is the solution to a practical problem. However, as the problem background is evolving, we need to properly characterize the relevant practical problem in order to make ethical theorizing relevant. Contrary to what has been claimed, the circumstances of justice do not then clash with intergenerational justice, but are the necessary presuppositions for its advancement. (shrink)

I suggest that the social justice issues raised by Internet regulation can be exposed and examined by using a methodology adapted from that described by John Rawls in 'A Theory of Justice'. Rawls' theory uses the hypothetical scenario of people deliberating about the justice of social institutions from the 'original position' as a method of removing bias in decision-making about justice. The original position imposes a 'veil of ignorance' that hides the particular circumstances of individuals from them so that they (...) will not be influenced by self-interest. I adapt Rawls' methodology by introducing an abstract description of information technology to those deliberating about justice from within the original position. This abstract description focuses on computing devices that users can use to access information and information networks that information devices use to communicate. The abstractness of this description prevents the particular characteristics of the Internet and the computing devices in use from influencing the decisions about the just use and regulation of information technology and networks. From this abstract position, the principles of justice that the participants accept for the rest of society will also apply to the computing devices people use to communicate, and to Internet regulation. (shrink)

In contemporary debates about justice, political philosophers take themselves to be engaged with a subject that’s narrower than the whole of morality. Many contemporary liberals, notably John Rawls, understand this narrowness in terms of context specificity. On their view, justice is the part of morality that applies to the context of a society’s institutions, but only has indirect application to the context of citizens’ personal lives. In contrast, many value pluralists, notably G.A. Cohen, understand justice’s narrowness in terms of singularity (...) against a plural background. On their view, justice is one fundamental value amongst a plurality of fundamental values. The purpose of my thesis is to establish that the pluralist conception of justice’s narrowness is theoretically significant and true. To establish its theoretical significance, I argue that proper attention to the ways in which different understandings of narrowness inform the work of contemporary egalitarians explains a considerable amount of disagreement between them concerning the content and scope of distributive justice. On the one hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in the manner Cohen and other pluralists do, i.e., understand a conception of justice to be a conception of a particular fundamental value, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context are compelling. On the other hand, I’ll argue that if we understand justice’s narrowness in a contextual manner, i.e., understand justice to comprise one or more all-things-considered principles adopted for the institutional context, then both luck-egalitarianism and the claim that justice extends to the personal context prove implausible. To establish the truth of the pluralist conception of narrowness, I argue first, that the contextual understanding is only plausible if fairness should be understood procedurally instead of substantively; and second, that substantive fairness cannot be eliminated, as specifying the content of procedural fairness requires a substantive criterion. The upshot is that justice’s narrowness is best understood in terms of singularity against a plural background, rather than in terms of context specificity. (shrink)

The small school movement originated in the democratic ideology of Deborah Meier, who sought to create schools that gave students, parents, teachers, and all stakeholders in the communities they served a voice in education. In New York City, Meier's vision was implemented haphazardly by a group of business and political elites able to pour millions of dollars into an initiative without carefully considering the complex interests involved in creating new small schools. According to this author, this lack of forethought placed (...) students and parents at an even greater disadvantage than had existed previously. It was thought that the creation of small schools of choice would provide students, parents, and families the most appropriate education for their children, and that free market practices would create an environment of increased accountability and transparency, which would improve educational outcomes for all students. The author argues that these measures failed to improve educational equity and opportunities for students, and that they also placed students most in-need at an even greater disadvantage, thus hurting the very children these laws were created to help. She supports this argument using a critique of neoliberalism in the context of education as defined by Michael Apple, John Rawls's original position, and the application of Rawls's position in an educational context by Barry Bull. (shrink)

The paper provides an analysis of the relationship between the concepts of justice and solidarity. The point of departure of the analysis is Ruud ter Meulen’s claim that these concepts are different but mutually complementary, i.e. are two sides of the same coin. In the paper two alternative accounts of the relationship are proposed. According to the first one, solidarity can be defined in terms of justice, i.e. is a special variety of liberal justice, viz. social liberal justice, which, apart (...) from the value of liberty, also stresses the importance of the value of equality. An example of such a theory is Rawls’s theory of justice, within which the value of equality is ‘encoded’ in the principle of fair equality of opportunity and in the difference principle. According to the second account, solidarity is an expression of a special type of social relationships – the so-called ‘thick relationships’, which are non-superficial, positive, their paradigmatic examples being family and friendship; in other words, the rules of solidarity are rules that are built into ‘thick relationships’. On the first account, justice and solidarity are not different, while on the second account they are different but mutually exclusive rather than mutually complementary. In the last part of the paper some remarks on the social causes of solidarity are made. (shrink)

Theorists have long debated whether John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness can be extended to nonideal (i.e. unjust) social and political conditions, and if so, what the proper way of extending it is. This paper argues that in order to properly extend justice as fairness to nonideal conditions, Rawls’ most famous innovation – the original position – must be reconceived in the form of a “nonideal original position.” I begin by providing a new analysis of the ideal/nonideal theory distinction (...) within Rawls’ theoretical framework. I then systematically construct a nonideal original position, showing that although its parties must have Rawls’ principles of ideal justice and priority relations as background aims, the parties should be entirely free to weigh those aims against whatever burdens and benefits they might face under nonideal conditions. Next, I show that the parties ought to aim to secure for themselves a special class of nonideal primary goods: all-purpose goods similar to Rawls’ original primary goods, but which in this case are all-purpose goods individuals might use to (A) promote Rawlsian ideals under nonideal conditions, (B) weigh Rawls’ principles of ideal justice and priority relations against whatever burdens and benefits they might face under nonideal conditions, and (C) effectively pursue their most favored weighting thereof. I then defend a provisional list of nonideal primary goods which include opportunities to participate effectively in equitable and inclusive grassroots reform movements guided by a series of substantive aims. Finally, I briefly speculate on how the parties to the nonideal original position might deliberate to principles of nonideal justice for distributing nonideal primary goods, suggesting that those goods should be distributed in proportion to unjust disadvantage. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss a powerful challenge to high-liberalism: the challenge presented by neoclassical liberals that the high-liberal assumptions and values imply that the full range of economic liberties are basic rights. If the claim is true, then the high-liberal road from ideals of democracy and democratic citizenship to left-liberal institutions is blocked. Indeed, in that case the high-liberal is committed to an institutional scheme more along the lines of laissez-faire capitalism than property-owning democracy. To present and discuss this (...) challenge, I let John Rawls represent the high-liberal argument that only a narrow range of economic liberties are basic rights and John Tomasi represent the neoclassical liberal argument that the full range of economic liberties are basic rights. I show that Rawls’s argument is inadequate, but also that Tomasi’s argument fails. I thus conclude that high-liberalism is in a precarious situation, but is not yet undone by the neoclassical liberal challenge. (shrink)

Is “liberal socialism” an oxymoron? Not quite, but I will demonstrate here that it is a much more unstable and uncommon hybrid than scholars had previously thought and that almost all liberals should reject socialism, even in its most attractive form. More specifically, I will show that three leading varieties of liberalism—neutralist, plural-perfectionist, and deliberative-democratic—are incompatible with even a moderate form of socialism, viz., associational market socialism. My paper will also cast grave doubt on Rawls’s belief that justice as fairness (...) is consistent with liberal socialism. (shrink)

Interview of Katrin Flikschuh, Rainer Forst and Darrel Moellendorf by Valentin Beck and Julian Culp for Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric.

This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism (...) cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized. (shrink)

Rawls offers three arguments for the priority of liberty in Theory, two of which share a common error: the belief that once we have shown the instrumental value of the basic liberties for some essential purpose (e.g., securing self-respect), we have automatically shown the reason for their lexical priority. The third argument, however, does not share this error and can be reconstructed along Kantian lines: beginning with the Kantian conception of autonomy endorsed by Rawls in section 40 of Theory, we (...) can explain our highest-order interest in rationality, justify the lexical priority of all basic liberties, and reinterpret Rawls’ threshold condition for the application of the priority of liberty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Kantian reconstruction will not work within the radically different framework of Political Liberalism. (shrink)

John Rawls’s political liberalism and its ideal of public reason are tremendously influential in contemporary political philosophy and in constitutional law as well. Many, perhaps even most, liberals are Rawlsians of one stripe or another. This is problematic, because most liberals also support the redefinition of civil marriage to include same-sex unions, and as I show, Rawls’s political liberalism actually prohibits same- sex marriage. Recently in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, however, California’s northern federal district court reinterpreted the traditional rational basis review (...) in terms of liberal neutrality akin to Rawls’s “public reason,” and overturned Proposition 8 and established same-sex marriage. (This reinterpretation was amplified in the 9th Circuit Court’s decision upholding the district court on appeal in Perry v. Brown.) But on its own grounds Perry should have drawn the opposite conclusion. This is because all the available arguments for recognizing same-sex unions as civil marriages stem from controversial comprehensive doctrines about the good, and this violates the ideal of public reason; yet there remains a publicly reasonable argument for traditional marriage, which I sketch here. In the course of my argument I develop Rawls’s politically liberal account of the family by drawing upon work by J. David Velleman and H. L. A. Hart, and discuss the implications of this account for political theory and constitutional law. (shrink)

Critics have argued that Rawls's account of self-respect is equivocal. I show, first, that Rawls in fact relies upon an unambiguous notion of self-respect, though he sometimes is unclear as to whether this notion has merely instrumental or also intrinsic value. I show second that Rawls’s main objective in arguing that justice as fairness supports citizens’ self-respect is not, as many have thought, to show that his principles support citizens’ self-respect generally, but to show that his principles counter the effects (...) of the market on lower class citizens’ sense of worth. This discussion establishes that Rawls, in the end, sees self-respect primarily as an intrinsic good. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen’s critique of the Rawlsian difference principle points out an inconsistency in its presentation. The initial equality decided by the participants in the original position under the veil of ignorance is not preserved by the inequality sanctioned by the difference principle. Cohen shows how the breakdown of the initial equality of the original position prevents the desired results of the Rawlsian system from being realized. Cohen argues that an egalitarian ethos is required within a society for equality preserving economic (...) distributions and Pareto superior outcomes to occur. Nonetheless, Cohen’s analysis of Rawls misses the ultimate cause of inequality, which is the dynamics of capital accumulation. An egalitarian ethos is only possible if there is a socialist mode of production to facilitate its development. Additionally, Cohen’s critique of Rawlsian constructivism through an argument for intuitionism does not address the natural-material existence of human beings. This existence must be considered for any advantageous social formation. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has recently leveled a series of what he alleges to be quite serious very general objections against Rawls, Rawlsian fellow travelers, and other social contract accounts of justice. In The Idea of Justice, published in 2009, Sen specifically charges his target philosophical views with what calls transcendentalism, procedural parochialism, and with being mistakenly narrowly focused on institutions. He also thinks there is a basic incoherence—arising from a version of Derek Parfit’s Identity Problem—internal to the Rawslian theoretical apparatus. Sen (...) would have political philosophy pursue intersocietal comparisons of relative justice more directly and in the manner of social choice theory. Yet the positive argument he develops in support of this method is quite thin. That aside, Sen’s polemical strategy of inflicting death by a thousand cuts is ineffective against the Rawlsian paradigm. For, as I show herein, none of these criticisms have the force we might be led to expect. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Fairtrade certification system represents an illuminating example of the challenge of systematically determining consumer and entrepreneurial responsibilities in our global age. In taking up the central question of what, if anything, may be called ‘just’ or ‘fair’ in Fairtrade, I more precisely argue for a two-fold thesis: that a meaningful evaluation of Fairtrade must consider both an interactional and an institutional understanding of global responsibilities to promote justice and that Fairtrade can be better defended against (...) several popular objections from the perspective of a theory that adequately differentiates between interactional responsibilities and institutional responsibilities of promoting justice under unjust circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper I examine John Rawls’s understanding of desert. Against Samuel Scheffler, I maintain that the reasons underlying Rawls’s rejection of the traditional view of distributive desert in A Theory of Justice also commit him to rejecting the traditional view of retributive desert. Unlike Rawls’s critics, however, I view this commitment in a positive light. I also argue that Rawls’s later work commits him to rejecting retributivism as a public justification for punishment.

La aspiración a formar sociedades justas se choca con alarmantes niveles de pobreza y desigualdad, un problema al cual toda reflexión sobre la justa sociedad debe ofrecer una respuesta convincente. Esta ponencia afirma (1ª parte) que la experiencia que tenemos de las injusticias – como la pobreza – puede dar origen a una reflexión sobre la justicia. Luego (2ª parte) presenta el concepto de pobreza según el enfoque de las capacidades de Amartya Sen y lo completa con una interpretación filosófica (...) de la pobreza como privación radical de libertad individual. Finalmente (3ª parte) analiza y critica la forma en que la teoría de la justicia de John Rawls no aborda el problema de la pobreza y propone un principio de justicia previo a los dos de Rawls – el principio “cero” – que recoge el desafío que la pobreza plantea al concepto de sociedad justa. (shrink)

In this article, I present and critically analyze the main ideas of the Nigerian thinker, Ifeanyi A. Menkiti, on the future of the multi-ethnic state in Africa. Menkiti appears to consider that the basic condition for the successful coexistence of the various groups occupying the states of Africa is for relations between them to rest on just principles. Justice should involve the fair and equitable division amongst peoples of the burdens and benefits of living in a common state. To realize (...) this ideal, he proposes the creation in Africa of morally neutral, managerial states. He bases his plan in part on the ideas of John Rawls. Close analysis of Menkiti’s views shows that his vision of the minimalist state is only a temporary solution, which is to lead to the peaceful dismemberment of the current post-colonial model of multi-ethnic states functioning within the old colonial borders. The basic value of Menkiti’s thought rests in his reversal of the usual perspective on African states, as he considers that maintaining territorial integrity or achieving unity should no longer be considered a paramount necessity. Published in "Hemispheres", 2010, No. 25. (shrink)

Are intellectual property rights for talented people justified by Rawls’ criteria of justice? In this paper, I argue that Rawls’ theory of justice is ill-equipped to answer this question. Tailored for rival goods and, as a result, centred on the distribution of benefits, it tends to restate questions of justice about unequal rights as questions about economic inequalities. Therefore, it lacks the tools necessary to distinguish among different forms of incentives for talented people. Once social and economic inequalities observe equality (...) of opportunity and improve the least advantaged, the theory is indifferent as to whether talented people are allowed to compete for monopoly rights or for direct financial reward. (shrink)