Many theories of social justice maintain that concern for the social bases of self-respect grounds demanding requirements of political and economic equality, as self-respect is supposed to be dependent on continuous just recognition by others. This paper argues that such views miss an important feature of self-respect, which accounts for much of its value: self-respect is a capacity for self-orientation that is robust under adversity. This does not mean that there are no social bases of self-respect that such theories ought (...) to incorporate. It means that they are different: they consist of the motivational and epistemic resources needed to develop and maintain such robustness. (shrink)

John Rawls’s thesis that a certain package of basic liberties should be given lexical priority is of great interest for legal and political philosophy, but it has received relatively little defense from Rawls or his supporters. In this paper, I examine three arguments for the thesis: the first is based on the two ‘moral powers’; the second, on the social bases of self-respect; and the third, on a Kantian notion of autonomy. I argue none of these accounts successfully establishes 1) (...) the distinct claim of lexical priority, 2) for the complete package of basic liberties, on the basis of reasons that are appropriately public. In turn, I propose an alternative argument, in support of those two claims, based on the social or ‘relational’ conception of equality. (shrink)