Rawls

Published in 1964, James Meade’s *Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property* packs an incredible concentration of insightful analysis and provocative policy ideas in under 100 pages. The book is a brilliant exploration of what a more egalitarian society might look like, and of what measures might help us to get there.

As a work that went on to exert a deep influence on both the economists Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson, and the philosopher John Rawls, it does not merit the relative neglect in which it now rests. Time is ripe for its rediscovery.

Online at Policy Network here: http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4909&title=James-Meade-and-predistribution-50-years-before-his-time

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be “the Newton of the moral world,” as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read in the 250 years since it was written. Rousseau's “Social Contract”: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles, leaving no stones unturned. The conclusion connects Rousseau's text both to his important influences and those who took inspiration and sometimes exception to his arguments. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining his famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication.

My provocation is that, in rejecting Rawls’s theory of justice, Sandel is in fact endorsing a snotty view of political realism. It is political realism sugarcoated with a potent dose of promising ideas of justice and common good, but it is snotty political realism nonetheless. Who knows where Sandel’s sense of civic loyalties stops?

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Methodological nationalism assumes that, to understand a phenomenon, nation-states are the relevant units of analysis. This assumption has been recognized as a source of bias in most of the social sciences. Does it bias Rawls’ understanding of justice, too? This paper argues that it does for at least two reasons. Firstly, what Rawls thinks justice requires on a global scale falls short of what states and international organisations actually do. Secondly, framing the difference principle in national terms, as Rawls did, is a way to increase the “citizenship rent”, or the revenue a person receives just by being citizen of a rich country . The paper argues that methodological nationalism biases Rawls’ understanding of justice by affecting both the plausibility and the coherence of his theory.

Una escueta visión histórica de la filosofía política analizada desde el punto de vista de la teoría del derecho y de la sociedad, nos permite ver cómo ha ido desarrollándose, desde Ockham, y actualmente hasta filósofos liberales como Rawls, una concepción de la justicia fundada en el hecho contractual, dispositivo mediante el cual se establece un determinado orden en la sociedad, basado en una noción artificial (construida) de la justicia.  Hobbes se constituye en el momento clave del giro copernicano de la cuestión, con su idea convencional de justicia.  Luego el utilitarista Hume elabora las llamadas “circunstancias de la justicia”, también convencionales, al igual que su teoría artificial de la justicia, ideas que influyen sobre Rawls, dos siglos más tarde.
El contractualismo explica y justifica el fundamento y la posibilidad de la sociedad a partir de un pacto entre sus miembros.  Fue desarrollado en toda su expresión en la Modernidad, por Hobbes Locke y Rousseau, si bien tuvo sus precedentes en los sofistas griegos y más tarde en Ockham.  Los motivos que condicionaron en la Modernidad el desarrollo de la teoría del contrato fueron la secularización de la sociedad, que ya había comenzado a gestarse en el medioevo y una concepción atomista y mecanicista de la sociedad.  Puede afirmarse que sobre el contractualismo moderno se perciben influencias no puramente políticas provenientes del nominalismo de Ockham.
La teoría política de Hobbes, acorde con el espíritu moderno, cientificista y mecanicista, produce un corte epistemológico en la historia de la filosofía social y política, pues a partir de ella el poder no estará más fundado en el derecho divino, ni en ningún otro factor extraterrenal, sino en un pacto entre seres humanos libres, artificialmente asociados entre sí.  Esta concepción de Hobbes acerca del origen de la sociedad y del Estado se opone tanto a la clásica (Aristóteles), que sostenía que “el hombre es un animal político”, como así también a toda la tradición del derecho natural (Santo Tomás de Aquino), derechos que no son negados, sino traducidos positivamente, efectivizados a través del contrato social.  Podemos hablar de una afirmación de la secularización, a partir de Hobbes, de la teoría social y política.
Hasta mediados del siglo XX, los estudios dedicados a metaética constituyeron la preocupación más marcada por parte de la corriente analítica en esta área, dejando de lado los problemas sustanciales, juzgados por entonces como carentes de sentido.  Rawls, aún siendo heredero de esta corriente filosófica, impulsa un nuevo desarrollo, retornando al carácter sustantivo de la ética, pero haciéndolo desde un framework cuya base política será la democracia liberal, su metodología el contractualismo y el contenido, un constructivismo pretendidamente exento de supuestos metafísicos, influenciado por su herencia kantiana, aunque con fuertes connotaciones individualistas hobbesianas.  Con estos elementos, Rawls diseña una teoría de la justicia cuya máxima pretensión es la de ser imparcial, teoría mediante la cual intenta refutar a las dos corrientes éticas predominantes en su tiempo: el utilitarismo y el intuicionismo.  A esto sumará su intención manifiesta de que una sociedad, para estar bien ordenada, será aquella en la cual prevalezca el derecho (Right) por encima del bien (Good).  Sólo entonces será posible, según el filósofo harvardiano, la existencia de una sociedad pluralista, donde puedan cumplirse los fines de la democracia liberal, lo cual no significará otra cosa, sin más, que la introducción del bien liberal en su pretendida aséptica teoría imparcial de la justicia.
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Religious freedom, and the status of religion in the public square, is presently a matter of worldwide debate. However, it is necessary to clarify the terms of the debate. This dissertation will offer a challenging invitation to deepen our understanding of the fundamental meaning of religious freedom by analyzing and challenging the notions of "religion," "freedom," and the "public square" as they have been commonly employed in discussions related to religious freedom and the place of religion in the public square in the works of Richard John Neuhaus, John Rawls, Robert Audi, José Casanovas, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor. It will also challenge the notion of "religious freedom" employed by international and legal documents, and in the work of David Schlinder, John Courtney Murray, and Martha Nussbaum. Following the work of Rainer Forst, it will also show why religious freedom should not be understood as "tolerance."
The goal of the book, then, is to provide a more effective way of dealing with issues of religious freedom and the place of religion in the public square. My investigation will be centered on Thomas Aquinas' notion of religion as a moral virtue, and Hanna Arendt's notion of political freedom. The novelty of this investigation will be in that the virtue of religion will be analyzed in connection to the proper place for the performance of its acts, namely, the private or the public sphere. The book will also show how Aquinas' notion of religion and its deviations (vices) offers a valuable guideline insofar as the public is concerned.
As a consequence, a new meaning will be offered on the notion of religious freedom, based on Aquinas' view of religion as virtue, and Arendt's notion of political freedom as a stage for virtue, which will help clarify the debate on religious freedom and the place of religion in the public square.

This paper argues that John Rawls’s remarks on the family reveal a fundamental problem with Rawlsian theory - more fundamental than Susan Moller Okin allows in her important critique. The problem is not that Rawls fails to apply his theory correctly to the family, but rather that the specific case of the family illustrates deep-seated difficulties with Rawlsian justice as a whole.

This essay is concerned with the question of what kind of economic system would be needed in order to realise Rawls’s principles of social justice. Hitherto, debates about ‘property-owning democracy’ and ‘liberal socialism’ have been overly schematic, in various respects, and have therefore missed some of the most important issues regarding the relationships between social justice and economic institutions and systems. What is at stake between broadly capitalist or socialist economic systems is not in fact a simple choice in a single dimension, but rather a range of choices across a range of different dimensions. This essay, then, has a dual objective: firstly, it aims to provide a richer account of this normative territory, while showing how issues of economic democracy, decommodification and the limits of markets, and the role of democratic economic planning, all raise questions of justice that are not well-captured by focussing only on questions of ownership. Secondly, it aims to show how the case for democratic socialism can be developed from Rawlsian foundations, in a way that is sensitive to the normative affinities between Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism and themes in socialist political thought, and which attends carefully to the different kinds of institutional elements which a stable, just, and democratic society would require. Taking these aims together, the hope is that we can move onwards to a richer debate about the ways in which the realisation of democratic socialist institutions may be seen as a requirement of social justice.

This paper provides an entrance into central discussions regarding Kant’s account of property. The first section shows how Kant engages and transforms important, related proposals from Hobbes and Locke as well as how the ‘libertarian’ and ‘liberal republican’ interpretive traditions differ in their readings on these points. Since Kantian theories for a long time didn’t focus on Kant’s Doctrine of Right but instead followed Rawls’s lead by developing Kantian theories grounded on Kant’s (meta-) ethical writings, the second section focuses on property discussions found in the Rawlsian tradition. The final section shows how important contemporary work in the Kantian tradition goes beyond Rawlsian, libertarian, and liberal republican concerns of distributive justice among free and equal citizens, to include questions central to, for example, the philosophy of care, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of sex and love, and environmental philosophy.

James Meade argued that public ownership of productive assets should have a central role in a 'liberal socialist' economy. While somewhat sceptical of the state seeking to run specific firms or industries, Meade argued that the state should own a significant share of a society's productive assets, using the return on the assets to promote a more equal distribution of income (e.g., through payment of a universal social dividend). This paper traces the development of Meade's thinking around this citizens' trust concept; explores its influence in UK policy discussions; and makes the case for the continuing relevance of the proposal in response to contemporary economic developments.

Este artículo parte de la premisa de que en las democracias liberales actuales se extiende un nuevo estilo discursivo propiamente cínico. El artículo traza una genealogía de este cinismo político partiendo del liberalismo político de John Rawls y recalando en la teoría agonística de la democracia de Chantal Mouffe, e intenta mostrar que la superación del liberalismo político que la teoría agonística lleva años proponiendo parece realizarse finalmente a través del cinismo, aunque con resultados diferentes de los esperados: la expansión del cinismo en la esfera pública debe entenderse como una degradación del debate público con consecuencias políticas inquietantes.

Neste trabalho pretende-se apresentar as concepções liberais de John Rawls
e Jürgen Habermas sobre a relação Estado e Religião na esfera pública de
uma sociedade democrática constitucional. Para tanto, apresenta-se as teorias
de Habermas e Rawls, sobre a ótica da questão de como uma sociedade
democrática que, ao assumir a perspectiva política liberal, aceita múltiplas
concepções de bem e planos de vida racionais que são irreconciliáveis entre
si e que podem regulamentar o convivo dos cidadãos religiosos de diferentes
credos, assim como, a relação entre religiosos e não-religiosos (seculares,
ateus, agnósticos) e suas justificações políticas na esfera pública. Assume-se
a perspectiva de que o Estado deva ser neutro e laico, i.e., que não possa
assumir uma religião como oficial, e tenta-se, a partir dessa premissa,
responder ao questionamento por meio dos escritos rawlsianos e
habermasianos expondo os pontos em comum e divergentes das duas teóricas
filosóficas. Também questiona-se neste trabalho se, a partir do momento em
que um Estado legisla sobre assuntos como aborto, eutanásia, casamento
homoafetivo e adoção de crianças por parte de casais homoafetivos, i.e.,
sobre as concepções de bem das pessoas, proibindo essas práticas, este
Estado não estaria perdendo sua neutralidade e laicidade. Assume-se, então,
que o Estado não deveria proibir determinadas práticas sobre o ponto de vista
político, mas reconhece-se também que há uma linha muito tênue entre
Estado Laico e “laicicista” que proíbe os símbolos e discursos religiosos na
esfera pública, e que, tanto a perspectiva “proibicionista”, quanto a
“laicicistas” não são ideais em uma democracia.

Up to the middle of the 20th century, studies of metaethics were the main object of study of the analitical current which covered that area, leaving aside fundamental problems, considered meaningless at that time. Even though Rawls is heir of this philosophical current, he supports a new approach which goes back to the substancial nature of ethics, though set in a framework whose political basis supposedly is liberal democracy, his methodology of contractualism and content, and a constructivism lacking metaphysical presuppositions, strongly influenced by Kantian thought. Taking these elements, Rawls designs a theory of justice whose main aspiration is fairness, a theory by which he tries to disprove the two main ethical currents of his time: Utilitarism and Intuitionism. To all this he adds a clear intention of considering an ordered society the one where Right is above Good. According to him, only then a pluralist society will be possible, a society where the ends of liberal democracy can be accomplished.

Human rights have arguably become the cross-cultural moral concept and evaluative tool to measure the performance—and even the legitimacy—of domestic regimes. Despite their ever-increasing institutionalization, questions remain about their theoretical bases and universal validity. In light of these and other challenges, justificatory strategies now generally incline toward one of two poles: a maximalist approach requiring human rights to be embedded within a larger (philosophical, religious, or cultural) vision of the good or a minimalist approach involving no particular metaphysics, religious tenet, account of human nature, or culturally idiosyncratic view. I offer a sympathetic but critical engagement with three accounts of justification that fall somewhere between this minimalist-maximalist divide: an urgent rights approach, a consensus-based approach, and the Capability Approach. The position I ultimately defend is informed by, but distinguishable, from these three approaches in its rejection of the minimalist’s attempted evasion of controversy through theoretical thinness and the maximalist’s inextricable coupling of ethics with a religious cosmology. I conclude that the human rights project both presupposes and itself provides, both in theory and in practice, a conception of that which is characteristically human, but that conception can be defended on either religious or non-religious grounds.

In 1993 John Rawls published his main and longest work since 1971, where he had published his reknown A Theory of Justice, book that made him famous as the greatest political philosopher of the century. We are referring to Political Liberalism, a summary of his writings of the 80’s and the first half of the 90’s, where he attempts to answer the critics of his intellectual partners, communitarian philosophers. One of the key topics in this book is the issue of “public reason”, whose object is nothing else than public good, and on which the principles and proceedings of justice are to be applied. The book was so important for the political philosophy of the time that in 1997 Rawls had to go through the 1993 edition, becoming this new one the last relevant writing published before the death of the Harvard philosopher in November 2002.

The paper proposes a general account of the structure and stages of typical political TEs, largely analogous to the structure of TEs in other domains. It takes into account historical considerations, discussing the two dominant families of political TEs in the history of Western political thought, first, the Platonic tradition of ideal states, out of which arguably derives the tradition of utopian thinking continuing in literary fiction as well as in philosophical and narrowly political writing. It then passes  to the other family of political TEs, i.e. the  social contract tradition. It turns out  that literary anti-utopias typically deploy crucial philosophical ideas traditionally typical of the social contact tradition in their criticism of their traditional positive counterparts. The concluding discussion combines a historical sketch and a topical-conceptual discussion for and against political TEs, arguing in their favor against the critical tradition from Aristotle to present day.

Abstract: The present work intends to analyze to what extent the concept of fairness and the ideas of the good complement the theory of justice of the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. It is important to awake the key reading of complementarity in the debate about fairness and good on Justice as Fairness without sacrificing the important critical perspectives, even a little distant from the canon of prevailing interpretations as long as integrating with many others and compose more comprehensive criteria for interpretation. John Rawls is acknowledged as an author belonging to the liberal tradition, whose thinking seeks to ensure the priority of the right over the good, an indispensable task to defend individual liberty. Although respecting the diverse ideas of the good, liberalism rejects the possibility of fixing a particular doctrine of good for the whole society. Rawls has been widely studied over the past decades, but little was written his use of ideas of the good regarding justice in his political conception. To establish how is the relationship of ideas of the good and the idea of justice in his theory is the basis for understanding the author's attempt to reconcile the good and the justice on Theory of Justice as Fairness. This idea of complementarity that followed his whole theory of justice was part of the major changes in his work and it would be a mistake to forget such argument in the discussion of how a contemporary democratic society can be good and fair for its citizens. The importance of this argument is also revealed in Rawls' idea that the greater the lack of complementarity between the fair and the good, greater is the prospect of having instability in society along the evils that follow such inconsistency. The idea of complementarity between the good and the fair, in all its breadth, was present during the written of this author's major works. To enrich the critique on Rawls is the ultimate intent of submitting to an examination of what was used by him to design his work.

Resumo: A pesquisa tem a intenção de analisar em que medida o conceito de justo e as ideias de bem se complementam na teoria da justiça do mais importante filósofo político do século XX. Sem abdicar das importantes perspectivas críticas é importante despertar no debate acerca do justo e do bem na justiça como equidade a chave de leitura da complementaridade, mesmo um pouco distante do cânone das interpretações predominantes, mas que possa ser integrada a tantas outras e compor assim um critério mais abrangente na interpretação. John Rawls é reconhecido como um autor pertencente à tradição liberal, cujo pensamento procura garantir a prioridade do justo sobre o bem, tarefa indispensável para defender a liberdade individual. Embora se respeite as mais diversas ideias de bem, o liberalismo rejeita a possibilidade de fixar uma doutrina de bem particular para toda a sociedade. Muito se tem estudado Rawls ao longo das últimas décadas, porém pouco, relativo ao uso que ele faz das ideias de bem enquanto congruentes com a justiça, na sua concepção política. Estabelecer como se dá a relação das ideias de bem com a ideia de justiça em sua teoria é a base para entender a tentativa do autor de conciliar o bem e a justiça na teoria da justiça como equidade. Essa ideia de complementaridade acompanhou toda a sua teoria da justiça, fez parte das principais mudanças em sua obra, e seria um erro esquecer esse argumento na discussão de como uma sociedade democrática contemporânea pode ser uma sociedade justa e boa para os seus cidadãos. A importância desse argumento revela-se também na ideia de Rawls de que quanto maior a ausência de complementaridade entre o justo e o bem, maior a perspectiva de haver instabilidade na sociedade, acompanhada com os males que seguem essa inconsistência. A ideia de complementaridade entre o justo e o bem, em toda a sua abrangência, esteve no ponto de vista de criação das principais obras do autor. Enriquecer a crítica sobre Rawls é o intento último de submeter à apreciação uma análise daquilo que foi por ele utilizado para a concepção de sua obra.

Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10923/5785

The philosopher Immanuel Kant held the idea of ‘duty’ to be of utmost importance when it came to ethics. This duty-centered approach to ethics is known as a “deontological” one, as opposed to an end-result based ethics known as being “teleological.” This essay will define Kant’s use of ‘duty,’ ‘oughts,’ ‘obligations,’ ‘merit,’ and ‘partiality,’ and the application of these terms to such examples as saving a child from drowning and saving a child on the other side of the world by donating to a charitable organization. In each of these two cases, Kant’s concept of ‘merit’ will be considered. Any contentions I have with Kant’s ethical approach with the given examples will be provided respectively.

Like most egalitarian political philosophers, John Rawls believes that a just society will rely on markets and business firms for much of its economic activity—despite acknowledging that market systems will tend to create very unequal distributions of goods, opportunities, power, and status. Rawls himself remains one of the few contemporary political philosophers to explore at any length the way an egalitarian theory of justice might deal with fundamental options in political economy. This article examines his arguments and conclusions on these topics. It argues that contemporary Rawlsians will reach different conclusions if they take more seriously than Rawls himself did: (1) the implications, for the political culture and the democratic regulatory state, of large firms competing in adversarial markets characterized by the inevitable “fact of market failure,” and (2) the relevance of ownership and governance relationships involving different kinds of business firms. And with respect to the second point, Rawlsians and other egalitarians have much to learn from contemporary economic, legal, and sociological theories of the firm, and their role in studying the structure of and rationale for corporate law. This is the kind of social theory that Rawls believes is relevant to the justification and application of theories of justice, but he himself did not appeal to it in his writings on political economy. Contemporary egalitarians can and should appeal to it now, and in doing so correct errors and omissions in Rawls’s analysis. But taking seriously the two points mentioned above will also force egalitarians who support efficient markets to face difficult dilemmas or compromises of their own.

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.

If solutions to the problem of inequality are to be as radical as reality now demands, what is instead required is a reimagining of what would be involved comprehensively to tame capitalism through democratic means. This will involve much further development of the kind of plurality of institutional and policy proposals sketched by Meade, and will involve both the private and public – individual and collective – forms of capital predistribution that Meade advocated. Piketty, like Meade, sees the need for both redistribution and predistribution, and both see that the institutional means necessary to create a more equal society will involve pursuing a plurality of parallel paths. It is closely in keeping with the spirit of Piketty’s Capital that the political and intellectual agenda ahead will be one that economics on its own cannot hope to encompass. It’s a vital agenda, with high stakes, and presents challenges to both academic researchers and political activists. On the success of this endeavour depends nothing less than the prospects for legitimate continuation of our economic system.

One way to defend Rawls' tolerance on unequalising incentives is to claim that they are necessary if we are to respect the basic liberty of freedom of occupational choice. This paper challenges that line of response by showing that many of the privileges and claims that come under the banner of freedom of occupational choice are not basic liberties. Some textual support is offered for the interpretive claim that Rawls was not convinced that freedom of occupational choice was a basic liberty.

This review locates Bhandary’s Freedom to Care in the history of philosophy, notes some of the theory’s distinctive features that clearly advance the care theory tradition, and raises some puzzles and questions regarding specific elements of the theory. My remarks focus mostly on Part I of the book and on the following four topics: (1) Bhandary’s Rawlsian roots, (2) Bhandary’s engagement with Kittay, (3) Bhandary’s choice of J. S. Mill and Rawls as her main historical interlocutors, and finally, (4) Bhandary’s methodological choice of “men/fathers,” “women/mothers,” and “children/girls/boys” as the main focus of much of her analysis.

Open access available here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/dialogue-canadian-philosophical-review-revue-canadienne-de-philosophie/article/asha-bhandarys-freedom-to-care-a-kantian-care-engagement/0358194D285D3F4FE9FC6915F14FC131