Abstract
Global relations are largely shaped by what Charles Mills calls “the racial contract”: the sometimes explicit and sometimes unspoken agreement that social arrangements must favor whites over nonwhites. This bias is strong among white political philosophers and especially in the liberal contractarian theories of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, and, most recently, Rawls. While these theories pay lip service to nominal equality in the name of universalism, they also ignore the inequality and disadvantage that nonwhites suffer at the hands of whites, and thus they contribute to epistemic obscurantism and racial domination. In this paper, first, I strengthen Mills‘s argument by providing an even more convincing objection against the procedural requirements of John Rawls‘s theory of justice; second, I argue that this objection gives us a good reason to distinguish between Rawls‘s liberal contractarianism and other theories in white political philosophy that are far more sensitive to Mills‘s critique; and, finally, I offer a partial defense of Martha Nussbaum‘s and Amartya Sen‘s capability–based approach, which I think is uniquely situated to address the inequalities of the racial contract.
Highlights
Liberal social contract theories in Western analytic philosophy usually conceive of persons as abstract political subjects united by a common humanity and a SPECTRA 3.1, February 2014common participation in a mutually beneficial social arrangement
First, I strengthen Mills’s argument by providing an even more convincing objection against the procedural requirements of John Rawls’s theory of justice; second, I argue that this objection gives us a good reason to distinguish between Rawls’s liberal contractarianism and other theories in white political philosophy that are far more sensitive to Mills’s critique; and, I offer a partial defense of Martha Nussbaum’s and Amartya Sen’s capability-based approach, which I think is uniquely situated to address the inequalities of the racial contract
In his book The Racial Contract[1] he contends that as long as white philosophers defend theories of justice that are blind to the existence of the racial contract, they help cultivate an epistemology of systemic ignorance that threatens the recognition of nonwhites as full persons and propagates a neoliberal model for quiet racial domination
Summary
Liberal social contract theories in Western analytic philosophy usually conceive of persons as abstract political subjects united by a common humanity and a SPECTRA 3.1, February 2014common participation in a mutually beneficial social arrangement. There is more to white political philosophy than social contract theories, and other approaches are more capable to acknowledge the racial contract as a serious problem.
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