Rawlsian Liberalism Research Articles

The Separateness of Persons and Liberal Theory

The fact that persons are separate in some descriptive sense is relatively uncontroversial. But one of the distinctive ideas of contemporary liberal political philosophy is that the descriptive fact of our separateness is normatively momentous. John Rawls and Robert Nozick both take the separateness of persons to provide a foundation for their rejection of utilitarianism and for their own positive political theories. So why do their respective versions of liberalism look so different? This paper claims that the difference is based in Rawls' and Nozick's differing understandings of the morally significant aspects of personhood, and argues that respect for separateness is a value better suited to defend Nozickian libertarianism than Rawlsian liberalism.

Theological and Political Liberalisms

Several highly critical theological responses to political liberalism have appeared in recent years. John Milbank, continuing his onslaught on all things modern, complains that political liberalism's “empty heart” suffers from a “totalitarian drift” toward “an increasingly joyless and puritanical world.” For Oliver O'Donovan, liberalism is “a false posture of transcendence” and modernity is “conceived as Antichrist, a parodie and corrupt development of Christian social order.” Robert Song warns against “the partial and limited character” of liberalism's freedoms and proclaims that “a responsible theology will learn to articulate its ‘No’” to liberal political society. Other commentators offer critiques of particular aspects of political liberalism, often suggesting revisions based on their own theological perspectives. These critical voices join others such as Stanley Hauerwas, one of liberalism's most outspoken theological critics for more than a quarter century, and they continue a line of critique that extends back through Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth.Not all the theological voices are critical. Christophe Insole, for example, finds that “politically liberal principles are compatible with a full-blooded and theologically main-stream Christian commitment.” Several Roman Catholic theologians have commented on the increasing mutuality between liberal democracy and Roman Catholic political and social teachings. Paul Sigmund notes that “the relation between Catholicism and liberal democracy has now become a positive and, one would hope, a mutually reinforcing one, even if there are a number of continuing tensions between them.” And Daniel Dombrowski offers a general defense of Rawlsian liberalism against claims that it is hostile to religion.

Beyond Theologies of Resentment: An Appreciation of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition

Jeffrey Stout's latest book is likely to command even wider attention amongst theologians than Ethics after Babel (1988). Written in three parts and comprising material some of which has already appeared in other contexts, the book argues several theses. The modern democratic tradition is richer and more complex than exponents and critics of Rawlsian liberalism tend to recognise. This tradition should continue to accommodate religious voices, although these need to be more patient of democratic politics than recent theologies of ‘resentment’. A moral pragmatism provides the best philosophical framework for promoting the discourse and practices of democracy. Each of these claims merits further elaboration before some critical remarks are ventured.

The True Confessions of a White Rawlsian Liberal: An Argument for a Capacities Approach to Democratic Legitimacy

This paper takes as its point of departure the constitutional talks in South Africa in the early 1990’s. I suggest that liberal rather than democratic values held a particular attraction to South African political philosophers like me. Taking the example of Rawlsian liberalism, I show how liberalism locates the normative anchors of legitimacy outside the democratic process and is content with a weak interpretation of political equality. As an alternative I sketch a capacities approach to democratic legitimacy drawing on the work of Sen and Nussbaum. In particular I argue that the capacity to participate in democratic practices is what grounds and legitimizes principles of democratic justice agreed to by citizens. I conclude by suggesting that South Africa’s democracy would have been stronger if the state had attended to the capacities of citizens to participate in the democratic process.

Colonizing the Last Frontier

In Aboriginal Rights and Judicial Wrongs: The Colonization of the Last Frontier, I examine a recent sea-change in federal Indian law that has escaped the notice of scholars. In the light of the divestiture of tribal sovereignty characterizing recent Supreme Court decisions, my article interrogates a contemporary case that rejects the property principle underlying all of federal Indian law itself in favor of a conception of aboriginal title never before countenanced in the United States and long discredited elsewhere. My analysis argues that this new conception traduces 175 years of American precedent and violates international law. I also contend that it vitiates the constitutional separation of powers, in which plenary power over the Indian nations is allocated to Congress, and amounts to a legislative decision by the courts to colonize the nation's last frontier, the ocean, through extinguishment of aboriginal interests therein. My article meticulously critiques the case at issue, Native Village of Eyak v. Trawler Diane Marie, Inc., and its interplay with common law aboriginal title, federal supremacy over the ocean, and the international law of sovereign succession. It draws novelly on English law in respect of the territorial sea and aboriginal title in current and former Commonwealth states, particularly Australia, Canada, and New Zealand but also Southern Nigeria and India. The article also situates the matter in the context of indigenous peoples' rights under international law and deploys the political philosophy of James Tully and Will Kymlicka to evoke the broader discourse of group rights and Rawlsian liberalism. Finally, I conclude it with recommendations: that Eyak be overturned as a doctrinally incorrect and politically indefensible intrusion into congressional prerogative and tribal autonomy; that its contemptible vision of aboriginal title be rejected as having no place in a postcolonial world; and that Congress alternatively fulfill its fiduciary duty to the plaintiff Indians by granting a title commensurate to their claim or providing compensation for the judicial taking of their right of occupation.

Animals, politics and justice: Rawlsian liberalism and the plight of non-humans

It is argued that Rawls illegitimately excludes animals as beneficiaries of the deliberations in the original position. Claims about the superiority of contractarianism from an animal protection perspective are devalued, however, because Rawls' principles of justice are themselves derived from, or at least influenced by, preexisting moral intuitions and values. In addition, excluding animals from Rawls' theory of justice leaves them subject to the liberal principle of moral pluralism. Here, in theory and practice, the treatment of animals becomes a matter of moral preferences, whereby the state is reluctant to intervene to prohibit those who see no wrong in animal cruelty.

Equality vs. Efficiency: The Geography of Solid Organ Distribution in the USA

There is at present a divide in the geographical literature between those interested in distributive justice as a social value and those who seek to implement distributive plans on the basis of efficiency of resource use. The former are 'social geographers' interested in equity as a social value, and the latter are 'practical' economic and locational geographers. This divide mirrors one existing elsewhere in social science between Rawlsian liberalism and utilitarian planners. Here we argue that equality and efficiency are related values that cannot be separated easily in the analysis of practical problems. Data on the distribution of transplantable human organs are considered in a practical consideration of this approach. The case-study suggests that inequality of distribution appears to effect adversely the general organ supply. Stated positively, the data suggest that, to the extent that equality of service is an objective, that goal may positively impact on organ supply. More generally, the conclusion argues for a conjoining of theoretical and practical geographical approaches where a scarce resource must be allocated across a dispersed population.

Theorizing the third way: New Labour and social justice

This article seeks to identify distinctive core elements in the ideological standpoint of New Labour. Whilst accepting that New Labour has absorbed theoretical aspects of a number of centre-left traditions, it is argued that an interpretative reconstruction of the resulting ideological configuration reveals it to be a departure from those established traditions. A reading of John Rawls's liberal theory of justice is used as a means of characterizing New Labour's general ideological approach; the implications are then traced through to the policy level and a correspondence between Rawlsian liberalism and New Labour's agenda is established. On this basis, it is argued that New Labour has adopted a 'social liberal' position, emphasizing procedural fairness over distributive patterns, which can be viewed as a departure both from traditional 'social democracy' and from the 'neo-liberalism' of the recent right.

Politics, Religion, and National Identity

This essay is not a further contribution to the debate about liberal individualism, the chief topic of discussion in political and social philosophy for the last twenty-five years or more. Nevertheless it is necessary to begin by rehearsing some features of that debate, claims that will be very familiar to contemporary political philosophers. Inspired largely by John Rawls, the modern version of political liberalism has tried to make coherent a conception of politics according to which political affairs should be separated, or at least seriously distanced, from the various moral and religious loyalties and programmes of individuals and groups of citizens. This central contention of Rawlsian liberalism has been expressed in different ways, but according to one of the commonest versions, it is to be interpreted as the view that the right must take precedence over the good. That is to say, in the political sphere, the implementation and application of impartial rules of social justice and civil liberty (the right) must take precedence over competing conceptions of what is or is not a valuable way of spending a human life (the good). Another familiar way of expressing the same doctrine says that the state must be neutral with respect to the moral alternatives with which a modern pluralistic society presents its members. This claim about state neutrality is most easily illustrated by a notable example; whether homosexuality is morally wrong or not is not the business of the legislator, and thus the goodness or badness of a gay lifestyle is a matter on which the law should be neutral.

Rejoinder to Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel's response to my critical essay is thoughtful, generous, and characteristically elegant. I am not the only one, I am sure, who will welcome this clarification of his views. Yet I am inclined to think that what he does not include in his response is as important as what he does.What Professor Sandel's response does not include is any attempt to sort out, qualify, accept, or reject the criticisms advanced in the “Sandel and the Self” section of my essay. He says in his second sentence that I bring out “the continuities and differences between Democracy's Discontent and my earlier work with subtlety and care,” but he fails to note that most of those continuities concern the unencumbered self he attributes to liberalism. We are left to wonder, then, what he makes of the three charges that I bring against his account of this self: that he mistakes the point of the unencumbered self in Rawlsian liberalism; that he trades on a false dichotomy between the encumbered and the unencumbered self; and that he neglects to notice a distinction, implicit in his as much as in Rawls's thinking, between the self in the abstract, general sense and the self in the concrete, particular sense.

Rawls and a Shrinking Liberty of Conscience

John Rawls claims that his system of political liberalism represents the “completion and extension” of liberty of conscience, a grand solution to the problem of religious diversity that accompanied liberalism's emergence in the early modern world. I argue that such a claim cannot withstand historical scrutiny, that Rawlsian liberalism instead represents aretreatfrom the commitments that drove liberal tolerationists. Rawls's political liberalism forces individuals with non-mainstream comprehensive doctrines either to change the doctrine to fit Rawls's conditions of publicity; to manufacture a “public” justification for comprehensively derived political stances; to seek to change the parameters of public debate through, for example, civil disobedience; or to advance comprehensively derived views only so long as public reasons follow in due course. The first two of these solutions run counter to the historical development of liberty of conscience, and the third fails due to Rawls's pervasive emphasis on stability. The fourth misrepresents the nature of moral reasoning and comprehensive doctrines themselves. In conclusion, I argue that underlying Rawls's liberalism is a belief-action split that has historically suppressed religious liberty and, more troubling, a type of repression that undermines the very notion of comprehensive doctrines.

Rawlsian Liberalism, Moral Truth and Augustinian Politics

Rawlsian Liberalism, Moral Truth and Augustinian Politics

Anti-Perfectionism and Rawlsian Liberalism

This article examines the justifications of anti-perfectionism given by John Rawls in his recent work Political Liberalism. Rawls, I argue, gives one major argument in defence of anti-perfectionism (what I shall call the ‘reasonableness among free and equal persons' argument) and two subsidiary arguments (what I shall call the ‘social unity’ argument and the ‘stability’ argument). None of these arguments, I claim, are persuasive. Rawls's most recent justification of anti-perfectionism is therefore unsuccessful.

The Art of Political Liberalism

AbstractThis article considers John Rawls's recent turn to “political liberalism.“ Rawls has revised his argument from A Theory of Justice in order to establish a more realistic account of a “well-ordered” society; that is, creating legitimate political stability amidst a plethora of conflicting yet reasonable conceptions of the good. The aim here is to consider the extent to which Rawlsian theories are at once open to the deep diversity of late-modern political communities, and yet seek to manage and constrain the liberty of “difference” for the purposes of maintaining a distinctive liberal political order. This involves trying to persuade people to comply with liberal norms despite themselves. But it has been the claim of Rawlsian liberalism that citizens be presented, without pretence, with reasons they can accept and live by in the course of establishing a well-ordered society. The drive for transparency here—through seeking out agreement on first principles of justice—obscures the “arts” of political liberalism and prevents us from thinking about the diversity of political communities in other ways.

Why Rawlsian Liberals Should Support Free Market Capitalism

Why Rawlsian Liberals Should Support Free Market Capitalism

Morality and Human DiversityVarieties of Moral Personality. Owen Flanagan

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssaysMorality and Human Diversity Varieties of Moral Personality. Owen Flanagan Laurence ThomasLaurence Thomas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 103, Number 1Oct., 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/293474 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Free Speech, Free Exchange, and Rawlsian Liberalism

Free Speech, Free Exchange, and Rawlsian Liberalism

The Perils of Conceptualism: A Response to Professor Fallon

I am grateful for Professor Fallon's constructive and lucid remarks. They are thoughtful and perceptive. But they also reveal the limitations of the kind of highly conceptualist focus that has unfortunately come to characterize so much of our modern constitutional scholarship. Fallon argues that what I identify as the paradox of public be dissolved if first amendment doctrine conceived within the framework of Rawlsian liberalism. He contends that from the perspective of that liberalism, members of a particular community can believe that behavior outrageous and therefore reprehensible while simultaneously believing, as members of a national community, . . . that their own illiberal moral norms ought not to enjoy the sanction of law.' If this so, Fallon concludes, denying the sanction of law to . . . illiberal norms does not corrode the necessary foundation [of] liberal norms for critical public discourse to occur. There is, in short, no paradox.2 Fallon is, of course, quite correct that there no logical inconsistency between the existence of community norms and the need for public toleration. But the limitations of this point become obvious as soon as it seen that law does not exist merely on the conceptualist plane of logic and theory, but serves also as a practical instrument for the governance of society. The paradox of public does not flow from the incompatibility of abstract ideas, but rather from the sociological tensions inherent in the dynamic functioning of the law. On Rawls' account, the purpose of public toleration to provide a foundation for political cooperation on a basis of mutual respect.3 This purpose, as Rawls remarks, is practical, and not metaphysical or epistemological.4 It be served only if public discussion informed and uncoerced, and reached by citizens in ways consistent with their being viewed as free and equal persons.5 Rawls' account,

Rawls' Kantian ideal and the viability of modern liberalism

Rawlsian liberalism is best understood and defended on the basis of a concrete but widely shared ideal of the person as a rational agent capable of normative self‐determination in the proper political and economic conditions. In Rawls’ recent works, this neo‐Kantian ideal of free moral personality is no longer understood as a requirement of rational or moral agency as such, but is a concrete historical ideal or meta‐value presupposed by the living tradition of liberal‐democratic judgment and practice, which reason can recover through a critical reflection upon this tradition. Read in this way, Rawls’ theory of social justice articulates a quite powerful, rational, concrete, historical, and social dimension of modern political identity, which the critics of liberalism cannot plausibly deny. But there are other rival, powerful bourgeois‐individualist and patriarchal ideals of personhood, equally rooted in modern political judgments and practices, which Rawlsian liberalism ignores, and which taken together g...

The theoretical foundations of liberalism

The publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in 1972 inaugurated a new era in Anglo-American political theory by providing a sophisticated and complex paradigm of liberal political diagnosis of and prescription for contemporary society; it resulted in a flood of detailed analyses and discussions of Rawls' proposals in the large and in the small, and also brought forth (in the form of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia) a counterblast from the libertarian Right which was of commensurate scope and vigour. In the present decade, however, the challenge to Rawlsian liberalism has taken on a new guise—one which it is the purpose of this paper to explore.