Rawls and Animals

This chapter claims that Rawlsians ought to deny that we have direct duties of justice toward animals. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, the chapter shows that animal rights critics of Rawls fail to offer convincing examples where Rawlsians would permit obviously unjust examples of animal cruelty; rather, they argue that even if Rawls would justify the correct policy, he does so for the wrong reasons. I call these “animal-centrality” arguments: the interests of animals must, as a theoretical matter, be central to why we protect them. Second, the chapter demonstrates that the theoretical costs of including animals in our theories of justice is much higher than often thought. Third, the chapter suggests that Rawlsians have significant yet often ignored resources to defend substantial protections for animals on indirect grounds. It thus concludes that the theoretical benefits of including direct duties for animals are significantly outweighed by the theoretical costs and that Rawlsians are justified in rejecting animal-centrality arguments.

A Feminist Defense of Political Liberalism

Some feminists claim that liberal theories lack the resources necessary for fully diagnosing and remedying the social subordination of persons as members of social groups. Part of the problem is that liberals focus too narrowly on the state as the locus of political power. However, equal citizenship is also affected by systems of power that operate in the background culture and that construct social hierarchies in which persons are subordinated as members of social groups. This chapter argues that political liberalism, properly understood, entails a commitment to substantive equality such that it has the internal resources to address the kinds of inequality produced by unjust forms of social power. Although some will claim that if the basic structure is the subject of justice, political liberalism will still fall short of securing gender justice, we explain why this worry is misplaced.

The Point of Justice

John Rawls famously claimed that “the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance” are “arbitrary from a moral point of view.” Luck egalitarians believe that a conception of justice that eliminates the effects of circumstance but not of choice captures that intuition better than Rawls’s own principles of justice. This chapter argues that the opposite is the case. We can learn from Rawls that one cannot overcome moral arbitrariness in social life by using a morally arbitrary distinction between choice and circumstance. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the incompatibility between these two approaches points to a deeper difference between a deontological and a teleological paradigm that is crucial for the debate between relational and nonrelational notions of political and social justice.

Rawls and Luck Egalitarianism

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls famously noted that many (dis)advantages reflect the outcomes of the social and the natural lottery. In these remarks, inter alia, some have seen the early appearance in Rawls’s work of what was later developed into a full-blown luck egalitarian theory of justice. Luck egalitarianism says that it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no choice or fault of their own. This principle differs from Rawls’s theory of justice. This had led some political philosophers to criticize Rawls for not thinking through the implications of his luck egalitarian commitments. This chapter (1) presents conflicting interpretations of the role considerations about luck play in Rawls; (2) assesses the exegetical support on offer for these interpretations; and, finally, (3) discusses what role considerations about luck should play in a theory of justice in the light of recent relational egalitarian theories.

Introduction

Many people share a strong intuition that it is unjust when one child is born into severe poverty with limited life prospects while another is born into affluence with many more opportunities. But what’s unjust about it? One might say it is unjust because there is nothing that either child did to ...

Rawls on Economic Liberty and the Choice of Systems of Social Cooperation

Classical liberals argue Rawls fails to give sufficient weight to economic liberty. This paper argues that these classical liberals are mistaken. We know that Rawls took seriously Marx’s critique that the merely formal equality guaranteed by the basic liberties principle was de facto undermined by the material inequality permitted by the difference principle. As a response to Marx, Rawls believed that his principles could be fully specified in only one of two forms: liberal market socialism or property-owning democracy. Each fully specified system disperses capital so as to bring it under democratic control. Furthermore, within each system, economic liberties are robustly protected in a stable way. The classical liberal critique misfires as it takes only a part of his view to be the whole and neglects the full specification of these principles in one or another of Rawls’s preferred social systems.

Rawls’s Underestimation of the Importance of Economic Agency and Economic Rights

In Rawls’s justice as fairness, the moral powers of democratic citizenship are the capacity for a conception of the good and the sense of justice, and basic rights are those necessary for the development and exercise of these two powers. Since economic agency is not a power of democratic citizenship, economic rights are not basic. To libertarians, this relative devaluation of economic agency and economic rights is a mistake, since economic agency and economic rights are the main concerns of justice. This libertarian critique is correct: justice as fairness underestimates the importance of economic agency and economic rights. Yet libertarian critics mistake how we should care about economic agency and which economic rights are basic. The economic agency that matters for justice as fairness is the capacity to work together with others, and the basic economic rights are those that enable and protect this capacity.

Introduction

What is the relation between political theory and political practice? In what ways can political philosophy help people to address real injustices in the world? John Rawls argues that an important role of political philosophy is to identify the ideal standards of justice at which we should aim in political practice. Other philosophers challenge this approach, arguing that Rawls’s idealizations are not useful as a guide for action or, worse, that they are an impediment to addressing actual injustices in the world. They argue, instead, that political philosophy ought to be focused on theorizing about the elimination of existing injustice. Still others argue that principles of justice should be identified without any constraint concerning the possibility of implementation or regulation in the real world at all....

Tolerating Decent Societies

Rawls argues that the public reason of a liberal democratic society should aim to include—and therefore tolerate—all reasonable persons. But the public reason that he defends for the Society of Peoples (globally) is considerably more inclusive. Rawls argues for the toleration of “decent” societies that are not liberal democracies. Critics have charged that such toleration, while perhaps pragmatic, is unprincipled. But a careful examination of Rawls’s criteria for “decency” reveals a defense of Rawls’s position that is grounded in the institutional requirements for a society to be able to make its own legitimate political decisions.

Right-Wing Populism and Noncoercive Injustice

John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples makes several assumptions that, in the years since that book’s writing, have been shown to be potentially flawed. The first is that democratic societies can be predicted to inculcate citizens with democratic values, such that democratic peoples have no realistic worry about backsliding into tyranny. The second is that there is a sharp conceptual distinction between coercive intervention, on the one hand, and mere conversation and speech on the other. The emergence of right-wing populism—and the related phenomenon of troll farms, intended to inflame disagreement and anger within democratic political communities abroad—have raised the issue of antidemocratic societies using speech to undermine support for democratic self-government abroad. Rawls’s Law of Peoples, I argue, is poorly suited for the task of responding to these circumstances. Rawls’s Law of Peoples might have been better situated for this task, the chapter concludes, had Rawls included robust respect for democratic governance within that law. This Democratic Law of Peoples might have been the basis of a global society in which democracies held each other to account for their deviations from democratic self-government—while still expressing tolerance and modesty about the extent to which we might coercively intervene in favor of democracy.