David Reidy

This essay revisits the claim that public political reason as Rawls understood it is incomplete with respect to at least some constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice. It proffers new examples of incompleteness and argues that to reach determinate judgments in these cases democratic citizens will need to draw from a wider pool of reasons than those belonging to their public political reason. It then suggests that and how, without offending the values served by public political reason or political liberalism more generally, democratic citizens might reason publicly with one another to resolve such issues. This involves their reasoning together not as reasonable citizens committed to and drawing reasons from their diverse but reasonable political conceptions of justice, but rather as reasonable persons committed to and drawing reasons from their diverse but reasonable comprehensive doctrines. By so reasoning publicly together free and equal persons properly complete the public political reason they share as free and equal citizens.

In this chapter, I provide a synoptic reconstruction of John Rawls’s political philosophy with special focus on his contribution to normative international theory. Perhaps the most influential and important political philosopher of the twentieth century working in the English language, John Rawls spent more than fifty years on the question of what any determinate population of human beings (sharing a language, history and so forth) might rationally, reasonably, and realistically hope politically to become and enduringly to be under favorable but possible background conditions. In two now-canonical monographs, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, he argued that one thing it might politically become and enduringly be is an independent and nonfungible liberal democratic people the citizen members of which, as free equals, visibly enjoy and reliably maintain between themselves political relations they publicly recognize as legitimate and so adequate to their together exercising a shared public reason to identify and realize institutionally the most reasonable conception of justice available to them. In a third and shorter, but also now-canonical, monograph, The Law of Peoples, Rawls asked what two or more independent and nonfungible liberal democratic peoples, if ever there are, might themselves together rationally, reasonably, and realistically hope politically to become and enduringly to be under favorable background conditions. He argued that they might politically become and enduringly be a peaceful and cooperative federation of diverse independent and nonfungible liberal democratic peoples each of which also recognizes, respects, and includes in their federation a class of internationally peaceful well-ordered constitutional republics not yet liberal or democratic, and refrains from interfering coercively in the domestic affairs of any polity within which rulers benevolently ensure that the basic interests of the ruled are reliably met. The upshot of Rawls’s three main monographs, then, is that there is nothing irrational, unreasonable or unrealistic about hoping for a world within which determinate populations of human beings (sharing a language, history, and so forth) become and enduringly remain independent and nonfungible legitimate liberal democratic peoples that then federate for peaceful cooperation not just among themselves but with some well-ordered constitutional republics not yet liberal or democratic and without coercively interfering in the domestic affairs of polities within which rulers benevolently ensure that the basic interests of those they rule are reliably met. While this hope is by itself insufficient to inform practical political decisions under all too common less than favorable conditions, it is, Rawls insists, absolutely essential if we, and especially our political leaders, are to bring to practical political decisions the kind of attitudinal orientation essential to our realizing and maintaining ourselves as diverse, nonfungible, independent free and equal human persons and corporate bodies politic.

This is the second volume of The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory where we continue to demonstrate the breadth of scholarship that constitutes International Political Theoryinternational political theory (IPT) (IPT). Where Volume I critically explored the contested originsorigin of the internationalinternational order, volume 2 explores a wide range of challenges this world orderworldworld order is now experiencing. Our contributors take the major ideasidea(s) that shape IPT—such as justice, strategic rivalryrivalrystrategic rivalry, legitimacy, fairnessfairness—and their antitheses, and apply to them the critical and normativenormative lenses that characterise the discipline. Below we explore the individualindividual contributions that fall into four sections, each of which takes a distinct approach to the subject and the scholarship that it can bring to bear.

This handbook provides a comprehensive exploration of International Political Theory, which in its broadest terms examines the ways in which ideas about justice, sovereignty, and legitimacy shape international politics. The two volumes of the handbook cover topics ranging from the foundations of international political thought to the latest debates in the field. Chapters 4 and 13 are available through open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This essay that takes up Rawls's journey from philosophical theology through moral philosophy to democratic theory and political philosophy and pauses at, to reflect on, a few significant points early in the journey. It aims to provide a sense of some of Rawls's important early concerns and commitments that structure or at least cast significant shadows over his later work in political philosophy, A Theory of Justice and subsequent works. According to Rawl, moral philosophers construct theoretical models to explain and predict familiar, everyday, noncontroversially competent moral judgments. Rawls refers to this work as “explication” and “ethics as science.” Rawls distinguishes between two tasks essential to moral philosophy. Ethical theory or moral theory starts with but takes us beyond ethics as science by helping us to refine and deepen our understanding of plausible candidate explications.

This chapter sets out and critically examine the main features of Jim Griffin's treatment of human rights in his _On Human Rights_. The criticisms pressed stem from perhaps three sources. First, Griffin fails to develop the concept of human rights as _rights_ beyond affirming the idea of rights as valid moral claims. Second, Griffin fails to account for the special role or place of human rights within the deontic domain of the right more generally. While he affirms human rights as weighty moral claims, he offers in the end little more than the intuitionist's advice to "call 'em as you see 'em" when it comes to adjudicating cases of competition or conflict between human rights and other weighty moral claims associated with, say, distributive justice, national security, perhaps even environmental stewardship. Third, Griffin conceives of the deontic domain of the right generally and so of human rights specifically in terms of the relationship between persons and their good rather than the relations between persons themselves or between persons within institutions. In the end, while _On Human Rights_ has much to recommend it, it likely will not bring to human rights discourse and practice the determinate structure and clarity its author hoped for.

John Rawls now presents and defends his theory of "justice as fairness" as a form of "political liberalism." Focusing on Political Liberalism , this dissertation critically examines the main features of Rawls's recent work in liberal political philosophy. ;Chapter One first introduces "justice as fairness," drawing on Rawls's A Theory of Justice . It then introduces Rawls's more recent work as responsive to the fact that in his 1971 presentation of "justice as fairness" he assumed a degree of moral consensus among citizens most unlikely, on his own account, to arise or endure within a stable, free, and open society. ;Chapters Two through Four examine critically the main elements of Rawls's political liberalism. Chapter Two concerns Rawls's freestanding public justification for liberal principles of political justice. It argues against Rawls's continued use of the original position argument, and proposes an alternative form of argument. Chapter Three examines the idea of an overlapping consensus, central to Rawls's account of the stability of a liberal society, and concludes that this idea is not needed and ought not be invoked to resolve stability issues. Chapter Four takes up the ideal of public reason. It proposes an improved argument for this ideal and clarifies the relationship between a society's stage of political development and the scope and content of its public reason. ;Chapters Five, Six, and Seven undertake to improve Rawls's account of political liberalism in two fundamental ways. Chapter Five revises Rawls's account of public reason and then develops, without falling into a perfectionist civic humanism, a conception of liberal democratic citizenship more robust and detailed than the conception Rawls offers. Chapter Six addresses the social reproduction of liberal democratic citizenship under conditions of pluralism, paying special attention to the need for and justification of compulsory education. Chapter Seven examines whether and how it is possible, consistent with liberal principles of political justice, to organize and govern a system of compulsory education. The dissertation concludes on a cautiously optimistic note about the prospects for liberalism in societies like the United States

The recent posthumous publication of John Rawls's undergraduate thesis 'A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community' constitutes a welcome opportunity to examine the relationships between Rawls's religious commitments and his political philosophy. In this essay, informed by a complete examination of Rawls's archived papers at Harvard, I set out some of these commitments, trace their development over time, and indicate some of the ways they find expression in Rawls's political thought. In the 1990s Rawls characterized his life's work as addressed to a question 'essentially religious in nature': Can human nature be redeemed? It is perhaps, then, no surprise that reading his work against the background of his, eventually non-theistic, religious commitments and concerns helpfully casts it in a new light

Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept universal human rights. The Charter of the United Nations commits nearly all nations of the world to promote, to realize and take action to achieve human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, yet this formal consensus masks an underlying confusion about the philosophical basis and practical implications of rights in a world made up of radically different national communities. This collection of essays explores the foundations of universal human rights in four sections devoted to their nature, application, enforcement and limits, concluding that shared rights help to constitute a universal human community, which supports local customs and separate state sovereignty. Rights protect the benefits of cultural diversity, while recognizing the universal dignity that every human life deserves. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives how human rights can help to bring moral order to an otherwise divided world.

Rawls’s The Law of Peoples has not been well received. The first task of this essay is to draw (what the author regards as) Rawls’s position out of his own text where it is imperfectly and incompletely expressed. Rawls’s view, once fully and clearly presented, is less vulnerable to common criticisms than it is often taken to be. The second task of this essay is to go beyond Rawls’s text to develop some supplementary lines of argument, still Rawlsian in spirit, to deflect key criticisms made by Rawls’s critics. The overall defense given here of Rawls’s position draws on a deep theme running throughout all of Rawls’s work in political philosophy, namely, that the task of political philosophy is to mark the moral limits given by and through a commonhuman reason, itself socially and historically achieved, within which human nature must develop (and reveal itself over time) if it is to be an expression or manifestation of human freedom.