-
38This is the introduction to the Ashgate volume on Rawls in their history of political thought series. It puts Rawls's life and work in context and then discusses the essays included in the volume, essays of high quality likely to shape scholarship on Rawls for the coming decades.
-
11Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept of universal human rights. 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. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives…Read more
-
103Rawls on International JusticePolitical Theory 32 (3): 291-319. 2004.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…Read more
-
32Rushing to revolution? A second look at globalization and justiceEconomics and Philosophy 22 (1): 125-137. 2006.In Globalization and Justice, Kai Nielsen brings his distinctive and passionate voice and considerable philosophical abilities to one of the pressing issues of our time: Is justice possible in our increasingly globalized world? Nielsen argues that it is, though the demands of justice are great, the challenges substantial, and the odds very long. Without a clear philosophical understanding of justice and a firm and focused political will, Nielsen maintains, we are likely to have globalization wit…Read more
-
6Book Review: Justice, Luck and Knowledge (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (1): 137-140. 2007.
-
44Pluralism, liberal democracy, and compulsory education: Accommodation and assimilationJournal of Social Philosophy 32 (4). 2001.
-
92A Just Global Economy: In Defense of RawlsThe Journal of Ethics 11 (2): 193-236. 2007.In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls does not discuss justice and the global economy at great length or in great detail. What he does say has not been well-received. The prevailing view seems to be that what Rawls says in The Law of Peoples regarding global economic justice is both inconsistent with and a betrayal of his own liberal egalitarian commitments, an unexpected and unacceptable defense of the status quo. This view is, I think, mistaken. Rawls’s position on global or international economic…Read more
-
14Human Rights: The Hard Questions (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2013.The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. A burgeoning human rights movement followed, yielding many treaties and new international institutions and shaping the constitutions and laws of many states. Yet human rights continue to be contested politically and legally and there is substantial philosophical and theoretical debate over their foundations and implications. In this volume, distinguished philosophers, political scientists, internationa…Read more
-
17Rawls on Philosophy and Democracy: Lessons from the Archived PapersJournal of the History of Ideas 78 (2): 265-274. 2017.
-
2Human Rights and Liberal TolerationCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 23 (2): 287-317. 2010.Offers, by way of systematic reconstruction of Rawls's Law of Peoples, a principled view of human rights and liberal toleration.
-
109Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2006.This volume examines Rawls's theory of international justice as worked out in his controversial last book, The Law of Peoples.
-
174Rawls's wide view of public reason: Not wide enoughRes Publica 6 (1): 49-72. 2000.What sorts of reasons are i) required and ii) morally acceptable when citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy undertake to resolve pressing political issues? This paper presents and then critically examines John Rawls''s answer to this question: his so called wide-view of public reason. Rawls''s view requires that the content of liberal public reason prove rich enough to yield a reasoned and determinate resolution for most if not all fundamental political issues. I argue that the content of li…Read more
-
109Reciprocity and Reasonable Disagreement: From Liberal to Democratic LegitimacyPhilosophical Studies 132 (2): 243-291. 2007.At the center of Rawls’s work post-1980 is the question of how legitimate coercive state action is possible in a liberal democracy under conditions of reasonable disagreement. And at the heart of Rawls’s answer to this question is his liberal principle of legitimacy. In this paper I argue that once we attend carefully to the depth and range of reasonable disagreement, Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy turns out to be either wildly utopian or simply toothless, depending on how one reads the…Read more
-
37Justice and the Global Economy in Rawls’s the Law of PeoplesSouthwest Philosophy Review 20 (1): 241-255. 2004.
-
40A right to health care? Participatory politics, progressive policy, and the price of loose languageTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (4): 323-342. 2016.This article begins by clarifying and noting various limitations on the universal reach of the human right to health care under positive international law. It then argues that irrespective of the human right to health care established by positive international law, any system of positive international law capable of generating legal duties with prima facie moral force necessarily presupposes a universal moral human right to health care. But the language used in contemporary human rights document…Read more
-
650The structural diversity of historical injusticesJournal of Social Philosophy 37 (3). 2006.Driven by a sharp increase in claims for reparations, reparative justice has become a topic of academic debate. To some extent this debate has been marred by a failure to realize the complexity of reparative justice. In this essay we try to amend this shortcoming. We do this by developing a taxonomy of different kinds of wrongs that can underwrite claims to reparations. We identify four kinds of wrongs: entitlement violations, unjust exclusions from an otherwise acceptable system of entitlements…Read more
-
37William Talbott’s Which Rights Should be Universal? (review)Human Rights Review 9 (2): 181-191. 2008.In this review essay, I first set out and then subject to criticism the main claims advanced by William Talbott in his excellent recent book, “Which Rights Should be Universal?”. Talbott offers a conception of basic universal human rights as the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy. I argue that his conception is at once too robustly liberal and democratic and too inattentive to key features of the rule of law to play this role. I suggest that John Rawls’s concep…Read more
-
36Human Rights: Institutions and AgendasPublic Affairs Quarterly 22 (4): 409-433. 2008.Distinguishes and shows how one can coherently affirm distinct human rights agendas rooted in distinct conceptions of human rights, each with its own normative aim and institutional and discursive field of application.
-
University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleDepartment of Philosophy
Political ScienceDistinguished Professor
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States of America