M. Victoria Costa

Feminists disagree about whether or not Rawls’s account of free and equal citizenship is an emancipatory ideal for women, and whether or not the application of the two principles of justice would suffice to dismantle relationships of domination that affect women’s lives. This chapter argues that there is no clear and uncontroversial application of Rawls’s principles of justice that supports those feminists who give affirmative answers to these questions. Regarding the first principle, one unsettled question is whether it protects sexual and reproductive rights, including the right to abortion. Regarding the second principle, there is indeterminacy due to the need to balance the requirements of fair equality of opportunity with parental rights. Moreover, the difference principle’s focus on the maximization of income and wealth for the worst off makes room for policies that do this while still leaving some women exposed to the arbitrary power of others.

This paper examines Kieran Oberman’s original application of a particular conception of freedom as non-interference to justify lockdowns during a pandemic. Oberman claims that lockdowns can be justified exclusively on the basis of the value of freedom. He also suggests that people who protested against lockdowns by demanding freedom did not fully grasp the value to which they appealed. This paper argues that the conception of freedom as non-interference Oberman employs is not useful as a guide to make public health policy decisions. This is because it unnecessarily multiplies the freedoms that need to be considered, and unhelpfully reinterprets easily understood harms such as severe illness and death in terms of loss of freedom. This paper argues that this conception of freedom also leads to counterintuitive assessments. Finally, the paper proposes three ways of thinking about freedom that seem better to capture the sense of loss of freedom during the pandemic and the corresponding political demands expressed in protests.

Lars Moen's The Republican Dilemma (2024) offers a novel and insightful contribution to the debate between liberals and republicans about the meaning of political freedom. Moen bases his criticism of republicanism on Ian Carter's Equivalent Judgments Thesis. According to this thesis, the theory of pure negative freedom and the republican theory entail equivalent comparative judgments about the freedom of people. In this paper I argue, first, that there are significant differences between the pure negative freedom theorist's assessment of individual cases and Philip Pettit's republicanism's assessment of those same cases. And I use these differences to raise doubts about the existence of a strong empirical correlation between the implications of the two views. Second, with regard to a putative equivalence in policy recommendations, I concede to Moen that there are important similarities between John Rawls’ and Pettit's recommendations. But I argue that these similarities do not support the equivalent judgments thesis because Rawls is not an advocate of the theory of pure negative freedom.

This book develops and applies a unified interpretation of John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness in order to clarify the account of citizenship that Rawls relies upon, and the kind of educational policies that the state can legitimately pursue to promote social justice. Costa examines the role of the family as the "first school of justice" and its basic contribution to the moral and political development of children. It also argues that schools are necessary to supplement the education that families provide, teaching the political virtues that support just social institutions. The book also examines the questions of whether civic education should aim at cultivating patriotic feelings, and how it should respond to the deep cultural pluralism of contemporary democratic societies.

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal.

This paper examines the ways in which public health measures taken to contain the spread of COVID‐19 impacted the freedom of those affected, understanding freedom as non‐domination. It argues that, in the absence of effective vaccines, individuals who carry a virus with the profile of COVID‐19 have the capacity to impose high risks of severe illness and death on other people. But formal and informal rules can help control this capacity, supporting the freedom of people in certain respects. With regard to governmental enforcement of public health measures such as lockdowns, it argues that—depending on the form they take—they can be consistent with the enjoyment of freedom as non‐domination of the population. Still, for this to be the case, some demanding conditions must be met. First, the government must continue to operate under a number of suitable checks. Second, the relevant policies must protect the basic interests of all members of the population. The paper also responds to criticisms of this account of freedom, stressing the connection between the secure enjoyment of basic liberties and the enforcement of formal and informal rules.

This paper defends a neorepublican account of civic virtue as consisting of stable traits of character, understood in broadly Aristotelian terms, that exhibit excellences associated with the role of citizen, and that contribute to the secure protection of freedom as non-domination. Such an account is important for the neorepublican project because neither laws nor social norms can yield reliable support for republican freedom without a parallel input from civic virtue. The paper emphasizes the need to distinguish civic virtue from desirable norms, which can operate in tandem. Against other neorepublican accounts of civic virtue, it argues that the primary function of such virtue is not to support the stability of republican regimes. Rather, it has a corrective function, and may in fact challenge institutions, laws, and informal norms if they allow for the exercise of arbitrary power. Finally, the paper argues that this account of civic virtue is better positioned than a stability-focused account to shed light on the relationship between civic virtue and the common good.

This article considers why the influential neo-republicans Philip Pettit and Richard Bellamy tend to minimise or deny the role that natural or moral rights play in republican thought. It argues that their specific views about the theoretical role of such rights are motivated by methodological commitments. In Pettit’s case the commitments are to consequentialism and formalism, while in Bellamy’s it is to proceduralism. But these commitments get in the way of providing a fully adequate account of the value of freedom as non-domination: one that allows us to determine when citizens actually enjoy this kind of freedom. Finally, the article argues that a full explanation of what it means to enjoy freedom as non-domination must unavoidably appeal to normative notions.

Neo-republicanism seems well suited to provide insight into current policies for the control and restriction of immigration. In this paper, I discuss three different accounts of domination to assess whether they can provide intuitively acceptable responses to the types of domination experienced by different groups of immigrants. First, I present and criticize an argument offered by Philip Pettit in support of the view that immigration restrictions could in principle avoid being dominating. My criticism focuses on Pettit’s account of non-arbitrary governmental action that claims that laws and policies are not dominating when people have democratic control over the government’s activity. Given the failure of Pettit’s argument, I turn to the proceduralist account of non-arbitrary state action proposed by Frank Lovett, and discuss the limitations of the account in diagnosing all ways in which border controls and immigration policy can generate domination. Finally, I present and defend the view that governmental action is not dominating when there are adequate checks that protect the objective interests of individuals.

This chapter examines the normative question of whether the cultivation of patriotic and nationalist ideals and attachments should have a central place in programs of civic education. It argues that the most useful way to draw the distinction between patriotism and nationalism focuses on their respective objects of loyalty; patriotism is loyalty to a country while nationalism is loyalty to a people. This way of distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism forms the background for the discussion of a variety of instrumental and non-instrumental arguments for cultivating patriotic and nationalist political attachments in schools. It also examines an assumption common to these programs of civic education: that a shared identity is crucial for citizens to have a sense of belonging that supports social stability and desirable forms of political change. The final part of the chapter introduces a number of alternative educational proposals that aim to avoid some of the difficulties faced by patriotic and nationalist strategies. These alternative proposals aim to encourage good citizenship while taking into account new challenges generated by the political, social, and economic conditions of an increasingly globalized world.

This paper defends an account of cosmopolitanism as a corrective virtue of the sort endorsed by Philippa Foot. In particular, it argues that cosmopolitanism corrects a common and dangerous tendency to form overly strong identifications with political entities such as countries, nations, and cultures. The account helps to unify the current heterogeneous collection of cosmopolitan theories, as is illustrated by a discussion of the cultural cosmopolitanism of Jeremy Waldron, and the political cosmopolitanism of Simon Keller. The account also helps distinguish cosmopolitans from their critics, most of whom share the cosmopolitan’s commitment to respect for human rights: for example, liberal patriots, liberal nationalists and liberal culturalists.

This paper offers an answer to an objection to Phillip Pettit’s neo‐republican account of freedom as non‐domination raised by Sharon Krause. The objection is that widespread prejudice, such as systemic racism or sexism, generates significant obstacles to individuals’ free agency but that neo‐republicanism fails to explain why these obstacles reduce freedom. This is because neo‐republicanism defines domination in terms of the capacity for arbitrary interference, but many prejudiced actions do not involve physical coercion, threats, or any other behavior typically described as types of interference. The paper discusses three strategies to account for the impact of widespread prejudice on the domination of groups. It argues that the most plausible strategy redefines domination in terms of behavior that is prima facie wrong and lacks appropriate checks. Such behavior includes interference but also includes prejudiced actions, such as failing to select the most qualified candidate for a job.

One of the central elements of John Rawls’ argument in support of his two principles of justice is the intuitive normative ideal of citizens as free and equal. But taken in isolation, the claim that citizens are to be treated as free and equal is extremely indeterminate, and has virtually no clear implications for policy. In order to remedy this, the two principles of justice, together with the stipulation that citizens have basic interests in developing their moral capacities and pursuing their conceptions of the good life, are meant to provide a more precise interpretation of what is involved in treating citizens as free and equal. Rawls’ critics, however, have argued that satisfying the two principles of justice is not the most appropriate or plausible way to respect the status of citizens as free and equal. In relation to this debate, the present paper has two aims. The first is to examine Rawls’ account of the type of freedom that a just society must guarantee equally to its citizens. I will argue that those who think of Rawls as a theorist of freedom as non-interference are mistaken, because his notion of liberty resembles in important respects the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. Second, I will consider the extent to which Rawls’ principles of justice successfully protect the freedom as non-domination of all citizens so as to effectively treat them as free and equal