William A. Edmundson

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal. This is an important book for all philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique.

The everyday virtue of civility functions as a constraint upon informal social pressures. Can civility also be understood, as John Rawls has proposed, as a distinctively political constraint? I contrast Rawls's project of constraining the political with Mill's of constraining both the social and the political, and explore Rawls's account of the relation between the two. I argue that Rawls's political duty of civility rests on the assumption that the political is peculiarly coercive; ignores the social enforcement of morality; and implausibly has civility apply to motives in acting, rather than to actions.

Political authority is the moral power to impose moral duties upon a perhaps unwilling citizenry. David Enoch has proposed that authority be understood as a matter of "robust" duty-giving. This paper argues that Enoch's conditions for attempted robust duty- or reason-giving are, along with his non-normative success condition, implausibly strong. Moreover, Enoch's attempt and normative- success conditions ignore two facts. The first is that success requires that citizens be tolerant of modest errors by the authority, which means that, in conditions of modest error, performing as directed must have a non-instrumental, intrinsic value. The second is that an attempt to exercise authority involves an intention to trigger a moral principle endowing conforming performances with intrinsic value. The mystery of political authority is the mystery of how official directives could possibly suffice to endow conforming performances with intrinsic value.

Proponents and opponents of the death penalty both typically assume that punishment, in some form or other, is justified, somehow or other, and that just punishment must in some sense be proportionate to the crime. These shared assumptions turn out to embarrass both parties. Proponents have to explain why certain prima facie proportionate punishments, such as torture, are off the table, while death remains, so to speak, on it. Opponents have to explain why their favored alternatives to capital punishment, such as life without parole, are both proportionate to the worst crimes and not as bad as death. The commitment to proportionality makes trouble for both sides of the issue, and its resolution is unlikely until there is a satisfactory general account of proportionality in punishing. Such an account is nowhere in sight.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015 and the subsequent attacks of November 13 cast a garish light onto a conundrum at the center of how liberal democracies understand themselves. The Syrian emigrant crisis has added further color. How can a tolerant, liberal political culture tolerate the presence of intolerant, illiberal, sub-cultures while remaining true to its principles of tolerance? The problem falls within the intersection of two developments in the thinking of John Rawls, the great American political philosopher who died in 2002. The later Rawls struggled with the problem of how society might stably survive the clash of plural sub-cultures that a liberal society - unless it is oppressively coercive - must itself foster and allow to flourish. And he separately struggled with the problem of how liberal peoples might peacefully share the planet with illiberal, but "decent" peoples elsewhere. This article shows that Rawls's two solutions do not easily mix.

Recent critics of the Roberts Court chide it for its lack of regard for precedent. Fred Schauer faults these critics for erroneously assuming that a rule of stare decisis formerly played a significant role in the Supreme Court's decision-making. In fact, it has long played only a rare and weak role in the Court's work. Nonetheless, according to Schauer, the critics are to be thanked for invigorating a needed debate about the importance of "stability, consistency, settlement, reliance, notice, and predictability" in the Court's decisions. This article argues that Schauer exaggerates the weakness of stare decisis in the Court's practices; and that his call for a public debate on the merits of the norm of stare decisis can only weaken it.

John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that “justice as fairness…is likely to have greater stability than the traditional alternatives since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology”. In support, he presented a psychology of moral development that was informed by a comprehensive liberalism. In Political Liberalism, Rawls confessed that the argument was “unrealistic and must be recast”. Rawls, however, never provided a psychology of moral development informed by a specifically political liberalism, leaving it at a disadvantage with respect to comprehensive liberalism itself. I argue that no coherent account is available. But, because Rawls’s Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, along with its implied stricture against “indoctrination in the pejorative sense,” is a creature of ideal rather than non-ideal theory, the deficiency is far less significant than many would assume. In non-ideal circumstances -- such as ours -- political liberalism does not disallow, and in fact requires, compulsory, free early education informed by the best available comprehensive liberal philosophy.