David Reidy

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.

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, international lawyers, environmentalists and anthropologists discuss some of the most difficult questions of human rights theory and practice: What do human rights require of the global economy? Does it make sense to secure them by force? What do they require in jus post bello contexts of transitional justice? Is global climate change a human rights issue? Is there a human right to democracy? Does the human rights movement constitute moral progress? For students of political philosophy, human rights, peace studies, and international relations.

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

In this paper I distinguish between three conceptions of human rights and thus three human rights agendas. Each is compatible with the others, but distinguishing each from the others has important theoretical and practical advantages. The first conception concerns those human rights tied to natural duties binding all persons to one another independent of and prior to any institutional context and the violation of which would “shock the conscience” of any morally competent person. The second concerns the institutional conditions necessary and sufficient for particularist legal and political obligations to take on prima facie moral force so that the members of different polities face one another in an asymmetric moral relationship, with each side having a rightful claim to political self-determination. The third concerns those human rights arising exclusively as a matter of positive international law out of the voluntary undertakings of legitimate polities within the international order. Each of these different conceptions is tied to a different human rights agenda. The second is tied to the struggle to realize recognitional norms of legitimacy within the international order. The third is tied to the ongoing effort to incorporate into positive international law through voluntary initiative an ever expanding moral consensus between legitimate polities. The first is tied to the emerging practice of humanitarian intervention and system of international criminal liability. Thus, while all human rights share certain features – they’re universal, and so on – human rights differ in important ways. Attending to these differences would likely improve both the theory and practice of human rights

John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has permanently shaped the nature and terms of moral and political philosophy, deploying a robust and specialized vocabulary that reaches beyond philosophy to political science, economics, sociology, and law. This volume is a complete and accessible guide to Rawls' vocabulary, with over 200 alphabetical encyclopaedic entries written by the world's leading Rawls scholars. From 'basic structure' to 'burdened society', from 'Sidgwick' to 'strains of commitment', and from 'Nash point' to 'natural duties', the volume covers the entirety of Rawls' central ideas and terminology, with illuminating detail and careful cross-referencing. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of Rawls, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, ethics, political science, sociology, international relations and law.

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