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

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 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 common human 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

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 without justice. This is surely correct.