John Anderson

Richard Rorty reimagined the traditional liberal private-public divide to face contingency. This chapter explains Rorty’s understanding of it as a crucial component of any just and stable political order in the post-secular West. Rorty’s continued defense of the liberal private-public divide has been criticized from the political right and left. His foundation-neutral model is, however, equipped (or can easily be modified) to answer these objections. And this is good news, because Rorty has shown us that the leading post-secular alternatives (e.g., identity politics) threaten freedom, risk humiliation, and undermine solidarity.

The Aristotelian notions of "natural justice" and epieikeia are neglected, and even incomprehensible in much of contemporary jurisprudence and legal practice. This neglect, and any associated imbalance between legal justice and natural justice are, it is argued, at the root of many legal injustices. Concrete paradigmatic examples of legal injustices are the starting point of the analysis and used to give meaningful content to the notion of legal injustices. Ronald Dworkin's attempted justification of contemporary democratic legal systems as "interpretations" grounded in his "community of principle" is criticized as an exemplary jurisprudential theory because his theory is viewed as describing, as well as any other theory, contemporary notions of law. It is argued that Dworkin's egalitarian reduction of justice into a principle of legal interpretation, together with his "community of principle" as personifying the interpretations of legal elites, are distinct from, and incompatible with, the related Aristotelian notions of friendship and natural justice. The Aristotelian notions of natural justice and epieikeia are described and used to diagnose the legal injustices identified earlier in the study, and to reveal the inadequacies of Dworkin's theory for making such a diagnosis. The Aristotelian notion of epieikeia is contrasted with legal notions of equity. Natural justice is distinguished from natural law notions and Kantian moral laws in terms of its subject matter, which involves particulars rather than universalizable rules and principles. Accordingly, it is argued that natural justice is perceived and grasped rather than deduced. Kant's notion of a "kingdom of ends" is briefly considered as a rival framework to the Aristotelian notion of natural justice, but rejected because of its incompatibility with the flexibility of epieikeia. Various reforms of the political and legal systems are proposed.

Many Protestant denominations have or recently had policies that prohibit “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained. By only prohibiting “practicing” homosexuals, proponents of these policies claim that they do not discriminate against homosexuals as a group since, technically, a homosexual can still be ordained as long as she is “non-practicing.” In other words, a condemnation of homosexual practice is not the same as a condemnation of homosexual persons. I argue that this is not the case; the rhetoric of homosexual practice does, in fact, amount to a condemnation of gays and lesbians. It does so by conflating the two things it claims to keep separate—homosexual conduct and homosexual identity. I demonstrate this conflation by analyzing the history of this rhetoric and how it has been adjudicated in church court decisions from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA)

For Kant and his followers, pure reason can be practical, and its substantive practical command is, broadly speaking, that we treat ourselves and others as worthy of respect as free and equal. If those who have defended the Kantian morality system are correct, this moral imperative will not be authoritative and inescapable simply because we don't know how to coherently reweave our practical commitments so as to leave it out, but because it is presupposed by the possibility of practical reason. On this model, the rational authority of moral dictates would be understood as absolute and universal. ;But what if Kant and his followers have been wrong? What if the search for practical unconditionality turned out to be vain? Kant himself would most likely react to this news by pronouncing that, without a priori necessity, there could be no moral necessity, and without moral necessity, there could be no purity of motive, and without purity of motive, there could be no moral worth, and without moral worth, there could be no legitimate ascriptions of praise and blame. In short, for Kant and his orthodox followers, without unconditionality, the morality system would collapse. ;I will argue that the search for a priori necessity behind moral law is indeed hopeless, but that this does not entail the collapse of the morality system. It does however force us to conceive a new way of accounting for practical normativity in the absence of unconditionality. It also requires that, in order to preserve morality, we find a defensible place for it as a contingent subset of ethics broadly construed. My answer is to provide a new account of morality, and practical normativity in general, against the backdrop of neopragmatism. My hope is to provide an alternative story which preserves the Kantian insight that practical necessity is driven by rational authority, but which does not presuppose unconditionality to explain the latter's force and inescapability. In short I will attempt to show that ethical principles, when considered in linguistic space, need not be a priori necessary to bind individuals in a genuinely authoritative sense.