Paul C. Fryfogle

Cosmopolitans like Gillian Brock, Charles Beitz, and Thomas Pogge argue that the principles of justice selected and arranged in lexical priority in Rawls’ first original position would—and should for the same reasons as in the first—also be selected in Rawls’ second original position. After all, the argument goes, what reasons other than morally arbitrary ones do we have for selecting a second set of principles? A different, though undoubtedly related, point of contention is the cosmopolitan charge that Rawls fails to consider the unfavorable conditions that owe themselves to global factors. Perhaps there was a time when interconnectedness and interdependency between states was not a factor, but in the current global order, this is certainly not the case. While this paper will address other related cosmopolitan concerns mentioned in Brock’s work, it is these two points that are perhaps the two biggest threats to the Rawlsian project and, as such, it is these two points that will be the primary focus of this paper.

Cosmopolitans like Gillian Brock, Charles Beitz, and Thomas Pogge argue that the principles of justice selected and arranged in lexical priority in Rawls’ first original position would—and should for the same reasons as in the first—also be selected in Rawls’ second original position. After all, the argument goes, what reasons other than morally arbitrary ones do we have for selecting a second set of principles? A different, though undoubtedly related, point of contention is the cosmopolitan charge that Rawls fails to consider the unfavorable conditions that owe themselves to global factors. Perhaps there was a time when interconnectedness and interdependency between states was not a factor, but in the current global order, this is certainly not the case. While this paper will address other related cosmopolitan concerns mentioned in Brock’s work, it is these two points that are perhaps the two biggest threats to the Rawlsian project and, as such, it is these two points that will be the primary focus of this paper.

John Rawls’s move from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism was motivated by his dissatisfaction with the account of stability offered in part III of Theory. Even members of Rawls’s well-ordered society need the assurance that, should they choose to maintain their sense of justice, others will do the same—members prefer to cooperate, but only if they are reasonably sure of others’ cooperation. This is the mutual assurance problem for stability. In recent for years, a growing number of theorist have argued that Rawls’s assurance mechanism, in the form of public reason, fails in societies marked by pervasive disagreement. These theorists have proposed convergence accounts as offering better solutions to the assurance problem. This thesis argues that the assurance convergence offers cannot be maintained because of the deep pluralism with which convergence theorists are rightly concerned.