William A. Edmundson

The “property question” is the constitutional question of whether a society’s basic resources are to be publicly or privately owned—that is, whether these basic resources are to be available to private owners, perhaps subject to tax and regulation, or are instead to be retained in joint public ownership and managed by democratic processes. James Madison’s approach represents a case in which prior holdings are taken for granted, and the property question itself is kept off of the political agenda. By contrast, John Rawls’s approach abstracts from any actual pattern of holdings, while putting the property question on the political agenda, but at a particular place. This paper compares and contrasts the two approaches. Two unpublished lectures by Rawls—one of them directed at Madison—are included as an appendix.

"This accessible introduction to the philosophy and practicality of market socialism is a must-read for anyone interested in building a more just and more free society." Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project "In this splendid new book, William Edmundson develops the social contract tradition to show how only a socialist society enables individuals to flourish. He makes such a clear and compelling case for socialism that no liberal who is truly committed to individual freedom, equality, and reciprocity can possibly resist." Lea Ypi, London School of Economics

This year is the centenary of the birth of philosopher John Rawls and the semi-centenary of his monumental A Theory of Justice. This essay explores the differences between political opposition and political resistance as reflected in his work. Rawls is remembered for the careful conditions he imposed in the Vietnam-War era upon justifiable civil disobedience in “nearly just” societies. It is less well known that he came to regard the United States as a fundamentally unjust society. The nation has shown itself not merely unserious about political equality—the cornerstone of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness—but hostile to it. The Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence sanctifies spending as speech and denies Congress the power to try to level the electoral playing field. In the Supreme Court’s Constitution, substantive political equality is of no value. The upshot is that civil disobedience, conceived as an appeal to a just constitution, is no longer possible in the United States. Political resistance may be permissible, however, within the bounds of right, “in such ways as promise some success.” This essay ekes out Rawls’s suggestive remarks about the justification of political resistance and attempts to extend them to current conditions.

The equal political liberties are among the basic first-principle liberties in John Rawls’s theory of Justice as fairness. Rawls insists, further, that the “fair value” of the political liberties must be guaranteed. Disavowing an interest in fair value is what disqualifies welfare-state capitalism as a possible realizer of Justice as fairness. Yet Rawls never gives a perspicuous statement of the reasoning in the original position for the fair-value guarantee. This article gathers up two distinct strands of Rawls’s argument, and presents it in a straightforward sequence. Justice as fairness is contrasted to a competitor political conception of justice that is just like it but without the fair-value guarantee. A schema of the two-strand argument is presented in the Appendix.

The state’s very existence seems morally problematic: there may be a justification, but there had better be. A vivid way of putting this is to say that gunmen, and the state as “gunman writ large,” threaten first force, while individuals who make conspicuous their readiness to defend what is theirs threaten not first but second force. But the “No First Force” maxim–originally Kant’s–must be relaxed if any institution of private property is to get off the ground. Property begins not in nature but in acts of appropriation, which in turn involve the use and threatened use of force against persons who might carry off the thing that has become property. Is it possible to relax the stricture against first force in a way that allows appropriation and transfer while maintaining a moral presumption against compulsory redistributive measures like those characteristic of modern welfare states? I argue that it is not.

ABSTRACT: Debates about global distributive justice focus on the gulf between the wealthy North and the impoverished South, rather than on issues arising between liberal democracies. A review of John Rawls’s approach to international justice discloses a step Rawls skipped in his extension of his original-position procedure. The skipped step is where a need for the distributional autonomy of sovereign liberal states reveals itself. Neoliberalism denies the possibility and the desirability of distributional autonomy. A complete Rawlsian account of global justice shows the necessity and possibility of a charter between liberal states, assuring each a proper minimum degree of distributional autonomy.

This book is the first detailed reconstruction of the late work of John Rawls, who was perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Rawls's 1971 treatise, A Theory of Justice, stimulated an outpouring of commentary on 'justice-as-fairness,' his conception of justice for an ideal, self-contained, modern political society. Most of that commentary took Rawls to be defending welfare-state capitalism as found in Western Europe and the United States. Far less attention has been given to Rawls's 2001 book, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. In the Restatement, Rawls not only substantially reformulates the 'original position' argument for the two principles of justice-as-fairness but also repudiates capitalist regimes as possible embodiments. Edmundson further develops Rawls's non-ideal theory, which guides us when we find ourselves in a society that falls well short of justice.

_ Source: _Page Count 19 Collectivities can have obligations beyond the aggregate of pre-existing obligations of their members. Certain such collective obligations _distribute_, i.e., become members’ obligations to do their fair share. In _incremental good_ cases, i.e., those in which a member’s fair share would go part way toward fulfilling the collectivity’s obligation, each member has an unconditional obligation to contribute.States are involuntary collectivities that bear moral obligations. Certain states, _democratic legal states_, are collectivities whose obligations can distribute. Many existing states are democratic legal states, but none satisfies more rigorous requirements of distributive justice. There, citizens who hold assets, in excess of what is just, bear a distributed duty to dedicate that excess toward correcting the injustice. It is an incremental good case not conditioned on the conformity of others who are also wealthier than justice allows, nor on the diligence of the state in meeting its obligations.

Rights come in various types - human, moral, civil, political and legal - and claims about who has a right, and to what, are often contested. What are rights? Are they timeless and universal, or merely conventional? How are they related to other morally significant values, such as well-being, autonomy, and community? Can animals have rights? Or fetuses? Do we have a right to do as we please so long as we do not harm others? This is the only accessible and readable introduction to the history, logic, moral implications, and political tendencies of the idea of rights. It is organized chronologically and discusses important events, such as the French Revolution. As an undergraduate text it is well-suited to introductions to political philosophy, moral philosophy, and ethics. It could also be used in courses on political theory in departments of political science and government, and in courses on legal theory in law schools.

The central problem of moral philosophy is to reconcile the universality of morals with the fact that morality arises from and engages our individual motives. Relativism is the view that universalism must be given up because this reconciliation is impossible. Typical strategies toward solving the central problem attempt to base morality on a motivating psychological universal viz. reason, sympathy or self-interest. These strategies assume that the universality of moral rules must be founded upon some antecedent universal element inherent in the psychology of persons subject to them. The implausibility of this assumption is exposed via analogy between morals and game-playing. The games analogy vividly illustrates the relativist's position, but morality is found to resemble not games, plural, but a particular hypothetical game whose description yields several vital distinctions. Insufficiencies of the view that individual commitment creates obligations are corrected by Hume's convention theory of morals. Although convention theories appear to incline toward relativism, attention to the distinctive character of morality reveals the presence of a result-orientated, universalizing rule-regarding rule among the necessary conditions of the existence of moral obligations. The tendency of this rule is to bring about the coalescence of distinct moral conventions, since it requires that the differences in their respective rules of obligation be susceptible of an explanation consistent with the content of each. A conventionalistic analysis of moral obligation incorporating this distinctive rule is stated. An effort is made to reconcile this analysis with the philosophical view known as internalism, which consists of an "entailment" thesis and a stronger, "syntactic" thesis. The entailment thesis is found to have plausible interpretations, none of which undermine the universalism upheld by the analysis. The syntactic thesis is criticized as involving an unconvincing semantics of the moral "ought". The problem of ultimate moral disagreement is examined as a source of support for relativism. On a conventionalistic analysis of obligation, ultimate disagreement upon a subject may be taken to indicate that the conventional underpinning presupposed by both contradictory views is insufficient to support either. Where this indication is given, no "relativizing" move is needed to relieve the logical tension between contradictories

The “property question” is the constitutional question whether a society’s basic resources are to be publicly or privately owned; that is, whether these basic resources are to be available to private owners, perhaps subject to tax and regulation, or whether instead they are to be retained in joint public ownership, and managed by democratic processes. James Madison’s approach represents a case in which prior holdings are taken for granted, and the property question itself is kept off of the political agenda. By contrast, John Rawls approach abstracts from any actual pattern of holdings, while putting the property question on the political agenda, but at a particular place. This paper compares and contrasts the two approaches.

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.

Pluralism is an appealing and now orthodox view of the sources of value. But pluralism has led to well-known difficulties for social-choice theory. Moreover, as Susan Hurley has argued, the difficulties of pluralism go even deeper. In 1954, Kenneth May suggested an intrapersonal analogue to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. In brief, May showed that an individual's response to a plurality of values will, given certain additional assumptions, lead to intransitive preference orderings. (Daniel Kahneman and others have shown that intransitivity is an empirical feature of preferences.) Hurley challenged May's additional assumptions as implausibly strong; but her work did not exclude the possibility that values may disobey the canon of rationality that insists on transitivity. John Broome has recently extended these canons to the "betterness" relation. This chapter argues that there is no good reason to be confident that values, understood as real features of the world, behave consistently with those canons.

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.