The Rawlsian institutional approach holds that distributive principles apply to socioeconomic institutions rather than transactions within the institutional framework. Critics claim that the approach is baseless. I defend Rawls’s institutionalism by showing that it has a rational basis: Rawls “constructs” a theory of justice from considered judgments, especially ideas found in the political culture and historical conditions of democracy, including the fact of reasonable pluralism, which supports his institutionalism. I use Rawls’s “fact-sensitive constructivism” to interpret his claim that “utilitarianism does (...) not take seriously the distinction between persons.” Rawls’s claim refers to his contrast between impartial spectator reasoning for the classical principle of utility and his original position, which aims to motivate the original position’s use of mutually disinterested parties to an agreement as more accurately reflecting democracy’s fact of reasonable pluralism. Rawls then shows that these original position conditions, meant to reflect separate persons in democracy, justify his egalitarian principles over classical utility. I extend his contrast to act-egalitarianism to show that Rawls’s fact-sensitive constructivism supports his institutionalism. I argue that the original position, which reflects separate persons, only justifies the institutional difference principle and that the natural reasoning for act-egalitarianism does not take seriously the separateness of persons. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen argues that Rawls’s difference principle is incompatible with his endorsement of incentives inequality—higher pay for certain professions is just when that pay benefits everyone. Cohen concludes that Rawls must reject both incentives inequality and ‘institutionalism’—the view that egalitarian principles, including the difference principle, apply exclusively to social institutions. I argue that the premises of Cohen’s ‘internal criticism’ of Rawls require rejecting two important parts of his theory: a ‘subjective circumstance of justice’ and a ‘shared conception of justice’. (...) These are important parts of Rawls’s ‘constructivism’. Constructivism is the view that a conception of justice is the solution to a practical interaction problem and is solved in part by examining the facts of the problem. Thus, an upshot of my arguments is that this Cohen/Rawls dispute reduces to another dispute over ‘constructivism’. (shrink)

I examine the main anticosmopolitan Rawslian argument, the ‘basic structure argument.’ It holds that distributive justice only applies to existing basic structures, there are only state basic structures, so distributive justice only applies among compatriots. Proponents of the argument face three challenges: 1) they must explain what type of basic structure relation makes distributive justice relevant only among compatriots, 2) they must explain why distributive justice (as opposed to allocative or retributive) is the relevant regulative concept for basic structures, and (...) 3) they must put forth a plausible concept of distributive justice. I show that Rawlsians support what I will call the ‘division of labor thesis’ to answer the first two challenges. Briefly, the division of labor thesis holds that distributive justice only becomes relevant where members of a division of labor jointly produce some socioeconomic product. To meet the third challenge, Rawlsians seem to accept what Elizabeth Anderson calls the ‘modern systemic concept of distributive justice’ – the idea that distributive justice organizes entire economic systems with respect to their distributive consequences or the relationships they maintain. I argue that if Rawlsians accept the systemic concept, they should reject the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge argues that John Rawls’s priority of liberty rule is not constraining enough: it permits morally unacceptable restrictions of basic liberties. Because of this, Pogge claims that Rawls fails in his two central ambitions: to construct a moral conception that (1) opposes utilitarianism and (2) matches his judgments in reflective equilibrium. Pogge attributes this error to Rawls’s “purely recipient-oriented theorizing”—assessing a society’s basic structure based on how its citizens fare. I argue that Rawls’s theory does not allow restrictions of (...) liberty that are offensive to moral considerations. I then explain how my arguments against Pogge show that Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium is crucial for assessing a society’s basic structure and how it follows from this that Rawls’s theorizing is not purely recipient-oriented. (shrink)

One of the central problems of personal identity is to determine what we are essentially . In response to this problem, Lynne Rudder Baker espouses a psychological criterion, that is, she claims that persons are essentially psychological. Baker’s theory purports to bypass the problems of other psychological theories such as Dissociative Identity Disorder and the problem of individuating persons synchronically. I argue that the theory’s treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder leads to untenable results, is invalid, and consequently fails to individuate (...) persons. (shrink)

In this article, the important but neglected link between workplace safety-enhancing behavior and ethics is explored. Using data from 237 employees from five manufacturing plants in the Midwest, we investigated how specific local ethical climate types are linked to incidences of injuries and two types of safety-enhancing behaviors: safety compliance and safety participation. It was hypothesized that egoist climates are positively related to injuries and negatively related to safety-enhancing behaviors. In contrast, it is proposed that both benevolent and principled climates (...) have negative relationships with injuries and positive relationships with safety-enhancing behaviors. Results provided support only for our principled climate types while benevolence has the desired negative relationship with injuries. Egoism and benevolence are not related to safety-enhancing behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed. (shrink)

Until the time of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, philosophers generally held economics to be an integral element of moral philosophy. These days, the language of values—moral, aesthetic, and cognitive—dominates philosophic discourse, even though contemporary philosophers rarely hold economics to be integral to moral philosophy. Examining the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the art of Marcel Proust, Edward Andrew provides the first sustained critical analysis of values discourse, an analysis that deconstructs its content and its form.

Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel (...) between Rome's expansionary dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings. (shrink)

An eloquent and passionate examination of the opposition between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The purpose of this investigation is to define the centrality of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008–09 and its following stage—the Great Recession, which are controlled by business religion of the emerging global civilization. When democracy defeated totalitarianism in 1989 with the removal the Berlin Wall, we achieved a New World Order. For a long time nobody could explain its meaning and practicality, since it did not seem possible to decompose the emerging Global Civilization into its pieces; religion, culture and (...) infrastructure. Global culture and global infrastructure could be recognized and somehow defined, but “global religion” was unrecognized. No sacred religions could be accepted as the world’s universal religion! However, these authors assume that our newglobal religion is no longer a sacred one, but secular under the guise and practice of business. The global civilization is characterized and its impact upon the well being of world’s population is assessed. The framework of business religion as the new religion of the Global Civilization is modeled and characterized. The future of business religion is evaluated and the means to develop a better and sustainable alternative is offered. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to contemporary political ethics What is the relationship between politics and morality? May politicians bend moral constraints in the name of political necessity? Is it always wrong for leaders to lie? How much political compromise is too much? In Political Ethics, some of the world’s leading thinkers in politics, philosophy, and related fields offer a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key issues in this rapidly growing area of political theory. In a series of original essays, the contributors (...) examine a range of urgent political problems: lies and deception, compromise and refusal to compromise, the meaning and limits of political integrity, representation and failures of representation, good and bad democratic leadership, the virtues and excesses of partisanship, administrative ethics, political corruption, whistleblowing, legitimate and illegitimate claims of political emergency, and lobbying. What emerges are realistic but demanding ethical standards—and a clear-eyed understanding of the ethical challenges of political life in the twenty-first century. With contributions by Richard Bellamy, Alin Fumurescu, Edward Hall, Suzanne Dovi and Jesse McCain, Eric Beerbohm, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, Joseph Heath, Elizabeth David-Barrett and Mark Philp, Michele Bocchiola and Emanuela Ceva, Nomi Lazar, Phil Parvin, and Andrew Sabl. (shrink)

SUMMARYPocock's Machiavellian Moment is monumental in its erudition, and thus one may be surprised that Pocock virtually ignored Macpherson's Political Theory of Possessive Individualism in his assessment of seventeenth-century political thought, and ignored Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli. Pocock noted that ‘the schools of Marx, Strauss and Voegelin concur’ in holding Locke to be a bourgeois or possessive individualist. Pocock elaborated a paradigm of republicanism as civic humanism as a contrast to liberalism as possessive individualism. Pocock seemed to accept tacitly Macpherson's (...) and Strauss's view that Locke inverted the Aristotelian view of property as a means to political participation, whereby politics became a means to the protection and accumulation of property. Macphersonian scholars have criticised Pocock for misinterpreting the function of property in the Atlantic republican tradition and Straussian scholars have criticised The Machiavellian Moment for its failure to distinguish ancient from modern republics, and for Pocock's failure to appreciate the epochal significance of Machiavelli's call to master fortune or dominate nature through technique. But it is questionable whether or not it is incumbent on an intellectual historian to address present preoccupations about capitalism or global technique. (shrink)

Chandran Kukathas has written a thoughtfully provocative book on perhaps the major issue of our time, namely, mass migration versus the world-wide desire for border controls, which, he argues, unju...

Christos Yannaras wrote The Inhumanity of Right in 1998 in the wake of NATO’s bombing of Serbs “who were defending their ancestral homes from the machinations of Croats and Bosnian Muslims (1992–96...

George Grant’s bleak assessment of the prospects of technological civilization owed a lot to his reading of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul. However, Grant understood technological development within the context of liberal theory and capitalist practice. Grant explained why liberalism is the doctrine most appropriate to the development of productive forces, or the most complete exploitation of natural and human resources. Unlike most North American conservatives, Grant was not a friend of capitalism but of civil servants who restrain capitalist accumulation (...) in the name of the common good or national community. Grant was what Gad Horowitz called a Red Tory and offered a unique perspective of how American technique has closed us off from love and contemplation, leaving us with the one-dimensional problem-solving mentality of the social engineer. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 662-683.

Change happens, sometimes predictably as with demographic patterns, sometimes unpredictably as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly and violently. Cass R. Su...