Online research in philosophy

(In German.) The book addresses Rawls's post-1985 political liberalism. His justification of political liberalism -- as reflected in his arguments from overlapping consensus -- faces the problem that liberal content can be justified as reciprocally acceptable only if the addressees of such a justification already endorse points of view that suitably support liberal ideas. Rawls responds to this legitimacy-theoretical problem by restricting public justification's scope to include reasonable people only, while implicitly defining reasonableness as a substantive liberal virtue. But this virtue-ethical grounding of political liberalism is itself unreasonable. The phenomenon of disharmony of practical reason gives the reasonable reasons to take it that political legitimacy does not obtain if and where moral-political principles are acceptable from their point of view only.

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

As Rawls's thought evolved from his 1958 article ‘Justice as Fairness’ to the 1996 edition of his book Political Liberalism, his response to the problem of political compliance would seem to have undergone a number of changes. This article critically evaluates the development of Rawls's various explicit or implied arguments that serve to justify compliance to just social arrangements, and concludes that the problem of political compliance remains without any cogent solution within the vast corpus of Rawls's work. Key Words: liberalism • philosophical anarchism • political duties • political obligation • Rawls.

This article examines the attempts by John Rawls in the works published after "Political Liberalism" to engage with some of the feminist responses to his work. Rawls goes a long way toward addressing some of the major feminist-liberal concerns. Yet this has the unintended consequence of pushing justice as fairness in the direction of a more comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, form of liberalism. This does not seem to be a problem peculiar to Rawls: rather, any form of liberalism hospitable to feminist concerns must be, at the very least, a partly comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, doctrine.

This essay argues that neutral paternalism (NP) is problematic for antiperfectionist liberal theories. Section 2 raises textual evidence that Rawlsian liberalism does not oppose and may even support NP. In section 3, I cast doubt on whether NP should have a place in political liberalism by defending a partially comprehensive conception of the good I call “moral capacity at each moment,” or MCEM, that is inconsistent with NP. I then explain why MCEM is a reasonable conception on Rawls's account of reasonableness. In section 4, I handle concerns that showing NP fails the test of Rawlsian public justification is a nonstarter since NP does not threaten any of our basic liberties. I sketch an argument that, if this is so, the burden is on political liberalism to defend its particular account of basic liberties, since MCEM is reasonable on Rawlsian grounds. More precisely, MCEM is a conception that challenges the way Rawls characterizes basic liberties; that is, his list of basic liberties should be more inclusive by political liberalism's own structural commitments, including Rawls's “liberal principle of legitimacy.” On this revised account, political liberalism can mount a strong opposition to hard legal paternalism.

The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed by the later Rawls. I show that he cannot offer us good grounds for the rational hope that citizens will assign political values priority over non-political values in cases of conflict about political matters. I also suggest an alternative approach to justification in political philosophy (that is, a weak realist, Williams-inspired account) that better respects the later Rawls’s concern with non-comprehensiveness and pluralism than either his own view or more comprehensive approaches. Thus, if we take reasonable pluralism seriously, then we should adopt what Shklar aptly called ‘liberalism of fear’.

Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism portrays liberalism as a supple political ideology, one which moves constantly between the horns of several connected dilemmas. In particular, liberalism cannot decide whether it is based on substantive political values or is neutral or substanceless. John Rawls's 'political liberalism' is argued to exemplify-and to fall prey to-Schmitt's critique. Rawls tries to find a shallow justification for liberalism, one which claims no truth for itself and is thus neutral between many different ideologies. But his justification, as he is forced to admit, presupposes the substantive commitments he wants to avoid. Hence, liberalism has to move beyond Rawls and accept its place within democracy. Key Words: Carl Schmitt • democracy • John Rawls • liberalism • neutrality.

In a footnote to the first edition of Political Liberalism, John Rawls introduced an example of how public reason could deal with controversial issues. He intended this example to show that his system of political liberalism could deal with such problems by considering only political values, without the introduction of comprehensive moral doctrines. Unfortunately, Rawls chose “the troubled question of abortion” as the issue that would illustrate this. In the case of abortion, Rawls argued, “the equality of women as equal citizens” overrides both “the ordered reproduction of political society over time” and also “the due respect for human life”. It seems fair to say that this was not the best choice of example, and also that Rawls did not argue for his example particularly well: a whole subset of the Rawlsian literature concerns this question alone. Rawls went on to clarify his views on abortion and public reason, but he continued to maintain that a society’s policy on abortion could be decided without introducing comprehensive moral doctrines concerning the moral status of the fetus. The three aims of this paper are to argue: (i) that a society cannot legitimately decide on its abortion policy using purely political values; (ii) that Rawls’ stances on abortion in his two major works are incompatible; and (iii) that neither of Rawls’ conceptions of justice could permit abortion.

Abstract Rawls ?s political liberalism abandons the traditional political?theory objective of providing a philosophical account of liberal democracy. However, Rawls also aims for a liberal political order endorsed by citizens on grounds deeper than what he calls a ?modus vivendi? compromise; he contends that a liberal political order based upon a modus vivendi is unstable. The aspiration for a pluralist and ?freestanding? liberalism is at odds with the goal of a liberalism endorsed as something deeper than a modus vivendi compromise among competing comprehensive doctrines. A liberalism that is supported ?for its own sake? rather than as a compromise must necessarily be based on some conception of the good, of the sort that political liberalism eschews.

Three interlocking features appear to underpin Rawls’s justification of political compliance within the context of political liberalism: namely, a specific territory; a specific society; and a specific conception of what it is to be reasonable. When any one feature is subject to critical examination, while presupposing that the other two are acceptable, Rawls’s argument for political compliance may seem persuasive. But when all three features are critically examined together, his justification of political compliance within political liberalism can be seen to lack cogency. Thus, political compliance fails to be justified by a free-standing political liberalism. Key Words: philosophical anarchism • political duties • political liberalism • political obligation • Rawls.