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Notes
See Cohen (1989, p. 734, n. 23).
The phrase ‘stably just’ is Cohen’s; see Cohen (1989, p. 744).
The phrase ‘intrinsically stable’ occurs at Rawls (1999a, p. 106).
Another way to describe Rawls’s accomplishment would be to say that he has (1) designed a contract situation in which intuitively plausible distributive principles would be agreed to and (2) shown that the agreement reached in that situation would be self-enforcing. I take this accomplishment to be significant because the problem of designing self-enforcing agreements which implement socially optimal outcomes in important cases is a decidedly non-trivial problem. I consider this way of characterizing Rawls’s accomplishment in Weithman (2015).
For a rigorous and imaginative argument for the possibility of the former, see Kavka (1983).
See also Rawls (1999a, p. 106).
Rawls says of Kant ‘In his moral philosophy, Kant seeks self-knowledge’ (Rawls 2000, p. 148). I believe he would say the same of himself.
See Rawls (2000, pp. 319–320) where Rawls says that Kant thought history aroused ‘loathing for our species.’
See, for example, Niebuhr (1986, pp. 123–141). Though Niebuhr did not, of course, know Rawls’s work, he is quite critical of the overly optimistic view of humanity that he thinks Enlightenment liberalism assumes.
According to data compiled by the UN, Sweden has the lowest Gini coefficient of income, and hence the least income inequality, among the advanced democracies (https://data.undp.org/dataset/Income-Gini-coefficient/36ku-rvrj). This fact, when conjoined with Sweden’s high level of human development, might suggest that it satisfies or comes close to satisfying the difference principle. But even if it does, Sweden would seem to need ‘wholesale change’ to satisfy the demands of fair equality of opportunity as measured by social mobility; see Clark (2014, pp. 19–44).
For example, see Gaus (2015).
For a vivid statement of how the comparison works, see (Laden 1991, pp. 189–222, p. 212).
Of course, one might disagree with Rawls and argue that it is inherent stability which is irrelevant to the choice of principles, either because one thinks that stability of any kind is irrelevant to the demands of justice (as Cohen 2008 argues) or because one thinks (as Professor Klosko seems to) that some other kind of stability is relevant instead. But those are arguments that would need to be made.
See, for example, Gilley (2006, p. 499).
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Weithman, P. Reply to Professor Klosko. Res Publica 21, 251–264 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9288-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9288-8