Abstract
Threats to the stability of liberal democracies are of obvious contemporary import. Concern with stability runs through John Rawls’s work. The stability that concerned him was that of fundamental terms of cooperation. Rawls long believed that the terms which would be stable were his two principles, but he eventually conceded that even a well-ordered society was more likely to be characterized by “justice pluralism” than by consensus on his own conception of justice. Contemporary liberal democracies, too, are divided about what justice demands. I believe Rawls’s treatment of stability can help us understand the conditions under which fundamental terms of cooperation can be stable under non-ideal conditions such as ours. But because Rawls never worked through the consequences of his concession, his view needs to be developed before we can draw on it.
Rawls’s treatment makes use of elementary game theory. Thus in Theory of Justice he said -- and in Political Liberalism he implied -- that stability would result from citizens with a sense of justice “playing” strategies which combined for what was, in effect, a Nash equilibrium. I argue that his concession requires a new conception of stability and implies that Rawls cannot appeal to a Nash equilibrium to show how stability would be maintained. His concession therefore forces open a troubling gap in his analysis. I fill that gap by proposing a weaker equilibrium concept that serves Rawlsian purposes. I conclude with what this project suggests for challenges facing the fragile liberal democracies of our own time.
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Notes
I am grateful to Zach Barnett, Samuel Freeman, Alex Schaefer and Benjamin Straumann, and to audiences at the Indiana Philosophical Association, the Catholic University of Portugal and the conference on “Justice in the City” at the London School of Economics, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
One scholar has called this kind of threat “executive aggrandizement”; see Bermeo, (2016, 10–13).
For discussion of these writings, see Freeman (2023).
More precisely “hereafter referred to as, but not cited as, ‘TJ’ and ‘PL’”, since I will continue to cite the works by years of publication.
For example, at 1999a, 154, Rawls refers to more and less stable conceptions of justice, at p. 350 he speaks of a well-ordered society as stable, and at p. 398 he predicates ‘stable’ of “a well-ordered society’s conception of justice.“
In TJ, the relevant conception of freedom is autonomy; in PL it is political autonomy. I shall ignore those complications here.
For a superb treatment of Rawls’s transition to political liberalism which draws on unpublished writings he produced during the period of transition, see Scheffler (2023).
Thus in a little-noticed footnote in “Reply to Habermas”, Rawls said that the idea of social union of social unions is “no longer viable as a political ideal once we recognize the fact of reasonable pluralism.“ (Rawls, 1996, 388 note 21).
I imagine that well-ordering by a hybrid is an outcome of political compromise.
Given a metric space (X; d) and a point p∈X, the open ball of radius r around p is Br(p) = {q∈X : d(p,q) < r}.
There is a further complication that I shall ignore here for simplicity’s sake. In his latest writings, Rawls suggested that political liberalism should evince agnosticism about which liberal political conception is most reasonable; see Freeman (2023, 260). He thereby suggested, in effect, that political liberalism should take no position on which conception of justice is at the center of the ball. He thus seemed to suggest that political liberalism should treat reasonability, as it applies to conceptions of justice, to be what he earlier called a “range property”. Interiority, as it applies to points inside a unit circle, is such a property because no point within a unit circle is any more interior to the circle than any other. Similarly, perhaps, no point in justice space that is within the ball of liberal political conceptions is any more reasonable as any other. For the notion of a range property, and its application to the unit circle, see Rawls (1999a, 444).
According to Voorneveld, Kets and Nordel (2005, 480 note 1), “a point-valued solution concept assigns to each game a collection of strategy profiles, i.e., a set of points in the strategy space of the game. A set-valued solution concept assigns to each game a collection of product sets of strategies, i.e., a set of product sets in the strategy space of the game.“
Basu and Weibull (1991). The concept might be called “closed by the common expectation of rational behavior”, but the acronym “C-CERB” is less euphonious than “CURB”. I am very grateful to Professor Basu for bringing his work to my attention and for suggesting that it might bear on a Rawlsian treatment of stability.
I shall suppose that all players have the same strategies open to them because any of them can vote for any conception of justice, though nothing turns on this assumption.
More precisely, CURB sets that satisfy the tightness condition can be shown to exist in those games; see Basu and Weibull (1991, 144).
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Weithman, P. Stability and equilibrium in political liberalism. Philos Stud 181, 23–41 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02075-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02075-6