The Limits of Rawlsian Justice

The Limits of Rawlsian Justice
Author: Roberto Alejandro
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1998
Genre: Law
ISBN:

In A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, Rawls set out to prove four major propositions to justify the politics of welfarism; namely, that the institutions of the modern state are compatible with an idea of justice defined by fairness; that political agreement on such an idea is possible; that justice as fairness avoids the pitfalls of utilitarianism and its concomitant reliance on majoritarian views; and that his view of justice is able to promote stability over the long run. In The Limits of Rawlsian Justice political theorist Roberto Alejandro challenges these assumptions. Whereas other opponents of Rawls have attempted to offer an alternative to his concept of justice as fairness, Alejandro instead examines Rawls from within his own writings, testing Rawls's assumptions on the basis of those assumptions themselves. As a result, Alejandro shows that Rawls's idea of justice as fairness is fraught with inner tensions, is exposed to utilitarian dangers, and is far from being the coherent model Rawls promised.

A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice
Author: John RAWLS
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674042603

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

In the Shadow of Justice

In the Shadow of Justice
Author: Katrina Forrester
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691216754

"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--

Reconstructing Rawls

Reconstructing Rawls
Author: Robert S. Taylor
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2015-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271056711

Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly toward cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. Robert Taylor believes that it is time to redeem A Theory of Justice’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.

Rawls's Egalitarianism

Rawls's Egalitarianism
Author: Alexander Kaufman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108429114

A new analysis of John Rawls's theory of distributive justice, focusing on the ways his ideas have both influenced and been misinterpreted by the current egalitarian literature.

The Law of Peoples

The Law of Peoples
Author: John Rawls
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2001-03-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674266560

This book consists of two parts: “The Law of Peoples,” a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls. “The Law of Peoples” extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. It explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an “outlaw society” and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” explains why the constraints of public reason, a concept first discussed in Political Liberalism (1993), are ones that holders of both religious and non-religious comprehensive views can reasonably endorse. It is Rawls’s most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine—such as that of Kant, or Mill, or Rawls’s own “Justice as Fairness,” presented in A Theory of Justice (1971).

Rawls Explained

Rawls Explained
Author: Paul Voice
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2011
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0812696808

In this context Rawls challenges us to see the world through the lens of fairness. Injustice can only be effectively challenged if we can articulate, to ourselves and to others, both why a situation is unjust and how we might move towards justice. Political philosophy at its best offers both an answer to the why of injustice and the how of political and economic change. --

John Rawls

John Rawls
Author: Thomas Pogge
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0195136365

This is a short, accessible introduction to John Rawls' thought and gives a thorough and concise presentation of the main outlines of Rawls' theory as well as drawing links between Rawls' enterprise and other important positions in moral and political philosophy.

John Rawls: Reticent Socialist

John Rawls: Reticent Socialist
Author: William A. Edmundson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2017-07-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107173191

The first detailed reconstruction of the late work of John Rawls, further developing his ideas of 'justice-as-fairness'.