David A. Reidy

Rawls on International Justice: A Defense

Rawls’s The Law of Peoples has not been well received. The first task of this essay is to draw (what the author regards as) Rawls’s position out of his own text where it is imperfectly and incompletely expressed. Rawls’s view, once fully and clearly presented, is less vulnerable to common criticisms than it is often taken to be. The second task of this essay is to go beyond Rawls’s text to develop some supplementary lines of argument, still Rawlsian in spirit, to deflect key criticisms made by Rawls’s critics. The overall defense given here of Rawls’s position draws on a deep theme running throughout all of Rawls’s work in political philosophy, namely, that the task of political philosophy is to mark the moral limits given by and through a commonhuman reason, itself socially and historically achieved, within which human nature must develop (and reveal itself over time) if it is to be an expression or manifestation of human freedom.

Rawls's Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough

What sorts of reasons are i) required and ii) morally acceptable when citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy undertake to resolve pressing political issues? This paper presents and then critically examines John Rawlss answer to this question: his so called wide-view of public reason. Rawlss view requires that the content of liberal public reason prove rich enough to yield a reasoned and determinate resolution for most if not all fundamental political issues. I argue that the content of liberal public reason will prove inadequate in this regard far more often than Rawls suspects.

Coercion and the State

I. What is Coercion? Scott Anderson: Coercion as Enforcement. Burton Leiser: On Coercion. Joan McGregor McGregor: Undue Influence as Coercion. II. Coercion and the Liberal Democratic State. Alistair MacLeod: Coercion, Justice and Democracy. Walter Riker: Can State Coercion Be Legitimate? Christine Sistare: John Brown and Coercion Against the State. III. Coercion and Secondary or Power-Conferring Laws. Emily Gill: Coercion, Religious Neutrality, and the Case of Same-Sex Marriage. Ken Henley: The Cheshire Cat: Gay Marriage, Religion and Coercion by Exclusion. IV. Coercion and National Security. Don Scheid: A Case for Indefinite Detention of Key Terrorist Suspects. Wade Robison: The Great Right: Habeus Corpus. V. Coercion and the International Order. Steven Lee: Coercion Abroad for Justice and Democracy. Carol Gould: Transnational Power, Coercion and Democracy. Monica Hlavac: A Developmental Approach to Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions. Bruce Landesman: Global Economic Justice, Partiality and Coercion. Helga Varden: International Political Obligations: The need for and structure of a legitimate cosmopolitan authority.

The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon

part of justification) Fair equality of opportunity Fairness, Principle of Faith Family Feminism Formal justice The four-stage sequence Freedom Freedom of speech Freeman, Samuel Fundamental ideas (in justice as fairness) G.

False pleasures and plato's Philebus

In the Republic and the Philebus, Plato allows that some pleasures have a place in a good life, at least for people, if not for gods. He maintains, however, that some pleasures have no place in a good human life. They have neither intrinsic nor instrumental value. This means that the value or goodness of the pleasures which do have a place in a good life must consist of something more, or other than, their pleasantness, for the pleasures which have no place in a good human life share the property of pleasantness. In Book IX of the Republic, Plato attempts to distinguish good pleasures from bad. Apparently dissatisfied with this effort, Plato undertakes in the Philebus to restate his overall moral theory and its distinction between good and bad pleasures. In the Philebus, Plato argues that some pleasures are false, and that false pleasures have no place in a good life. Notwithstanding significant scholarly attention, Plato’s Philebus continues to generate significant interpretive and analytic dissensus at three levels. The first concerns the extent to which it provides a coherent and unified general account of pleasure. 1 The second concerns the extent to which it provides a coherent, unified, and normatively significant account of false pleasures. 2 The third concerns the extent to which its account of false pleasures coheres with its general account of pleasure, and with the account of true pleasures given in Book IX of the Republic. I will make an initial case for the coherence, unity, and normative significance of the account of false pleasures given in the Philebus. I will also suggest a reading of the Philebus which minimizes conflict between its general account of pleasure and its more specific account of false pleasures, while preserving a high degree of continuity between the Philebus and the Republic, especially Book IX.

A Right to Health Care? Participatory Politics, Progressive Policy and the Price of Loose Language

In this paper I assess the claim that there is a moral human right to health care roughly as set out by Article 12 of the ICESCR. After developing a conception of moral human rights as necessary conditions to legal human rights (by treaty or custom) with prima facie moral force, I argue that while there is a moral human right to health care it is far more modest than that set out by Article 12. I argue also that the human right to health care is thus of limited value in the context of health care reform efforts and that this ought to be accepted by those advocating health care reform, which is for the most part best pursued through a participatory, progressive politics of the common good.

Basic structure of society

Rawls maintains that the basic structure of society is the irst subject of justice. A society is a more or less independent, closed and self-suficient, ongoing system of cooperation between persons within which it is ordinarily possible for a person to live out a complete life. A society’s basic structure is the network or system of institutions, taken as a whole and in dynamic relation to one another, that forms the institutional background within which individuals and associations interact with one another. It includes political and legal structures, economic systems, civil society, the family, and so on. It is the total institutional structure of a society as an ongoing cooperative venture carried out by a particular people. A conception of justice for the basic structure of society is a conception of social justice. Social justice concerns justice in the production and distribution of the goods for the sake of which a people cooperates within and through the basic structure of its society. Rawls distinguishes social justice from local or transactional justice (a conception of justice for a particular kind of institution or transaction within a society), on the one hand, and international justice (a conception of justice for the relations between societies), on the other. He begins, but does not end, his inquiry into justice with an inquiry into social justice. Rawls’s two principles specify a conception of social justice, “justice as fairness.”

RUSHING TO REVOLUTION? A SECOND LOOK AT GLOBALIZATION AND JUSTICE

In Globalization and Justice, Kai Nielsen brings his distinctive and passionate voice and considerable philosophical abilities to one of the pressing issues of our time: Is justice possible in our increasingly globalized world? Nielsen argues that it is, though the demands of justice are great, the challenges substantial, and the odds very long. Without a clear philosophical understanding of justice and a firm and focused political will, Nielsen maintains, we are likely to have globalization without justice. This is surely correct.

Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy

Book Information Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. By Eamonn Callan. Oxford University Press. New York. 1997. Pp. viii + 262. Hardback, £25.00.