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74 results

Page 1 of 4

  • Public Deliberation, Public Reason, and Concern for Truth

  • Paul J. Weithman
  • Journal:
    The Review of Politics / Volume 87 / Issue 3 / Summer 2025
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 April 2025, pp. 346-368
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  • In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” John Rawls implied that a well-ordered society would be a deliberative democracy and said that public reason is essential to it. After his turn to political liberalism, he was chary about claims of truth. In Section 1, I lay out essential features of Rawlsian deliberative democracy. In Section 2, I introduce some prominent commentary on Rawls’s treatment of truth and public reasoning. On these readings—collectively “the non-permissive reading”—Rawls’s treatment of truth has problematic implications for public reasoning and therefore for deliberative democracy. In Section 3, I survey those implications. In Section 4, I argue that the texts which are taken to support the non-permissive reading support a very different reading. In Section 5, I argue that Rawls does not endorse the theses imputed to him by the non-permissive reading and that his view does not have the implications surveyed in Section 3.

  • Avoiding risks behind the veil of ignorance

  • Paul Weithman
  • Journal:
    Economics & Philosophy / Volume 41 / Issue 3 / November 2025
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    13 January 2025, pp. 634-653
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  • Lara Buchak defends a Weight-Ranked Utilitarianism (WRU) that she says avoids the critique of Rawls’s that is sometimes thought fatal: utilitarianism unjustifiably blurs the distinction between persons. Buchak’s defence depends upon (i) a version of Harsanyi’s assumption that parties to a social contract should reason as if they have an equal chance of being anyone and (ii) a hypothesis she explores in a recent article. I argue that her assumption and hypothesis are untenable. WRU fails of the generality to which Buchak aspires because it fails for one of her most important cases: the distributive question posed by Rawls.

  • 16 - Religious Pluralism and Social Unions

  • from Part IV - Pluralism, Democracy, and the Future of Justice as Fairness
  • Edited by Paul Weithman, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    Rawls’s <i>A Theory of Justice</i> at 50
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 277-295

  • Summary

    Rawls’s argument that a well-ordered society would be a social union of social unions is crucial to his larger argument for stability. The former argument depends upon what I call “the security assumption.” I contend that reasonable religious pluralism casts doubt on the assumption and on the argument which appeals to it. Seeing why the dubitability of the security assumption makes the idea of a social union of social unions non-viable, we can come to a better understanding of the development of Rawls’s thought. Equally if not more important is the relevance of the security assumption for contemporary politics. That assumption identifies a condition that must be satisfied if members of a liberal democracy are to find their collective activity as citizens inherently valuable. Failure to satisfy that condition suggests why some members of liberal democracies as we know them deny the inherent value of relations with their fellow citizens.

Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50
  • Edited by Paul Weithman
  • Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • In 1971 John Rawls's A Theory of Justice transformed twentieth-century political philosophy, and it ranks among the most influential works in the history of the subject. This volume of new essays marks the 50th anniversary of its publication with a multi-faceted exploration of Rawls's most important book. A team of distinguished contributors reflects on Rawls's achievement in essays on his relationship to modern political philosophy and 20th-century economic theory, on his Kantianism, on his transition to political liberalism, on his account of public reason and contemporary challenges to it, on his theory's implications for problems of racial justice, on democracy and its fragility, and on Rawls's enduring legacy. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars working in moral and political philosophy, political theory, legal theory, and religious ethics.

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