John Rawls John Rawls Debating the Major Questions Edited by JON MANDLE AND SARAH ROBERTS- CADY 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data Names: Mandle, Jon, 1966– editor. | Roberts-Cady, Sarah, editor. Title: John Rawls : debating the major questions / edited by Jon Mandle and Sarah Roberts-Cady. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019054113 (print) | LCCN 2019054114 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190859213 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190859206 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190859244 (epub) | ISBN 9780190859220 (online) Subjects: LCSH: Rawls, John, 1921–2002. | Political science—Philosophy. | Social contract. | Justice. | Equality. | Philosophers—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC JC251 .R32 A25 2020 (print) | LCC JC251. R32 (ebook) | DDC 320 .01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054113 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054114 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America Acknowledgments Sarah Roberts- Cady is grateful to her colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at Fort Lewis College, Justin McBrayer and Dugald Owen, for their guidance, feedback, and encouragement throughout this project. It was Justin’s great sug- gestion to structure this book as a dialogue between philosophers with different views. Both Justin and Dugald read multiple drafts of the book proposal and the chapter on animals, offering thoughtful and challenging feedback that improved the work. Sarah is also thankful to her husband, Tony, and her children, Elsie, Adelaide, Irie, and Brooklyn, for their support and patience all those weekends when she missed family bike rides and didn’t fold the laundry because she was working on this book. Jon Mandle thanks his colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany, and especially Kristen Hessler, for creating such a posi- tive and supportive philosophical home. He also thanks David Reidy for sharing years of conversation and reflection about Rawls’s work. And he is grateful for the loving care of his family, Karen Schupack and Anna Schupack, who contrib- uted the cover portrait of Rawls. Contributors Matthew Adams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University. He specializes in political philosophy with a focus on non- ideal theory and topics at the intersection of justice and applied ethics. His work has been published in journals such as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and The Monist. He is the editor of Methods in Bioethics: The Way We Reason Now (Oxford, 2017). Amy R. Baehr is Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra University, where she teaches political philosophy, philosophy of law, and women’s studies. Her work on feminism and liber- alism has appeared in journals including Law and Philosophy, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and Hypatia; and in anthologies including The Philosophy of Rawls: A Collection of Essays (Garland, 1999), Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls (Penn State, 2013) and The Original Position (Cambridge, 2016). She is editor of Varieties of Feminist Liberalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) and author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on liberal feminism. She is currently working on an edited volume, Caring for Liberalism: Dependency and Political Theory, with Asha Bhandary (Routledge). Michael Blake is a Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance at the University of Washington, where he is jointly appointed to the Department of Philosophy and to the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. He is the author of three books: Justice and Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2013); Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Prevent Emigration? with Gillian Brock (Oxford, 2015); and Justice, Migration, and Mercy (Oxford, 2020). His current research focuses on the ethics of migration policy, and the liberal rights of the dead. James Boettcher is a Professor of Philosophy at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. His research is focused on public reason. His work has been published in Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and Public Affairs Quarterly. Gillian Brock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published widely on political and social philosophy, including more than two hundred peer- reviewed publications. Her books include Justice for People on the Move (Cambridge, 2020), Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford, 2009), Cosmopolitanism versus Non- cosmopolitanism (Oxford, 2013), Debating Brain Drain, with Michael Blake (Oxford, 2015), and Global Health and Global Health Ethics, with Solomon Benatar (Cambridge, 2011). M. Victoria Costa is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at William and Mary. She has numerous peer-r eviewed publications on social and political philosophy, particularly on xii Contributors John Rawls’s liberalism and Philip Pettit’s neorepublicanism. Her papers have appeared in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, Hypatia, the Journal of Social Philosophy, and Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, among others. She is the author of Rawls, Citizenship and Education (Routledge, 2011). Colin Farrelly is Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. His books include Justice, Democracy and Reasonable Agreement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Virtue Jurisprudence, coedited with Lawrence Solum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Biologically Modified Justice (Cambridge, 2016), and Genetic Ethics: An Introduction (Polity, 2018). Tony Fitzpatrick is a Reader in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. His recent books include International Handbook on Social Policy and the Environment (Edward Elgar, 2014), Climate Change and Poverty (Policy Press, 2014), A Green History of the Welfare State (Routledge, 2017), and How to Live Well: Epicurus as a Guide to Contemporary Social Reform (Edward Elgar, 2018). Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe- University in Frankfurt. He specializes in the foundations of morality and the basic concepts of norma- tive political theory. In 2012, he was awarded the Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation. His books include Contexts of Justice (University of California Press, 2002), Toleration in Conflict (Cambridge, 2013), The Right to Justification (Columbia, 2012), Justification and Critique (Polity, 2014), and Normativity and Power (Oxford, 2017). Christie Hartley is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. She has published articles on political philosophy and feminist theory in Social Theory and Practice, Law and Philosophy, Philosophy Compass, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, the Journal of Social Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies. With Lori Watson, she is the author of Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism (Oxford, 2018). Eva Feder Kittay is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She has published widely in feminist philosophy, political theory, and disability studies. Her books include Learning From My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds (Oxford 2019), Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (Routledge, 2009, Revised 2nd Edition 2019), Cognitive Disability and the Challenge to Moral Philosophy (Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (Blackwell, 2007), and Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Kasper Lippert- Rasmussen is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark and a Professor II in the Department of Philosophy at UiT— The Arctic University of Norway. He has published extensively on issues of ethics and justice. Recent books include Luck Egalitarianism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Relational Egalitarianism (Cambridge, 2018), and Making Sense of Affirmative Action (Oxford, 2018). Presently, he is working on a book manuscript on being in a position to blame. Contributors xiii Christopher Lowry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include political philosophical method- ology, justice and disability, and the intersection of egalitarianism and bioethics. His work has been featured in the Journal of Social Philosophy and in the collection From Disability Theory to Practice, edited by Christopher A. Riddle (Lexington Books, 2018). Jon Mandle is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Albany. His scholarly work focuses on political philosophy and ethics, with a special emphasis on John Rawls. He is the coed- itor of The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon, with David Reidy (Cambridge, 2015), and A Companion to Rawls, with David Reidy (Blackwell, 2014). He is also the author of three monographs: Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice”: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2009), Global Justice (Polity Press, 2006), and What’s Left of Liberalism? An Interpretation and Defense of Justice as Fairness (Lexington Books, 2000). Rekha Nath is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama. Her re- search in ethics and political philosophy has been published in journals such as Bioethics, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, The Monist, and Social Theory and Practice. She is currently working on a book on the injustice of weight stigma. Jeppe von Platz is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Richmond. He is the winner of the American Philosophical Association Fred Berger Memorial Prize 2008, which he shares with David Reidy. His research on political philosophy can be found in the book Theories of Distributive Justice: Who Gets What and Why? (Routledge, 2020) and in articles published by Ethics, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, the Journal of Value Inquiry, Public Affairs Quarterly, and the Journal of Social Philosophy. David A. Reidy is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee–K noxville. He works in political and legal philosophy with a special focus on John Rawls. In addi- tion to publishing many articles, he coedited A Companion to Rawls, with Jon Mandle (Blackwell, 2014), The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon, with Jon Mandle (Cambridge, 2015), Rawls (Ashgate, 2008), and Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? with Rex Martin (Wiley- Blackwell, 2006). Sarah Roberts- Cady is a Professor of Philosophy at Fort Lewis College. Her work on ethics and political philosophy has been published in journals such as the Journal of Social Philosophy; Ethics, Policy & Environment; International Journal of Applied Philosophy; and Politics and the Life Sciences. Patrick Taylor Smith is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Twente, where he focuses on global and intergenerational justice as they relate to technology and the environment. His work has been published in The Monist, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Ethics, Policy, and the Environment, Philosophy and Public Issues, Critical Review of International and Social Philosophy, and Transnational Legal Theory. Alan Thomas is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of York in the UK. He has published extensively in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. His xiv Contributors books include Value and Context (Oxford, 2006), Thomas Nagel (Acumen Press and McGill/ Queen’s University Press, 2009/ 2015), Bernard Williams (as editor and contrib- utor) (Cambridge, 2007), and Republic of Equals: Pre- distribution and Property- Owning Democracy (Oxford, 2017). He is currently completing a book titled Ethics in the First Person. Lori Watson is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, and affiliate faculty in the School of Law. She has recently published two books with Oxford University Press, Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism, with Christie Hartley (2018), and Debating Pornography, with Andrew Altman (2019). Her third book, Debating Sex Work, with Jessica Flannigan, is forthcoming. She has also published numerous articles on topics in political philosophy and feminism. An Introduction to Rawls on Justice Jon Mandle and Sarah Roberts- Cady For almost fifty years, the work of John Rawls (1921–2 002) has played a central and guiding role in the development of Anglo-A merican political philosophy. This is certainly not to say that his views have been uncritically accepted. On the contrary, an enormous literature has been generated criticizing and explaining where Rawls goes wrong. But each of Rawls’s three major books, A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971 (revised edition 1999), Political Liberalism, first published in 1993 (expanded edition 2005), and The Law of Peoples, first published in 1999, set the agenda for many other philosophers’ major research projects.1 In this introduction, we provide only the barest overview of the key ideas of his first two majors volumes, with discussions of The Law of Peoples found in the introductions to Parts IX and X. Rawls’s aim in his first major book, A Theory of Justice, is to identify prin- ciples of justice for guiding the basic terms of cooperation within a society. In particular, he wants to offer an alternative to utilitarianism, which he argues cannot “provide a satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of free and equal persons.”2 Rawls was immensely successful in establishing “justice as fair- ness” as at least a credible alternative to utilitarianism. In addition to defending nonutilitarian principles for evaluating social justice, he also developed a dis- tinctive method of justifying them, an account of moral psychology and devel- opment, and much else. But there were important limitations and simplifying assumptions that Rawls explicitly noted. For example, he was narrow in his focus on principles of justice for evaluating the “basic structure of society”— the system formed by a society’s basic social institutions—r ather than other possible objects of evaluation, such as the justice of particular laws and policies. And he put aside (until The Law of Peoples) questions about the justice of relations among different 1 His other books, which we will here treat largely as supplemental, are Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Harvard University Press, 1999); Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Harvard University Press, 2007); Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Harvard University Press, 2007); his undergraduate thesis, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Thomas Nagel (Harvard University Press, 2009); and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Harvard University Press, 2001). 2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Harvard University Press 1999), xii. Jon Mandle and Sarah Roberts-Cady, An Introduction to Rawls on Justice In: John Rawls. Edited by: Jon Mandle and Sarah Roberts-Cady, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190859213.003.0001.