DOCSLIB.ORG

Is Justice As Fairness a Realistic Utopia? a Critical Examination of Rawls's Idea of Overlapping Consensus

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Is Justice As Fairness a Realistic Utopia? a Critical Examination of Rawls's Idea of Overlapping Consensus _________________________________________________________________________Swansea University E-Theses Is justice as fairness a realistic utopia? A critical examination of Rawls's idea of overlapping consensus. Felton, Maria Paz C How to cite: _________________________________________________________________________ Felton, Maria Paz C (2006) Is justice as fairness a realistic utopia? A critical examination of Rawls's idea of overlapping consensus.. thesis, Swansea University. http://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42460 Use policy: _________________________________________________________________________ This item is brought to you by Swansea University. Any person downloading material is agreeing to abide by the terms of the repository licence: copies of full text items may be used or reproduced in any format or medium, without prior permission for personal research or study, educational or non-commercial purposes only. The copyright for any work remains with the original author unless otherwise specified. The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder. Permission for multiple reproductions should be obtained from the original author. Authors are personally responsible for adhering to copyright and publisher restrictions when uploading content to the repository. Please link to the metadata record in the Swansea University repository, Cronfa (link given in the citation reference above.) http://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/researchsupport/ris-support/ Is Justice as Fairness a Realistic Utopia? A Critical Examination of Rawls’s Idea of Overlapping Consensus. Maria Paz C. Felton Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. University of Wales, Swansea Department of Politics and International Relations 2 0 0 6 ProQuest Number: 10798168 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10798168 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 SUMMARY DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed -................. (candidate) Date Z\ .( .0 ^ 0 .4 ................................................... STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Where correction services have been used, the extent and nature of the corrections is clearly marked in a footnote(s). Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed ...........*..................................................(candidate) Date .............................................. STATEMENT 2 I hereby consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organizations. Signed ...................... (candidate) Date ,?.V\o3\.Q4 Summary Is Justice as Fairness a Realistic Utopia? A Critical Examination of Rawls’s Idea of Overlapping Consensus. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an alternative account of how justice as fairness can be delivered. My general proposition is that if justice as fairness is to be regarded as a realistic utopia, some alterations need to be made into the argument about the possibilities of its realization offered by Rawls. The main problem comes from the idea of overlapping consensus and its association with stability. A crucial working conjecture is that we need overlapping consensus neither to stabilize justice as fairness, nor to justify it. My alterations to Rawls’s argument also originate as a result of two theoretical burdens within political liberalism: its notion of stability and its account of the fact of reasonable pluralism. Both ideas have been inadequately problematized, and therefore demand significant revision. The idea of stability needs to be revised because of its exclusive focus on questions of moral coherence at the expense of more relevant aspects such as institutional and political stability. The account of reasonable pluralism also needs to be revised because it is both too narrow and significantly unfocused. A crucial consequence that follows from these revisions is that, in order to preserve institutional stability under the conditions of pluralism, we need to render the stability of institutions separately from the coherence of citizens’ overall moralities. These two conceptual revisions lead me to effect three alterations into Rawls’s argument. In particular I show that: ^constitutional consensus is necessary, but not yet sufficient, for stability of the required kind, 2)political justification is necessary and sufficient for the right kind of justification, and 3)overlapping consensus is part of moral, not political, justification and, therefore, not required for a political project such as Rawls’s. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to various people and, first of all, to my supervisor, Dr. Mark Evans. I am particularly grateful for his support and for helping me in the pursuit of something that I have always valued -clarity of thought. I wish to thank him also for his comments on both general and detailed matters. I am also especially indebted to Professor Bruce Haddock for his encouragement and for the numerous discussions that we had about political philosophy, and to Professor Rex Martin for his invaluable help with the reading of Rawls’s texts. I am also grateful to the Department of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea for the support offered during the course of my study. My work on this thesis would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of my husband, John. He has taken over, particularly in the last year, some of the tasks that the running of a household with three young children normally requires. I am deeply thankful to him for sharing some of the worry that goes with writing a thesis. My mother has also been involved in this thesis by providing invaluable childcare at crucial times. I am also grateful to her. My three children, Antonio, James and Daniel, all bom whilst studying for this Ph.D have been a constant source of motivation. I finally wish to thank the audiences of three conferences at the Universities of Manchester and Essex for various valuable comments on some of the ideas contained in this thesis, and to the editors of Politeia for publishing my paper ‘Overlapping Consensus and Critical Justification’. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1 THE BACKGROUND 10 1 Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical 11 2.The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus 16 3.The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus 27 4.Political Liberalism and Beyond 32 5. Conclusion 42 2 OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS: A CRITICAL ENQUIRY 44 1 .Critiques of Overlapping Consensus 44 2.Overlapping Consensus: A Critical assessment 66 3. Conclusion 89 3 THE PROBLEM OF STABILITY 91 1. Stability: Some General Considerations 92 2.Stability in TJ 105 3. Stability in PL 135 4.Conclusion 141 4 PLURALISM AND POLITICAL LIBERALISM 144 1 .Reasonable Pluralism: Features and Implications for Political Liberalism 147 2.Problems with Rawls’s account 153 5 CONSENSUS AND STABILITY 173 1 .Constitutional Consensus: Preliminary Remarks 174 2.Rawls on Constitutional Consensus 182 3.Stability and Constitutional Consensus 189 6 CONSENSUS AND JUSTIFICATION 202 1 .The limits of Constitutional Consensus 202 2.Rawls on Justification 208 3 .The Idea of Public Reason 213 4.Public Reason and Political Justification 218 5.Stability and Legitimacy 223 7 OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS REVISITED 226 1 .Overlapping Consensus: Realistic or Unrealistic Utopia? 227 2,Overlapping Consensus: A Dystopia? 235 3.Overlapping Consensus and Critical Justification 239 CONCLUSION 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 Abbreviations A Theory o f Justice TJ ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ PnM ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’ IOC ‘The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus’ DPOC Political Liberalism PL ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ IPRR ‘The Law of Peoples’ LoP Justice as Fairness: A Restatement JFR INTRODUCTION The purpose of my thesis is to develop an alternative account -to the one offered by Rawls himself- of how justice as fairness can be delivered. In doing so, my general intention is not to challenge the overall aim of his project, but to improve on his particular framework. The initial impetus for pursuing this programme was prompted by an increasing dissatisfaction with the Rawlsian notion of overlapping consensus and its association with the problem of stability. Whilst I was generally sympathetic towards his attempt to reconcile people’s political perspectives with their overall moralities, the more I looked into the notion of overlapping consensus, the more I was led to think that it was too utopian, and therefore not a realistic utopia. By way of clarification, let me state at the outset what constitutes, in Rawls’s own terms, a realistic utopia. A given project of political philosophy
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Fragility of Consensus: Public Reason, Diversity, and Stability
    The Fragility of Consensus: Public Reason, Diversity, and Stability (Forthcoming in The European Journal of Philosophy) John Thrasher and Kevin Vallier Abstract: John Rawls’s transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism was driven by his rejection of Theory’s account of stability. The key to his later account of stability is the idea of public reason. We see Rawls’s account of stability as an attempt to solve a mutual assurance problem. We maintain that Rawls’s solution fails because his primary assurance mechanism, in the form of public reason, is fragile. His conception of public reason relies on a condition of consensus that we argue is both unrealistic in modern, pluralistic democracies and fragile. Rejecting his conception of public reason as unable to maintain stability, we offer an “indirect alternative” that we believe is much more robust. We offer experimental evidence to back up this claim. John Rawls’s early conception of stability required a substantive ‘congruence’ between the right and the good (1999: 496-505).1 He later rejected this view, however, believing it was untenable in light of the fact of reasonable pluralism. Pervasive disagreement among reasonable members of a well-ordered society will inevitably lead to a breakdown in congruence; destabilizing institutions based on Justice as Fairness.2 In Political Liberalism, Rawls attempted to avoid this problem by developing a conception of stability ‘for the 1 (Rawls 1999) is hereafter TJ. Many readers may be unfamiliar with Rawlsian ‘congruence,’ but the concept is pivotal. See: (Weithman 2010), hereafter WPL? Throughout, we us PL to refer to (Rawls 2005).
    [Show full text]
  • Public Reason1
    charles larmore 10 Public Reason1 For John Rawls, public reason is not one political value among others. It envelops all the different elements that make up the ideal of a constitutional democracy, for it governs “the political relation” in which we ought to stand to one another as citizens (CP,p.574). Public reason involves more than just the idea that the principles of political association should be an object of public knowledge. Its concern is the very basis of our collectively binding decisions. We honor public reason when we bring our own reason into accord with the reason of others, espousing a common point of view for settling the terms of our political life. The conception of justice by which we live is then a conception we endorse, not for the different reasons we may each discover, and not simply for reasons we happen to share, but instead for reasons that count for us because we can affirm them together. This spirit of reciprocity is the foundation of a democratic society. Public reason has emerged as an explicit theme in Rawls’s writings only after A Theory of Justice with his turn to “political liberalism” and the pursuit of a common ground on which people can stand de- spite their deep ethical and religious differences. But the concept itself has always been at the heart of his philosophy. It runs through his first book in the guise of the idea of publicity, playing an in- dispensable part in the theory of justice as fairness. The notion of fairness itself, so central to Rawls’s thought, denotes that mutual acknowledgement of principles which public reason demands and which forms the real import of the language of social contract he has used to articulate his conception of justice.
    [Show full text]
  • The Lukewarm Religions of Rawls' Overlapping Consensus
    Aporia vol. 24 no. 2—2014 The Lukewarm Religions of Rawls’ Overlapping Consensus ALEXANDER SCHAEFER With regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position that life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and—I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman. I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that women can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor, in my view. —Vice President Joe Biden I. Introduction iden’s statement neatly exemplifies Rawls’ ideal separation of one’s Comprehensive Moral Doctrine (CMD) from the sphere of political Breason. Given what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment,” it is un- reasonable for any citizen in a democratic society to expect all others to adopt his or her exact same doctrine (54).1 Therefore, it is also unreason- able to use the values and beliefs of one’s particular CMD to form laws that will apply equally to all citizens. Doing so would force those who reasonably disagree with one’s CMD to act in accord with it. If a legitimate and stable 1 Although a CMD can be any system of values that extends beyond the political (containing “nonpolitical values and virtues” (Rawls 175)) this paper will treat only religious CMDs. Whether parts of this critique can be extended to cover other types of CMDs is an open question.
    [Show full text]
  • Fairness, Consensus, and the Justification of the Ideal Liberal Constitution
    Fairness, Consensus, and the Justification of the Ideal Liberal Constitution Philip Cook LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 4/2009 London School of Economics and Political Science Law Department This paper can be downloaded without charge from LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers at: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/wps/wps.htm and the Social Sciences Research Network electronic library at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1331374. © Philip Cook. Users may download and/or print one copy to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. Users may not engage in further distribution of this material or use it for any profit-making activities or any other form of commercial gain. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1331374 Philip Cook The Justification of the Ideal Liberal Constitution Fairness, Consensus, and the Justification of the Ideal Liberal Constitution Philip Cook * Abstract: In Constitutional Goods Brudner argues that the justification of the ideal liberal constitutional must be based on an alternative conception of public reason from that that presented by Rawls in Political Liberalism. This paper sets out the disagreement between the two notions of justification, and argues that Brudner’s proposed account is problematic on two accounts. Firstly, it seems internally inconsistent. Brudner’s alternative to Rawls’s overlapping consensus, a convergent consensus on an inclusive conception of liberalism, will be impossible given the plural and often contradictory nature of differing liberal doctrines. Secondly, even if such a consensus is possible it will be characterized by modus vivendi rather than a reasonable agreement based on the value of fairness.
    [Show full text]
  • Consensus on What? Convergence for What? Four Models of Political
    Consensus on What? Convergence for What? Four Models of Political Liberalism* Gerald Gaus and Chad Van Schoelandt 1 A PROJECT, NOT AN EDIFICE In an early symposium on A Theory of Justice, John Chapman remarked that “Rawls’s theory has both the simplicity and the complexity of a Gothic cathedral.”1 In his recent important book on Rawls’s political turn, Paul Weithman notes and endorses this characterization. Weithman seeks a unified interpretation of Theory, Rawls’s political turn and its search for stability, overcoming the many partial interpretations that take only “one view of the cathedral.”2 When readers turn to Political Liberalism, the style that comes to mind is not gothic, but baroque.3 If one takes even the 1993 hardback edition of Political Liberalism as a single, unified construction — much less the paperback edition, which includes the important “Reply to Habermas”— it has the tension, movement, complexity and irregularity of the baroque. Nevertheless, at least as far as we can see, the baroque interpretation too fails — after numerous readings, we are unable to construct a reasonably coherent and viable interpretation that accounts for all the *An earlier version of this essay was delivered to the 25th anniversary of conference of Rawls's Political Liberalism, hosted by the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for Ethics, Georgia State University, May, 2016. Our thanks for the comments and suggestions of all the participants; subsequent comments by Paul Weithman were especially vaulable, as were discussions with Brian Kogelmann. 1 John W. Chapman, “Rawls’s Theory of Justice,” American Political Science Review, vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Catholics, Muslims, and the Possibility of Overlapping Consensus Elizabeth A
    Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2009 Reconciled to Liberty: Catholics, Muslims, and the Possibility of Overlapping Consensus Elizabeth A. Barre Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES RECONCILED TO LIBERTY: CATHOLICS, MUSLIMS, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS By ELIZABETH A. BARRE A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2009 Copyright © 2009 Elizabeth A. Barre All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Elizabeth A. Barre defended on July 7, 2009. _______________________________________ John Kelsay Professor Directing Dissertation _______________________________________ M. Victoria Costa Outside Committee Member _______________________________________ Sumner B. Twiss Committee Member _______________________________________ Aline Kalbian Committee Member _______________________________________ Adam Gaiser Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________________ John Corrigan, Chair, Department of Religion The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii One of the main aims of moral philosophy is to look for possible bases of agreement where none seem to exist. It must attempt to extend the range of some existing consensus and to frame more discriminating moral conceptions for our consideration. Justifying grounds do not lie ready at hand: they need to be discovered and suitably expressed, sometimes by lucky guesses, sometimes by noting the requirements of theory. —John Rawls, A Theory of Justice iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A central theme of the pages that follow is that our moral arguments and identities are inextricably linked to and shaped by the communities in which we find ourselves.
    [Show full text]
  • Jack Donnelly Graduate School of International Studies University of Denver
    THE RELATIVE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS1 Jack Donnelly Graduate School of International Studies University of Denver [forthcoming, 2007, Human Rights Quarterly] Human rights as an international political project are closely tied to claims of universality. The foundational international legal instrument is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1993 World Human Rights Conference, in the first operative paragraph of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, asserted that “the universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question.” Attacks on the universality of human rights, however, are also widespread. And some versions of universalism are indeed theoretically indefensible, politically pernicious, or both. This essay explores several different senses of “universal” human rights. I also consider, somewhat more briefly, several senses in which it might be held that human rights are “relative.” I defend what I call functional, international legal, and overlapping consensus universality. But I argue that what I call anthropological and ontological universality are empirically, philosophically, or politically indefensible. I also emphasize that universal human rights, properly understood, leave considerable space for national, regional, cultural particularity and other forms of diversity and relativity. 1 The tone of this essay owes much to a long conversation with Daniel Bell and Joseph Chan in Japan nearly a decade ago. I thank them for the sort of deep engagement of fundamental differences that represents one of the best and most exhilarating features of intellectual life. I also thank audiences at Yonsei University, Ritsumeikan University, and Occidental College, where earlier versions of this paper were presented, and more than two decades of students who have constantly pushed me to clarify, sharpen, and properly modulate my arguments.
    [Show full text]
  • Public Reason and Political Justifications
    Fordham Law Review Volume 72 Issue 5 Article 29 2004 Public Reason and Political Justifications Samuel Freeman Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Samuel Freeman, Public Reason and Political Justifications, 72 Fordham L. Rev. 2021 (2004). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol72/iss5/29 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE IDEA OF PUBLIC REASON REVISITED PUBLIC REASON AND POLITICAL JUSTIFICATIONS Samuel Freeman* INTRODUCTION In a constitutional democracy citizens normally have a sense of the kinds of reasons that are fittingly appealed to, as well as those that are not, in legislative and judicial forums and when arguing about laws and the constitution with people who hold different religious or philosophical views. We see this all the time in arguments in news editorials, for example. But it is very hard to characterize these reasons in any straightforward way. It is not enough to say that, because people have different faiths and their differences are irresolvable, religious considerations ought to be kept out of politics. For people have irresolvably conflicting philosophical and ethical beliefs too. Moreover, sometimes it may be wholly fitting within public political life for members of a faith to declare the religious beliefs that lead them to support or oppose measures involving fundamental questions of justice (Martin Luther King's religious declarations in support of civil rights is one example).
    [Show full text]
  • Rawls, Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship: Toward a Liberal Reconciliation
    University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2013 Rawls, Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship: Toward a Liberal Reconciliation Jeffrey Michael Cervantez University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Cervantez, Jeffrey Michael, "Rawls, Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship: Toward a Liberal Reconciliation. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2013. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2562 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Jeffrey Michael Cervantez entitled "Rawls, Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship: Toward a Liberal Reconciliation." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. David Reidy, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: E.J. Coffman, Adam Cureton, Anthony Nownes Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Rawls, Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship: Toward a Liberal Reconciliation A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Jeffrey Michael Cervantez December 2013 ii Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey M.
    [Show full text]
  • Vol. 2, No 1, 2021 Chris O. Abakare JOHN RAWLS
    InternationalVol. 2, No 1, Journal 2021 Social Sciences and Education Chris O. Abakare Volume 2, Number 1, 2021, pa. 30-51 JOHN RAWLS: OVERLAPPING CONSENSUS AND PUBLIC REA Chris O. Abakare Department of Philosophy, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Ifite Road, 420110, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria Email; [email protected] Received : 11 Mei 2021 Reviewed: 4-23 Juni 2021 Accepted: 31 Juli 2021 ABSTRACT John Rawls Rawls’s political thought has been chosen for study because he has been very influential and his philosophy can be used in interpreting modern constitution. Rawls’ later works had focused on the question of stability; how a society ordered by the two principles of justice endures? His answer to this question is contained in a collection of lectures titled Political Liberation. In these lectures, Rawls introduced the ‘idea of an overlapping consensus’ – or agreement of justice as fairness between citizens who hold different religious and philosophical views. Political liberalism also introduced the idea of Public reason – the common reason of all citizens. This work attempts to explained and interrogate John Rawls idea of “Overlapping Consensus and Public Reason”. This paper submits that Rawls Political Liberalism is a rich and suggestive account of how to justify a scheme of principles for ordering the basic structure of society. This work further argues that Rawls’s theory leaves us with same pressing problems. One of the problems that Rawls must answer is that of providing a critic and justification. By calling justice as fairness a political conception Rawls has abandoned the attempt to provide such a critical justification. But in doing so, one has to wonder what reasons one would have to ultimately accept the political conception, other than merely pragmatic ones.
    [Show full text]
  • Does Social Justice Ground Democracy in Education Or Does Democracy Ground Social Justice?
    DOES SOCIAL JUSTICE GROUND DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION OR DOES DEMOCRACY GROUND SOCIAL JUSTICE? Sheron Fraser-Burgess Ball State University In recent theorizations of education’s emerging political economies theorists aim to make sense of the relation between persistent social and economic inequalities in schooling experiences and stringent accountability regimes.1 Salient to these movements are a set of looming demographic transitions. These include the forecasted emergence of a majority-minority society and the cultural flux of primary social institutions such as families, education, and long-standing pillars of religious beliefs and norms. Particularly arresting to philosophers of education is that, as unintended consequences, such developments have the potential further to vacate the promise of public schools as vehicles of equity. How, in the face of revolutionary change, can American education advance a democratic society that treats all equitably? The notion of social justice is one moral lens through which philosophers of education continue to interpret and evaluate the interplay between contemporary sociopolitical conditions in education (e.g., schools, accountability, and public sentiment) and democratic norms. The term social justice has been bandied about in the field of education for much of the last two decades as a particular understanding of the moral framework by which we evaluate social institutions.2 Despite its broad usage, the term remains somewhat unspecified in educational discourse. As Kent den Heyer claims, social justice is considered by some to be an empty signifier because of its multifarious interpretations.3 1 Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997); Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education (New York: Routledge, 2011); Lisa Delpit, Multiplication Is for White People (New York: New Press, 2012).
    [Show full text]
  • The Fragility of Consensus: Public Reason, Diversity and Stability
    bs_bs_banner DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12020 The Fragility of Consensus: Public Reason, Diversity and Stability John Thrasher and Kevin Vallier Abstract: John Rawls’s transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism was driven by his rejection of Theory’s account of stability. The key to his later account of stability is the idea of public reason. We see Rawls’s account of stability as an attempt to solve a mutual assurance problem. We maintain that Rawls’s solution fails because his primary assurance mechanism, in the form of public reason, is fragile. His conception of public reason relies on a condition of consensus that we argue is unrealistic in modern, pluralistic democracies. After rejecting Rawls’s conception of public reason, we offer an ‘indirect alter- native’ that we believe is much more robust. We cite experimental evidence to back up this claim. 1. Introduction John Rawls’s early conception of stability required a substantive ‘congruence’ between the right and the good (Rawls 1999: 496–505).1 He later rejected this view, however, believing it was untenable in light of the fact of reasonable pluralism. Pervasive disagreement among reasonable members of a well-ordered society will inevitably lead to a breakdown in congruence, destabilizing insti- tutions based on Justice as Fairness.2 In Political Liberalism, Rawls attempted to avoid this problem by developing a conception of stability ‘for the right reasons’ that obtains so long as citizens come to affirm a political conception of justice consistent with their distinct reasonable comprehensive doctrines.3 Public reason, on this account, is the critical mechanism that generates stability.
    [Show full text]