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POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND THE POSSIBILITY OF EGALITARIANISM A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by James Kelleher III January 2008 © 2008 James Kelleher III POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND THE POSSIBILITY OF EGALITARIANISM James Kelleher III, Ph. D. Cornell University 2008 This dissertation is a study of political liberalism, both as that doctrine was developed by John Rawls and as it has come to be understood and modified by others. It is agreed that the search for moral common ground was at the heart of Rawls’s project, but the details of his preferred response to the “fact of reasonable pluralism” are widely disputed. I argue that the currently dominant views of these details are mistaken, and I offer new interpretations of Rawls’s political liberalism and of his reasons for developing it. I claim that Rawls’s theory is, contrary to most accounts, more concerned with justice than with legitimacy and less concerned with securing agreement between actually existing citizens than his most well-known formulations might suggest. But this resulting theory incorporates two fundamental yet conflicting strands, and the only way to render it consistent and plausible is to formulate an “orthodox political liberalism” that ends up looking much like the view painted by the (still) mistaken rival interpretations. This orthodox political liberalism derives its plausibility from the resemblance of its moral rationale to the rationale for the traditional liberal stance in favor of state neutrality on religion. It is next argued that orthodox political liberalism has difficultly sustaining the arguments needed to defend a sufficiently determinate egalitarian criterion of distributive justice. We therefore confront a tension between liberal egalitarianism and the moral underpinnings of liberal neutrality on religion. After setting out reasons for thinking that we should in fact question the traditional liberal stance on religion in political life, I attempt to develop a framework of political justification that would reassert the traditional constraints on religious considerations, this time for more pragmatic reasons. Unfortunately, this initially attractive framework—which I call pragmatic contextualism—is in the final analysis unsatisfactory. I conclude that since the constraint on publicly acceptable reasons that is the hallmark of political liberalism and the bane of economic egalitarianism is not in fact a demand of justice, we should reject political liberalism and explore further the possibility of strongly egalitarian criteria of economic justice. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH James Paul Kelleher III graduated from Freeport High School, in Freeport, Maine, in 1997 and from Colgate University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He received a Master’s degree in philosophy from Cornell University in 2005, and his doctorate in philosophy from Cornell University in 2008. iii for Ann iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first and greatest debt is to my advisor Richard Miller, who has provided invaluable support and guidance at every turn during my graduate studies. Dick’s unwavering kindness, dedication to teaching, devotion to his students, philosophical sensitivity, and commitment to justice have had a genuinely profound impact on me. I will always be grateful for all that he has done for me. Special thanks go to Terence Irwin, who spent many hours reading and commenting on my work when I took his year-long course in the history of ethics and then during my Fifth Semester Tutorial. Terry also served on my Special Committee with Michele Moody-Adams, and I thank both of them for their time, comments, and support during the latter years of my tenure at Cornell. I have benefited greatly from extensive conversations with and comments from many others as well. With apologies to those I unintentionally leave out, I would like to thank Sean Aas, Vincent Baltazar, David Estlund, Nate Jezzi, Jacob Klein, George Klosko, Daniel Koltonski, Emily Muller, and Sara Streett. Also, two brief conversations with Thomas Pogge in March 2006 were extremely helpful and inspiring. During the end-stages of this project I had the pleasure of working part-time for a wonderful organization fighting for social justice and civil rights in America today. I wish to thank the staff of the National Fair Housing Alliance, and especially Cat Cloud, DeeDee Swesnik and Nhu-Han Duong, for their joviality and kind support over the last sixteen months. Lastly, I would like to thank my closest friends. Dave Jacobsen was always there to lend a supportive ear and to offer cheerful advice on how to push through and get the job done. And although we spent our grad years in different states, Paul Audi v and I went to grad school together, and I am certain that without his humor, friendship, and philosophical companionship I would never have finished year one.—Finally, I owe more than I can convey to Ann McCall. Her love and support sustained me while I worked on this project, and the thought of being able to start a real life with her provided the most effective impetus for finishing. Thanks to her, I can finally say what I have wanted to say for some time: the only chapter I am now working on is the one we are writing together. Work on this dissertation was financially supported by two Sage Fellowships granted generously by the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch.......................................................................................................iii Dedication......................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................v Chapter 1. Introduction...................................................................................................1 Chapter 2. Political Liberalism I: Congruence and Stability........................................11 I. A Theory of Justice and the Role of Stability.................................................13 II. The “Serious Internal Problem” with A Theory of Justice .............................16 IV. Evidence from the 80s.....................................................................................21 V. A Benign Plank ...............................................................................................24 VI. Rival Interpretations........................................................................................30 VII. How to Read The Congruence Argument.......................................................50 VIII. Lessons for Reading Political Liberalism .......................................................54 IX. Conclusion ......................................................................................................59 Chapter 3. Political Liberalism II: Stability, Legitimacy, and Reasonable Rejection..60 I. Chauvinism or Indeterminacy? .......................................................................61 II. Rawls’s Escape Route.....................................................................................67 IV. Justice and Legitimacy....................................................................................75 V. Conclusion ......................................................................................................89 Chapter 4. The Role of Reasonable Rejection in Scanlon's Contractualism................92 I. Scanlon’s Escape Route: First Try..................................................................94 II. Scanlon’s Escape Route: Second Try .............................................................97 III. The Purely Formal Notion of Reasonableness................................................99 IV. Non-Formal Reasonableness and “Upward” Contractualism.......................103 V Conclusion ....................................................................................................105 Chapter 5. Toward an Orthodox Political Liberalism ................................................107 I. The Reconciliation of Perfectionism and Political Liberalism .....................107 II. Problems for the Reconciliation....................................................................110 III. Orthodox Political Liberalism.......................................................................121 IV. Conclusion ....................................................................................................126 Chapter 6. Political Liberalism and the Possibility of Egalitarianism........................128 I. Troubles with Libertarianism........................................................................128 II. Rawls’s Criterion of Distributive Justice......................................................131 III. Problems with Rawls’s Criterion ..................................................................135 IV. The Dangers of Unstable Egalitarianism ......................................................144 V. Conclusion ....................................................................................................150 Chapter 7. Neutrality on Religion and Neutrality on the Good..................................152 I. Candidates for Non-Assimilation..................................................................152 II. Problems for Neutrality.................................................................................155