John Rawls's thesis that a certain package of basic liberties should be given lexical priority is of great interest for legal and political philosophy, but it has received relatively little defense from Rawls or his supporters. In this paper, I examine three arguments for the thesis: the first is based on the two 'moral powers'; the second, on the social bases of self-respect; and the third, on a Kantian notion of autonomy. I argue none of these accounts successfully establishes 1) the distinct claim of lexical priority, 2) for the complete package of basic liberties (including the fair value of the political liberties), on the basis of reasons that are appropriately public. In turn, I propose an alternative argument, in support of those two claims, based on the social or 'relational' conception of equality. 1 Indeed, Rawls claims that assigning a package of basic liberties special priority is characteristic of any liberal theory.
This paper examines the following distinctive republican claims: (1) goodwill and virtuous self-restraint are insufficient to realize freedom; and (2) suitable law is constitutive of freedom. In the contemporary literature, these claims are commonly defended in connection with the conception of freedom as nondomination. This account, however, is often rejected on the grounds that freedom as nondomination is moralized and impossible to realize. In response, I propose that the point of protecting people from domination is better understood not as realizing freedom, but instead as giving persons a civic status as equals. Giving persons a civic status as equals, I claim, realizes an important form of social or 'relational' equality, and I distinguish this aim from giving persons a 'status as nondominated’, as some republicans require. I argue that this account vindicates alternative claims about the insufficiency of goodwill and constitutive importance of suitable law—understood in terms of equality rather than freedom—while avoiding the moralization and impossibility objections. I conclude by suggesting some further advantages of the proposed account versus the standard republican view.
Several philosophers argue for the ‘convergence thesis’ for positional goods: prioritarians, sufficientarians, and egalitarians may converge on favouring an equal (or not too unequal) distribution of goods that have positional aspects. I discuss some problems for this thesis when applied to two key goods for which it has been proposed: education and wealth. I show, however, that there is a variant of the thesis that avoids these problems. This version of the thesis is significant, I demonstrate, because it applies to a person’s status as a citizen, which I suggest is the central concern of social or ‘relational’ egalitarianism.
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