The publication of Political Liberalismhas allowed John Rawls to bring to the fore issues that remained in the background of A Theory of Justice. His explicit attention to the concept of ‘the reasonable’ is a welcome development. In a more recent publication, he affirms the importance of this concept, ‘while [granting] that the idea of the reasonable needs a more thorough examination than Political Liberalism offers.’ In this paper, I will present a critical exposition of the senses of the reasonable on which justice as fairness relies. Rawls employs the term in four main contexts. I will outline these various senses and argue that in each case, a controversy in the secondary literature can be resolved by close attention to the concept of the reasonable. In three of these contexts, Rawls relies on what I will call a ‘strong’ sense of the reasonable, while in one he sometimes seems to rely on a ‘weak’ sense. I argue that justice as fairness is best served by relying on a strong sense throughout.
In an era of globalization, basic institutional structures that shape our daily interactions transcend national boundaries. According to the institutional approach to social justice favored by John Rawls, we have a special obligation to ensure that the basic terms of these interactions are just. Two recent proposals would help accomplish this: a global resource dividend and a Tobin tax. Both of these proposals work within markets. Some have objected that globalization will lead to the homogenization of previously diverse cultures. However, although globalization will increase the pace of cultural and social change, the path of these developments is unpredictable.
For almost fifty years, the work of John Rawls (1921–2002) has played a central and guiding role in the development of Anglo-American 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, ...
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