John Rawls pinpoints stability as the driving force behind many of the changes to justice as fairness from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. Current debates about Rawlsian stability have centered on the possibility of maintaining one’s allegiance to the principles of justice while largely ignoring how citizens acquire a sense of justice. However, evaluating the account of stability in political liberalism requires attention to the impact of reasonable pluralism on both of these issues. I will argue that the (...) first question of Rawlsian stability – how a child acquires a sense of justice – remains unanswered in Political Liberalism. This fact has been overlooked by Rawls, his defenders, and his critics. The failure to attend to the ways reasonable pluralism undermines Rawls’s own story about a child’s moral development ultimately threatens Rawls’s account of stability in political liberalism – or so I will argue. Despite all of the changes Rawls makes to justice as fairness in order to resolve the stability challenge, Political Liberalism fails to deliver the robust stability Rawls seeks. (shrink)

Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State, by ChambersClare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 226.

Whether a liberal state should sanction marriages, and if so, in what form, is a hotly contested topic in liberal political theory. This essay responds to a radical proposal by Clare Chambers to end state sanctioned marriage and replace the institution with a network of practice-based directives aimed at ensuring gender equality and liberty. I argue that this proposed framework suffers from the serious defect of not only failing to ensure liberty but actively undermining it due to the way directives (...) will inevitably either include too many people under their scope to preserve liberty or too few to ensure equality. While the presence of this defect does not settle the debate concerning how liberal states should handle marriage, it makes clearer the tradeoffs involved in selecting new personal relationship law frameworks to replace marriage. (shrink)

This paper responds to arguments that polyamorous groups or care networks do not qualify for equal treatment with marriages. It refutes the points that polyamory is inherently hierarchical or unstable, that there are too few people in such arrangements to mount an argument for recognition, that polyamory harms children, and that there are insurmountable legal and practical hurdles to network marriage. Finally, it respond to the charge that extending recognition to polyamorists will devalue the recognition of same-sex marriage.