Political Liberalism and the Radical Consequences of Justice Pluralism

Journal of Social Philosophy 50 (2):212-231 (2019)
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Abstract

Political liberalism’s central commitments to recognizing reasonable pluralism and institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice are inconsistent. If reasonable pluralism applies to conceptions of justice as it applies to conceptions of the good, then some reasonable people will reject even many liberal conceptions of justice as unreasonable. If so, then imposing these conceptions of justice on citizens violates the liberal principle of legitimacy and related public justification requirements. This problem of justice pluralism requires that political liberals abandon their commitment to institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice. Instead, political justification should be limited to the public justification of a modest scheme of rights and a set of constitutional rules. Justice pluralism chastens the ambitions of political liberalism while pushing the political liberal research program in new and promising directions.

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Kevin Vallier
Bowling Green State University

Citations of this work

In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence.Kevin Vallier & Ryan Muldoon - 2020 - Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (2):211-230.
Public justification.Kevin Vallier - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Political activism, egalitarian justice, and public reason.Blain Neufeld - 2024 - Journal of Social Philosophy 55 (2):299-316.
Justice, Diversity, and the Well-Ordered Society.Brian Kogelmann - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269):pqw082.

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