Thomas Pogge has been challenging liberal thinking on global politics, often through critical engagement with John Rawls’ work. Pogge presents both normative and empirical arguments against Rawls: normatively, Rawls’ domestic Theory of Justice and global Law of Peoples are incompatible ideal theories; empirically, LP is too removed from the actual world to guide the foreign policy of liberal societies. My main purpose here is to contest the first, ideal theory criticism in order to direct more attention to (...) the second, non-ideal objection. I argue against Pogge that TJ and LP can be read as coherent, once one employs a Rousseauian rather than Pogge’s economic Kantian reading of TJ. The first two sections present Pogge’s view of TJ and contrast it with a Rousseauian alternative that is less cosmopolitan and economic and much more focused on the democratic and sovereign context of justice as fairness. The third section seeks to refute Pogge’s incoherence arguments, which encompass the identity of the parties to the international original position, their motivations and their decisions. Instead of a conclusion, the last section emphasizes LP’s non-ideal problems, and suggests that insofar as LP is the most robust liberal ideal theory of global politics, its empirical failure indicates the need to shift global justice theorizing even more to the non-ideal realm.Keywords: Rawls; Pogge; global justice; ideal theory; non-ideal theory; cosmopolitanism; statism; Rousseau; Kant; democracy. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes briefly what John Rawls meant by stability, the role it plays in Theory of Justice (TJ), and the outline of his main strategies for showing that a well‐ordered society based on his principles of justice would be relatively stable. It presents comments on Rawls's use of developmental moral psychology in support of his claim that societies based on justice as fairness would be relatively stable. The chapter discusses Rawls's conception of self‐respect, its role (...) in his arguments for justice as fairness, and whether it is subject to a certain Kantian objection that echoes in our contemporary political culture. It argues that if Rawls's turn to an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines as the basis of stability in Political Liberalism (PL) was well motivated, then why not quietly bypass the earlier work on a sense of justice and self‐respect simply as an acknowledged failure. (shrink)

The present exposition has the following structure. In the first part,, I will synthetize some of the criticisms of Rawl’s conception of subject, or self; in the second part, I will scrutinize a 1963 paper by Rawls entitled “The sense of justice”, and hope to show, on the basis of this text, that one cannot say that the Rawlsian moral being is a being without flesh, blood or life, as critics have suggested, following in the footsteps of criticism from (...) Hegel to Kant; third, I will examine excerpts of TJ that deal, directly or indirectly, with the concept of subject; finally, I will look at papers published after TJ that may be relevant to the present topic. (shrink)

In the past decade, scholars such as Samuel Freeman, Martin O’Neill, Alan Thomas and others have argued that no matter how widely Rawls’s theory of justice (TJ) was understood as a defence of the welfare state (WS), the socio-economic system Rawls defends and always defended is property-owing democracy (POD). In this article I present the argument that Rawls did not defend POD in TJ. However, while the claim that it was POD the socio-economic system implied by the principle (...) of difference generated heated reactions by defenders of the WS, the argument I raise differs from most of them. In the article I maintain that, for Rawls, principles of justice underdetermine the choice of social systems, and that although this is true of both principles, it is especially true of the difference principle, whose ability to arbitrate between different social and economic policies is limited. I show how the attempt to uniquely determine the set of social and economic policies authorized by the difference principle clashes with what Rawls explicitly states in TJ and contrasts with central aspects of his sociological and political conception of socio-economic decision-making. Although my aim is to show that the difference principle itself does not discriminate among socio-economic systems, this does not preclude that additional reasons can help in narrowing the range of socio-economic systems allowed. With reference to the ideal of social union that Rawls expounds in the third part of TJ, I argue that TJ does, in fact, offer additional reasons to appraise the WS as preferable to POD. I maintain that the centrality Rawls attributes to the social unity of a just society provides the basis for an understanding of Rawls’s position towards POD after TJ. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the tradition of just war theory. It focuses on Rawls's comments in A Theory of Justice (TJ). The discussion is entirely in the service of an account of conscientious refusal to fight in war. The chapter focuses on Rawls's best developed discussions of the doctrines of just war and related ideas in The Law of Peoples (LP). It discusses the place of these doctrines in Rawls's account of the law of peoples, the importance of (...) human rights to the accounts, and Rawls's account of the conditions in which the hope for peace is reasonable. Rawls takes Kant's Perpetual Peace as a guide for the development of his views in LP. The domestic conditions that Rawls takes to be necessary to produce satisfaction for the right reasons are demandingly egalitarian. Rawls maintains that it would be unrealistic to hope for an international society comprised entirely of liberal people. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a reading that confirms John Rawls's view that the stability argument of Part Three of Theory of Justice (TJ) was crucial for the success of TJ as a whole, that it was indeed flawed, and that fundamental ideas of Political Liberalism (PL) can be traced to the wide‐ranging consequences of recognizing the flaw in that argument. In Rawls's political liberalism, one can find at least two accounts of the way in which stability considerations enter into (...) justificatory arguments – one repairs the account in TJ and is similarly structured, while another pushes political liberalism in a more radical direction. The chapter briefly discusses how the thin theory of the good is employed in Rawls's stability analysis. It is not “the fact of pluralism” but the “fact of reasonable pluralism” that motivates Rawls's political turn; reasonable pluralism is the result of our best exercise of free practical reason. (shrink)

Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception (...) of normative stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply. (shrink)

One feature of John Rawls’s well-ordered society in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism is that citizens in the well-ordered society, when adhering to the principles of justice governing that society, realize their full autonomy. This notion of full autonomy is explicitly Kantian. This constancy, I shall argue, raises problems. Though the model of the well-ordered society presented in TJ is arguably consistent with Kant’s notion of autonomy, the model of the well-ordered society presented in (...) PL is not. The problem is that in the well-ordered society of PL people’s reasons for complying with the principles of justice are overdetermined in a problematic way. This raises the interesting question of acting from overdetermined motives in Kant’s system of ethics. In this paper I argue that regardless of which plausible interpretation of acting from overdetermined motives we adopt, the prospect of citizens realizing their full autonomy in Rawls’s PL are small. This is a serious defect of the theory. (shrink)

In recent years, countries have begun to establish ministries of transitional justice as part of political transitions from authoritarianism to democracy or from conflict to peace. This may reflect a broader historical trend in the administration of TJ, which has evolved from isolated offices within a particular ministry to ad hoc cross-ministry coordinating bodies to the establishment of dedicated ministries. The reasons for the establishment of specific ministries to pursue TJ, what we call ministerialization, have not attracted scholarly attention. (...) This article explores the causes and likely consequences of this development. In particular, it applies international relations, comparative politics, and public policy theories to explain the phenomenon. Contrary to some TJ literature that is concerned about hegemonic transnational discourse, international actors have played little to no role in shaping how TJ is bureaucratically managed. Rather, based upon fieldwork in Solomon Islands and Tunisia, the article concludes that ministerialization has been the result of domestic policy entrepreneurship. For TJ ministries to become a norm, however, more transnational actors will need to be convinced of the benefits of such an institutional arrangement. (shrink)

The subject of this paper are the implications of Lyotard's critique of the intellectual as a public actor. It is shown that Lyotard's critique of politics results in a rejection of political theory, real politics and political involvement of the intellectual. In place of that, Lyotard develops his concept of "philosophical politics", i.e. "reflexive writing" as a specific form of political disengagement. The author argues that Lyotard's critique of the political involvement of the intellectual is acceptable, but that Lyotard's (...) concept of "philosophical politics" cannot compensate for the lack of an acceptable real politics and an appropriate political theory. It can be viewed only as an individual-existential posture of resistance to the dominant political patterns which, as preconditions of its own possibility, must presuppose the existence of an acceptable real politics and appropriate political doctrine. Osnovni predmet ovog rada predstavljaju implikacije Liotarove kritike intelektualca kao politickog delatnika. Autor najpre pokazuje da Liotarova kritika politike rezultira odbacivanjem politicke teorije, realne politike i politickog angazmana intelektualca. Umesto toga, Liotar razvija koncept "filozofske politike", tj. "refleksivnog pisanja", kao specifican oblik politickog dezangazmana. Za autora je Liotarova kritika politickog angazmana intelektualca prihvatljiva, ali naglasava da Liotarov koncept "filozofske politike "ne moze nadoknaditi nedostatak prihvatljive realne politike i odgovarajuce politicke teorije. Naime, ona moze da se shvati samo kao jedan individualno-egzistencijalni stav otpora prema vladajucim politickim obrascima, koji mora da pretpostavi postojanje prihvatljive realne politike i odgovarajuce politicke doktrine kao uslov sopstvene mogucnosti. (shrink)