A democracia é, atualmente, o modelo preeminente de organização e de exercício da autoridade política. No entanto, os regimes políticos democráticos existentes ao redor do mundo nem sempre satisfazem critérios de justiça substantiva. Isto é, a democracia política pode existir, e perdurar ao longo do tempo, mesmo que se verifiquem violações claras de exigências normalmente associadas à justiça política e social. A partir dessa constatação, a questão substantiva desta dissertação é o exame da maneira pela qual considerações de justiça política e social são tratadas pela literatura da teoria democrática. O ponto de partida é o exame da teoria democrática minimalista. A despeito da acurácia e parcimônia analítica dessa teoria, as respostas que ela oferece à questão substantiva aqui examinada podem não ser satisfatórias. Portanto, são analisadas as formas de lidar com a nossa questão substantiva também no campo da teoria política normativa. Nesta análise, a principal alternativa teórica examinada é o liberalismo político de John Rawls, com o objetivo de desvendar em que medida o conteúdo normativo dessa teoria é menos ou mais compatível com as dimensões que são enfatizadas pela teoria democrática minimalista e que a tornam atraente.; Democracy currently is the most prominent model of organization and of exercising political power. However...

Este trabalho discute a teoria do direito de Ronald Dworkin, desde sua gênese até seus desenvolvimentos mais recentes, com o objetivo específico de aferir a influência que esta sofreu da filosofia política de John Rawls e de sua concepção de justiça. Essa influência foi especialmente sentida na metodologia inicialmente concebida por Dworkin para responder às tradicionais questões de teoria geral do direito, já que estas teriam sido mal resolvidas pelos positivistas. O que se verifica é que tal método se baseia na idéia de equilíbrio reflexivo de Rawls. Essa intensa convergência que inicialmente se verifica é progressivamente afastada na medida em que Dworkin caminha rumo a um liberalismo abrangente, defendendo uma continuidade entre a moralidade política e a ética, e Rawls reinterpreta sua teoria para defender uma limitação desta ao domínio do político.; This paper will discuss Ronald Dworkins legal theory since its genesis till its most recent studies, aiming specifically assess how this theory was influenced by John Rawls political philosophy and his conception of justice. This influence was specially noticed in the methodology first conceived by Dworkin to respond to the traditional issues of jurisprudence...

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar argumentos a favor de uma concepção igualitária de liberalismo político. Em primeiro lugar, apresenta-se uma classificação dos diferentes tipos de liberalismos políticos contemporâneos: (i) liberalismo do medo, (ii) liberalismo antifundacionista, (iii) liberalismo ético e (iv) liberalismo igualitário. A partir dos princípios de tolerância desenvolvidos em cada um deles, procura-se defender um ideal de razão pública como o melhor critério de justificação para regular o uso da coerção política entre cidadãos livres e iguais.; The work has two main goals. It attempts to provide arguments for the egalitarian branch of political liberalism. At first place, it is presented four types of possible political liberalisms: (i) the liberalism of fear, (ii) antifoundationalist liberalism, (iii) ethical liberalism and (iv) egalitarian liberalism. Departing from reasons for toleration offered by each of them, it argues that an ideal of public reason is the best way to conceive the use of political coercion on free and equal citizens.

[Introduction]: Like the play, this paper disputes the answer given by Juliet’s fantasy. It does so in the context of academic debate by showing that the use of a name, ‘liberalism’ in this case, can have significant implications for political and historical analysis. My aim, in fact, is to question conventional academic characterisations of liberalism and to suggest that the adoption of a different usage not only serves to clarify liberal governmental practice – including many of the recent developments which, for want of a better name, tend to be grouped together under the label of neo-liberalism – but also to provide a fuller and more powerful account of the work of central figures in the liberal tradition. Specifically, the characterisations I wish to dispute present liberalism as focused essentially on one or more of the following concerns: - relations between the state and its subjects; - the promotion and defense of individual liberty; - and, as a special case of the second, the promotion and defense of private property.; no

Defence date: 2 February 2001; Supervisor: Steven Lukes ; Co-supervisor: Jeremy Waldron; In this dissertation I analyse and criticise the recent theory of political liberalism of John Rawls and Charles Larmore. Furthermore, I sketch an alternative solution to the challenge which this theory confronts. The main challenge in the political liberalism of Rawls and Larmore is the difficult reconciliation between, on the one hand, the value of justice seen as the ultimate and substantive standard for the assessment of institutions and policies and, on the other hand, the pervasive pluralism of ideas of the good life and their supporting world views, in contemporary liberal societies. Political liberalism reconciles these by considering that principles of justice can be consensual in a pluralist society because they are political, not comprehensive (according to Rawls) or neutral in their justifications (according to Larmore). In this way, contentious moralities and philosophies, whether religious or not, are precluded from political justification. I show the unfeasibility of this justificatory restraint both at the level of the idea of justice and in the account of pluralism provided by the advocates of political liberalism. Their implicit theories of pluralism require philosophical fallibilism in order to make sense. Moreover...

John Rawls' "Eine Theorie der Gerechtigkeit" wird grundlegend dargestellt. Zentrale Begriffe und Konzeptionen werden benannt und erläutert; hierzu zählen der Urzustand, der Gerechtigkeitsbegriff, die Gerechtigkeitsgrundsätze, das Differenzprinzip, das Überlegungsgleichgewicht, die wohlgeordnete Gesellschaft, die politische Pflicht und der zivile Ungehorsam. In einem weiteren Schritt werden grundsätzliche Strömungen der Kritik (Libertarianismus, Kommunitarismus, Feminismus) und zwei herausragende Kritiker vorgestellt: Jürgen Habermas und Martha Nussbaum. Desweiteren kommt Rawls' Politischer Liberalismus in Grundzügen zur Darstellung. Im Mittelpunkt stehen hier die Idee des übergreifenden Konsenses und der freie und öffentliche Vernunftgebrauch. Ein eigenes Kapitel wendet sich dem Verhältnis zwischen Rawls politischer Philosophie einerseits und der Theologie und Ethik andererseits zu. Schliesslich werden noch konkrekte Anwendungskontexte auf Rezeption und Integration der Rawlsschen Gerechtigkeitstheorie hin untersucht: Wirtschaftsethik, Gesundheitsethik, Umweltethik, Informationsethik, interkulturelle Ethik und Menschenrechte sowie globale Ethik. Den Schlusspunkt bildet eine Reflexion auf Rawls' Selbstkennzeichnung seiner Theorie als Realutopie.; John Rawls "A Theory of Justice" is presented in a fundamental way. Key notions and concepts are namend and explicated. Among these are the original position...

This is a study in the political ethics of liberalism. It uses political obligation theory to shed light on the neutrality-perfectionism debate. My thesis is that neutralism cannot provide a coherent foundation for liberal political morality because a viable account of general political obligation relies on background assumptions about persons and conduct that are reasonably contestable even though they are not illiberal. To make this case, Section I reviews the conceptual details of neutrality across two generations of thinking. Second-generation neutrality, under political liberalism, is the more plausible rendering because it acknowledges that liberalism must stake a middle-ground between non-moral instrumentalism and moral absolutism. Liberalism, in other words, needs a moral reason to be neutral. I question whether political liberalism remains sufficiently moral and sufficiently neutral by asking if it offers mutually sustaining legitimacy and obligation principles. Section II discusses perfectionist ethics and highlights a crucial kind of value, called inherent value, often invoked but rarely scrutinized in political theory. Inherent value marks the main ethical difference between liberal neutrality and illiberal perfectionism...

This paper takes as its starting point the fact of reasonable pluralism and defends political liberalism as the best means of accommodating diversity and a plurality of different conceptions of the good. I then ask what is needed for a social order characterized by diversity and a multiplicity of different ways of life to come into existence and perpetuate itself over time. First, I defend political liberalism and argue that the creation of a society that is accommodating of diversity requires that the state be mindful of the spillover effects between public institutions and the private lives of citizens. Second, I argue that the individuals living in such a society must adopt certain virtues, both publicly as well as privately. I achieve this by presenting an account of the virtues of citizens in a political liberal society. Third, I draw out the implications of having a society characterized by reasonable pluralism and many different conceptions of the good, by arguing that such a society should avoid adopting too expansive a role, since an overly ambitious conception of social justice risks stifling the diversity a political liberal society is trying to protect. I conclude with some general remarks about the current state of liberal theorizing and the need for liberal theorists to provide an account of liberalism that includes more than one’s conception of distributive justice and legitimate state coercion.; Thesis (Master...

El artículo expone la justicia como un problema político desde la perspectiva del filósofo John Rawls. En su desarrollo se señalan las implicaciones del constructivismo kantiano en el constructivismo político rawlsiano. Se discute cómo la conexión entre estos dos tipos de constructivismo, proporciona un procedimiento de construcción, en el que agentes racionalmente autónomos, sujetos a condiciones razonables, elaboran acuerdos sobre principios públicos de justicia para lograr un sistema justo de cooperación que trascienda generacionalmente. Se concluye, mostrando las limitaciones y alcances de esta propuesta en el pensamiento filosófico y político contemporáneo.; This paper discusses justice in terms of political problem as viewed by John Rawls’ philosophy. It claims that the Kantian politic constructivism has some implications on the base of the Rawlsian liberalism. It argues about how the connection between these two different types of constructivism provides a construction procedure in which rational autonomous agents, submitted to reasonable conditions, make agreements concerning public principles about justice in order to reach a fair system of cooperation that goes beyond the generations. It concludes showing the limitations and achievements of the proposal in contemporary political philosophy.

This dissertation develops a political liberal approach to multiculturalism as an alternative to its dismissal by some egalitarian liberals and its celebration by some multicultural liberals. Some egalitarian liberals overstate the liberal tension with group-specific claims, disregard the role of culture in a person's life, and exaggerate the propensity of group-specific claims to exacerbate conflict. Confusing religion with culture, they assign to religion the status of an all purpose good that liberals traditionally assign to income and wealth. While political liberals require that the state grant exemptions to religious practices that violate uniform rules, these egalitarian liberals do not. Some multicultural liberals overstate the liberal failure to accommodate group-specific political claims, exaggerate the role of culture in a person's life, and ignore the invented nature of culture. Confusing culture with religion, they assign to culture the moral weight liberals traditionally assign to religion. Political liberals, however, assign to culture the same social weight they assign to a person's family, firm, neighborhood and other associations. Political liberals also distinguish encompassing groups, such as language-nations or factory-towns...

El autor pretende averiguar cuál es la teoría del Derecho que cabría promover desde el liberalismo político de John Rawls. Para lo cual, toma como punto de partida la tesis sugerida por Ronald Dworkin, según la cual el método del equilibrio reflexivo permite superar el positivismo jurídico, y entender la filosofía del Derecho como una labor interpretativa. A partir de ahí, el trabajo se centra en indagar cuál de las dos interpretaciones que distingue Dworkin —el convencionalismo jurídico o el Derecho como integridad— podría postularse a partir de la filosofía política de Rawls. La conclusión que se defiende es que el liberalismo político y, más concretamente, su idea de la razón pública, podrían servir para avalar el convencionalismo jurídico. No obstante, la «ampliación» de la razón pública del último Rawls parece exigir, fuera de los límites de su liberalismo político, una interpretación basada en la integridad y la coherencia.; The main aim of the author is to discover the theory of law that one would be able to claim from Rawls’ political liberalism. With this, the paper takes for granted Dworkin’s suggestion in the sense that reflexive equilibrium enables the going beyond of legal positivism...

The Virtue ethical approach to morality is generally thought to be in tension with liberalism in politics. Their incompatibility seems to be straightforward when considering political liberalism. This is because the virtue ethical approach to morality seems to be committed to a perfectionist view of society, whereas political liberalism resists this conceptualization. But this is not the only source of trouble between virtue ethics and political liberalism. A more basic problem seems to be that, in a liberal society, there are many incompatible though reasonable comprehensive doctrines. This fact of reasonable pluralism seems to imply that the very idea of characterizing the moral virtues constitutes an impossible task in a liberal society. This conclusion is too quick, however. A non-eudaimonist, consequentialist conception of virtue can find a place within political liberalism, though this account of moral virtue must be qualified in important ways.; Tradicionalmente, la ética de la virtud es caracterizada como si estuviera en tensión con el liberalismo. Su incompatibilidad parece ser directa cuando consideramos al liberalismo político. La razón es que la ética de la virtud parece estar comprometida con una concepción perfeccionista de la sociedad...

The impact and relevance of economic theory to the development of “A Theory of Justice” are often left aside in the immense literature regarding the works of John Rawls. And yet, understanding the elements of political economy in Rawls’work is fundamental for the comprehension of why Rawls will abandons a utilitarian approach to political philosophy and, consequentially, for our understanding of the main issues that motivate the notion of Justice as Fairness.  This article has two mains goals: First, to describe the influence of John Stuart Mill, Kenneth Arrow and Vilfredo Pareto in the methodological turn found in the idea of the Original Position; and second, to describe the historical elements that are presupposed for the conceivability of Rawls’ ideals. I conclude the present paper with some remarks suggesting a historicist and phenomenological complement to the ideal descriptions found in political liberalism as understood by Rawls.; O impacto e a relevância da teoria econômica para o desenvolvimento de A Theory of Justice são, frequentemente, deixados de lado na imensa literatura a respeito das obras de John Rawls. Ainda assim, entender os elementos de economia política na obra de Rawls é fundamental para a compreensão dos motivos pelos quais ele abandonará uma abordagem utilitarista para a filosofia política e...

This thesis advances a defence of Richard Rorty's political liberalism. It is widely held that what Rorty calls anti-foundationalism either consciously proposes, or logically entails, the denial both of ethical commitment and the possibility of moral justification. Others argue that Rorty reduces commitment to a parochial concern, and that justification is relative to the standards of a narrowly conceived community. Commitment and justification, it is said, reduce to pointing out whatever it is that constitutes 'the way we happen to do things around here'. In turn, anti-foundationalism is said to render obsolete any normative project in political theory. The thesis rejects these claims, arguing that Rorty does not reduce commitment and justification in this way. Anti-foundationalism is shown not to reduce reason-giving to 'what we happen to think around here', and it is also cleansed of claims that it is relativistic, irrational and nihilistic. Justification as the response for reasonable requests for explanation of our beliefs and practices remains important for Rorty, centrally in his account of justification through 'wide reflective equilibrium'. The thesis shows how Rorty's view of liberal ironism is the completion, not the negation...

Over the course of (roughly) the past three decades, much of contemporary liberal political theory has followed John Rawls and taken a ‘political’ turn. Liberalism, it is now generally supposed, is a ‘political’ doctrine, not a philosophy of life. The most influential account of such a liberalism is public reason liberalism. According to public reason liberals, political rules and decisions have to be justified by appeal to ideas or arguments that those subject to them (at some level of idealisation) endorse or accept. Public reason is the standard by which moral or political rules can be assessed. In this thesis I do two things. First, I offer a critique of public reason liberalism. I argue that it fails to live up to the ideal of liberal reason, that it fails to take diversity seriously, and that it is based on a problematic account of political institutions. Second, I articulate a genuinely ‘political’ alternative, which I call a liberalism without liberals. I develop this alternative on the basis of a re-interpretation of David Hume’s critique of the social contract and of his account of pluralism, the moral order and social criticism. I argue that Hume understands political society as the product of shared interests and not (as social contract theorists suppose) as an embodiment of a common will. I also argue that Hume offers a compelling...

The thesis is a defence of contractualism in liberal political theory. My aim is to show that contractualism can play a crucial role in the political theory of liberalism if it applies to the meta-ethical level rather than the ethical level. In particular, I will argue that the contractualist concept of 'reasonable agreement' provides the foundation for a new comprehensive liberal political theory. The basic intuition behind the idea of reasonable agreement is that all principles and rules must be capable of being justified to everyone: these are principles and rules on which everyone could reach agreement, where the agreement is defined in terms of what no one could reasonably reject. The first introductory chapter will attempt to establish that contractualism reflects the ethical core of liberalism, and that the contractualist theory of reasonable agreement gives the best account of egalitarianism. This will be followed by six chapters, divided in two parts, and a brief conclusion. Part I presents the case for contractualism from a theoretical angle, providing a conceptual analysis of reasonable agreement. Part II examines reasonable agreement from a political angle, providing an analysis of three key questions in political liberalism. The three chapters making up Part I deal with the theories of Rawls and Scanlon...

The thesis argues that there are a number of pluralist ethical theories each one of which exemplifies traits that make it compatible, to different degrees, with different liberal doctrines. The pluralist ethical theories on which I focus are Berlinian value pluralism, lexical pluralism, non-linear value pluralism, value pluralism as reasonable disagreement and Kekes' theory of primary and secondary values. While delineating these pluralist variations, I also investigate their relationship with moral relativism and moral objectivism. Then I proceed to examine their compatibility with different liberal doctrines. The liberalisms examined are Mill's liberalism, Rawls' liberalism in A Theory of Justice and Rawls' liberalism in Political Liberalism, while there is also reference to Kekes' conservatism which is derived from pluralist premises. Then I continue by focusing specifically on the relationship between ethical pluralism and Raz's liberal perfectionism. I present my understanding of Raz's liberal system of ideas and I specify the two concepts in which I will tackle the issue of its compatibility with ethical pluralism. Firstly, I exercise the methodology that I have used in my discussion regarding the compatibility between different pluralisms and different liberalisms by examining the compatibility of liberal perfectionism with ethical pluralisms of variable radical aspirations. Secondly...

As a doctrine of political legitimacy, liberalism introduced nations as the only legitimate units through which liberty was to be articulated. In historical reality, liberalism has affirmed the concept of liberty through the self-legitimising acts of national liberation, thereby generating nationalism as its historical by-product. My thesis focuses on their common conceptual core, through textual analyses of several classical liberal authors, each of whom represents one century and is granted one chapter. Algernon Sidney (17th century) was the first author who defined nations as the sole, self-referential source of political legitimacy, whose liberty was to be achieved through establishment of their own legislative institutions, by which they self referentially legitimised themselves as ‘nations’. Rousseau (18th century)defined liberty as identification of man’s individual will with the presumed will of the entire society, which provided nationalism with a sociopsychological mechanism and philosophical rationale for its subsequent emergence and functioning on the societal level. Rawls’s concept of justice (20th century) develops this mechanism further, as a perpetual reciprocal recognition between the nation’s individual members. This ritual recognition of one another as free and equal is reciprocally extended only between co-nationals but non-reciprocally denied to all non-members: as members of other nations...

This thesis offers the first systematic critical examination of the political thought of Bernard Williams; explains the relation between his political realism and his critical assessment of much modern moral philosophy, and discusses how his work illuminates the debates about the nature and purpose of political theory. I defend Williams’s fundamental claim that the central questions of political morality arise within politics and argue accordingly that political theory should not, contrary to the position implicit in much contemporary political theory, in the first instance be seen as an exercise in applying a set of external moral principles to politics. I argue that although Williams’s critique of contemporary political theory is mistaken in its claim that contemporary political theorists conventionally endorse a monolithic form of moralism, he convincingly shows that political theory should begin with an understanding of the distinctive character of politics, as this enables us to understand the goods that are internal to it. In this regard, Williams’s realism is best read as an attempt to make ethical sense of politics, and as an attempt to explain how we can continue to affirm a kind of liberalism, without recourse to the moralised presuppositions that he insists we must jettison. I go on to argue that by developing the insights of Williams’s late work we can articulate a defence of liberalism that has marked advantages over the ‘high liberalism’ that most contemporary liberal theorists defend. This latter argument illustrates the distinctiveness of Williams’s contribution to contemporary debates about realism in political theory as most of the realist thinkers with whom he is grouped endorse a form of realism in order to impugn liberalism.