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Chapter 16 - Social Contract Fragmentation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2025

William A. Edmundson
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
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Summary

Rawls had misgivings about the account of stability he gave in A Theory of Justice. It ignored “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” that is, that the social contract has to attract people who disagree about fundamental values of the kind embraced in “comprehensive” doctrines. The contract doctrine welcomes reasonable comprehensive doctrines but forbids the use of state power to promote a comprehensive liberalism, which he confessed he had assumed. There is also a “fact of oppression,” that no state can stabilize itself by imposing a comprehensive doctrine without resorting to the tactics of Torquemada or Stalin. A “liberal principle of legitimacy” forbids this. One must hope for an “overlapping consensus” of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines to settle upon a “political conception of justice.” Rawls’s concessions may lead even further, amounting to a “fact of justice pluralism,” that is, that there are multiple, incompatible, but equally reasonable political conceptions of justice – including ones that reject political equality as Rawls conceives it. Rawls admitted there was a “family” of such conceptions but insisted that each must satisfy a “criterion of reciprocity.” This chapter ekes out Rawls’s published remarks to construct a “reciprocity” argument for fair value, complementing the “stability” argument of Chapter 15.

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Chapter
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The Social Contract
Political Equality from Putney to Rawls
, pp. 202 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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