The year 2021 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, a work that was said to revive political philosophy when it was published in 1971. To mark the anniversary, and the centenary of Rawls’s birth, the University of Notre Dame hosted a two-day international conference: John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at Fifty. Planning for the conference began with the issuance of invitations in 2018. While the conference itself was held in the midst of a global pandemic that could not have been foreseen when planning began, it took place in the window between the spread of the Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus. Some who hoped to attend were unable to do so because of public health protocols. But the conference drew 140 registrants from fifteen states and a half dozen countries. For almost everyone in attendance, the conference was their first since the onset of the pandemic. Their shared sense that the academic world was opening up again made the occasion all the more celebratory.

Because planning for the conference began so far in advance, it was possible to secure commitments from many of the best political philosophers now working. The conversation within and between sessions was deep and probing. While it is impossible for a volume of conference essays to recreate the excitement of a conference, it is to be hoped that this volume will give readers some sense of the very high quality of work done at the conference and will advance both Rawls scholarship and political philosophy.

It is unfortunate that the volume does not include essays by two philosophers who were to have taken part: Jerry Gaus and Charles Mills. Their deaths are great losses to the field and their absence from the conference was sorely felt. But Jerry’s position was ably represented by his student and friend Kevin Vallier, whose essay appears here. Charles Mills’s illness would have prevented him from traveling to Notre Dame, but he had hoped to deliver his remarks by zoom. Sadly, he passed away days before the conference and we missed the benefit of even his virtual presence. Tommie Shelby and Henry Richardson, who were to have shared the podium with him, paid tribute to him in the session in which all three of them were to have spoken, as did the session chair James Sterba.

In the course of developing and revising his theory, Rawls contributed to – and sometimes set the agenda for – a number of sub-areas of political and moral philosophy. He was also an accomplished historian of philosophy whose readings of his predecessors have proven immensely influential. Because Rawls worked on so many questions and had such wide influence, it is understandable that there were no lines of inquiry that ran through the conference in its entirety and that unite all of the essays in this volume. There were, however, threads that bound together groups of essays, sometimes in unexpected ways. The essays in this volume have been grouped so as to reflect those thematic continuities, but there are also interesting intersectional dialogues among the essays that will be noted along the way.

I.1 Rawls and History

Rawls lectured regularly on the history of political and moral philosophy. Many of his students have gone on to do important and creative historical work. It was therefore natural to have a section on Rawls and the history of philosophy at the conference and to devote Part I of the conference volume to it.

In Chapter 1, S. A. Lloyd argues that Rawls’s theory provides what her title refers to as “taillight illumination.” By that she means that Rawls’s theory casts light backwards in the history of political philosophy, illuminating previously neglected features of his predecessors’ work. The predecessor whom she takes Rawls to illuminate is Thomas Hobbes, on whom Lloyd has done groundbreaking work, beginning with Loyd (Reference Lloyd1992). Lloyd argues that in light of Rawls’s development of political liberalism, certain features of Hobbes’s work can be seen in sharper relief. The feature on which she focuses is Hobbes’s political conception of the person. Seeing that conception at work in Hobbes, she thinks, both raises the possibility that Hobbes pioneered political liberalism and helps to break the hold of the game-theoretic interpretations of Hobbes that have been so prominent in the literature on him.

Daniel Brudney’s “The Theory Rawls, the 1844 Marx, and the Market” (Chapter 2) juxtaposes the Rawls of 1971 with a thinker with whom he is not often compared: the Marx of 1844. If Lloyd uses Rawls to provide taillight illumination of his predecessors, Brudney uses Marx to provide what we might call “headlight illumination” of Rawls. For he uses Marx to highlight an important but underappreciated element of A Theory of Justice and to bring to light an unappreciated and worrisome tension in that work. More specifically, Brudney argues that Marx’s true communist society would be characterized by a “give/receive” relationship in which citizens care for one another’s well-being. Having isolated the defining features of that relationship, Brudney then argues that such a relationship would also characterize the well-ordered society of A Theory of Justice. That is the underappreciated element of Rawls’s theory and the one that gives rise to the unappreciated tension.

Brudney argues that the market activity Rawls allows in a well-ordered society would threaten the relationships of mutual care to which he is committed. But Brudney also argues that restricting the role of markets so as to preserve those relationships may well run afoul of what members of a market society may take as a tenet of common sense, since in a market society citizens may believe that indifference rather than mutual care is natural to us. In that case, the market restrictions necessary to preserve the give/receive relationship among citizens might not be publicly justifiable by appeal to the common sense of citizens and the deliverances of social science, as Rawls’s commitment to public reason requires. It seems that Rawls can have mutual care or mutual justifiability but not both. In raising the possibility that mutual care cannot be had, Brudney’s is the first essay in this collection – but not the last – to raise the possibility that the society Rawls envisioned may be vulnerable to, rather than stabilized by, the internal dynamics its institutions generate.

Aaron James’s “Rawls, Lerner, and the Tax-and-Spend Booby Trap: What Happened to Monetary Policy?” (Chapter 3) locates Rawls, not in the history of philosophy, but in the history of economic thought – specifically in the economic thought of the mid-twentieth century. James argues that Rawls, like much of political philosophy, accepts the axioms of what he calls “sound finance.” According to sound finance, budgets should be balanced and expenditures – including transfers and social programs needed to satisfy the principles of justice – should be paid for out of tax revenues. Accepting the second of these axioms leaves Rawls vulnerable to Nozick’s famous critique of redistributive views: that the taxation needed to finance them is tantamount to forced labor and is therefore morally unacceptable.

James notes that as early as the 1930s and ’40s some economists – notably Abba Lerner, whom James says Rawls read with care – had developed an alternative to sound finance: “functional finance.” These economists argued that the view of taxation as a revenue-raising device is obsolete in a society that has moved off the gold standard. Once the gold standard has been abandoned, central banks can provide all the resources societies need – including all that they need to satisfy the difference principle – by increasing the money supply. The question James raises is why Rawls ignored functional finance.

This is not just a historical question, since the embrace of sound finance left Rawls open to Nozick’s objection and since functional finance has recently been championed in an important new work of economics (Marglin Reference Marglin2021). Moreover, James observes in passing that Rawls’s acceptance of sound finance led him to rely on markets, suitably regulated, to achieve distributive justice. If Brudney is right about the tension in Rawls’s view induced by his reliance on markets, then the question James raises about Rawls’s neglect of functional finance is even more pressing than James says.

In “Rawls’s Principles of Justice as a Transcendence of Class Warfare” (Chapter 4), Elizabeth Anderson locates Rawls in the history of social democratic thought. She begins by observing that in the 1980s, corporate elites in the United States initiated a series of assaults on the New Deal consensus. They justified their largely successful assaults and their economic gains by meritocratic arguments. Those arguments, Anderson says, are similar to the desert-based arguments wielded by elites in the class warfare of the late nineteenth century. But, she observes, it was not only nineteenth-century elites who appealed to desert. Representatives of all different class interests appealed to desert – albeit different conceptions of desert – to ground their claims. Where all such arguments misfire, Anderson says, is in the confusion of local and systemic principles. Local principles “directly guide agents in distributing goods to specific individuals.” Systemic principles “govern the choice of systems of local principles by constraining their overall distributive consequences, defined in terms of opportunities for various goods.” Desert may be appropriate for local application, but it is an inappropriate basis for systemic principles of distributive justice.

One side may gain the upper hand in class warfare if it successfully enforces its desert claims. But Anderson argues that class warfare can be transcended only with general acceptance of appropriate systemic principles grounded on shared democratic citizenship. This approach was pioneered early in the twentieth century by the Social Democratic Party of Sweden. “Rawls’s principles of justice,” Andersons says, are also grounded on common citizenship and so “aim to … end[] a class-based society” and thereby transcend class warfare. She warns that the elimination of class distinctions may not lead to the elimination of other forms of hierarchy. But by attempting to transcend class warfare, and to envision a society in which all share the status of free equals, Anderson thinks Rawlsians fall squarely within the tradition of social democracy.

Peter de Marneffe’s essay “The Significance of Injustice” (Chapter 5) is perhaps the most provocative in the collection. De Marneffe begins with what he calls “the traditional view of justice.” That is a view of justice he finds in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Hume, and Kant. According to that view, injustice entails that a person suffering an injustice has been wronged. “Injustice in the traditional sense,” de Marneffe says, “has a special kind of significance for our relations to each other.” But, he continues “the failure of our social institutions to conform to Rawls’s two principles of justice does not have [that significance].” The reason it does not, de Marneffe argues, is that institutions can fail to conform with Rawls’s principles without anyone having performed actions that would warrant the reactive attitudes the tradition thinks are natural responses to injustice. It follows that Rawls’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding (TJ 1999, 9–10), his theory of justice does not “tally with” the traditional view of justice.

De Marneffe concludes that what Rawls has given us is not a theory of right and wrong or part of a theory of right and wrong. What he has given us is “a vision of the ideal democratic society” – perhaps, though de Marneffe does not says so, a vision of an ideal social democratic society à la Anderson. That society may be “something worthy of aspiration” but, de Marneffe concludes, realizing that society is “not necessary for mutual respect.”

I.2 Developments between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism

Part II of the volume is made up of four essays on the development of Rawls’s views in the crucial two decades between the publication of A Theory of Justice and the publication of Political Liberalism. It opens with an essay – Stephen Darwall’s “On Being a Self-Originating Source of Valid ‘Claims’” (Chapter 6) – that dovetails nicely with de Marneffe’s.

Darwall notes that Rawls introduces his description of persons as “self-originating sources of valid claims” in his Dewey Lectures, published in 1980. The Dewey Lectures are the writings in which Rawls’s Kantianism was at its apogee. Darwall argues that by adding the description of persons as self-originating sources of claims to his theory, Rawls filled a lacuna or remedied a defect in the Kantian interpretation of the theory he had laid out in section 40 of A Theory of Justice.

In section 40, Rawls says that we express our nature when we act from principles chosen in the original position. A society in which everyone realizes her nature may be what de Marneffe called “something worthy of aspiration.” But, Darwall argues, the fact that we express our nature when we act from the principles does not imply that those principles are principles of right. For Darwall, like de Marneffe, thinks that principles of right are principles whose violation properly elicits certain reactive attitudes, such as guilt from oneself and blame from others. A failure to express our nature – or, as de Marneffe might have it, to realize something worthy of aspiration – elicits attitudes of an entirely different kind. Once persons are conceived of as self-originating sources of valid claims, however, they are conceived of as having the authority to hold one another accountable, and so to blame one another, for their failures. Parties in the original position, who represent persons so conceived, then choose principles that can properly be called principles of right.

Darwall does not address the question of whether violations of Rawls’s two principles, which apply to the basic structure, properly occasion reactive attitudes with respect to other persons. His essay does not, therefore, have implications for the most fundamental worry de Marneffe raised. But it does show how Rawls supplemented his view after the publication of Theory so as to incorporate what de Marneffe calls “the traditional view of justice.” The essay also shows, in a very satisfying way, how Darwall’s own pioneering work on the second-person standpoint bears on the interpretation and viability of Rawls’s theory.

Samuel Scheffler’s “Moral Independence Revisited” (Chapter 7) also concerns the development of Rawls’s thought after publication of A Theory of Justice – in Scheffler’s case, the development that eventually led Rawls to recast his theory as a political liberalism.

In the introduction to Political Liberalism, Rawls credits Scheffler (Reference Scheffler1979) with having played an important role in that development. Scheffler begins his contribution to this volume by reviewing the argument of his essay and by asking what it was about that essay that led to such significant changes in Rawls’s thought. To answer that question, he turns not only to Rawls’s published work – prominently including “The Independence of Moral Theory” and the Dewey Lectures – but also to unpublished correspondence and to unpublished lectures that Rawls delivered in the late 1970s and 1980s. The result is an informed and nuanced discussion of Rawls’s attempt simultaneously to establish political philosophy’s independence from metaphysical questions about personal identity and philosophy of mind, and to give his conception of the person the central place that constructivism demands. Scheffler concludes by observing that Rawls thought he finally resolved the tension between those goals only in Political Liberalism, where he developed the political conception of the person and the political version of constructivism.

Rainer Forst’s “The Method of Insulation” (Chapter 8) – like Darwall’s and Scheffler’s essays – treats of the development of Rawls’s thought between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. His contribution, like Scheffler’s, attends closely to Rawls’s “Independence of Moral Theory” and his Dewey Lectures. Like Scheffler, Forst zeroes in on Rawls’s attempt to insulate political philosophy from other areas of philosophy. And like Scheffler, Forst discerns a tension in Rawls’s view, albeit a different one than Scheffler identified. The tension Forst discerns is between (i) the autonomy or insularity of a political conception of justice from what Rawls famously called “comprehensive doctrines” and (ii) the political conception’s dependence on those doctrines for the moral force they need to trump unreasonable views. Forst is far less sanguine than Scheffler about Rawls’s ability to resolve the tension he discerns. He concludes that “the struggle for ever more independence led to the danger of philosophical and normative dependence, and the island that Rawls tried to create is in danger of being washed away.”

Japa Pallikkathayuil opens “The Stability or Fragility of Justice” (Chapter 9) by laying out the concerns about Theory’s treatment of stability that, Rawls says, led him to recast justice as fairness as a political liberalism. That Rawls should have been moved by these concerns shows that he regarded stability as an important feature of a conception of justice. Pallikkathayuil asks why he accords it such importance, a question she pursues by addressing Gerald Cohen’s claim that stability is alien to justice (Cohen Reference Cohen2008, 328). She argues that Rawls takes stability to be an important feature of justice as fairness because he thinks the role of that conception is to establish fair terms of cooperation and that any such terms are bound to be stable.

But she also contends, in sympathy with another of Cohen’s criticisms, that the concept of justice has application even in circumstances where mutually advantageous cooperation is not possible – hence not only in what Rawls identifies as the circumstances of justice. “What matters” for the applicability of justice, she says, is precisely the claim that Darwall said Rawls needed to make if the parties in the original position are to choose principles of justice properly so called: “that we are ‘self-authenticating sources of valid claims.’” Pallikkathayil insists that broadening the circumstances of justice beyond the circumstances of cooperation does not require giving up what she regards as the core Rawlsian insight: that the point of justice is to establish an inherently stable relationship of mutual justifiability among citizens. But she concludes by suggesting that a relationship of mutual justifiability might not be secured by the Rawlsian ideal of public reason. Stability and mutual justifiability may be achievable, she thinks, but they may require a non-Rawlsian conception of how citizens reason together.

I.3 Rawls, Ideal Theory, and the Persistence of Injustice

Essays in Part III of the volume ask whether Rawls’s theory is capable of handling cases of injustice, prominently including racial injustice. As would be expected, Charles Mills figures prominently in all of the essays here. It is regrettable beyond measure that he was not able to contribute an essay of his own to this part of the volume.

The first essay in Part III, like the final essay in Part II, argues for modifying Rawls’s account of the circumstances of justice. In “The Circumstances of Justice” (Chapter 10), Erin Kelly argues that the circumstances should be taken to include contingent facts about a society’s history of injustice and exploitation. Kelly is especially interested in the US history of racial injustice. Such historical circumstances make justice necessary and, Kelly argues, parties in Rawls’s original position should take account of them when adopting principles of justice. Thus does she think the resources of Rawlsian political philosophy can be brought to bear on legacies of domination and structural injustice. Moreover, Kelly thinks that once we see Rawlsian principles as remedies to historic injustice, we can add to the reasons Rawls offers for thinking that justice is a good. Justice is a good because it helps to effect moral repair in response to collective wrongdoing. Kelly contrasts her approach with the way it is usually thought Rawls would handle problems of historical injustice, by relegating them to the realm of non-ideal theory. She concludes by sketching some affinities between her approach to the grave injustice of racism and the approach of Charles Mills.

Henry Richardson begins “Why Rawls’s Ideal Theory Leaves the Well-Ordered Society Vulnerable to Structural Oppression” (Chapter 11) with the frank acknowledgment that Mills’s work reveals a flaw in Rawlsian ideal theory. The well-ordered society of justice as fairness does not contain adequate bulwarks against racism, so even a just society could eventually come to be marred by bigoted oppression. Richardson’s conclusion recalls and promises to vindicate Elizabeth Anderson’s closing warning that elimination of economic class hierarchy does not mean the elimination of hierarchies of other kinds. And it anticipates arguments by Kevin Vallier and Joshua Cohen that the justice of Rawls’s well-ordered society may be more vulnerable than Rawls acknowledged.

The vulnerability of a well-ordered society is due, Richardson argues, to Rawls’s overly juridical understanding of the basic structure and his overly moralized conception of power. The basic structure as Rawls conceives it consists only of some legally constituted institutions and of the legally constrained aspects of others. Power as Rawls conceives it is overly moralized because it excludes various kinds of de facto power and the power exercised by informally constituted in-groups. Members of these groups may gain power through access to cultural and social capital that others do not enjoy. Even in a well-ordered society, the elite snobbism that can develop among those with such access can eventually – through stages Richardson hypothesizes – lead to exclusion and domination that are unjustifiable but beyond the reach of law. But while Charles Mills criticized Rawls for pursuing ideal theory, Richardson believes the flaws he identifies in Rawlsian ideal theory can be repaired; how to repair them is the one of the subjects of Richardson’s ongoing work.

In “Race, Reparations and Justice as Fairness” (Chapter 12), Tommie Shelby acknowledges that Rawlsian ideal theory would be gravely flawed if it could not condemn racial injustice. He has argued in other work that it can. In this essay, he argues – contra Charles Mills – that reparations for past racial injustice are consistent with the essentials of Rawls’s theory. Thus he argues that parties in the original position would acknowledge a natural duty of reparation. He also argues, in the spirit of the priority Rawls accords the basic structure as a subject of justice, that attaining a just basic structure should have priority over the duty to make reparations for past injustices and that reparations made for recent injustices must be consistent with attaining and maintaining a just basic structure.

In “On the Role of the Original Position in Rawls’s Theory” (Chapter 13), Laura Valentini asks what a normative theory is and insists on the importance of distinguishing the desiderata of normative theories from the evidence supporting them. This distinction is, she says, crucial to rebutting two quite different critiques of Rawls. One is Charles Mills’s critique that Rawls’s theory is excessively idealized. The other is a criticism touched on by Pallikkathayil’s essay: Gerald Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s constructivism as fact-sensitive.

Both Mill’s and Cohen’s criticisms of Rawls zero in on the role of the original position. But, Valentini argues, these criticisms are not criticisms of Rawls’s theory properly speaking because the original position is not, properly speaking, part of Rawls’s theory. Arguments from the original position are evidence for, rather than part of, that theory. Rawls’s aims justify his reliance on evidence provided by an idealized choice situation in which principles are adopted for idealized conditions. Mill’s critique of ideal theory therefore misfires. Moreover, given those aims – which include formulating an account of justice that can enduringly well-order human societies in the circumstances of justice – a theory that has those aims must be fact-sensitive. So Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s principles as fact-sensitive misfires as well. Of course one can reject Rawls’s aims, as Mills and Cohen seem to do. But, Valentini insists, to reject the aims of a theory is not to reject the theory itself.

I.4 Pluralism, Democracy, and the Future of Justice as Fairness

Kevin Vallier’s “Public Reason at Fifty” (Chapter 14) concerns what he calls “the public reason project” as it developed through Rawls’s writings and beyond. The public reason project is the project of determining what basic social arrangements, if any, can be justified to everyone who is subject to them. Rawls clearly pursued that project. Indeed, we saw that the argument of Daniel Brudney’s essay turned on Brudney’s claim that mutual justifiability by public reason is one of Rawls’s central commitments. The late Gerald Gaus also pursued it. Vallier defends the superiority of Gaus’s approach to the project because, he thinks, it effectively responds to the failure of Rawls’s.

To see the failure that Vallier thinks undermines the Rawlsian approach, recall a point Pallikkathayil discussed in her essay: Rawls thinks the best conception of justice is the one that is most likely to be enduringly or stably adhered to once it is instituted. The Rawls of A Theory of Justice defended justice as fairness on the ground that it satisfied that desideratum. Vallier presents the development of Rawls’s thought after Theory as a series of attempts to remedy what he found unsatisfactory in that defense. Vallier contends that the free society Rawls’s principles of justice require is bound to be characterized by reasonable pluralism about justice. The three models of public reason Vallier says Rawls developed in A Theory of Justice, and then in Political Liberalism and its paperback edition, attempt first to deny and then to contain such justice pluralism.

Rawls’s hope was to show that the desideratum he asserted in Theory would be satisfied by justice as fairness or by a small family of liberal conceptions of justice. But, Vallier thinks, none of the Rawlsian models succeeds. Gaus’s response to this failure developed significantly over many years; Vallier identifies four models of public reason in Gaus’s writings. Though Vallier does not say so here, it seems that the momentum of Gaus’s thought was carrying him toward the denial that stability is a desideratum. If that is right, then a non-Rawlsian conception of public reasoning leads to a very different place than Pallikkathayil suggests at the end of her essay.

Samuel Freeman (Chapter 15), like Vallier, is interested in the ways Rawls revised his view to accommodate the possibility of what Vallier called “justice pluralism.” Freeman notes that in his published writings of the middle 1990s, Rawls introduced the ideas of a well-ordered liberal society and a well-ordered constitutional democratic society. These are societies governed by one or another reasonable liberal political conception of justice. Much of Freeman’s essay is devoted to identifying the formal and substantive features of such societies. One important formal feature, he says, is that citizens accept the criterion of reciprocity.

Reciprocity is shown by citizens’ willingness to offer one another shared public reasons, considerations whose reason-giving force all citizens recognize in virtue of their shared status as free equals. This requirement differs from the conception of public reason that Pallikkathayil recommends at the end of her essay and from the view of public reason endorsed by Vallier in other work (Vallier and Muldoon, Reference Vallier and Muldoon2021). These two alternative views, Freeman might say, violate the condition of reciprocity. Conceptions of justice satisfy the criterion of reciprocity only if they require fair equality of opportunity, and include limits on economic inequalities and a commitment to full employment. It follows, Freeman thinks, that “neo-liberal and libertarian views including the classical and libertarian-liberal positions of Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Epstein, Gaus, Tomasi, Schmidtz, Brennan, and others” are not reasonable conceptions of justice. This conclusion enables us to see how Freeman would respond to Vallier. Vallier’s objection that Rawls cannot accommodate justice pluralism is premised on the claim that the range of reasonable conceptions of justice includes conceptions whose reasonability Freeman would deny.

My own contribution to the volume, “Religious Pluralism and Social Unions” (Chapter 16), takes up the role and fate of the concept of a social union in Rawls’s work. Rawls’s claim that a well-ordered society would be a social union of social unions does important work in A Theory of Justice, but the idea of a social union virtually disappears from Rawls’s work after “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority.” In “Reply to Habermas,” Rawls says that the idea is no longer viable once we appreciate the fact of reasonable pluralism. I argue that it is no longer viable because Rawls’s use of the idea depended on an assumption I call “the security assumption.” According to that assumption, the security of the basic liberties in a social union of social unions makes it psychologically possible for citizens in the well-ordered society to enjoy the diverse public culture of a free society. I canvas reasons Rawls might have rejected the assumption and suggest that the security assumption – or its violation – helps to explain the degraded state of our own public life.

The next two essays in Part IV are about Rawls on democracy.

David Estlund has long-standing interests in the question of what justifies democratic procedures for political decision-making, and whether those procedures can be justified because of their epistemic merits (Estlund Reference Estlund2008). In “One Person, At Least One Vote? Rawls on Political Equality … within Limits” (Chapter 17), Estlund argues on textual and doctrinal grounds that Rawls is not in-principle opposed to John Stuart Mill’s proposal of plural voting. According to Mill’s proposal, citizens who are most likely to make just and wise political decisions would be entitled to more than one vote or to cast votes weighted more heavily than those of other citizens. According to Estlund’s reading of Rawls, Rawls would allow such plural voting so long as that measure would do better than the alternatives at protecting and promoting the other liberties, especially the other liberties of those who have the least liberty. What Estlund calls Rawls’s “lift all boats exception” – the element of Rawls’s theory that justifies inequalities in income, wealth and opportunity – could justify inequalities in the right to vote as well.

Joshua Cohen’s “Reflections on Democratic Fragility” (Chapter 18) explores Rawls’s concern that democracy might be fragile even under favorable conditions. Cohen assumes for the sake of argument that citizens all endorse reasonable comprehensive doctrines and reasonable political conceptions of justice, but that those conceptions will differ because of the burdens of judgment. Because all reasonable political conceptions endorse some form of democracy, all citizens will endorse it. But, Cohen observes, because of citizens’ different histories, experiences, and interests, they may support different conceptions of democracy. Indeed, Cohen observes “we may see deep disagreement among [citizens’] conceptions of justice, the forms of democracy they recommend, and the interests and identities of citizens who endorse those competing conceptions.” These disagreements may be so deep that

In A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, Rawls was concerned that even in a well-ordered society, citizens’ interest in pursuing their conception of the good – together with their uncertainly about others’ commitments – might move them to defect from the agreement that would be reached in the original position. That is, he was concerned that citizens might find it individually rational to defect from the choice that is collectively rational and that justice would be undone by a collective action problem. In both books, he offered intricate and powerful arguments for the claim that goodness and rightness are congruent. Summing up those arguments, he said that “the hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good” (TJ 1999, 505).

Cohen, in effect, raises the possibility that because citizens embrace different conceptions of justice, democracy may be threatened by a generalized prisoner’s dilemma even if Rawls’s congruence arguments succeed. Thus Cohen returns to the justice pluralism that figured prominently in Vallier’s and Freeman’s essays to argue, as Richardson had, that a well-ordered society might not be as stably just as Rawls hoped. Cohen recognizes that removing the hazard to which he calls attention requires that “an appreciation of reasonable disagreement on the fundamentals of justice – of the fact of reasonable political pluralism – itself have a genuine practical grip on the public, political culture.” This, he grants, “imposes great expectations on public reason and the associated duty of civility.” But he closes by expressing the hope that those great expectations can be met.

The final essay in the collection is Leif Wenar’s (Chapter 19). Where the essays in Part I looked back to the history of political philosophy, Wenar looks fifty years forward, asking “What parts of Justice as Fairness might spread beyond the academy into American public culture by the 100th anniversary [of Theory], in 2071?”. He argues that the original position, the object of so much attention in the copious literature on Rawls, is too cognitively and culturally inaccessible to become part of public political culture. What Wenar finds in Rawls, and what he thinks might become part of that culture, is the model of social relations that gives his essay its title: “A Society of Self-Respect.”

Wenar’s explication of the model depends upon a contrast that was drawn by Anderson in her essay, a contrast between Rawlsian and meritocratic justifications of distribution. When claims of merit and desert are used to justify large inequalities such as those that prevail in the contemporary United States, Wenar says, the result is a politics of envy and resentment in which some citizens derive their sense of self-respect from class or ethnic identity. By contrast, the Rawlisan justification of equal basic rights, of fair equality of opportunity, and of whatever inequalities the difference principle allows, all bolster citizens’ self-respect. Wenar’s focus is on the respect citizens have for themselves. But he observes that when citizens respect themselves, they are likely to respect one another. Wenar does not argue, against de Marneffe’s closing claim, that realizing the Rawlsian model is necessary for mutual respect. But he does make the case that realizing it is sufficient. In my own essay, I suggested that Rawls’s theory might help us understand some of the alienation characteristic of contemporary American politics. Wenar, like Anderson, suggests that his theory might help us not only to understand the divisiveness of our politics, but also to transcend it.

It would seem inappropriate to close this introduction without paying homage to the thinker whose powerful and compelling vision of a just society has been a source of inspiration and inquiry for half a century. But tribute is sometimes better paid in work than in words. It is sometimes better shown than said. The willingness of so many outstanding philosophers to lay aside their other projects, and to produce such superb essays, is a far greater tribute to John Rawls than anything that could be said here. The collection of those essays is dedicated to his memory.

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Readers may be helped by a couple of notes about citation practices. Rawls’s works are cited parenthetically in the text according to abbreviations given in the front matter. Authors of the essays collected here have usually cited only the 1999 edition of A Theory of Justice. Sometimes reference to the 1971 edition or to both the 1971 and 1999 editions was necessary for comparison’s sake or to analyze the development of Rawls’s thought. In all cases, footnotes and parenthetical citations will make clear which edition is being cited. In the case of works published before 1900, every effort has been made to cite using the standard scholarly apparatus and the pagination of a contemporary edition.