Description
Book SynopsisIn Why Political Liberalism? Paul Weithman offers a fresh, rigorous, and compelling interpretation of John Rawls''s reasons for taking his so-called political turn. Weithman takes Rawls at his word that justice as fairness was recast as a form of political liberalism because of an inconsistency Rawls found in his early treatment of social stability. He argues that the inconsistency is best seen by identifying the threats to stability with which the early Rawls was concerned. One of those threats, often overlooked by Rawls''s readers, is the threat that the justice of a well-ordered society would be undermined by a generalized prisoner''s dilemma. Showing how the Rawls of A Theory of Justice tried to avert that threat shows that the much-neglected third part of that book is of considerably greater philosophical interest, and has considerably more unity of focus, than is generally appreciated. Weithman painstakingly reconstructs Rawls''s attempts to show that a just society would be stab
Trade Reviewnot only a convincing rebuttal of the standard story ... but more importantly, a detailed reconstruction of the parts of the argument Rawls ultimately found to be wanting, the flaws Rawls discovered there, and the ways that the pieces of the later work serve to fix those problems. ... Weithman's reconstruction of both the original argument in A Theory of Justice and the later, political, replacement, are masterpieces of close, almost scholastic, exegesis. * Anthony Simon Laden, Mind *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; List of Tables ; Introduction ; 1. The Public Basis of View ; 2. Stability and Congruence ; 3. Ideals and Inconsistency ; 4. The Acquisition of Four Desires ; 5. Thin Reasons to be Just ; 6. The Argument from Love and Justice ; 7. Kantian Congruence and the Unified Self ; 8. The Great Unraveling ; 9. The Political Ideals of Justice as Fairness ; 10. Comprehensive Reasons to be Just ; Conclusion
