I argue that the legitimacy of the political conception of justice is not sufficient to guarantee stability, which prompted Rawls's turn to political liberalism. To make political liberalism broadly inclusive, Rawls believes that the scope of justice must be limited to the political domain.
The Stability of Justice as Fairness
The Second Stability Question: From Congruence to Overlapping Consensus
Rawls can no longer ask whether a person's sense of justice is congruent with her goods. In PL, the second question of stability is formulated with explicit reference to the fact of reasonable pluralism, and Rawls' answer depends on showing that reasonable comprehensive doctrines can converge on the political conception of justice.
The First Question: Moral Development
Therefore, obtaining a sense of justice is an essential component of Rawls's solution to the problem of stability. As he explains, his account of moral development is tied to the conception of justice proposed in Justice as Justice.
Contemporary Debates about Rawlsian Stability
However, Weithman does not think that these changes force changes in the acquisition of the sense of justice. Largely ignored in the current discussion of stability is gaining a sense of fairness.
Just Families and a Child’s Acquisition of a Sense of Justice: Okin’s Critique
Okin’s Critique of Rawls’s Political Turn
Until the gender structure of the family is challenged, "there can be no hope of equality for women in either the domestic or the public sphere" (Okin 1989, 125). Okin argued, in short, that if the family is not just, citizens will not acquire the necessary capacities to participate as free and equal citizens.
Responses to Okin
If sexist comprehensive doctrines threaten women's political equality, they need not be tolerated as reasonable and thus pose no threat to the legitimacy of political liberalism. If they are reasonable, this implies that they respect women's political freedom and equality.
The Inadequacy of Rawls’s Stability Solution
Rawlsian stability requires that citizens subscribe to the political conception from their own comprehensive doctrines. Stability for the right reasons requires that the political conception of justice be justified on three levels.
Three Ways Forward
The reconceptualization of Rawls's first component of rationality as a form of recognition of respect for the equal status of oneself and one's fellow citizens has two implications in political liberalism. This is a form of recognition and respect for the equal ability of our fellow citizens to freely draw conclusions about their own conception of the good. How could a conception of justice based on a commitment to freedom and equality consistently ignore threats to the free and equal status of half the population.
Thus, civic education of children can be another component of the social basis of self-respect.
Civic Education: Political or Comprehensive?
Political versus Comprehensive Approaches to Civic Education
Rawls thinks that PLCE can meet this challenge by showing that political liberalism is different from comprehensive liberalism. He points to "the great differences both in scope and in generality between political and comprehensive liberalism" and "I hope that the exposition of political liberalism in these lectures56 will provide a sufficient answer to the objection" (PL, 200). Davis and Neufeld argue that the independent component, by itself, is not a convincing defense of political liberalism's distinctive approach to civic education.
I will show that political liberalism has a special approach to civic education; however, I argue that a defensible version of PLCE requires the introduction of a bifurcation within Rawls's concept of reasonableness.
The Criteria for Reasonableness
All three lines of response agree that a politically liberal civic education requires the cultivation of rationality. This departs from Rawls in important ways, as I think much of the confusion lies in the divergent implications of embracing different components of rationality. However, this criterion links the liberal principle of legitimacy to the basic qualification of reasonableness.
67 Rawls says, "the second basic aspect" of reasonableness "is the willingness to recognize the burdens of judgment and to accept their consequences for the use of public reason in guiding the legitimate exercise of political power in a constitutional regime" (PL, 54 ).
Cultivating Reasonableness in Political Liberal Civic Education
- Inclusive Reasonableness and Civic Education: Cultivating the Respect
- Inclusive Reasonableness and Civic Education: Teaching the Burdens of
- Restrictive Reasonableness and Civic Education: the Legitimacy Criterion
I have argued (in 3.1 and 3.2) that the criterion of respect and the criterion of the burden of judgment are necessary components of the moral qualification of reasonableness and should be included in PLCE. As such, justifying the inclusion of the criterion of legitimacy as a necessary component of rationality in civic education becomes much more difficult. Note the limitations that accompany the inclusion of the legitimacy criterion of reasonableness in civic education.
Beyond being restrictive, the criterion of legitimacy is vulnerable as a component of children's civic education.
Conclusion
Reasonableness means respecting yourself and your fellow citizens as free and equal moral persons. The core component of reasonableness, the recognition of oneself and one's fellow citizens as free and equal moral persons, essentially involves some kind of recognition of respect for the equal status of oneself and one's fellow citizens. Full reasonableness requires recognition of respect for fellow citizens as free and equal moral persons.
The essential qualification for reasonableness is the recognition of respect for oneself and one's fellow citizens as free and equal moral persons.
Reasonableness: A Moral Threshold of Respect
Why Be Reasonable?
Political liberalism seeks the basis for a just and stable society among free and equal people despite deep disagreements about the conceptions of the good, but only among reasonable people. This threshold is a matter of respecting oneself and one's fellow citizens as free and equal moral persons and the willingness to participate fairly in society. For Rawls, the best way to respect people as free and equal in politics is to use reasons accessible to all, that is, public reasons.
Disambiguating the moral qualification of reasonableness from Rawls' principle of legitimacy is important for expanding political liberalism as a broader framework within which alternative reasonable principles of justice and, I suggest, legitimacy can be debated.
Qualifying as Reasonable: A Moral Threshold
- Reasonableness and the Virtue of Fair Cooperation
- Reasonableness as Recognition Respect
- The Core Component of Reasonableness
- Why Accepting the Burdens of Judgment Does Not Entail Accepting Public
Rawls argues that accepting the burdens of judgment also requires accepting the consequences of the burdens of judgment for the use of public reason to guide the legitimate exercise of coercive power; this is the third criterion of reasonableness — the legitimacy criterion. If public reason is the 'consequence' of accepting the burdens of judgment, this does not suggest that Rawls regards public reason as including the burdens of judgment. Recognizing the consequences of the burdens of judgment need not require the acceptance of public reason or any other proposition about ensuring the legitimacy of state coercion.
Rawls also lends some support to the view that accepting the consequences of the burden of judgment does not necessarily mean accepting Rawls's legitimacy.
Reasonable Pluralism Expanded
They argue that political liberalism itself places limits on any public political conception of justice. Political liberalism need only protect the free and equal status of citizens; but this distinction seems to minimize the substantive feminist content of political liberalism. In this section, I will argue for a feminist extension of political liberalism committed to supporting the free and equal status of all persons.
In the next section, I will consider how a Rawlsian feminist political liberalism can maintain its inclusive scope without undermining the feminist potential of securing the social basis for the recognition of respect for all citizens as free and equal.
Feminism and Diversity in Political Liberalism
Feminist Critiques of Political Liberalism
This criticism is no small matter; if they succeed, then political liberalism's theoretical adequacy is seriously threatened. Before turning to my own proposal, I will first examine two recent attempts to secure the feminist potential of political liberalism. In this chapter I focus on situating my own defense of the feminist potential of political liberalism in relation to the two liberal feminist approaches that are closest to my own view (Hartley and Watson 2010 and Brake 2013).
I agree that political liberalism can be a powerful tool for feminism, even though it allows a variety of overarching doctrines to qualify as reasonable.
Hartley and Watson’s Substantive Equality and Reciprocity
Linking the substantive equality of women to public reason and reciprocity, understood as a justifying norm, undermines the impact of Hartley and Watson's argument that political liberalism is feminist. The effects of oppression on one's capacity to participate in public discourse is an empirical issue and perhaps Hartley and Watson are right to point to this capacity as the key to showing political liberalism is feminist. There is a tension between these two aspects of Hartley and Watson's account of feminist political liberalism.
This, I think, is one reason why Hartley and Watson leave open the permissibility of abstaining from exercising one's rights and freedoms as a citizen.
Brake on the Development of Children’s Self-Respect
Attention to ensuring the social foundations of citizens' self-respect is an important component of ensuring recognition and respect among citizens. Brake argues that the social foundations of self-esteem are "socially distributed determinants of beliefs about self-esteem, that is, beliefs that a person has moral powers and is a free and equal citizen" (Brake 2013, 65). Rawls argues that a just structure of institutions provides the social foundations of self-respect.
According to Rawls, “the social basis of self-respect is explained by the structure and content of just institutions together with features of public policy.
Reasonable Recognition Respect and Securing the Feminist Potential of
- Categorizing Sexist Comprehensive Doctrines
- Split Views: Nonpublic Gender Hierarchy and Gender Egalitarian
- Developing the Social Bases of Recognition Respect
Let us consider what types of institutional structures might support the recognition of the free and equal status of all persons. An essential feature of securing the free and equal status of all includes political commitment to anti-discrimination laws. In addition to a public political framework that supports the free and equal status of all citizens as moral persons, recognition of respect also requires the development of the social basis of self-respect.
While self-respect is a moral attitude that captures one's respect for oneself as a free and equal citizen, the social basis of self-respect is inherently institutional.
Can Feminist Political Liberalism Still Be Inclusive?
Therefore, the feminist extension of political liberalism also helps to solve a broader problem for the Rawlsian system. John Rawls and the Political Coercion of Unreasonable Men." In The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, edited by Victoria Davion and Clark Wolf, 16-33. The Turn to Political Liberalism" in A Companion to Rawls, edited by John Mandle and David A.
Political Liberalism and Civic Education: The Liberal State and Its Future Citizens.” Journal of Philosophy of Education.
Conclusion
