Comments on Leif Wenar's Nussbaum Lecture, “The Development of Unity”

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The Development of Unity

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. She is a Founding President of HDCA. Her most recent book is The Cosmopolitan Tradition: a Noble but Flawed Ideal (2019).

Notes

1 I use this idea in all three of my books on the CA, and clarify it further in my (Nussbaum 2011).

2 Even though Rawls devotes a good deal of A Theory of Justice to the critique of Utilitarianism, he clearly thinks it one of the “reasonable comprehensive doctrines” that will make up the OC: it is one of his examples, in Political Liberalism, of how the transition from an initial modus vivendi to the OC takes place. For an excellent account of this whole question, see Scheffler (2003).

3 See Nussbaum (2004); reprinted in Economics and Happiness, ed. Luigino Bruni and Pier Luigi Porta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1005), 170–183.

4 This is what Mill, in his posthumously published essay, “The Utility of Religion,” calls the “Religion of Humanity,” following the ideas of Auguste Comte.

5 I harp on this all the time, but for an important further reference see Wolff and De-Shalit (2008).

6 And see also the discussion of “sum-ranking” in the Introduction to Sen and Williams (1982).