Two questions for Professor Vallier

ABSTRACT

Kevin Vallier claims to have attained a ‘great goal’ of the social contract tradition: ‘to show that there are regimes supported by the reason of the public and that have authority for citizens in those regimes’. I contend that his argument depends upon changing the meanings of ‘reason of the public’ and ‘authority’, and conclude that he has not attained the goal he claims.

KEYWORDS:

• Social contract theory
• Rawls
• public justification

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Adam Gjesdal, Christie Hartley, and my fellow symposiasts for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Christie Hartley has suggested that Vallier imposes more substantive constraints in other work: that moral rules must be justified for someone by ‘recognizably moral reasons, or at least reasons the person in question can see as moral rather than as immoral.’ But the first disjunct of the suggested constraint is inconsistent with Vallier’s refusal ‘to take a position on which moral standards are correct.’ (Vallier, 2021, p. 29) If ‘can see as’ means ‘treats as’, then the second relocates rather than answers the question I’m pressing about the definition now in view.

2. Rawls said he regarded justice as fairness as the most reasonable conception of justice; see (Rawls, 1996, p. xlviii).

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Notes on contributors

Paul Weithman

Paul Weithman is the Glynn Family Honors Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He works primarily in political philosophy and its history. His most recent book is Rawls, Political Liberalism, and Reasonable Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He is the editor of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)