“…The “system” that Rawls posits as stable is the well‐ordered society . The well‐ordered society plays a crucial role in Rawls's work (Kogelmann 2017) and will also feature prominently in the remainder of this article, so it is worthwhile to carefully review this idea. Rawls writes: A society is well‐ordered when it is not only designed to advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a public conception of justice.…”
Section: Justice As a Stable Equilibriummentioning
Following the work of John Rawls, political theorists have fixated on the comparative stability of different equilibrium states of justice. This article identifies a crucial gap in this literature, namely, the lack of attention paid to nonequilibrating systems. Drawing on Kakutani's theorem, I present plausible cases in which society will fail to exhibit any equilibrium states of justice. An important implication for political theory is that, rather than focusing exclusively on stable equilibria, theorists should examine dynamic processes of justice, which need not exhibit equilibrating forces. To this end, a concept more useful than stability is that of robustness, or the ability of a system to maintain general desiderata in the face of an evolving conception of justice.
“…The “system” that Rawls posits as stable is the well‐ordered society . The well‐ordered society plays a crucial role in Rawls's work (Kogelmann 2017) and will also feature prominently in the remainder of this article, so it is worthwhile to carefully review this idea. Rawls writes: A society is well‐ordered when it is not only designed to advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a public conception of justice.…”
Section: Justice As a Stable Equilibriummentioning
Following the work of John Rawls, political theorists have fixated on the comparative stability of different equilibrium states of justice. This article identifies a crucial gap in this literature, namely, the lack of attention paid to nonequilibrating systems. Drawing on Kakutani's theorem, I present plausible cases in which society will fail to exhibit any equilibrium states of justice. An important implication for political theory is that, rather than focusing exclusively on stable equilibria, theorists should examine dynamic processes of justice, which need not exhibit equilibrating forces. To this end, a concept more useful than stability is that of robustness, or the ability of a system to maintain general desiderata in the face of an evolving conception of justice.
“…The well-ordered society is a model of a complete conception of justice that allows us to evaluate that conception of justice and to rationally evaluate a world that realizes that conception. Although Rawls changes his analysis of the well-ordered society considerably over the course of this work (Kogelmann 2017), Rawls's mature view of the well-ordered society is the conjunction of three conditions:…”
Section: Beyond the Well-ordered Societymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Reasonable pluralism also extends to disagreements about many other issues including, plausibly, the right. Pluralism about the right is likely to run just as deep as pluralism about the good (Gaus 2016;Kogelmann 2017). In any case, there is no way to limit the impact of evaluative and doxastic diversity.…”
Section: Beyond the Well-ordered Societymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…If we are interested in evaluating liberalism in relation to its various competitors, however, we should not assume that all reasonable members are already committed liberals. Further, as Kogelmann argues, there are certain forces within political liberalism that naturally lead to pluralism about justice within a free society once we accept the reality of reasonable pluralism and the burdens of judgment (Kogelmann 2017, 5-7).…”
We argue that the Rawlsian description of a just liberal society, the wellordered society, fails to accommodate deep disagreement and is insufficiently dynamic. In response, we formulate an alternative model that we call the open society, organized around a new account of dynamic stability. In the open society, constitutional rules must be stable enough to preserve social conditions that foster experimentation, while leaving room in legal and institutional rules for innovation and change. Systemic robustness and dynamic stability become important for the open society in a way that they are not in the well-ordered society. This model of the open society and the corresponding model of stability has interesting implications for thinking about the goals, norms, and institutions of liberal political systems.
“… 1 We thus join a growing body of literature in political philosophy that points out the positive benefits diversity and disagreement can bring about. As a few examples see Gaus (2016), Muldoon (2016), Kogelmann (2017). That said, we do not wish to suggest that there is something problematic about homogenous societies.…”
In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma.
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