Political Liberalism and the Radical Consequences of Justice Pluralism

Journal of Social Philosophy 50 (2):212-231 (2019)
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Abstract

Political liberalism’s central commitments to recognizing reasonable pluralism and institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice are inconsistent. If reasonable pluralism applies to conceptions of justice as it applies to conceptions of the good, then some reasonable people will reject even many liberal conceptions of justice as unreasonable. If so, then imposing these conceptions of justice on citizens violates the liberal principle of legitimacy and related public justification requirements. This problem of justice pluralism requires that political liberals abandon their commitment to institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice. Instead, political justification should be limited to the public justification of a modest scheme of rights and a set of constitutional rules. Justice pluralism chastens the ambitions of political liberalism while pushing the political liberal research program in new and promising directions.

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Kevin Vallier
Bowling Green State University

Citations of this work

Liberal Legitimacy and Future Citizens.Emil Andersson - 2025 - Philosophical Studies 182 (5):1067-1090.
In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence.Kevin Vallier & Ryan Muldoon - 2020 - Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (2):211-230.
Public justification.Kevin Vallier - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Three Problems for Political Perfectionism.Kevin Vallier - 2026 - Social Theory and Practice 52 (2):329-340.

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References found in this work

A Theory of Justice.John Rawls - 1971 - Oxford,: Harvard University Press. Edited by Steven M. Cahn.
The idea of justice.Amartya Kumar Sen - 2009 - Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Liberalism without Perfection.Jonathan Quong - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.

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