Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6416188" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think that Theory of Justice claims to overcome the is/ought divide - the key premises for Rawls's arguments in favour of his conception of justice are themselves normative premises, namely, claims about the dictates of rationality, plus certain moral intuitions that he takes to be widely shared.I think that, by the time of Law of Peoples, Rawls does think that the is/ought divide can be overcome in a certain fashion, namely, that certain historical truths can have normative force because of their constitute significance for our present-day forms of political life. The key truth he is interested in is the role of toleration in bringing an end to the wars of religion, which underpins what he calls &quot;the fact of reasonable pluralism&quot;.I don't think he is denying Hume's claim in taking this view - rather, I think he is positing that a fact can also, in certain circumstances, carry normative force for anyone who is interested in social life being viable. And he thinks that, given that human beings have no choice but to live socially, any rational person does have an interest in social life being viable.An interesting feature of Law of Peoples is that most of the commentators on it are cosmopolitan liberals who attack Rawls for having &quot;sold out&quot; his liberalism, because he acknowledges that those for whom the wars of religion don't occupy the same place in history (eg Iran, perhaps Turkey, definitely IS) don't have the same reason as those who participate in the liberal-democratic inheritance to take reasonable pluralism seriously. In a certain sense, Rawls regards their non-liberalism as a type of faultless disagreement, rather than an error of reasoning.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6416188, member: 42582"] I don't think that [I]Theory of Justice[/I] claims to overcome the is/ought divide - the key premises for Rawls's arguments in favour of his conception of justice are themselves normative premises, namely, claims about the dictates of rationality, plus certain moral intuitions that he takes to be widely shared. I think that, by the time of [I]Law of Peoples[/I], Rawls does think that the is/ought divide can be overcome in a certain fashion, namely, that certain historical truths can have normative force because of their constitute significance for our present-day forms of political life. The key truth he is interested in is the role of toleration in bringing an end to the wars of religion, which underpins what he calls "the fact of reasonable pluralism". I don't think he is denying Hume's claim in taking this view - rather, I think he is positing that a fact can also, in certain circumstances, carry normative force for anyone who is interested in social life being viable. And he thinks that, given that human beings have no choice but to live socially, any rational person does have an interest in social life being viable. An interesting feature of [I]Law of Peoples[/I] is that most of the commentators on it are cosmopolitan liberals who attack Rawls for having "sold out" his liberalism, because he acknowledges that those for whom the wars of religion don't occupy the same place in history (eg Iran, perhaps Turkey, definitely IS) don't have the same reason as those who participate in the liberal-democratic inheritance to take reasonable pluralism seriously. In a certain sense, Rawls regards their non-liberalism as a type of faultless disagreement, rather than an error of reasoning. [/QUOTE]

Verification