Author: Wiggins D.

Source: Mind, Volume 113, Number 451, July 2004 , pp. 477-512(36)

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Abstract:

The purpose is to stage a dialogue between (1) a pre-liberal conception of justice, represented by Aristotle as revived with the help of ideas of Lucas, Jouvenel and (later on in the argument) G. A. Cohen, and (2) a liberal conception, as founded in Kant and refurbished, renewed and worked out in (say) A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. Among the questions at issue are the roles of habit, disposition and formation; the nature of the dependency (whether one way, the other way, or back and forth) between the justice of the citizen of a polity and the justice of the constitutional arrangements of the polity; the superior prospects of a piecemeal, bottom-up approach to justice or of a top-down, contractual approach; the remedial/restorative conception of justice versus more than merely remedial/restorative conceptions; tolerance of contingency; the propensity of liberal regimes to replace by managerial procedures more and more of the arrangements that previously entrusted important matters to the practical judgement of individuals; the multiplicity and diversity of the neo-Aristotelian requisites for a good polity versus the rather simpler demands of liberalism, which relate mostly to legitimacy; the idea of equality proper to a just and good polity; the closed, open enough, or completely open character of such a polity.

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2004-07-01

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