Rawls and His Critics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The influence of John Rawls’s work on academic political and moral theorizing, especially on the academic disciplines of political and moral philosophy, would be difficult to overstate. The theoretical ambitions and the clear normative implications of his book A Theory of Justice showed the academy how much could still be accomplished in political philosophy. The book’s systematicity and clarity showed that these accomplishments could be won without loss of rigor. Its obvious connections to Kant and the social contract tradition did much to revive philosophers’ interest in the history of liberal thought. This seminar will begin with a careful study of parts of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and of some of his later works. Rawls's theory has attracted criticism from a number of quarters. Some of the most interesting criticisms have come from the late Gerald Gaus and his students, who have argued for a quite different and anti-Rawlsian way of reasoning about fundamental political questions, and who have questioned Rawls's focus on what he called a well-ordered society. The latter part of the seminar will be spent reading and assessing some of their criticisms.