Suchergebnisse
"Gavin Kerr"
Titel: Property-Owning Democracy and the Priority of Liberty
Autor: Gavin Kerr
Seite: 71-92
Abstract: The distinction drawn by Rawls between the ideas of property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism parallels his distinction between justice-based ’liberalisms of freedom’ (including his own conception of justice as fairness) and utilitarian-based ’liberalisms of happiness’. In this paper I argue that Rawls’s failure to attach the same level of significance to essential socio-economic rights and liberties as he attached to the traditional liberal civil and political rights and liberties gives justice as fairness a quasi-utilitarian character, which is incompatible with the fundamental objective of protecting the highest-order interests of citizens conceived as free and equal. I argue that in order fully to protect these interests, rights to access to non-human capital and productive resources should be assigned the same level of significance as that assigned to the civil and political rights and liberties, and prioritized over the lower-order rights and benefits regulated by Rawls’s second principle of justice.
Titel: Comment on Gavin Kerr
Autor: Ivo Wallimann-Helmer
Seite: 93-97
Not Losing Major Liberal and Rawlsian Insights
Abstract: In this comment I challenge Kerr’s claim that a coherent expression of a ’liberalism of freedom’ needs an extended first Rawlsian principle of justice incorporating the principle of fair equality of opportunity for two reasons. First, such an extended first principle leads to illiberal consequences by narrowing down the scope of individual responsibility for choice and effort way too much. Second, such an extended first principle misses a main Rawlsian insight, namely that in a theory of justice the principle securing basic liberties and the principle of fair equality of opportunity serve different purposes.
Property-Owning Democracy
2013 (35) Heft 1
Guest-Editors: Francis Cheneval / Christoph Laszlo
Editorial
In recent years, ’property-owning democracy’ (POD), defined by widespread ownership of productive assets, has become one of the key-factors in the assessment of the institutional design implied in John Rawls’s theory of justice. The wider implications of this inquiry also engage scholars who do not subscribe to Rawls’s conception of justice but are broadly interested in normative questions of political economy and the basic structure of a just polity. In the course of this debate, the in...