John Rawls

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The legacy of John Rawls

The legacy of John Rawls

The Ludwig Von Mises Institute Senior Fellow, David Gordon, recently wrote an article on the legacy of the political philosopher John Rawls. In this piece, he discloses some interesting information about the relationship between John Rawls and Robert Nozick:
“In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he had praised A Theory of Justice as a great work of [...]

Common political fallacies

In Cato Journal, Volume 28, No. 1 (Winter 2008), the independent scholar Anthony de Jasay reviews four common fallacies (as presented in the works of John Stuart Mill, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Armen Alchian) that many social scientists and political journalists keep repeating without rigorous analysis.
The first fallacy is that production should be governed [...]

Rights: nonsensical, empirical and hypothetical

If there is one thing that characterizes contemporary political discourse, and contemporary political liberalism in particular, it is the obsession with “rights.” Individual rights are absolute, or “trumps,” that do not permit to be overridden by collective goals, and can only be defeated by another trump. But since every right implies a corresponding obligation (a [...]

Justice as impartiality

One common answer to the question of what should characterize an acceptable theory of justice is that it should be “impartial.” This is generally understood to mean that a theory of justice should not be tailored to the interests of specific individuals (or groups of individuals). This raises two questions. First, do [...]