Journal of Political Philosophy最新文献

Some of the strongest criticisms of the original position have come from contractualists sympathetic to egalitarianism. In “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” Thomas Scanlon objected that, without special assumptions, choice under uncertainty justifies maximizing the average rather than the minimum, and is thus compatible with the least advantaged suffering serious avoidable hardship. Yet Scanlon also argued that the difference principle is unreasonably strict in its single-minded focus on raising the least advantaged position without regard to the size of forgone benefits in other parts of the distribution.1

Scanlon went on to develop a contractualist theory of moral obligation, not of social justice.2 More recently, he has discussed the reasons for objecting to economic inequality, defending a “weaker” version of the difference principle.3 Yet, as Jacob Barrett has argued,4 Scanlon is not entirely clear about the content of his alternate principle. Nor has he explained exactly how it is derived from the requirement of invulnerability to reasonable rejection.

Others have worked out what has become known as the “complaint model” of reasonable rejection, building on Scanlon's suggestions about how we might accommodate a limited form of aggregation while preserving the main thrust of contractualism's individualism.5 However, this model has been developed primarily in the context of moral rather than political philosophy, with a focus on problems of rescue, not decisions about the basic structure of a political society. The result is that there still isn't a Scanlonian theory of justice.

Choice from behind a veil of ignorance forces one to imagine what it would be like to be in someone else's disadvantaged position, but it also permits one to gamble—for the sake of a greater expectation—that one is unlikely to end up in that position. The complaint model of reasonable rejection requires not only that I consider your situation, but that I withdraw my own complaint if it is (much) smaller than yours.7 Since everyone in my position should do the same, it won't matter if there are more of us in my position than in yours. The complaint model is subject to a number of objections, but I will argue that most of them do not arise with respect to choices about the design of the basic structure of society, assessed in terms of the lifetime prospects associated with different social positions. As the basis for a theory of distributive justice, however, the complaint model is insufficiently egalitarian. Minimizing the maximum complaint does disallow many relatively trivial gains higher up in the spectrum of advantage from outweighing one serious loss lower down. However, once we relax lexical priority, the complaint model can also prevent many smaller gains lower down from outweighing one larger loss at the top end.

The article develops an egalitarian alternative to the complaint model, based on a competing account of role reversal. I

In the public discourse of Western democracies,1 the axis of “urban” versus “rural” has reappeared.2 Often discussed in the context of right-wing populism and its successes among rural voters, commentators have discussed the “Big Sort,”3 the contrast between “Anywheres” and “Somewheres,”4 and the lifeworlds of “hillbillies.”5 Scholars in the social sciences have attempted to understand what it feels like to live in rural places, using ethnographic methods,6 or how to understand the resentment against urbanites expressed in farmers' protests.7 In studies of electoral politics, the differences between urban and rural voting behavior have long been an issue.8 One political scientist, Jonathan A. Rodden, claims, with regard to the US, that “The Democrats, quite simply, have evolved into a diverse collection of urban interest groups, and the Republicans into an assemblage of exurban and rural interests.”9

In philosophical discussions about justice, in contrast, one finds hardly any mention of the urban–rural divide.10 Geography plays a role in discussions about global justice, but not in discussions about justice within societies. Several reasons might explain this gap (apart from a possible sociological explanation: namely, that philosophers tend to be urbanites). One is the assumption that all questions about these geographical differences can be subsumed under other dimensions of justice. For example, if rural populations are poorer, on average, this is a matter of distributive justice; if they do not have good schools, this is a matter of equality of opportunity, and so on. This argument is hard to reject if one operates at a high level of abstraction and discusses the formulation and justification of different principles of justice. However, political philosophy might also want to address issues that are closer to concrete real-life issues, whether one describes this as “non-ideal” theory11 or “problem-driven” political philosophy.12 For such approaches, it seems relevant to ask what considerations of justice might apply to the urban–rural divide that social scientists have diagnosed.

A focus on the concerns of rural communities is also sometimes coupled with nationalist tendencies, even within scholarship.14 It is understandable not to want to be associated with such voices.

Nonetheless, if political philosophy is interested in the matters that mar our societies, it seems at least worth asking whether there might be any issues of justice at all with regard to the urban–rural divide. The aim of this article is to ask what theories of justice might have to say about this topic. I take a relational-egalitarian perspective, which focuses on the relations that should hold between the citizens of a just society,15 but also discuss the applicability of some luck-egalitarian arguments.16 Overall, the article provides a survey of the various dimensions of the question: what (if anything) would a just society, whose citizens re