This chapter explores John Rawls’s political liberalism, a contemporary reworking of the idea of the social contract and one which straddles the boundary between Hobbesian rationality and Kantian reasonableness. The discussions cover the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’; the ‘original position’ and Rawls’s political constructivism; the principles of justice; the stability of the liberal State; the stages of application of the political conception of justice; and justice and liberal legitimacy.
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12. John Rawls’ Political Liberalism
J. E. Penner and E. Melissaris
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VIII. Justice and Morality
H. L. A. Hart
Celebrated for their conceptual clarity, titles in the Clarendon Law Series offer concise, accessible overviews of major fields of law and legal thought. This chapter examines the claim that, between law and morality there is a connection which is in some sense ‘necessary’, and that it is this which deserves to be taken as central, in any attempt to analyse or elucidate the notion of law. The chapter attempts to separate and identify some long-entangled issues. The first of these issues concerns the distinction within the general sphere of morality of the specific idea of justice and the special features which account for its peculiarly intimate connection with law. The second concerns the characteristics which distinguish moral rules and principles not only from legal rules but from all other forms of social rule or standards of conduct.
