Render Unto Rawls: Law, Gospel, and the Evangelical Fallacy

Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) is widely credited with having revived post–World War II Anglo American political philosophy. This book together with his later writings are routinely judged to constitute the most important body of work in that field. Indeed, with the collapse of Second World and Third World socialist ideologico-political alternatives, liberalism in one form or another h...

Rawls, Constructivism, and the Tragic

In 1980, the liberal political philosopher John Rawls delivered a remarkable series of lectures at Columbia University. The Dewey Lectures, subsequently published in the Journal of Philosophy as “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” detailed a metaethical procedure–or method for formulating principles–that informed his earlier A Theory of Justice (1971) and that would make possible its sequ...

Rawls and Kantian Constructivism

Evangelical Christianity and Romanticism

Dr. Bebbington is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Stirling, Scotland. This article is the second in a series of three entitled 'Evangelical Christianity and Western Culture Since the Eighteenth Century' and was presented by the author in the Staley Lectures at Regent College in April1989. (The first lecture in the series was published in the December 1989 issue of Crux.) The lec...

Revisiting Rawls

The present paper revisits the issue of rational decision making in John Rawls’ original position. Drawing on Isaac Levi’s theory of decision, I discuss how we can defend Rawls against John C. Harsanyi’s charge that maximin reasoning in the original position is irrational. The discussion suggests that systematic application of Levi’s theory is likely to have important consequences for ethics an...