Sublime

Enfin il a trouvé dans la philosophie libérale le système de valeurs qui pouvait structurer un modèle d’action. Pour lui, la philosophie libérale, en respectant le pluralisme des idées et en privilégiant l’empirisme dans l’analyse et l’action, représente le système le moins mauvais pour orienter la politique.

For Rawls, a just society is one in which we can “face one another openly,” in the sense that we can offer a justification to one another for the way society is organized, including to the least well off.

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What about democracy? Most political philosophers agree that democracy has instrumental value. It functions pretty well and tends to produce relatively just outcomes. So, they think, democracy is valuable at least in the way a hammer is valuable. Most philosophers, however, also think we should value democracy the way we value a painting or person.

As of 2016, there is no serious alternative to the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and a free market. The social protests that swept the Western world in 2011 – such as Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish 15-M movement – have absolutely nothing against democracy, individualism and human rights, or even against the basic pri

Rawls accepted the possibility of thickly constituted, morally encumbered selves. But he insisted that such loyalties and attachments should have no bearing on our identity as citizens. In debating justice and rights, we should set aside our personal moral and religious convictions and argue from the standpoint of a “political conception of the per

A public square and an education system that systematically undermine the virtues required to sustain a society will, unsurprisingly, produce a generation of citizens who lack those virtues.

John Rawls laid out much philosophical theory dedicated to the conditions under which a socially just society might be organized. In this, he set out a universalist thought experiment in which a socially just society would be one in which an individual given a choice would be equally happy to be born into any social milieu or identity group.

What Lincoln had shown was the practicality, in politics, of a moral standard. I mean by this an external frame of reference that shapes interests and actions, not—like Douglas’s—an internal one that only reflects them. Lincoln’s didn’t arise from faith, or formal ethics, or even the law, a profession necessarily pragmatic in its pursuit of justice