Eliminating Terms of Confusion: Resolving the Liberal–Republican Dispute

Lars J.K. Moen*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    3 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    John Rawls thinks republicanism is compatible with his political liberalism. Philip Pettit insists that the two conflict in important ways. In this paper, I make sense of this dispute by employing David Chalmers’s method of elimination to reveal the meaning underlying key terms in Rawls’s political liberalism and Pettit’s republicanism. This procedure of disambiguating terms will show how the two theories defend the same institutional arrangement on the same grounds. The procedure thus vindicates Rawls’s view of the two theories being compatible. The reason for this compatibility is that both theories are politicized—that is, they are constructed to attract the compliance of all reasonable members of a modern, pluralistic society.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)247-271
    Number of pages25
    JournalJournal of Ethics
    Volume26
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jun 2022

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Eliminating Terms of Confusion: Resolving the Liberal–Republican Dispute'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this