Clarifying Cohen: A Response to Jubb and Hall

In this brief essay, we clarify Cohen’s ‘Facts and Principles’ argument, and then argue that the objections posed by two recent critiques of Cohen—Robert Jubb (Res Publica 15:337–353, 2009) and Edward Hall (Res Publica 19:173–181, 2013)—look especially vulnerable to the charge of being self-defeating. It may still be that Cohen’s view concerning facts and principles is false. Our aim here is merely to show that two recent attempts to demonstrate its falsity are unlikely to succeed.     

Political Moralism and Constitutional Reasoning: A Reply to Bernard Williams

Res Publica - Williams’s well-known critique of the ‘moralism’ of liberal political philosophy—its disconnect from political reality—holds special significance for the...     

The Union Makes us Strong,but Does it Make Us Free? A Review of Mark Reiff’s In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization

Res Publica - Mark Reiff’s book In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization successfully delivers the promise contained in the title—the case for a version of...     

Friend or Foe?: Bernard Williams and Political Constitutionalism

Res Publica - This article looks at Bernard Williams’s relevance to particular debates in constitutional theory about the legitimacy of two competing models of institutional design:...     

The Liberty of the Liberty Principle

Res Publica - Mill’s Liberty Principle aims to protect ‘social’ freedom, which is traditionally understood as negative freedom. I argue that Mill’s conception of social...     

Three Types of Sufficientarian Libertarianism

Res Publica - Sufficientarian libertarianism is a theory of justice that combines libertarianism’s focus on property rights and non-interference with sufficientarianism’s concern for...     

Conjecture and the Division of Justificatory Labour: A Comment on Clayton and Stevens

Res Publica - Clayton and Stevens (Res Publica 20: 65–84, 2014) argue that political liberals should engage with the religiously unreasonable by offering religious responses and showing that...     

Pluralistic Partisanship

Res Publica - This essay explores and criticizes Matteo Bonotti’s argument that parties and partisans in a publicly justified polity should appeal primarily, if not exclusively, to accessible...     

Dworkin’s Unity of Value: An Interpretation and Defense

Res Publica - Ronald Dworkin’s unity of value thesis underlies his influential moral, political, and legal thought. This essay presents an interpretation of the unity thesis designed to...     

A Sufficiently Just Liberal Society is an Illusion

Res Publica - Matteo Bonotti’s book on Partisanship and Public Reason in Diverse Societies is grounded on a theory of partisanship that sees the demands of public reason as internal to the...     

A Sense of Proportion: Some Thoughts on Equality,Security and Justice

Res Publica - This article develops an intuitive idea of proportionality as a placeholder for a substantive conception of equality, and contrasts it with Ripstein’s ideas, as presented in an...     

Rescuing Rawls’s Institutionalism and Incentives Inequality

Res Publica - G. A. Cohen argues that Rawls’s difference principle is incompatible with his endorsement of incentives inequality—higher pay for certain professions is just when that pay...     

Human Rights,Legitimacy, Political Judgement

Res Publica - This paper grapples with Bernard Williams’s prima vista enigmatic assertion that ‘[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation...     

Is the Reasonable Person a Person of Virtue?

Res Publica - The ‘reasonable person standard’ (RPS) is often called on in difficult legal cases as the last resource to be appealed to when other solutions run out. Its complexity...     

The Inevitable Social Contract

Res Publica - The mark of ‘the political’, according to Bernard Williams, lies in a society finding an answer to the ‘first political question’—the...     

The Failure of Traditional Environmental Philosophy

Res Publica - A notable feature of recent philosophical work on climate ethics is that it makes practically no reference to ‘traditional’ environmental philosophy (of the sort that has...     

The Limits of Liberal Cosmopolitanism

Res Publica - The essay critically reviews two recent contributions to the debate on global justice made by Darrel Moellendorf and Thomas Pogge respectively. Given both authors’...     

Democratic Legitimacy and the Competence Objection

Res Publica - Elitist scepticism of democracy has a venerable history. This paper responds to the latest round of such scepticism—the ‘competence objection’, articulated in recent...     

Rawls’s Ideal Theory: A Clarification and Defense

Res Publica - In recent work in political philosophy there has been much discussion of two approaches to theorizing about justice that have come to be called ‘ideal theory’ and...     

Cosmopolitan Sentiment: Politics,Charity, and Global Poverty

Res Publica - Duties to address global poverty face a motivation gap. We have good reasons for acting yet we do not, at least consistently. A ‘sentimental education’, featuring...