Benevolence and Justice On the Role of Benevolence in Liberal Political Conceptions of Justice

This dissertation explores the role of benevolence in political liberalism. The most influential approach to justice in contemporary political philosophy, Rawls's political liberalism, faces a tension between two major goals: respect for reasonable pluralism and stability. That tension is particularly serious in Rawls's late works, where Rawls acknowledges that in a well-ordered society citizens can be expected to affirm a plurality of reasonable liberal political conceptions of justice. The focus of the stability inquiry thus becomes the family of liberal political conceptions and how those conceptions complement each other in a just society.;I argue that the family of liberal political conceptions will be more stable if it includes a political conception of justice containing an ideal of benevolence. According to this ideal, citizens publicly display benevolence in their commitments to one another to do their parts in maintaining a basic structure of society that places a priority on the full development of what Rawls calls the "second moral power"---the power to form, revise, and rationally pursue a conception of the good. Such citizens would, in their public conduct, find a portion of their happiness in promoting the capacities of others to form or at least affirm determinate conceptions of the good that they can accept as worthy of their full allegiance.;This dissertation draws inspiration from Leibniz's striking, but underappreciated, account of justice as the "charity of the wise." It also discusses G. A. Cohen's influential account of the "egalitarian ethos" and considers what an individual ethos of distributive justice would be like in a society that values the ideal of benevolence. Finally, I turn to the political philosophy of John Locke and attempt to show how a citizen affirming a comprehensive Lockean doctrine could be part of an overlapping consensus on the ideal of benevolence.