| My goal is to do justice to three commitments emphasized, but not fully carried through, by Kant and Rawls: the primacy of the practical, the focus on the basic structure, and the conception of the person as autonomous agent. Chapter I shows how Rawls adapts and then extends Kant's moral philosophy while avoiding its practical solipsism, rigorism, and austerity. Chapter II discusses the idea of developing a more and more detailed interpretation of our moral conception by placing it within an ever richer environment of facts and causalities--a process that will broaden its scope, specify its results, and determine its political application. Chapter III argues that, once Rawls' simplifying assumption of national self-sufficiency is set aside, a Kantian conception of justice cannot decline to venture beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Therefore we need special principles of global background justice, focusing on individual life-prospects. Chapters IV and V ask how Rawls' principles should be specified to the point were they yield definite requirements stateable within jurisprudence, economics, and political theory. Here, I believe, Rawls does not adequately provide for rights to subsistence and care, interaction, and non-discrimination; for the fair value of his basic liberties; and for education, health-care, and employment. Chapter VI outlines, and defends as feasible, the main institutional features of a global scheme that would satisfy the principles of justice on their preferred specification.;I hope that this thesis may help motivate and may contribute to a moral discourse that in time will give practical meaning to our traditional values of democracy, freedom, equality, and civic friendship which are affirmed on all sides and yet claimed in support of an unending variety of mutually incompatible institutions and policies. A unified interpretation of these values will challenge each of us, and especially those in positions of authority, either to accept it and act accordingly, or to propose an alternative interpretation for moral consideration, or at least to desist from laying claim to the values in question. |
