In Chapter 5, I distinguished three variants of contemporary liberal theory – perfectionist, pragmatic, and political – and I explored one important strand of political liberalism, its conception of neutral public dialogue. In this chapter and the next, I continue the discussion of political liberalism by focusing on the recent work of its prime exponent, John Rawls.

Recall that, as Charles Larmore put it, political liberalism is a theory at once minimal (in that it allows wide scope for free choice and diversity) and moral (in that it appeals to individual motivations other than self-interest). Some interpreters of A Theory of Justice regarded it as “pragmatic” in the sense in which I am using the term, that is, as an effort to derive a conception of justice simply from the rational calculations of self-interested agents. Since the beginning of the 1980s, starting with the Dewey Lectures, Rawls has made it clear that he does not wish to be viewed in this fashion. Justice as fairness, he now insists, has at its core a moral conception, an (allegedly Kantian) understanding of moral personality. By fleshing out this idea, he says, he hopes to prevent misinterpretations of his theory,