Rawls on farting vs sharting

55 years have gone by since Rawls published his 'theory of justice'. In the preface, he explains what he was attempting.  

Perhaps I can best explain my aim in this book as follows. During much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some form of utilitarianism.

Rawls was familiar with GEM Anscombe's 1958 paper 'modern moral philosophy'. Virtue ethics is considered to have been influenced by this paper. Rawls could be considered to disagree with her 'three theses'. 

I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy;

it may not be profitable but it may be virtuous 

that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.

Rawls thinks that provided humans have a certain type of risk aversion, psychology is irrelevant. Rational analysis can, by itself, assert what a Just society would look like.  

The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—

if God judges us on the basis of our moral our immoral actions, we may be forgiven for thinking he does so in the manner of a human judge deciding if we have fulfilled a contractual or customary or other obligation in the manner of a good and worthy person. 

and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of 'ought', ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.

Again, Rawls would say duties are economic & thus can their justice or injustice can be determined by purely rational means. In particular, there is a 'reflective equilibrium' just as, in Economics, there is 'general equilibrium' where all markets clear save by reason of specific 'market failures'. 

My third thesis is that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.

Rawls was taking issue with Harsanyi & Vickrey's use of the 'veil of ignorance' so as to provide a more Left-wing or compassionate alternative. 

Was Rawls correct? He had taught a course alongside Ken Arrow & Amartya Sen, both of whom received Nobel Prizes for Econ and Econ, surely, is 'positive'- i.e. like Physics- not 'normative'- like Art. 

One reason for this is that it has been espoused by a long line of brilliant writers who have built up a body of thought truly impressive in its scope and refinement. We sometimes forget that the great utilitarians, Hume and Adam Smith, Bentham and Mill, were social theorists and economists of the first rank;

Classical economists- maybe. But then you would have to add in Marx & Lasalle & so forth.  

and the moral doctrine they worked out was framed to meet the needs of their wider interests and to fit into a comprehensive scheme.

What about Malthus & Ricardo who, arguably, were greater economists?  

Those who criticized them often did so on a much narrower front.

The best criticism of an academic scribbler is to say that business men & policy makers ignore them completely.

Utility was the other side of the coin of productivity. As technological progress speeded up, there was bound to be greater interest in raising productivity by increasing 'efficiency' (i.e. what is achieved).  

They pointed out the obscurities of the principle of utility and noted the apparent incongruities between many of its implications and our moral sentiments.

This had been done in an earlier age by Mandeville whom both Hutcheson & Smith attacked.  

But they failed, I believe, to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it. The outcome is that we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism.

Whereas what really matters is Expectations.  

Most likely we finally settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better.

In other words, we can- by arbitrary stipulation- have something good enough for our purposes. We may say 'the cost of improving the thing isn't equal to any possible benefit we might receive from doing so.'  

But this is no reason not to try. What I have attempted to do is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.

Particularly Kant for whom the thing is hypothetical. If everybody would agree to it (the publicity principle) it is just and, if you held Kant's beliefs, you would feel yourself morally bound to obey the laws of that Society.  

In this way I hope that the theory can be developed so that it is no longer open to the more obvious objections often thought fatal to it. Moreover, this theory seems to offer an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior, or so I argue, to the dominant utilitarianism of the tradition. The theory that results is highly Kantian in nature. Indeed, I must disclaim any originality for the views I put forward.

Rawls was being modest. Still, it may have been that similar ideas had been floated in academic seminars in the previous decade.  

I mentioned virtue ethics as having, to some extent, emerged from GEM Anscombe's essay. But was Rawls himself a virtue ethicist? Consider the opening of his first chapter-

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.

A utilitarian would say social institutions are good if they raise total factor productivity or allocative efficiency. A system of thought might be wholly false but if it is useful, why not use it?

Consider astrology. It is false to say that stars have any influence over us. But astrologers (at least in India) provide focal solutions for coordination or matching problems and thus astrology turns out to be rather useful. It may be that it, like geomancy, originated for this very reason.   

A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue;

In STEM subjects- maybe. But solving collective action problems has to do with establishing or identifying public signals which promote better correlated equilibria. 

likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

But the cure may be worse than the disease. In Economics, there is the 'second best theorem' which says that, when one distortion exists, the "second-best" solution is often to deliberately introduce other, offsetting distortions rather than attempting to fix the primary issue in isolation. 

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

None do. Lawyers & Judges & politicians may pretend otherwise but the thing simply isn't true.  

For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.

It may deny anything it likes. But this doesn't mean it speaks sooth.  

It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many.

I don't allow myself to fart. I don't know why everybody calls me 'farty-pants'.  

Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled;

they may be justiciable- e.g. a convict or incarcerated lunatic may be allowed to approach the court to secure her release. 

  the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

How are 'rights secured'? The answer is by the provision of remedies. But remedies are costly. To get resources allocated to them takes 'political bargaining' or 'the calculus of social interests'. 

The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one;

All theories are erroneous. Better theories may exist but finding out about them may be more costly than beneficial.  

analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

We don't know when such necessity arises because we are not omniscient.  

Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.

Virtue ethics may hold to this view. But it isn't empirically valid.  

These propositions seem to express our intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice.

Few of us greatly care about justice. Litigious people tend to be crackpots.  

No doubt they are expressed too strongly. In any event I wish to inquire whether these contentions or others similar to them are sound, and if so how they can be accounted for.

They aren't sound- unless we are speaking of 'mere puffery'. They can be accounted for by monomania.  

To this end it is necessary to work out a theory of justice in the light of which these assertions can be interpreted and assessed.

Why? If someone says 'Beauty is the ability to fart continually', we don't need a theory to dismiss the assertion as foolish and unfounded. I suppose if a Judge says Justice is the most important thing or if an Artist says Beauty is the most important thing or if I say 'what truly matters is farting', then we understand that people like praising their own calling in life.  

I shall begin by considering the role of the principles of justice. Let us assume, to fix ideas, that a society is a more or less self-sufficient association of persons who in their relations to one another recognize certain rules of conduct as binding and who for the most part act in accordance with them.

Societies have to do different things at different times in order to survive. Rules become more or less binding or are superseded by other rules as circumstances dictate. 

What Rawls is doing is concluding from the fact that we all think it impolite to fart while in refined company, that we also think it wrong to fart. 

Suppose further that these rules specify a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those taking part in it.

Why bother doing so? Following David Lewis, we may consider conventions to be Schelling focal solutions to coordination games- convenient enough but of no great importance in themselves.  

Then, although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage,

it may be. It may not. Man is a social animal. Men sometimes do stupid shit. Whole Societies, too, may do very stupid shit indeed.  

it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests. There is an identity of interests since social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts.

This is an unreal alternative. People are sociable. Few would want to end up like Robinson Crusoe.  

There is a conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share.

They may do. They may not.  

A set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares.

Why? Lots of people do well for themselves without any such thing. True, if you are a pedagogue, you may distinguish 'principles' from heuristic devices or rules of thumb. But most people aren't pedagogues. On the other hand, some legal regimes do distinguish principles applicable to certain types of cases. But that is a matter for lawyers. It isn't connected to a general theory of Justice.  

These principles are the principles of social justice:

There may be no principles in a society which its people find to be just. Paternalistic regimes may have this quality.  

they provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society

the most basic is the family. But in a happy family nobody mentions rights or duties. Everything is done out of love.  

and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Nobody can do this. Expectations seldom match outcomes. Moreover, a benefit may turn out to be a burden & vice versa. There's many a man who thought the arrival of a baby would make his life harder. It didn't. Life became sweeter though- no doubt- money might be tight.  

Now let us say that a society is well-ordered when it is not only designed to advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a public conception of justice.

We don't know when a society is well-ordered. If it suddenly succumbs to an invasion, insurrection or economic collapse, we say it wasn't well-ordered at all. But this may have been because of unanticipated exogenous factors. 

Do 'public conceptions' regulate anything at all? No. Regulation is done by people, not conceptions. 

That is, it is a society in which (1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice,

how is this possible? Magic? An Angel appearing in the Sky and announcing that such is the case?  

and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles.

We don't know of anything which satisfies any principle whatsoever fully or in an absolute sense. Indeed, even in Mathematics there appear to be no absolute proofs.  

In this case while men may put forth excessive demands on one another, they nevertheless acknowledge a common point of view from which their claims may be adjudicated.

A separate point of view. It may be held only by those whose profession it is to hold it. The thing doesn't need to be 'common' to all. Justiciability has this quality. There may be nobody in Society- including the Judges- who thinks a particular law is good but it remains the law till overturned.  Similarly, in a dispute as to who is the better poet, we might agree that the matter should be settled by the Poet Laureate & in a dispute as to whose Pizza is better, the judge should be Garfield the cat. 

If men’s inclination to self-interest makes their vigilance against one another necessary,

It doesn't. There is only a small class of people against whom Society needs to exercise vigilance & there can be separate provision for this- e.g. Homeland Security keeping track of possible terrorists.  

their public sense of justice makes their secure association together possible.

Sadly, secure association may be lacking even if there is a public sense of justice & lots of law courts & hanging judges. The opposite is equally true.  

Social contract theories are merely 'just-so stories'. The older story was that God was the Judge who either sent you to Heaven or Hell and the King, on Earth, was the shadow of God who hanged evil doers & rewarded the meritorious. 

Among individuals with disparate aims and purposes a shared conception of justice

is impossible. James Bond does not share Dr. No's conception of justice. Where aims are different, you have 'separating equilibria' rather than a pooling equilibrium. Two people who want to have babies together get married. Rules which apply to the interactions of strangers don't apply to them.  

establishes the bonds of civic friendship;

being civil does not involve bonding. We may apologize when we bump into a chap on the street. This doesn't make us bosom buddies.  

the general desire for justice limits the pursuit of other ends.

There is no general desire for justice. It exists in a limited form but may be disintermediated because it is more urgent to pursue other ends.  

One may think of a public conception of justice as constituting the fundamental charter of a well-ordered human association.

One may- if of one is a fucking cretin. Constitutions have no magic powers.  

Existing societies are of course seldom well-ordered in this sense, for what is just and unjust is usually in dispute.

Usually? Always.  

Men disagree about which principles should define the basic terms of their association.

Or they don't bother. The thing is 'mere puffery'.  

Yet we may still say, despite this disagreement, that they each have a conception of justice.

Why stop there? Why not say they have a conception of farting or a conception of scratching their arse?  

That is, they understand the need for, and they are prepared to affirm, a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining what they take to be the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Nobody in their right mind would bother to do any such thing.  

Thus it seems natural to think of the concept of justice as distinct from the various conceptions of justice and as being specified by the role which these different sets of principles, these different conceptions, have in common.

If so, it is also natural to think that the concept of farting is distinct from that of shitting. Yet, sharts occur. Everybody needs to affirm a characteristic set of principle for demarcating farting from sharting because I am writing a big fat book on the Theory of Farting and thus have to pretend that this isn't an utterly foolish and pointless exercise.  

Is there a right to break the law?

 Tim Sommers asserts, in 3Quarks, that 'you have a right to break the law'. Such is not the case. You may have an immunity to break a particular law or, alternatively, you may do so with impunity because you will not be punished in any way.  

To confuse a right with an immunity is a license to write paranoid nonsense. 

John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, defines civil disobedience as a politically (or socially) motivated, public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law (or order) undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or policies against a general background of fidelity to law by actors willing to accept the consequences of their actions.

Not necessarily. One may simply defy the law because one wishes to be a 'martyr' to some noble cause or the other.  

He argued that civil disobedience is justifiable even in a reasonably just society.

Anything is justifiable in any manner whatsoever. I shit on Rawls's head to protest the Vietnam War. I think this is justifiable because Rawls should invent a time machine & go kill Kennedy.  

Some have objected to Rawls’ focus on an idealized account of what civil disobedience would be like in a society presumably more just than ours.

Society may give an immunity to nutters of various types from making a nuisance of themselves on certain occasions. The thinking is- this is a 'safety valve'.  

They worry that this distorts, rather than clarifies, the role of civil disobedience in actual, existing societies.

Essentially such actions are an immunity claim. Society permits the smaller nuisance so as to avert some greater mischief. One may think of civil disobedience as a 'costly signal' or a measure of 'preference intensity'. However, it may also have a mimetic value. People may think the protestors are cool or, at the very least, more inclined to sexual experimentation. The Greenham Common encampment began as a protest against Tom Cruise's missile (or so I fondly believe). It became the go-to place for bi-curious housewives from the Shires & thus continued to exist long after Tom Cruise withdrew his penis from England's Green, Pleasant & increasingly Lesbian land.  

Others have argued that Rawls’ account has too little to do with the paradigm cases of civil disobedience. For example, Gandhi and King did not operate against the backdrop of legitimate, reasonably just societies – unless you consider Colonial India or the Jim Crow South reasonably just.

Sadly, Indians did consider British India reasonably just. At any rate, they would have nothing to do with the parallel 'Swadesi' legal system proposed by Gandhi. What was cool about Gandhian agitations was that you got to go to jail for a bit. This raised your position in the community & entitled you to a reward from Congress Ministries or Municipal Corporations.  

Philosophers have

shit for brains 

also objected to various features of the view wondering whether justifiable political actions must be public or whether the actors must always accept the consequences or even whether political action must be non-violent.

It can be very violent- though wholly imaginary.  

I believe that Rawls had good reasons for offering an account idealized in these ways.

His reason was that he taught useless shite. Still, a good purpose was served. Kids exposed to his shite, grew up to vote Republican.  

Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience is not a general theory of justifiable political action.

It is nothing at all. Does Civil Disobedience give you an immunity under tort law- e.g. can a business adversely affected by a 'sit-in' sue for damages? NYT v Sullivan was a landmark decision protecting the press. It is said, Clarence Thomas wants to overturn it. 

His focus on civil disobedience is motivated simply by the need to take one thing at a time and an awareness of the special place in our thinking about justice and our public life that civil disobedience holds.

The Ku Klux Klan had an even more special place. If people refuse to obey a particular law, it may become unenforceable. Equally, laws may be passed even though nobody wants or expects them to be enforced. The thing is purely cosmetic. 

Ideally, civil disobedience as conscientious political action for social or political change models the change it seeks

e.g. dumping tea in the Boston harbour to signal the determination to be subject to no taxation save on the basis of responsible representation.  

by being public, non-violent, and appealing to the sense of justice of others.

Or by showing that enforcing the law will be too costly. You can arrest one guy smoking dope in the street. You can't arrest ten thousand. To understand obedience or disobedience you need to look at the pay-off matrix and threat points & hold out problems & so forth. The thing is strategic- i.e. game theoretic. You can always get some stupid Professor to say 'As Kantians we cany justify shitting on Rawls's head by appealing to the apodicity of the transcendental fart'. 

Appealing especially to those who disagree with a particular act or campaign. And it is done with a willingness to accept consequences in a way that reinforces the rule of law even in its breach.

Does forming an orderly queue to be hit on the head & carted off to jail 'reinforce the law'? No. It is a fucking nuisance- like reporting yourself to the police every time you shit on Rawls's head. 

It is part of the change it seeks.

Smoke dope in public along with a big bunch of guys and you may indeed change what is seen as lawful behaviour. But this is also true of a Mafia boss who walks into a police station and kills the Chief Inspector. If nobody stops him walking out of the station, everybody understands that he, and he alone, is the Law in the precinct. If you want revenge for your daughter's rape, it is the Godfather you go to see.  

In fact, again, I think that in a liberal democracy there is a right to civil disobedience, rather than it being sometimes justifiable.

No. Law enforcement has a limited immunity to take coercive actions against people. This is a justiciable matter.  Speaking generally, you have a right to do what you like save where somebody has a superior right or immunity. 

One problem with focusing on justifiability is that

anything can be justified by anything. That's why lawyers get paid big bucks to focus on justiciable issues. Philosophy professors are paid a meagre wage to teach shite to shitheads.  

it can get mired in the issue of whether or not there is a generalized obligation to obey the law.

& a generalized obligation to be obliged & an obligation to that obligation & so forth. This is simplly childish.  

Surprisingly, most philosophers are “Philosophical Anarchists.”

i.e. not just useless but anarchically so- i.e. they add a turd to the faculty punch bowl as a fuck you to the Dean. 

They say that you have no obligation to obey the law over and above your moral or pragmatic reasons for doing so. I assume, nonetheless, that at least sometimes, especially in a reasonably just society, it is wrong to break the law.

Whether or not a law has been broken is a justiciable matter.  Everybody is innocent till proven guilty. 

Another way justifiability can lead us astray is that, behind every act of civil disobedience there is a claim of injustice or wrong.

Which is why justifiability doesn't matter. Only justiciability does. Hire a lawyer, not a philosopher.  

A focus on justifiability leads to

wasted time.  

a focus on these claims.

which are a waste of time.  

However, I don’t want to know if political action is ever justified by injustice, of course it is. I want to know if, even in a reasonably just society, there is at least this form of political action, civil disobedience, that is justified even when the claim that the actor has been wronged is mistaken.

It is justified by the fact that you are as stupid as shit & simply didn't know any better.  

As Joseph Raz puts the point, the question of whether or not civil disobedience is a right is whether actors are “entitled civilly to disobey even though [or when] one should not do so”.

It isn't a legal right. It may be a claim to a right- e.g. the right to decapitate boring people. 

Like free speech

which is a justiciable matter 

– indeed, it is free speech – the test case is always what to do with what it is that you disagree.

Nope. It has to do with constitutional law & case law & complicated stuff of that sort.  

Of course, you don’t want to suppress your own side in an argument.

My side tends to be a fart. Sometimes it turns into a shart. Suppress it by all means. Also, fuck arguments. Be silent & carry a big stick.  

But what about the other side? Even John Stuart Mill

a guy who worked for the East India Company- they're the bad guys in Pirates of the Caribbean.  

in his seminal On Liberty

like Kant, he thought Liberty might be cool for WASPS but not darkies  

failed to extend free speech to youth, barbarians, and Catholics (under the sway of a foreign sovereign).

Does Civil Disobedience fall foul of the 'harm principle'? If any specific person or enterprise is targeted, there is harm. Should it be covered by tort law? The problem was, if enough people were involved, the cost of enforcement would be too great. In Ireland, in 1880, the boycott of Captain Boycott cost the Exchequer 10,000 pounds. They brought in 50 labourers, under heavy military protection,  to harvest 500 pounds worth of crops. Boycott had to leave the country. 

Admittedly, there is something paradoxical about suggesting that there even could be a legal right to break the law.

That is why the thing is called an immunity, not a right. We don't say ' some White men have a legal right to commit statutory rape in America'. We say 'in certain states, for certain men, there is a right to marry a 15 year old girl if certain conditions are met. This then creates an immunity to have sex with her.' 

Since the law has been broken and, by hypothesis, civil disobedients are willing to accept the consequences of such an act and since we are assuming it is wrong to break the law – what can it even mean to say there is such a right?

Anyone can say they have the right to fly up Uranus. A claim is not a right even if it s a rights claim.  

I assume that civil disobedients face and accept legal consequences for their actions, but that we would recognize such a right by treating them differently than ordinary law breakers.

A court is welcome to look at mitigating circumstances.  

This might mean leniency in treatment, sentencing, or even, in some cases, simply not subjecting them to the full legal consequences their actions.

Which also happens if it is too costly to enforce the law.  

I leave aside the practical side of this question.

Which is the only side that matters.  

As for the conceptual side, again, rights, by definition, can be used wrongly. That may put the point too strongly. But there is nothing logically wrong with the claim that a reasonably just society includes a right (potentially enshrined in law in some way) to disobey the laws of that society.

That's an immunity. A mentally retarded person may have such an immunity.  

A reasonably just society, arguably, would have a special place for civil disobedience.

Also, it would have a special place for taking a shit. 

Civil disobedience proceeds out of a desire to communicate an injustice, to appeal to the better angels of our nature, even at some risk to yourself and without rejecting the whole of the social order tout court.

I suppose one could say it expresses 'preference intensity'. But, it is a nuisance. Society may decide it is cheaper to compromise with the nuisance creators. 

It invokes a lawful social order, even where it does not yet exist, an order based on a shared commitment to justice while recommending fidelity to law even in the breach of it.

It may do. It may not. The problem is, two can play at that game. One bunch of nutters create a nuisance & then another bunch creates an equal and opposite nuisance.  

Civil disobedience also enacts the liberal political order by demonstrating that it is strong enough to tolerate, within limits, even dissent that breaks with the liberal order and/or the law on some particular point.

So does murder.  

Just as Rawls argues that a liberal political state must tolerate a certain level of intolerance

& murder 

by its illiberal members, so too must tolerate its own excesses.

not to mention its really stinky farts.  

It is consistent with the proper understanding of liberalism that there is, paradoxically, a (limited) right to break the law even in the best – but, most importantly, in the worst of times. “Civil disobedience is not our problem,” Howard Zinn argued, “Our problem is civil obedience.”

The real problem is that a 'political order' costs money. If the State goes off a fiscal cliff, it won't have very much in the way of law & order. Plenty of Gandhians who queued up to get hit on the head & carted off to jail, had to run the fuck away from rampaging mobs once the Brits threw in the towel.  

_

Rawls v Habermas & why cats say bow wow.

The Rawls/Habermas debate dates back to 1995. It was a dialogue between the deaf. Rawls's 'social primary goods' are 'the essential rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth, and social bases of self-respect that any rational person would desire to pursue their life plans.' For Habermas, it is the outcome of fair, rational, and inclusive communicative action. 

Both were wrong. Why? We only have a right if there is an effective remedy under a bond of law. Suppose I invested all my money with Bernie Madoff. I think I am well off. Unknown to me, Madoff has pissed that money against the wall. Thus, though 'social primary goods' may exist, nobody can be sure that they do. As for 'rational communicative action'- it can result in our society doing stupid shit and thus getting invaded & enslaved. 

Rawls, in his response to Habermas, wrote

Of the two main differences between Habermas's position and mine, the first is that his is comprehensive while mine is an account of the political and it is limited to that.

Nobody knows what the limits of the 'political' are. There may be an environmental or invasion threat which we aren't paying attention to. Our politics ought to be about solving that 'collective action problem' rather than deciding who gets which Cabinet portfolio.  

The first difference is the more fundamental as it sets the stage for and frames the second. This concerns the differences between our devices of representation, as I call them: his is the ideal discourse situation as part of his theory of communicative action and mine is the original position.

Both only make sense if there is no Knightian uncertainty & thus the Social Contract can be 'complete'- i.e. provide for every eventuality. Sadly, in such a world, there would be no need for language, education or any type of coordinating device. There would be some algorithm which solves the Social 'Transportation problem' in an optimal manner without any resources getting used up in communication.  

These have different aims and roles, as well as distinctive features serving different purposes.

Rawls wanted to replace Risk Pooling & Insurance with a rule for redistributing assets to those worst off. This was foolish. There is an obvious moral hazard. Moreover, having an insurance industry creates an incentive for discovering ways to reduce risk & getting Society to implement such mechanisms- e.g. the Fire Insurance company has an incentive to lobby for the creation of a Fire Brigade & fire safety regulations for buildings, etc.  

(1) I think of political liberalism as a doctrine that falls under the category of the political. It works entirely within that domain and does not rely on anything outside it.

Even liberal countries need armies to defend themselves. Thus diplomacy & military doctrine are 'political'. But so is Scientific research- e.g. finding out how to split the atom.  

The more familiar view of political philosophy is that its concepts, principles and ideals, and other elements are presented as consequences of comprehensive doctrines, religious, metaphysical, and moral.

Fuck that. What matters is defence & diplomacy & raising productivity so as to pay for more of both.  

By contrast, political philosophy, as understood in political liberalism, consists largely of different political conceptions of right and justice viewed as freestanding.

Which would be cool if missiles launched on another continent can't take out our cities within a matter of minutes. 

There may be 'freestanding' political issues- i.e. ones which have no economic or national security implications. But they are likely to be trivial. After all, people with different 'conceptions' may agree that the sensible thing is to let smart people make important decisions just as they did in the past.  

So while political liberalism is of course liberal, some political conceptions of right and justice belonging to political philosophy in this sense may be conservative or radical; conceptions of the divine right of kings, or even of dictatorship, may also belong to it.

This doesn't matter in the slightest. I may believe God has appointed King Charles III as an absloute monarch but be perfectly content that he continues to 'reign, not rule'. Equally, I might decide that Sir Keir Starmer is actually a Dictator who, for some reason of his own, chooses to appear to wholly lack a spine. 

Although in the last two cases the corresponding regimes would lack the historical, religious, and philosophical justifications with which we are acquainted, they could have freestanding conceptions of political right and justice, however implausible, and so fall within political philosophy.

Anything at all can fall within it. I am totes triggered by the fact that girls have to sit down to pee. Compulsory gender reassignment surgery is required.  

Thus, of the various freestanding political conceptions of justice within political philosophy, some are liberal and some are not.

In your opinion. Sadly, if you are not for compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males, you are a fucking Fascist.  

I think of justice as fairness as working out a liberal political conception of justice for a democratic regime, and one that might be endorsed, so it is hoped, by all reasonable comprehensive doctrines

Sadly, it is anything goes. Just say 'for commodity x to exist income distribution y is required.'  Currently even the worst off get some quantity of x. If there was income redistribution, nobody would get any.'  

I do not know of any liberal writers of an earlier generation who have clearly put forward the doctrine of political liberalism.

Because it is either stupid or meaningless. Liberalism is about the Taxman not fucking you over. Let 'Welfare Queens' get jobs cleaning your mansion. 

 Rawls thought Liberalism could be 'freestanding' in the sense of not having to deal with Metaphysics or Theology. The problem here is that willingness to defend the country may depend on a common bond of religion which is itself essentially metaphysical. 

...Habermas's position, on the other hand, is a comprehensive doctrine

a silly one which comes down 'it's nice to talk things over & get everybody to agree. Hitler's big mistake was to beat people & send them to gas chambers. He should have bored them to death instead.' 

and covers many things far beyond political philosophy. Indeed, the aim of his theory of communicative action is to give a general account of meaning, reference, and truth or validity both for theoretical reason and for the several forms of practical reason.

Since the time of Ancient Greece, there have been highly selective criteria for eligibility & accountability (dikomasia & euthnoi) which gets narrowed down as the importance of the issue being decided increases. 

It rejects naturalism and emotivism in moral argument

though both are persuasive 

and aims to give a full defense of both theoretical and practical reason.

None can be given save their relative success. But that is a contingent matter.  

Moreover, he often criticizes religious and metaphysical views.

You should hear what Religion & Metaphysics say about him.  

Habermas does not take much time to argue against them in detail; rather, he lays them aside, or occasionally dismisses them, as unusable and without credible independent merit

though there have been plenty of successful polities founded on Religion. There have been none founded on his stupid shite.  

in view of his philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse and communicative action. I mention two passages in Faktizitdt und Geltung. From the preface: 'Discourse theory

useless shite 

attempts to reconstruct this self-understanding [that of a universalistic moral consciousness and the liberal institutions of the democratic state] in a way that empowers its intrinsic normative meaning and logic to resist both scientific reductions and aesthetic assimila- tions..

You can't 'reconstruct' my self-understanding save by the means I myself took. You may say you have arrived at the same conclusion as I have done by some different method. Thus my self-understanding is that I am a teenaged cheerleader who slays Vampires. I came to it by watching Buffy & noticing that Sarah Michell Gellar looks just like me. Well, not quite, but I have the very same frock she wore in Series 2, Episode 4. By contrast, you come to the conclusion that I am a teenaged Vampire Slayer by studying the Mochijuki proof of the abc conjecture. At least, that's what I hope will happen. 

.After a century that more than any other has taught us the horror of existing unreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason are destroyed.

The Germans had a shitty first half of the century. Then, they were conquered & an occupying Army enabled them to rise up.  

Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies,

in which case it knows how it came about- i.e. it possesses omniscience.  

depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is, on a reason that puts itself on trial.

Procedural reason does no such thing. Law courts use it. The Judge is not put on trial.  

The critique of reason is its own work:

No. It is stupid shit done by some useless tosser in the Philosophy Dept. Nobody talks to him. He takes to drink & then tops himself. Sad.  

this Kantian double meaning is due to the radically anti-Platonic insight that there is neither a higher nor a deeper reality to which we could appeal-

Sure there is. STEM subject mavens are discovering more and more about it.  

we who find ourselves already situated in our linguistically structured forms of life (FG 11).

We who teach stupid shite to morons while smart peeps do STEM subjects.  

Now, read as not appealing to religious or metaphysical doctrines, political liberalism could say something parallel to this passage regarding political justice,

i.e. unjust redistribution of hard earned money 

but there would be a fundamental difference. For in presenting a freestanding political conception and not going beyond that, it is left entirely open to citizens and associations in civil society to formulate their own ways of going beyond, or of going deeper, so as to make that political conception congruent with their comprehensive doctrines.

Also citizens and associations can discover a worm-hole which takes them to a parallel dimension where I am a teenaged Vampire slayer.  

Political liberalism never denies or questions these doctrines in any way, so long as they are politically reasonable.

Political liberalism stupid shite.  

That Habermas himself takes a different stand on this basic point is part of his comprehensive view. He would appear to say that all higher or deeper doctrines lack any logical force on their own.

That is a question for mathematical logic which these two cretins were too stupid to understand.  

He rejects what he calls an essentialist Platonic idea of reason

like the one Godel had?  

and asserts that such an idea must be replaced by a procedural reason that puts itself on trial and is the judge of its own critique.

I am the judge of my own shit. This doesn't turn it into chocolate cake.  

In another passage in chapter 5 of Between Facts and Norms, after an explanation of how the ideal discourse situation proceeds, he stresses that the principle of discourse requires that norms and values must be judged from the point of view of the first-person plural.

More particularly if that first-person plural is a bunch of kittens.  

The practice of argumentation recommends itself for such a jointly practiced, universalized role taking.

Kittens can be very argumentative more particularly with a ball of yarn.  

As the reflexive form of communicative action,

e.g. telling Habermas he has shit for brains & should kindly fuck the fuck off 

it distinguishes itself socio-ontologically, one might say, by a complete reversibility of participant perspectives, which unleashes the higher-level intersubjectivity of the deliberating collective.

This would only be the case if 'origins' were 'recoverable'- i.e. the underlying process was non-dissipative & no impredicativity supervened.  

In this way, Hegel's concrete universal [Sittlichkeit]

Sittlichkeit is the practical application of the concrete universal.  

is sublimated

it can't be sublimated or sublated. It merely is what is currently happening in 'ethical life'.  

into a communicative structure purified of all substantial elements (FG 280).

This is nonsense even by the low standards of German pedants. Remove 'substantial elements' from a 'communicative structure'- e.g. all the words from a sentence- and you are left with nothing at all. 

Thus, according to Habermas, the substantial elements of Hegel's view of Sittlichkeit, an apparently metaphysical doctrine of ethical life (one among many possible examples), are-so far as they are valid- fully sublimated into (I interpret him to mean expressible, or articu- lated, by) the theory of communicative action with its procedural presuppositions of ideal discourse.

In other words, actual morality & ethical behaviour disappear completely because there is no need for them under ideal conditions.  

Habermas's own doctrine, I believe, is one of logic in the broad Hegelian sense:

i.e. nonsense or a cascade of intensional fallacies. Did you know dogs are sublimated into cats? That's why cats say 'Moo!'  

a philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse (of theoretical and practical reason) which includes within itself all the allegedly substantial elements of religious and metaphysical doctrines.

Mathematical logic is a 'rational discourse'. Does it include 'substantial elements' of karma or the doctrine of incarnation? No. But it could have 'oracles'.  

His logic is metaphysical in the following sense:

it is shit emanating from the asshole of his asshole.  

it presents an account of what there is.

That's not 'beyond physics'. It is descriptive shite of some stripe.  

And what there is are human beings engaged in communicative action in their lifeworld.

Human beings have spent a lot of time ignoring the fuck out of me in my life-world. Is it coz I iz bleck? No. It is because I am very flatulent.  

As to what 'substance' and 'substantial' mean, I would conjecture that Habermas intends something like the following: people often think that their basic way of doing things- their communicative action with its presuppositions of ideal discourse, or their conception of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens as free and equal- needs a foundation beyond itself discerned by a Platonic reason that grasps the essences, or else is rooted in metaphysical substances.

People communicate for utilitarian reasons or merely a result of mimetic drives. Plato's 'methexis' may be relevant in the sense that we want to 'participate' in good things- e.g. share happiness if our team won the match.  

In thought we reach behind, or deeper, to a religious or metaphysical doctrine for a firm foundation.

Only if that is what we are paid to do and we are too stupid to understand STEM subjects.  

This reality is also expected to provide moral motivation.9 Without these foundations, everything may seem to us to waver and we experience a kind of vertigo, a feeling of being lost without a place to stand. But Habermas holds that "In the vertigo of this freedom there is no longer any fixed point outside the democratic procedure itself- a procedure whose meaning is already summed up in the system of rights" (FG 229).1

 Nonsense! Parliaments have procedures. But political parties or action committees may not. You tend to moored in your party & don't feel vertigo when you get elected to Parliament because you are still moored in that same party.

The preceding comments bear on Habermas's last two paragraphs (131). Here he says we each see our own views as more modest than the other's. He sees his view as more modest than mine, since it is purportedly a procedural doctrine that leaves questions of substance to be decided by the outcome of actual free discussions

not free at all. You are elected to represent a particular constituency & you may belong to a particular party which has made pledges of a binding type in its manifesto.  

engaged in by free and rational, real and live participants, as opposed to the artificial creatures of the original position.

In the original position, rational people refuse to sign a social contract because it is null & void save for the passing of immediate consideration. Rawls had shit for brains.  

He proposes, he says, to limit moral philosophy to the clarification of the moral point of view

of which, being a fucking Kraut, he knew nothing 

and to the procedure of democratic legitimation,

see above 

and to the analysis of the conditions of rational discourses and negotiation.

ditto 

In contrast, my view, he thinks, takes on a more ambitious task, since it hopes to formulate a political conception of justice for the basic structure of a democracy, all of which involves fundamental substantive conceptions, which raise larger questions that only the actual discourse of real participants can decide.

Suppose we have to decide whether cats say bow wow. I think we will decide that cats don't say bow wow because that is the fact of the matter. You may say 'we can't say that. First there must be a public discussion. Only after everybody agrees that cats don't say 'bow wow', can be affirm that such is the case.

The contrast between Habermas & Rawls is that Rawls thinks we will agree, if behind a 'veil of ignorance', that cats say bow wow. Habermas feels not enough time has been wasted on this matter. Why not bring everybody together so they can agree cats say bow wow? 

At the same time, Habermas thinks I see my view as more modest than his: it aims to be solely a political conception and not a comprehensive one. He believes, though, that I fail in doing this. My conception of political justice is not really freestanding, as I would like it to be, because whether I like it or not, he thinks that the conception of the person in political liberalism goes beyond political philosophy.

That's true enough.  

Moreover, he claims that political constructivism involves the philosophical questions of rationality and truth. And he may also think that, along with Immanuel Kant, I express a conception of a priori and metaphysical reason laying down in justice as fairness principles and ideals so conceived. I deny these things.

I merely think cats say bow wow. My cat bites the postman. Would it do so if it didn't say bow wow? I think not. Harsanyi may disagree but he is stoooopid.  

Rawls's Law of Peoples

John Rawls explained that what he meant by the term "law of peoples" (derived from the traditional ius gentium, and the phrase ius gentium intra se) refers to what the laws of all peoples have in common. An example would be the 'natural' law which recognized the rights of a master over a slave or the right of a father to put a disobedient son to death. 

Rawls did not seem to understand that the primitive notions of Roman law had long been superseded. Ulrich Huber, in the seventeenth century, is generally credited with introducing the notion of 'comity of nations' .' Huber wrote that comitas gentium ("civility of nations") required the application of foreign law in certain cases because sovereigns "so act by way of comity that rights acquired within the limits of a government retain their force everywhere so far as they do not cause prejudice to the powers or rights of such government or of their subjects."[12] Huber "believed that comity was a principle of international law" but also that "the decision to apply foreign law itself was left up to the state as an act of free will."'

Philosophers are too ignorant and stupid to contribute anything to a field where smart people study hard so as to make a lot of money resolving difficult legal cases. 

In his book, Rawls says- 

By the "Law of Peoples" I mean a particular political conception of right and justice that applies to the principles and norms of international law and practice.

Those principles and norms are similar to those which arise in maritime law. No 'political conception' applies. That is why the ideology of the lawyer or judge expert in such matters would be wholly irrelevant. 

It is a different matter that an idiot could take the view that international maritime law equates Capitalism with piracy. 

I shall use the term "Society of Peoples" to mean all those peoples who follow the ideals and principles of the Law of Peoples in their mutual relations.

There are none such. Rawls himself was a law abiding American citizen. He paid State and Federal taxes but omitted to remit any money whatsoever to foreign governments. Indeed, he even had a Savings Account on which he received interest in flagrant disregard to Sharia law regarding usury.  

These peoples have their own internal governments, which may be constitutional liberal democratic or non-liberal but decent governments.

That is irrelevant. Reciprocity, on the other hand, matters.  

In this book I consider how the content of the Law of Peoples might be developed out of a liberal idea of justice similar to, but more general than, the idea I called justice as fairness.

Which was neither fair nor 'operationalizable' by laying down criteria for justiciability. Instead it was the utterly foolish notion that people would respond to 'Knightian Uncertainty'- i.e. not knowing what the future might hold- not by buying insurance but by adopting a rule such that the worst off would have first claim to resources.  

Rawls hadn't noticed that all affluent countries had adopted a 'Social Insurance' scheme to provide a 'safety net'. However, 'moral hazard' militated for keeping unemployment benefits down to a level which would not destroy work incentives. 

This idea of justice is based on the familiar idea of the social contract,

International law is based on treaties which could be considered a type of incomplete contract.  

and the procedure followed before the principles of right and justice are selected and agreed upon is in some ways the same in both the domestic and the international case.

Rawls must have noticed that the UN, or its predecessor, the League of Nations, had not followed any such procedure.  

This monograph on the Law of Peoples is neither a treatise nor a textbook on international law. Rather, it is a work that focuses strictly on certain questions connected with whether a realistic Utopia is possible, and the conditions under which it might obtain.

The answer has to do with preference and endowment diversity. If these meet a 'Goldilocks condition' then the answer is yes. But this does not mean the thing is desirable. The fact is, preference and endowment diversity should increase so that there is more incentive for STEM subject research, better mechanism design, higher allocative and dynamic efficiency etc. There are all sorts of ways in which life could be better for everybody.  

I begin and end with the idea of a realistic Utopia.

Perhaps, such a thing obtained when technology was stagnant and life was nasty, brutish, and short.  

Political philosophy is realistically Utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought of as the limits of practical political possibility.

Political possibilities are constrained by the economic production possibility frontier which, in turn, depends on Technology, mechanism design, etc. Utopias are stoooopid. People don't greatly care about the shite which exercises those who come up with them.  

Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the nature of the social world allows reasonably just constitutional democratic societies existing as members of the Society of Peoples.

No it doesn't. It rests on finding ways to reverse climate change and make 'green energy' cheap and ubiquitous. Also, what would be cool would be spaceships equipped with 'warp-drive' or which could 'jump into hyperspace'. Technology matters. Political Philosophy doesn't.  

In such a social world peace and justice would be achieved between liberal and decent peoples both at home and abroad.

Only in the sense that Death would be abolished if everybody was very liberal and decent and was willing and able to live forever.  

The idea of this society is realistically Utopian in that it depicts an achievable social world that combines political right and justice for all liberal and decent peoples in a Society of Peoples

Just as the idea that nobody will suffer death is 'realistically Utopian'. All we need is a bunch of peeps who are liberal and decent and unwilling or unable to die.  

Rawls outlines his premises thus-

Following Rousseau's opening thought in The Social Contract, I shall assume that his phrase "men as they are" refers to persons' moral and psychological natures

why not their economic, political, racial, religious, regional, linguistic or ideological preferences? One may say there is an element of 'hysteresis' or 'uncorrelated asymmetry' here. In the former case, there is 'path dependence' whereas Rawls is assuming ergodicity- i.e. he is living in La La land. In the latter case, there are eusocial bourgeois strategies which reduce 'rent dissipation'. This means his analysis is sub-optimal. He is denying himself a better solution concept (introduced by John Maynard Smith). Moreover, he is ignoring the fact that resources are required to run Institutions. 

One may defend Rawls by saying 'he invokes ceteris paribus. If other things were equal, then his analysis would be helpful'. The problem is that if people were as he assumes they are, then other things wouldn't be equal. They would be completely different. 

and how that nature works within a framework of political and social institutions;

This is circular. Political and Social institutions work in ways dictated by the human beings running or financing them. 

and that his phrase "laws as they might be" refers to laws as they should, or ought, to be.

Nobody knows what that might be. The fact is, the law is a service industry whose aim, as Hume said, is utility. It changes for the same reason that other service industries- e.g. Entertainment or Accountancy or Education- change. Competition between jurisdictions may militate for convergence in mission critical areas. But, equally, it may lead to 'monopolistic competition' with greater and greater product differentiation. This would result in competing 'Tiebout models' with different fiscal mixes and local laws and regulations. People could 'vote with their feet' and relocate to jurisdictions which suit them best.  

I shall also assume that, if we grow up under a framework of reasonable and just political and social institutions, we shall affirm those institutions when we in our turn come of age,

Just as if grow up on a nice planet in a nice part of the Universe, when we grow up we often say to each other 'I affirm the Universe. It is so nice'. The fact is, we take stuff which works for granted. But we are happy to see them improved in various ways- e.g. made cheaper or become faster or more accurate in operation.  

and they will endure over time.

evolve, not endure.  

In this context, to say that human nature is good is to say that citizens who grow up under reasonable and just institutions—institutions that satisfy any of a family of reasonable liberal political conceptions of justice—will affirm those institutions and act to make sure their social world endures.

Rawls lived in a country which was ready willing and able to blow up the world. Thus it preserved its institutions though, no doubt, it changed them out of all recognition within the space of Rawl's own lifetime. Many other countries weren't so fortunate. They didn't have nukes. They didn't have a kick-ass army which could put down any domestic or external threat.  Some were conquered or came under foreign domination. For one's 'social world to endure, you may have to bend your knee to a foreign tyrant or the domestic puppet he has installed. You may have to pay lip-service to an obnoxious ideology or religion. Such has it ever been. Freedom is a luxury which only those with unrivalled military and economic resources can be sure of retaining. But even then, the content of freedom will be 'essentially contested'. 

As a consequence of focusing on the idea of a realistic Utopia,

this theory will have zero application to the real world 

many of the immediate problems of contemporary foreign policy that trouble citizens and politicians will be left aside altogether or treated only briefly. I note three important examples: unjust war, immigration, and nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, Rawls will ignore the entire history of Humanity so as to talk ignorant bollocks.  

The crucial fact for the problem of war is that constitutional democratic societies do not go to war with one another.

Yes they do- unless their Super-power hegemon stops them.

This is not because the citizenry of such societies is peculiarly just and good, but more simply because they have no cause to go to war with one another.

Sure, they do. It is a different matter that, if the result of the war is a foregone conclusion, no war occurs.  

Compare democratic societies with the nation-states

there were no such things. There were Kingdoms or oligarchic Republics- e.g. Genoa, Venice, etc.  

of the earlier modern period in Europe. England, France, Spain, Hapsburg Austria, Sweden, and others fought dynastic wars for territory, true religion, for power and glory, and a place in the sun.

Colonies? 

These were wars of Monarchs and Royal Houses;

The Second World War wasn't.  

the internal institutional structure of these societies made them inherently aggressive and hostile to other states.

No. Institutional structures were irrelevant. What mattered was the expected Cost vs the Benefit of military conflict.  Where different parties had different Expectations, war was a 'discovery' process. One may say 'proxy wars' served the same purpose once 'Mutually Assured Destruction' was established. 

The crucial fact of peace among democracies rests on the internal structure of democratic societies, which are not tempted to go to war except in selfdefense or in grave cases of intervention in unjust societies to protect human rights.

This is pure fantasy. It is like Amartya Sen saying 'there can be no famine in a democracy, though he himself came from a place where two big famines- 1943 & 1974- were exacerbated by corrupt elected politicians taking charge. 

Any war could be said to be about 'human rights'. Perhaps Rawls was naive enough to think the Civil War really was about slavery.  

What Democracy can do is greatly increase the power of the State to wage long 'total wars' of attrition. Monarchies went in for limited wars of short duration. War was merely an extension of diplomacy. What was new was the US- a democracy- adopting a doctrine of 'mutually assured destruction'. If the world had been blown up when I was young, the blame would have fallen on Wilsonian Democracy. It still may happen. Maybe multi-ethnic Empires and Monarchies weren't such a bad thing. The American Civil War was the first modern war. The two World Wars could bee thought of as European Civil wars. 

Since constitutional democratic societies are safe from each other, peace reigns among them.

Sadly, the people of Vietnam, or more recently, Afghanistan, haven't been safe from 'constitutional democratic societies'. The War on Terror killed 1.3 million, mainly Muslim, people.  

Concerning the second problem, immigration,

the US grabbed a big chunk of Mexico. When Rawls was a rising young academic, the US deported, under 'Operation Wetback' at least 300,000 people. The true figure may have been over a million.  

I argue that an important role of government, however arbitrary a society's boundaries may appear from a historical point of view, is to be the effective agent of a people as they take responsibility for their territory and the size of their population, as well as for maintaining the land's environmental integrity.

This depends on the resources available to the government. Controlling migration costs money and requires considerable man-power.  

Unless a definite agent is given responsibility for maintaining an asset and bears the responsibility and loss for not doing so, that asset tends to deteriorate.

Which is why a definite agent should be given responsibility for deporting aliens. Citizens should be sterilized or euthanized for Eugenic reasons.

On my account the role of the institution of property is to prevent this deterioration from occurring.

In which case, property title should be denied to those who, prima facie, lack the resources or intelligence to prevent such deterioration.  

In the present case, the asset is the people's territory and its potential capacity to support them in perpetuity;

if the existing government can't seal the borders, perhaps the country should be conquered by someone who can. A constitutional democracy is welcome to declare itself the Protectorate of some foreign potentate. 

and the agent is the people itself as politically organized.

If they get swamped by immigrants, it is their own fault.  

The perpetuity condition is crucial. People must recognize that they cannot make up for failing to regulate their numbers or to care for their land by conquest in war, or by migrating into another people's territory without their consent.

Why? The Americans, who established a constitutional democracy 250 years ago, did no such thing. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If immigration made the US largely White, yet more immigration may make it largely 'coloured'. Why should English rather than Spanish be the national language? 

Still, it is good to know that Trump is the ideal Rawlsian Chief Executive. But we can't be sure he really will be able to arrest or reverse 'demographic change'.  

There are numerous causes of immigration. I mention several and suggest

on the basis of ignorance and stupidity 

that they would disappear in the Society of liberal and decent Peoples. One is the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, the denial of their human rights.

decent people don't do such things. Also there would be no rape or murder or fat shaming or economic inequality or prejudice against people who awarded themselves a PhD in Fartology.  

Another is political oppression of various forms,

like high taxes. There are plenty of tax exiles.  

as when the members of the peasant classes are conscripted and hired out by monarchs as mercenaries in their dynastic wars for power and territory. 

When did this last happen? The plain fact is, mercenaries can be hired directly.  

Often people are simply fleeing from starvation, as in the Irish famine of the 1840s.

Irish immigration continued after the famine ended.  

Yet famines are often themselves in large part caused by political failures and the absence of decent government.

No. Excess mortality from a food availability deficit can be mitigated by 'decent government'. But, a decent government- e.g. that of Finland in the 1860s may decide not to bother. Malthusian solutions for Malthusian problems may be endorsed by 'Constitutional Democracies'.  

The last cause I mention is population pressure in the home territory, and among its complex of causes is the inequality and subjection of women.

Oh! That's why Europeans killed indigenous people and took over their territory! It was because their women were denied the vote.  

Once that inequality and subjection are overcome, and women are granted equal political participation with men and assured education, these problems can be resolved.

In other words, once economic problems are solved, politics may become nicer because everything is becoming nicer.  

Thus, religious freedom and liberty of conscience, political freedom and constitutional liberties, and equal justice for women are fundamental aspects of sound social policy for a realistic Utopia (see §15.3-4).

Which is why America was right to invade Afghanistan. It is now a Utopia for lesbians- right?  

The problem of immigration is not, then, simply left aside, but is eliminated as a serious problem in a realistic Utopia.

Because all problems are eliminated by magic. 

To be fair, the new mathematical Welfare Econ & Social Choice theory which Rawls was exposed to as a rising young academic was based on nothing but magic.  

I shall only briefly mention the question of controlling nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Among reasonably just liberal and decent peoples the control of such weapons would be relatively easy, since they could be effectively banned.

Thus, Rawls's own people weren't 'liberal and decent'. Truman used atom bombs against Japan. The country went on to develop H-bombs and to stockpile them while perfecting ballistic missile and other delivery system. Incidentally, in 1971, Nixon threatened to 'nuke Calcutta' at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation War.  

These peoples have no reason for going to war with one another.

What reason did the US have for going to war in Indo-China?  

Yet so long as there are outlaw states—as we suppose—some nuclear weapons need to be retained to keep those states at bay and to make sure they do not obtain and use those weapons against liberal or decent peoples.

So, this is just 'American Exceptionalism'. Whatever it does is 'liberal and decent'. Thankfully, killing enough G.Is is a way of persuading it to be less liberal and decent.  

How best to do this belongs to expert knowledge, which philosophy doesn't possess.

Rawls didn't even possess common sense.  

There remains, of course, the great moral question of whether, and in what circumstances, nuclear weapons can be used at all.

That isn't a moral question. It is a Game Theoretic question of an ideographic kind. Rawlsian rubbish would be irrelevant.  

The Law of Peoples holds that decent nonliberal points of view exist, and that the question of how far nonliberal peoples are to be tolerated is an essential question of liberal foreign policy.

No. Foreign policy has to tolerate any regime which it can't coerce by military or economic means. Moreover, collective security may require alliances with ideological enemies. Stalin was an ally of Churchill & Roosevelt.  

The basic idea is to follow Kant's lead as sketched by him in Perpetual Peace (1795) and his idea of foedus pacificum.

Why bother? The French Republic soon turned into an Empire. Napoleon installed his brothers as Kings of various States. Kant's 'philosophical sketch' amounts to saying 'everybody should be nice nice. Don't be nasty. Also, let us agree to forbid any sensible diplomatic and military arrangement likely to secure the 'balance of power' and thus preserve peace in Europe.  

I interpret this idea to mean that we are to begin with the social contract idea of the liberal political conception of a constitutionally democratic regime and then extend it by introducing a second original position at the second level, so to speak, in which the representatives of liberal peoples make an agreement with other liberal peoples.

First everybody should become very nice. Then they should talk nicely to other nice nice people. After that, nastiness will cease to exist. 

The problem is that Rawls's social contract is not 'incentive compatible'. The first country to adopt it is the first country to collapse. By contrast, the Leninist solution- 'Soviets' are formed in every town or district across the globe. These Soviets form a Socialist Union. The dictatorship of the proletariat is established. Class enemies are liquidated. Then, by some magic, Communism is achieved- i.e. scarcity ceases to exist. The State withers away. Everybody does some work just for the fun of it and gives away the product of their labour to anyone who needs it. This is the 'realistic Utopia' Rawls was trying to compete with. He failed. It is plausible that Communism can be achieved by killing anyone who doesn't get with the program. It is not plausible that Rawls Social Contract can be imposed non-coercively. The plain fact is, anyone can agree to anything but then decide not to abide by the agreement. If a contract can't be enforced, it is a dead letter. 

Looking back at the Foreign Policy of senile Biden, we do find a Rawlsian emphasis on Democracy & Human Rights. But his 'summit for Democracy' was a miserable failure. 

The Social Contract, if it is anything, is an incomplete contract of adhesion. If it is 'liberal'- i.e. permits free entry and, more importantly, exit- then its capacity to redistribute resources is severely limited. Moreover, as with any 'incomplete contract' (i.e. one which does not specify all possible states of the world because of Knightian Uncertainty) there has to be an adjustment of beneficial and control rights over the course of the contract. In other words, we can't predict the distributional consequences.  

The wider problem is that of unanticipated 'exigent circumstances'. When these arise, ideology becomes irrelevant. Any type of regime can follow any type of policy. Political Philosophy is merely a dogma compatible with any type of praxis. 

(i) There are two necessary conditions for a liberal conception of justice to be realistic.

There are no necessary or sufficient conditions for any robust coevolved process or mechanism.  Anti-fragility entails multiple realizability. 

The first is that it must rely on the actual laws of nature and achieve the kind of stability those laws allow for the right reasons.

We don't know the 'laws of nature' or what constitute 'right reasons'. We have better and better approximations for certain purposes.   

It takes people as they are (by the laws of nature), and constitutional and civil laws as they might be, that is, as they would be in a reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society.

The Law is a service industry. Just as there is price and wage discrimination, so too is there service provision discrimination.  This means, the thing is 'rationed' at the margin. Some get their full entitlement. Others get nothing. 

Here I follow Rousseau's opening thought in The Social Contract: 

My purpose is to consider if, in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.

The answer was no. Principles don't matter. Practice does.  

In this inquiry I shall try always to bring together what right permits with what interest requires so that justice and utility are in no way divided.

Hume took the opposite approach. Justice was merely a service industry aiming at utility- i.e. promoting mutually beneficial transactions and reducing uncertainty.  

The second condition for a liberal political conception of justice to be realistic is that its first principles and precepts be workable and applicable to ongoing political and social arrangements.

There are infinitely many such principles and precepts. But they don't matter in the slightest.  

Here an example may be helpful: consider primary goods (basic rights and liberties, opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect)

Nobody knows what they are. This is an 'intension' without a well-defined 'extension'. It means nothing.  

as used in justice as fairness.

The thing has never been used. It isn't even theoretical. It is simply meaningless.  

One of their main features is that they are workable. A citizen's share of these goods is openly observable and makes possible the required comparisons between citizens (so-called interpersonal comparisons).

Try taking away the share of the majority of the citizens so as to benefit the 'worst off' and you will have a Revolution. What you can have is a corrupt nomenklatura living large while pretending to care deeply for the toiling masses.  

This can be done without appealing to such unworkable ideas as a people's overall utility, or to Sen's basic capabilities for various functionings (as he calls them).

It is costly to discover what people have and impossible to discover what their capabilities or functionings might be. A healthy young man who has just been given a clean bill of health by medical experts might still keel over dead. The autopsy might discover that he lacked some specific 'functioning' of an arcane type.  

2. Stability for the right reasons means stability brought about by citizens acting correctly according to the appropriate principles of their sense of justice, which they have acquired by growing up under and participating in just institutions.

In other words, only if there already is an ideal society will you have the sort of ideal citizens which permit an ideal society to function. Thus, there can never be such an ideal society because the egg can't come before the chicken which lays it.  

 It doesn't follow, however, that Sen's idea of basic capabilities is not important here;

Since it is meaningless, it fits well with Rawls's meaningless shite.  

and indeed, the contrary is the case. His thought is that society must look to the distribution of citizens' effective basic freedoms, as these are more fundamental for their lives than what they possess in primary goods, since citizens have different capabilities and skills in using those goods to achieve desirable ways of living their lives.

The silly man had read somewhere that some people have slower or faster metabolisms and this may alter how much food they need. What he didn't get is that ad hoc or discretionary adjustments can and are made.  

The reply from the side of primary goods is to grant this claim—indeed, any use of primary goods must make certain simplifying assumptions about citizens' capabilities—but also to answer that to apply the idea of effective basic capabilities without those or similar assumptions calls for more information than political society can conceivably acquire and sensibly apply.

There is not just a 'Preference Revelation' problem. People simply won't truthfully report their assets or capabilities if this gives rise to a higher tax burden. Instead, everybody with money or influence will have a Doctor's note declaring them to be hopelessly disabled.  

Instead, by embedding primary goods into the specification of the principles of justice and ordering the basic structure of society accordingly, we may come as close as we can in practice to a just distribution of Sen's effective freedoms.

Who will supply all these 'primary goods'? Nobody. What is the incentive?  It is a different matter that there may be a Ministry of primary goods with plenty of well paid bureaucrats which does not itself produce any 'primary goods'. No doubt, Professors might be given cosy little sinecures on QUANGOs set up by such Ministries but that doesn't actually help poor people. 

There is a family of reasonable liberal conceptions of justice,

'Social Justice' not the stuff Law courts concern themselves with.  

each of which has the following three characteristic principles: the first enumerates basic rights and liberties of the kind familiar from a constitutional regime;

Rights and liberties are Hohfeldian incidents. They are meaningless unless they are linked to incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. The King may say 'I care deeply about the poor. That is why I've decided to attend a Conference in Monte Carlo about Social Justice. I will be taking with me a large delegation of concubines. To save money on airfare, I will buy a couple of super yachts for the return journey'.  

the second assigns these rights, liberties, and opportunities a special priority,

Though, attending conferences in Monte Carlo must be given even more special priority 

especially with respect to the claims of the general good and perfectionism values; and the third assures for all citizens the requisite primary goods to enable them to make intelligent and effective use of their freedoms. 

Everybody should be given a flying saucer so as to make effective use of their freedom to explore distant galaxies. But, what is even more important is that death should be abolished. The best freedom of all is that of never having to die. 

Why 'reflective equilibrium' is mere magical thinking

Justice is about justiciability which is restricted and generally protocol bound. Where this is the case, there is an 'interpretation' of existing principles or rules. Interpretations are epistemic and change as the knowledge base changes. Moreover, because of impredicativity, unicity or naturality may be lacking. Finally, it should be noted, Knowledge is a disequilibrium phenomenon driven by cognitive dissonance.

Social Choice theorists and other such shitheads indulged in cascading intensional fallacies while ignoring the importance of 'interpretation' and the 'far from equilibrium' nature of knowledge systems. 

 A case in point is Rawl's reflective equilibrium which refers to 'the mutual adjustment of principles and judgments in the light of relevant argument and theory'. This just means that there is no pressure to alter either accepted principles or judgments under given circumstances. 

The problem here is that principles can be interpreted in different ways such that, ceteris paribus, the same judgment is made by different people or different judgments are made by the same person. In other words, 'reflective equilibrium' is 'anything goes'. After all, when our interpretation of a principle or a judgment changes, it is not the case that the principle or judgement has itself changed. This is because interpretations are 'epistemic' and based on our knowledge base. Neither principles, not judgments are. However, unless principles can be shown to be independent of each other, or no new principle can be shown to subsume two or more existing principles, then 'mutual adjustment' with judgments is not efficient. In other words, the process of arriving at it could be streamlined. This means, if there is 'utility' in having principles, then there is more utility in rejecting an existing cozy little 'mutual adjustment' so as to get better judgments. This is particularly important because of 'Knightian Uncertainty'. Unanticipated states of the world require principles of more general import or application. This can be seen in the evolution of case law where a particular principle is given a more general interpretation such that it subsumes certain other principles or reduces their scope such that they designate a type or category. In other words, they serve a descriptive function or are mere 'terms of art'. 

Different jurisdictions may have different principles, yet because interpretation changes as the knowledge base changes, judgments may converge. But this isn't Rawls's 'reflective equilibrium'. It is a case of different jurisdictions competing with each other for fear of falling behind economically or engendering a political or social backlash. 

Carl Knight, in an article for the Stanford Encyclopaedia, asserts

If you believe that conduct in some case is right or wrong, you have a moral judgment or intuition.

Not necessarily. Your judgment might be aesthetic, or a matter of social convention or wholly strategic or self-serving.  

Perhaps you have many such judgments about different cases. You might, nevertheless, consider that judgments alone do not justify the moral views they express.

You might nevertheless consider yourself to be a pussy cat chasing mice on the rings of Uranus.  

You and your moral interlocutors might be concerned that “what we actually accept is fraught with idiosyncrasy and vulnerable to vagaries of history and personality” (Elgin 1996: 108) or displays “irregularities and distortions” (Rawls 1971: 48).

You might also be teaching worthless shite to imbeciles. Meanwhile kids you were at skool with, who did STEM subjects, are making the world a better place. 

John Rawls proposed to address these

stupid 

concerns through the

even more stupid 

method of reflective equilibrium. We first ensure that our judgments are considered, being made in circumstances appropriate for moral deliberation.

But those circumstances may only arise by reason of some immoral or repugnant asymmetry of power or influence. 'Judge not lest ye be judged' is a sound enough maxim.  

We are then to consider general principles that might accommodate our set of considered judgments—and more than that, explain and extend them.

What better 'general principle' is there than 'judge not' ? The proper reflective equilibrium for any person who reflects upon their own inequities or relative ignorance, is one which seeks greater understanding, not more and more 'moral intuitions' which, at bottom, tend to be foolish, mischievous, or otherwise repugnant.  

On the standard wide reflective equilibrium, we are to consider

'all possible descriptions to which one might plausibly conform one’s judgments together with all relevant philosophical arguments for them. (Rawls 1971: 49)'

'All possible descriptions' is an 'intension' whose extension is epistemic, impredicative and, because of Knightian Uncertainty, unknowable. Nobody can 'conform' with what is unknowable. This is the intensional fallacy writ large. The same holds for 'all relevant philosophical arguments'. 

This requires that we reflect on a wide range of principles, arguments, and theories.

Which is like saying 'we must conform with what we would want to conform with were we omniscient Gods. This requires us to chop off our own heads and shove those heads so far up our poopers that they reappear on top of our necks. Just keep doing this till you gain the power to create a nice new multiverse of your own.' 

Equilibrium is reached where principles and judgments have been revised such that they agree with each other.

One could speak of Judge Hercules who achieves 'harmonious construction'. But, he is omniscient. We aren't. All we can do is make provisional judgments when we have to while recognizing that all principles are defeasible and sublatable- i.e. they will be replaced by something better as our knowledge base expands or our Structural Causal Models improve. 

In short, the method of reflective equilibrium is the mutual adjustment of principles and judgments in the light of relevant argument and theory.

But that 'relevant argument and theory' must be the one provided by smart peeps who didn't waste their time teaching or studying useless shite. Even there, the 'regret minimizing' strategy would be to hedge your bets and experiment a little at the margin. In other words, don't apply the judgment in all cases. See what happens when it isn't done.  

Reflective equilibrium is the dominant method in moral and political philosophy (McPherson 2015: 652; Anderson 2015; de Maagt 2017: 444).

Because both turned to stupid shit long ago. The great thing about the intensional fallacy is that it provides an algorithmic method to crank our more and more virtue signalling nonsense under the rubric of scholarship.  

Its advocates suggest that “it is the only rational game in town for the moral theorist” or “the only defensible method” (DePaul 1993: 6; Scanlon 2003: 149; see also Freeman 2007: 35–36; Floyd 2017: 377–378).

If you are stupid but want to teach shit, it is rational to embrace the intensional fallacy. But you can make more money teaching people how to levitate.  

Though often endorsed, it is far more frequently used. Wherever a philosopher presents principles, motivated by arguments and examples, they are likely to be using the method.

No. Nobody can use this method just as nobody can levitate. Still, one might change or 're-word' principles to make them sound less stupid or out of date. Thus instead of the sound Kantian principle that Niggers are stupid and thus we should ignore what they say, we might have a principle of epistemic eligibility such that only Niggers who repeat our brand of stupid shite are deemed worthy of listening to. 

They are adjusting their principles—and with luck, their readers’—to the judgments suggested by the arguments and examples. Alternatively they might “bite the bullet” by adjusting initially discordant judgments to accommodate otherwise appealing principles. Either way, they are usually describing a process of reflective equilibrium, with principles adjusted to judgments or vice versa.

No. They are merely making feasible adjustments. Reflective equilibrium requires infeasible adjustment of a sort which can only be made 'at the end of mathematical time'.  

Reflective equilibrium is a formal expression of standard methodological practice in moral and political philosophy. 

Which is why both have turned to shit.  

While the distinction between judgments and principles may intuitively correspond to that between the particular and the general,

[p]eople have considered judgments at all levels of generality, from those about particular situations and institutions up through broad standards and first principles to formal and abstract conditions on moral conceptions. (Rawls 1974: 8)

People have always thought that judgments should be made by judges who mention, in the 'ratio', what principle has been applied. People think that even judges, when not in court, merely have opinions or make decisions which they may or may not be able to justify by appealing to any particular principle. 

A Society is considered to be well functioning when very few people ever have to appear before a Court of Law. As for 'moral philosophers', they are merely a glorified type of child minder for young people who aren't yet mature enough to get a job and start a family. 

A first distinction is, then, that while principles necessarily generalize to more than one case (List & Valentini 2016; Slavny et al. 2021), judgments may be either general or particular.

It is perfectly possible to have a principle which applies in one and only one case. This is like the 'halacha vein morin kein' by which it was permissible for Phinehas to slay Zimri & Kosbi. However knowledge of this law forbids the very action it would otherwise dictate. As for judgments, they may simply be ineffective or futile.  

A second distinction is that judgments express an agent’s moral outlook

they may do. They may not. But anything at all may express moral outlook. I do it with farts.  

while principles are candidate representations of that outlook

That may be true of 'moral principles'. But that would be only be a small subset of one's principles. Moreover, one's moral principles may be overridden by other principles. Thus I might think it immoral to kill yet, as a member of a Jury, return a guilty verdict in a Capital case. 

What is missing from this account is the importance of 'interpretation'. Principles are interpreted in a particular way to get a particular judgment.  Why won't these shitheads admit this obvious truth?

In mathematics, interpretation is the process of giving meaning to mathematical expressions, such as symbols and formulas. The value that is assigned to an expression is called the interpretation of that expression. If there is a science of law or a 'Moral Science' then there is a deontic logic which has a mathematical representation. It is possible there is a canonical- i.e. unique and non-arbitrary (i.e. 'natural')- representation. But we know it won't be complete or include its own 'meta-language' or interpretation. Thus by the results of Godel, Tarski, Turing etc., this 'reflective equilibrium' is gibberish. 

In reflective equilibrium, judgments are the views actually held by the moral deliberator

but, speaking generally, they are inchoate. Moreover, one may change the interpretation even of one's own past judgments. Interpretation much more than principles or views or values, are essentially epistemic. They are bound to change as our knowledge base changes or our Structural Causal Models improve. Knowledge is a disequilibrium phenomenon. It is driven by cognitive dissonance. Pedants and Pundits may want to pretend otherwise. But we piss on their heads. 

while a “scheme of principles represents their moral conception and characterizes their moral sensibility” (Rawls 1974: 7; see also Rawls 1971: 48).

No such 'scheme' has ever existed any more that there has been a 'scheme' according to which the timing and smelliness of our farts has been pre-established.  

This section examines judgments, while the next considers principles.

1.1 Considered Judgments

The method of reflective equilibrium starts with judgments.

We make decisions. We have opinions. Judges make judgments. A protocol bound profession may require competent authorities to give something similar. In either case, the thing is defeasible. If a judgment is supported by a justification, then it may serve to create a 'public signal' which supports a superior Aumann correlated equilibria.  

An initial question is which of these judgments should be allowed entry to the process.

All- by Rawls's previous stipulation. If even one is left out, there is no equilibrium. 

An obvious position with some appeal is to allow any judgments or intuitions. A permissive view says that

[o]ur “intuitions” are simply opinions; our philosophical theories are the same. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions, and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium … If our official theories disagree with what we cannot help thinking outside the philosophy room, then no real equilibrium has been reached. (Lewis 1983: x; cf. Goodman 1965: 63–64)

Moreover, any possible intuition must be included. But many possible intuitions are currently unknowable.  

This might seem cavalier, but we are at the moment only discussing the starting point of the method. If reflective equilibrium does its job,

it can't. The thing isn't feasible. 

our initial judgments may be transformed, and will at any rate cohere with theoretical considerations.

If we knew everything we may indeed be able to 'judge as gods' but, this may involve not judging at all 

The mainstream view, by contrast, suggests that only considered judgments should be used in reflective equilibrium. These are “those judgments in which our moral capacities are least likely to be displayed without distortion” (Rawls 1971: 47).

Sadly, we know that the 'considered judgments' of our finest spiritual, moral, and judicial minds have been shit. They were creatures of a more ignorant and bigoted age. But, our kids are now old enough to say the same of us.  

We should (1) be capable of reaching the right decision (e.g., be reasonably well informed),

sadly nobody knows if they have this capability 

(2) be in circumstances where we can do so (e.g., not be scared or upset), and

You can be scared and upset and yet make the right call.  

(3) be motivated to do so (e.g., not stand to gain or lose from the results of our deliberations).

Again, motivation may not matter.  

In short, we should have the ability, opportunity, and desire to make the right decision (Rawls 1971: 48).

So, to make the right decisions we should be such that we couldn't not make the right decisions. This is a very important discovery. We can all levitate simply by being the sort of people who can't not levitate.  

In moral and political philosophy, the judgments used in reflective equilibrium are usually these Rawlsian considered judgments.

Just as, in levitation, the levitational technique used is that which ensures levitation occurs. 

I

1.2 The Confidence Constraint

Rawls proposes that “we can discard those judgments made with hesitation, or in which we have little confidence” (Rawls 1971: 47).

But that is itself a judgment. The problem with discarding it is that some very useful judgments too have to be discarded. Knowledge, as I said, is a disequilibrium phenomenon. In this case you are driven to do more research so as to have greater confidence in the 'key-stone' judgment. But, it may turn out our hesitation or lack of confidence is wrong-headed.  

In other words, considered judgments are subject to a confidence constraint. 

No. All judgments are defeasible. Confidence is irrelevant. We know in advance that it is misplaced in some particular which may or may not be very important indeed.  

Relatedly, Rawls frequently refers to considered judgments as “convictions” (e.g., Rawls 1971: 19–21, 45, 48, 53, 246, 318–320, 447, 520, 580).

Our convictions may not be 'considered' while we ourselves may not be convinced by a judgment which is useful or, indeed, vital.  

The confidence constraint extends to revisions of judgments, which must be made “with conviction and confidence” (Rawls 1974: 8). A more modest version of the confidence constraint is a compromise between the ideal of accounting for all judgments and practical limitations (Scanlon 2003: 144).

Why compromise with nonsense? Some people tend to be confident and optimistic. It is a personal trait. If you are speaking of 'confidence intervals', that is an empirical matter and relates to what can be treated as fact rather than an unsupported supposition.  

1.3 The Epistemic Constraint

Considered judgments, even those that satisfy the confidence constraint, are not limited as to their content. One might have the ability, opportunity, and desire to make the right decision, yet make a grossly mistaken decision, and be confident in it (see Sternberg [ed.] 2002). This may motivate an epistemic constraint. 

Or it may not. If it is important to make the judgment, we just do it already while admitting it may be wrong or not supported by any discoverable facts.  

A modest version would exclude judgments that are logically inconsistent or founded on empirical error.

But we may be wrong about it being logically inconsistent or based on false information.  

A more ambitious constraint excludes any unjustified or unwarranted beliefs (Kelly & McGrath 2010).

We don't know what is unwarranted. What we have are provisional beliefs. At some future point, it is likely they will be considered unjustified.  

For example, Gerald Gaus comments that “clearly unjustified beliefs are, if anything, epistemic liabilities,” approvingly quoting Quine and Ullian’s suggestion that “insofar as we are rational, we will drop a belief when we have in vain tried to find evidence for it” (Gaus 1996: 86; Quine & Ullian 1970: 16).

Not if it is useful. Plenty of people find it useful to believe in a kind and loving God.  

Friends of reflective equilibrium largely reject such a constraint. The basic complaint is that it makes epistemological determinations in advance of the reflective process where these are rather the proper upshot of that process. Reflective equilibrium can be viewed as a negative method, i.e., as what we’re left with when we decide that positive criteria for epistemic success cannot be laid out prior to fully considering our substantive topics (Walden 2013: 255). On this view, what counts as justification, warrant, or consistency should be decided with all relevant theory on the table as part of the process of reflective equilibrium and is not prescribed by the method itself.

Very true. It is only while levitating that you should consider how you came to levitate or why this has suddenly become possible for a creature without wings.  

Rawls, it seems, was as big a fraud as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. But the Maharishi died a billionaire.