The Virtues of Fair Social Cooperation

Abstract

In the chapters to come I shall make my case against the principled paradigm of ideal theory by criticizing a wide range of contemporary theories of justice. These include Rawls’s theory of ‘justice as fairness’, Ronald Dworkin’s version of ‘luck egalitarianism’, and both right (e.g. Robert Nozick) and left (e.g. Michael Otsuka, Philippe Van Parijs) variants of libertarianism. This book has two primary goals. The first goal is the negative aim of chipping some dents in the armour of ideal theory. The second, more positive aim, is to provide the basics of the virtue- oriented theory of civic liberalism. Given the breadth of theories and issues I attempt to cover in the first aim, I only provide brief glimpses of what civic liberalism prescribes in these different contexts rather than a detailed, expansive account of what the demands of justice in nonideal theory are. So I acknowledge that this book does not fully outline and defend the theory of civic liberalism. That project will have to wait for another day. But in this chapter I do provide a general account of the theoretical basis of civic liberalism and highlight what its central prescriptions are for both individuals and social institutions. I return to these insights again at various stages in future chapters, as I address issues such as toleration, freedom of expression, welfare reform and judicial review.