Paul Weithman: “Justice: Rawlsian, Aristotelian and Thomistic”

Thus religion is correlated with partisan and policy divides in the US. And as is evident to even the most casual observer of my country, those divides have paralyzed if not broken our politics. The resulting fragility of our institutions raises the question of whether it is possible to have a stable liberal order that enjoys the principled support of the many religious worldviews represented in the American body politics, including the worldview of the "nones". This is not just a question for political science, but also for political philosophy. For some time, I have tried to understand John Rawls's answer to that question, and to the place of Catholicism the stable liberal order he envisions.

But the question Rawls asks, and the further questions his answer raises, are in need of refinement. One way of refining them is to ask whether some form of Catholic political thought might support liberal principles in the special circumstance of John Rawls's well-ordered liberal society. More specifically, we might ask whether Catholicism can take part in the "overlapping consensus" that Rawls said would have to obtain in that society if it is to be stably just. The Thomist-Aristotelian tradition of Catholic political thought seems not to have conceptual space for social justice as Rawls conceives it because principles of social justice apply in the first instance to the basic structure. I argue that Rawls's focus on the basic structure is not the obstacle it seems to be.

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Paul Weithman is the Glynn Family Honors Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame, the university from which he received his B.A. in 1981. He earned his Master's and Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of John Rawls and Judith Shklar. He joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in 1991.

He works primarily in political philosophy but has also worked in moral philosophy, religious ethics, medieval political theory and the philosophy of education. He chaired the Philosophy Department between 2001 and 2007. He currently directs the interdisciplinary minor in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and co-directed the Glynn Family Honors Program from 2014 to 2021. His Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship won the annual book award of the North American Society of Social Philosophy. His Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls's Political Turn won the Spitz Prize, given to the best work of liberal and democratic theory published in its year. A collection of his papers Rawls, Political Liberalism and Reasonable Faith was published by Cambridge in 2016.

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