This paper presents a critique of American liberal capitalism, a system that began as a mere experiment but has now become the only form of life that isbroadly recognized as legitimate. Such legitimation is sustained by the seemingly objective and transcendent authority of a consensus that, as a matter of fact, isincapable of self-critique and judgment. For in liberal capitalism, the quest for happiness is measured primarily by the successes of free enterprise and the freemarket in general. These successes have thus become the only legitimate sources of individual and collective action. But in spite of such successes, liberal capitalism does nothing about the actual unjust relations between different social classes and between different countries. In order to address this unjust situation, liberal capitalism rightly searches for a theory of justice that can provide genuine selfjustification or self-legitimation. But capitalist culture has wrongly found such self-justification in the liberal theory of Rawls, whose veil of ignorance ends up legitimating capitalism’s own “worst of all possible situations.”

This paper explores the relationship between justice and government, examining views on the subject expressed by traditional political philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke, as well as those expressed by contemporary political theorists such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. According to Rawls, justice is one of the fundamental concerns of a governing body; Locke and Rousseau agree that government and justice are essentially connected. Nozick and Max Weber, however, claim that the essential characteristic of government is not justice, but power. This paper argues that government, as an institution formed and controlled by human beings, is subject to the moral injunction to treat human beings as entities accorded certain rights, and included among these rights is the right to just treatment. Governments are therefore enjoined to be just because human beings, as rational agents, and therefore persons, are owed the minimal respect due a person, such as the right to freedom and the right to forbearance from harm by others to self and property.

Just over seventy years ago, three trials took place in Nuremberg, Germany. At the time, they seemed a turning point in international relations—and, indeed, proved to be. The trials involved the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, economic, and judicial leadership of Nazi Germany, those who planned, oversaw, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other large crimes. At the time, the Trials were widely condemned for using retroactive criminal statutes. The most famous discussion is what became known as the Hart-Fuller Debate. This paper argues that Locke provides the best account of the lawfulness of the Trials—at least when compared to the accounts offered by Fuller, Hart, and Ronald Dworkin.

In this paper I argue that the right to equal respect and consideration that Rawls incorporates into the original position by means of the veil of ignorance cannot provide support for his two principles of justice independently of an appeal to considered judgments. The trouble is that this right is intolerably vague. The crucial terms are neither transparent in meaning nor clearly definable, and so they can only be understood against a background of considered judgments. To the extent that the principle is kept vague, it places no constraints on the conditions of the original position. To the extent that its meaning is specified, its interpretation presupposes the very principles and considered judgments that are supposed to be independently justified by the device of the original position. Finally, I respond to Norm Daniels’s claim that “wide reflective equilibrium” provides a way to test moral principles independently of their respective considered judgments.

While scholars have begun to illuminate the contribution of modern Epicure­anism to developments in political theory during the Enlightenment, scholars remain divided as to whether David Hume should be interpreted as an appropriator of modern Epicurean thought. In this essay, I contend that Hume’s political theory contributes not only to the development of the Epicurean idiom, but also to the evolution of contractarian thought, with which Epicureanism is linked. Though Hume is undoubtedly innovative, particularly in regard to his treatment of consent, he does not operate in an entirely new idiom of political theory, one that is “without precedent” (Sagar, Opinion of Mankind). Instead, Hume adopts and refines the Epicurean conventionalism that propelled the modern liberal project of turning politics into a science. This interpretation of Hume clarifies what modern Epicurean political theory is, while also showing that the alleged distance between Hume and Lockean liberalism is narrower than often supposed.

Liberal nationalists have been hard pressed to respond to the normative demands of human rights and global impartiality in justifying special redistributive requirements for fellow citizens in a democratic polity. In general, they tend to support disparate standards of distributive justice for insiders and outsiders by favoring a relational approach to justice that affirms co-national preferences while not denying the importance of global impartiality. Following Sen and critiquing Rawls, I re-frame the debate by re-configuring the notion of relationality with a globalist tilt, with the hope of rescuing the discourse on global justice from its current stalemate.

I evaluate the mechanism Rawls uses to elicit his just savings principle. My analysis focuses on his account of membership in the original position because who is in the original position and what they know has important consequences for the rest of Rawls’s theory of intergenerational justice. I consider three options: present time of entry (PTE), actual people from various generations, and all possible people. However, I will argue that Rawls is ultimately not successful since there is no plausible composition of the original position that avoids the non-identity problem and generates acceptable moral principles without logical contradictions or inconsistencies with the rest of his theory of justice.