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The "Open Society" is a society of free individuals, cooperating while pursing diverse ways of living. The Open Society and Its Complexities marshals formal models and empirical evidence to show that our open society is grounded on the moral foundations of human cooperation originating in our distant evolutionary past, but has built upon these foundation a complex society that requires us to rethink both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance.

This essay examines two different modes of reasoning about justice: an individual mode in which each individual judges what we all ought to do and a social mode in which we seek to reconcile our judgments of justice so that we can share common rules of justice. Social contract theory has traditionally emphasized the second, reconciliation mode, devising a central plan (the contract) to do so. However, I argue that because we disagree not only in our judgments of justice but also about the degree of reconciliation justice calls for, the social contract presupposes a single, controversial, answer to the proper degree of reconciliation. In place of the social contract's 'top-down' approach, this article explores the idea of self-organizing moral systems, in which each individual, acting on her own views of justice (including the importance of reconciliation), responds to the decisions of others, forming systems of shared justice. Several basic agent-based models are explored to begin to understand the dynamics under which individuals with diverse views of justice may come to share common rules. It is found that, surprisingly, by increasing the diversity in a system, we can sometimes increase the possibility of agreement.

Abstract:Some understand utopia as an ideal society in which everyone would be thoroughly informed by a moral ethos: all would always act on their pure conscientious judgments about justice, and so it would never be necessary to provide incentives for them to act as justice requires. In this essay I argue that such a society is impossible. A society of purely conscientiously just agents would be unable to achieve real justice. This is the Paradox of Pure Conscientiousness. This paradox, I argue, can only be overcome when individuals are prepared to depart from their own pure, conscientious, judgments of justice.

AbstractThe "welcome return" to "substantive political philosophy" that Rawls'sA Theory of Justicewas said to herald has resulted in forty years of proposals seeking to show that philosophical reflection leads to the demonstrable truth of almost every and any conceivable view of the justice of property rights. Select any view—from the justice of unregulated capitalist markets to the most extreme forms of egalitarianism—and one will find that some philosophers have proclaimed that rational reflection uniquely leads to its justice. This is, I believe, a sort of ideological thinking masquerading as philosophizing. In this paper, using some tools from game theory as well as experimental findings, I seek to sketch a non-ideological approach to the question of the justification of property rights. On this approach the aim of political philosophy is, first and foremost, to reflect on whether our social rules of property are within the "optimal eligible set" of rules acceptable to all.

AbstractJustificatory liberalism is liberal in an abstract and foundational sense: it respects each as free and equal, and so insists that coercive laws must be justified to all members of the public. In this essay I consider how this fundamental liberal principle relates to disputes within the liberal tradition on "the extent of the state." It is widely thought today that this core liberal principle of respect requires that the state regulates the distribution of resources or well-being to conform to principles of fairness, that all citizens be assured of employment and health care, that no one be burdened by mere brute bad luck, and that citizens' economic activities must be regulated to insure that they do not endanger the "fair value" of rights to determine political outcomes. I argue in this essay: (1) a large family of liberal views are consistent with the justificatory liberals project, from classical to egalitarian formulations (but not socialist ones); (2) overall, the justificatory project tilts in the direction of classical formulations.

In replying to Steven Wall's and Andrew Lister's thoughtful essays on my account of justificatory liberalism in this issue, I respond to many of their specific criticisms while taking the opportunity to explicate the foundations of justificatory liberalism. Justificatory liberalism takes seriously the moral requirement to justify all claims of authority over others, as well as all coercive interferences with their lives. If we do so, although we are by no means committed to libertarianism, we find that that many of our cherished values, moral intuitions, and political aspirations no longer ground the range of authority over others many of us would claim. In this sense, justificatory liberalism is a theory of limited authority and limited government — which is what a genuinely liberal theory must be.