John Rawls
American philosopherWikipedia
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55
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52
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Search complete. 91 mentions across 55 episodes found for "John Rawls".
Oct 28, 2026
Shadi HamidGUEST
I mean, to say that religion should be privatized or to maybe bracket religion in the public arena.
Shadi HamidGUEST
I mean, John Rawls famously said, at the heart of liberalism in his construction is the idea that people who have comprehensive doctrines, in other words, religions, that they can believe in those comprehensive doctrines, but that when they're arguing in the public sphere, they should argue in ways that are intelligible to non-religious people.
Shadi HamidGUEST
In other words, they should make secular arguments, even if what's driving them is religion.
Shadi HamidGUEST
So I think that there are different flavors of this in liberalism, and I wouldn't want to kind of oversimplify, but I think that if we take the Rawlsian framework as the predominant one of the 20th century, there is this expectation that religious people should suppress their religiosity when they're in public.
Shadi HamidGUEST
That's something that we can kind of sit with, however uncomfortable it might be.
Jeffrey ChurchHOST
Yeah, I wanted to ask, I think, about this sort of maybe distinction between secularism and liberalism, because I think I can understand the concern about secularism as sort of leading towards the kind of effacement of religion, a belief in sort of scientism, you know, universal doubt, and then the kind of certainty with regard to rationality and so on.
Jeffrey ChurchHOST
But I think I distinguish that from a... liberal perspective where liberalism and if you just take john rawls i think the way that you you just sketched him i mean rawls has a kind of um you know he begins with the fact of reasonable pluralism right so there's a sort of plurality of many different world views that's assumed in in liberalism liberalism involves a kind of institutional neutrality not like pushing a particular secular worldview, but a sort of acceptance of many, many different worldviews.
Jeffrey ChurchHOST
So, yeah, and I think public reason is like, it's about...
Erik MatsonGUEST
And liberal values are sort of free floating, and they don't need to have richer conceptions of the good.
Erik MatsonGUEST
Some of this goes back to Rawls and his attempt to formulate a kind of political liberalism, a kind of value-free liberalism that... elevates neutrality and equality, but of course neutrality and equality are values and why should we value neutrality and equality? Why should we value free speech? What are the kinds of preconditions that would lead us to want to recognize others as individuals with the right to speak? So I do think that there are kind of deep philosophical and theological presuppositions that are necessary for the liberal project to sustain itself and for the market to sustain itself for that matter.
Dan HuggerHOST
Yeah.
Dan HuggerHOST
One of the things that you argue in the book, and this grows out of this, is that theology and economics need each other in some sort of fundamental way.
Mike BeggsGUEST
That is another dilemma in this tradition that we do talk about in the book.
Mike BeggsGUEST
So there's a famous, the reason we talk about the surfer, this comes from a famous, it was actually a footnote of John Rawls where he says, nothing in what I'm saying should imply that we should be just giving the Malibu surfer money without having any obligation to work.
Mike BeggsGUEST
And the Marxist, the analytical Marxist, Philippe Van Parise, he says on that footnote of Rawls and says, well, why shouldn't the surfer be fed? And he made the case for the universal basic income on a few grounds.
Mike BeggsGUEST
And I think in the book, we say the surfer is kind of a romantic figure.
Justin HolmesGUEST
If you have a rule proactively, we don't know.
Justin HolmesGUEST
It's like the veil of ignorance from John Rawls.
Justin HolmesGUEST
We don't know.
Justin HolmesGUEST
We don't really know what the impacts are going to be because I don't think we have any sense of who's going to screw up a ballot in this specific way.
Daniel SheehanGUEST
But we were like ships passing in the night.
Daniel SheehanGUEST
And so I ended up going and talking with John Rawls back over at Harvard because I was in Boston in Lee Bailey's firm.
Daniel SheehanGUEST
So I went back over and had meetings with John Rawls, the head of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard.
Daniel SheehanGUEST
And he invited me to come back and do my PhD there at Harvard.
Daniel SheehanGUEST
working on comparative social ethics of comparing and contrasting the ethics of different worldviews.
speaker_0HOST
Then there is the theological view shaped by St. Augustine and championed by Martin Luther, according to which, as a result of human sin, mundane authority is simply finger-pointed by God.
speaker_0HOST
By contrast, sophists Marcellus de Padua, John Locke, Rousseau, and John Rawls espouse various versions of social contract as a foundation of a state.
speaker_0HOST
But the theory that we need to dust off in the context of Russia's aggression is the conquest theory.
speaker_0HOST
The Polish-Austrian sociologist Ludwik Gumplowicz is a founding pioneer of this paradigm, also known as überlagerung, or conflict theory.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
So I thought, well, then what's your job? And he's like, well, we work with models of fairness.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
And it's like, okay, well, whose model of fairness? And that led to this discussion on John Rawls, political philosopher, so on and so forth.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
And then when I started looking into the jobs broadly, and this is from a professional perspective, I started pulling down job descriptions for AI ethicists.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
This is 2022, 2023.
32 MINS LATER
Andrew SidwellGUEST
He wrote in the 70s.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
I wrote later than that, too.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
He wrote in opposition to John Rawls, who I mentioned earlier.
Andrew SidwellGUEST
One of the things, one of Nozick's sort of thought experiments was what he called the experience machine.
David TianHOST
When you are the one with less consideration because you have less standing, equal standing now becomes a lot more consequential to you, right? That makes a lot more sense, right? This forces you to consider terms that you can accept without relying on just being powerful enough to escape those consequences.
David TianHOST
Now, John Rawls was, of course, focusing on principles that govern society.
David TianHOST
Our focus in this episode is more narrow and smaller.
David TianHOST
And this is about the personal choices that you make that would lead to your success, right? So when it comes to your personal choices, and these personal choices, let's say, affect other people, what you should do is consider this from behind the veil of ignorance.
Mike BeggsGUEST
That is another dilemma in this tradition that we do talk about in the book.
Mike BeggsGUEST
So there's a famous, the reason we talk about the surfer, this comes from a famous, it was actually a footnote of John Rawls where he says, nothing in what I'm saying should imply that we should be just giving the Malibu surfer money without having any obligation to work.
Mike BeggsGUEST
uh and the marxist the analytical marxist philippe van paris replied he says on that footnote of rolls and says well why shouldn't uh the surfer be fed and he made the case for the universal basic income uh on a few grounds And I think in the book, we say the surfer is kind of a romantic figure.
Mike BeggsGUEST
We should really be talking about, what about the gamer who just wants to sit around and game all day? Should the gamer be fed? Ultimately, we do believe that there is a role for a modest basic income.
Mike BeggsGUEST
That is another dilemma in this tradition that we do talk about in the book.
Mike BeggsGUEST
So there's a famous, the reason we talk about the surfer, this comes from a famous, it was actually a footnote of John Rawls where he says, nothing in what I'm saying should imply that we should be just giving the Malibu surfer money without having any obligation to work.
Mike BeggsGUEST
And the Marxist, the analytical Marxist, Philippe Van Parise, he says on that footnote of Rawls and says, well, why shouldn't the surfer be fed? And he made the case for the universal basic income on a few grounds.
Mike BeggsGUEST
And I think in the book, we say the surfer is kind of a romantic figure.
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