The Law of Peoples

We're talking about John Rawls tomorrow at the Tennessee Philosophical Association annual meeting.

It's Duke's Owen Flanagan, author of The Really Hard Problem, on personal and narrative identity tonight, in the keynote: "all the interesting facts about each person [are] about the particulars of his or her story, not in the fact that he or she has a story." Sounds like an anti-Rawlsian perspective. Anti-Randian, too. Can't wait to hear the details.

But it'll be smart of us all to remember what Rawls wrote in The Law of Peoples:

it is often thought that the task of philosophy is to uncover a form of argument that will always prove convincing against all other arguments. There is, however, no such argument. Peoples may often have final ends that require them to oppose one another without compromise...

One does not find peace by declaring war irrational or wasteful, though indeed it may be so, but by preparing the way for peoples to develop a basic structure that supports a reasonably just or decent regime and makes possible a reasonable Law of Peoples.

So here's hoping we'll all be reasonable.