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.

really hard

Two weeks from today the Tennessee Philosophical Association gathers once again at Vanderbilt. I'm expected to have something to say about John Rawls. As a past president of this organization I have to say: it is a great pleasure not to be in charge of organizing it this year, though the '07 symposium was great fun. (Just wish the Vandy video-tapers hadn't lost our taped tribute to John Lachs!)


I'm really looking forward to the keynote the night before from Duke's Owen Flanagan. He wrote The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. If I get to do that "Humanism and Meaning"* course someday I may use it. 


Flanagan says of Rawls (and Aristotle, and eudaimonia or human flourishing): 

"The project of human ecology conceived as eudaimonics then becomes seeking the world most beneficial to all human beings, including future ones."

Sounds like a good plan to me.






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*This course would resemble the "Atheism & Spirituality" course from last Spring, but this time with even greater attention to the reasons for affirming humanism (naturalism, atheism) rather than for rejecting theism. We'd explore and critique the claim that a humanist worldview is as meaningful to its adherents as theism is to theists, with John Dewey's A Common Faith, Andre Comte-Sponville's Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" and "Why I'm Not a Christian," and more recent voices as well. What makes life worth living, for those who do not seek for meaning beyond it? 

Sound like a good course to you? Vote for it in the Fall '11 survey.