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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2025
Rawls suggests that facts about the political virtues must be part of the construction of a reasonable political conception of justice. The thesis of this article is that, if an account of political virtue is a necessary element in a reasonable political conception, then so too is an account of political vice. The political vices are those attitudes, feelings, and dispositions that systematically work against reasonableness or the other cooperative or discursive goals of political virtue. The article concentrates on several epistemic-political vices along with practical-political vices that have epistemic elements. Epistemic-political vices such as close-mindedness or gullibility are especially worrisome in the digital age, given their tendency to undermine practices of public reasoning and deliberative democracy. Each political vice is understood as a characteristic failure of one of the Rawlsian burdens of judgment. Each is in this way a more specific form of unreasonableness.
1 See, e.g., Luppi, Roberto, ed., John Rawls and the Common Good (New York: Routledge, 2022)Google Scholar.
2 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 157 Google Scholar, li, and 253.
3 Shklar, Judith, Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 15 Google Scholar: “One misses a great deal by looking only at justice. The sense of injustice, the difficulties of identifying the victims of injustice, and the many ways in which we all tend to live with each other’s injustices tend to be ignored …” For Rawls’s debt to Shklar, whom he calls a teacher of sorts, see Political Liberalism, xxxii.
4 Shklar, Judith, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
5 This paragraph draws on my “Political Virtues” in The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon, ed. Jon Mandle and David Reidy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 631–34.
6 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 122, 157, 163, 194, and 347.
7 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 123.
8 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 139.
9 Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness, ed. Kelly, Erin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 92 Google Scholar.
10 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56.
11 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56–57.
12 For criticism of public reason liberalism in this regard, see Enoch, David, “Political Philosophy and Epistemology: The Case of Public Reason,” Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 3, ed. Sobel, David, Vallentyne, Peter, and Wall, Steven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 132–65Google Scholar.
13 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 220, and Justice as Fairness, 92, observing that all forms of reasoning include “common elements” such as principles of inference or rules of evidence. For further discussion, see Cohen, Joshua, “Truth and Public Reason,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37 (2008): 2–42 Google Scholar.
14 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 449.
15 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 383 Google Scholar and 167; for discussion, see Roberto Luppi’s “Virtue,” in John Rawls and the Common Good, 226–48.
16 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 157, n. 23.
17 Cf. Robert Audi’s conception of “civic virtue” as consisting in those qualities of character that enable persons to excel in the role of citizen, thereby contributing to the realization of justice and other basic political goods: Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150.
18 Here I adapt what Rawls says about comprehensive doctrines directly to persons, namely, that they might present a mixture of both reasonable and unreasonable elements and that one unreasonable element does not render a doctrine (or, arguably, a person) unreasonable “as such” (Political Liberalism, 244, n. 32).
19 Kevin Vallier associates idealization with rationality, information, and motivational coherence in “Against Public Reason’s Accessibility Requirement,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (2011): 366–89.
20 Enoch, David, “Against Public Reason,” Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, ed. Sobel, David, Vallentyne, Peter, and Wall, Steven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 112–44Google Scholar, with a reply by Lister, Andrew, “The Coherence of Public Reason,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (2018): 64–84 Google Scholar.
21 Compare Audi who maintains that an adequate reason is one that would be intelligible to a normal adult with a good high school education: Religious Commitment and Secular Reason, 90.
22 See his historical and conceptual analysis in Forst, Rainer, Toleration in Conflict, trans. Cronin, Ciaran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
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24 McKinnon, Catriona, Toleration: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2008), 21 Google Scholar.
25 Forst identifies these limits in terms of a respect (rather than a permission) conception of toleration. On the degree to which the intolerant should be tolerated in some weaker sense of being entitled politically to their convictions, see his Toleration in Conflict, 23–25 and 568–71. See also Rawls, Theory of Justice, 190–94.
26 John Courtney Murray, “The Problem of Religious Freedom,” Theological Studies 25 (1964): 503–75, https://library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1964e#THE%20TWO%20VIEWS.
27 Bayle, Pierre, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23, “Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full” (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 134 Google Scholar.
28 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56; hereafter I shall refer to the “sources” BJS1 through BJS6 simply as “burdens.”
29 Anderson, Elizabeth, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 46 Google Scholar.
30 Kinder, Donald and Sanders, Lynn, Divided by Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
31 Anderson, Imperative of Integration, 53–60.
32 Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 35 Google Scholar.
33 For examples, see my “Immigration Policy and Civic-Political Identity,” Public Affairs Quarterly 27 (2013): 1–23.
34 Hartley, Christie and Watson, Lori, Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 146 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Hartley and Watson, Equal Citizenship, 148.
36 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56–57.
37 Cassam, Quassim, Vices of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 23 Google Scholar; see also Medina, José, The Epistemology of Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 30 Google Scholar.
38 Each of the listings in Political Liberalism is partial in the sense that each is missing at least one political virtue, and normally more than one, cited by Rawls at least once elsewhere in the book (122, 157, 163, 194, and 347).
39 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56.
40 Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 34.
41 Acosta, Jesse and Kemmelmeier, Markus, “The Changing Association between Political Ideology and Close-Mindedness,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 10 (2022): 657–75Google Scholar, at 659.
42 Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 33.
43 Tetlock, Philip and Gardiner, Dan, Superforecasting (New York: Crown, 2015), 112–13Google Scholar.
44 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011), 81 Google Scholar.
45 Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 146.
46 Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 183–84.
47 Sunstein, Cass, #Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 66–70 Google Scholar; Cody Turner, “Online Echo Chambers, Online Epistemic Bubbles, and Open-Mindedness,” Episteme (2023); Del Vicario, , Bessi, Alessandro, Zollo, Fabiana and Quattrociocchi, Walter, “The Spreading of Misinformation Online,” PNAS 113 (2016): 554–59Google ScholarPubMed.
48 Sunstein, #Republic, 226–33.
49 Levy, Neil, “Do your own Research!,” Synthese 200 (2022): 1–19 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
50 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56.
51 Here I adapt the terminology from Carter, J. Adam and McKenna, Robin, “Skepticism Motivated,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2020): 702–18Google Scholar.
52 Lord, C. G., Ross, L., and Lepper, M. R., “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979), 2098–2109 Google Scholar. On the limitations of this study, along with an extended argument that better designed experiments actually give rise to the opposite result, see Coppock, Alexander, Persuasion in Parallel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Talisse, Robert, Overdoing Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 117 Google Scholar.
54 Sunstein, #Republic, 77–78; Talisse, Overdoing Democracy, 112–14.
55 Sunstein, #Republic, 99–100.
56 Cassam, Quassim, Conspiracy Theories (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019)Google Scholar. On the epistemological difficulties associated with drawing a bright line between unwarranted and warranted conspiracy theories, see Keeley, Brian, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999): 109–26Google Scholar.
57 Sunstein, Cass and Vermeule, Adriane, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2009): 202–27, at 205Google Scholar.
58 Sunstein and Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” 210.
59 Consider the 2020 survey result that fewer than half of US respondents were willing to label the following statement as false: “A group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” In this NPR/Ipsos poll 17% of respondents reported that the statement is true and 37% weren’t sure (Ipsos [December 30, 2020] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-123020). The example is not meant to suggest that conspiracy theories are only a product of the far right, as this one is. People on both sides of the electoral-partisan divide are prone to conspiratorial thinking.
60 Levy, Neil, “It’s our Epistemic Environment, Not our Attitude towards Truth, that Matters,” Critical Review 35 (2023): 94–111 Google Scholar.
61 Sunstein and Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” 223. On the reinterpretation of evidence, see Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” 120.
62 Sunstein and Vermeule “Conspiracy Theories,” 217.
63 Levy, “Do your own Research!”
64 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56.
65 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 454.
66 For examples and discussion, see Reidy, David, “Public Political Reason: Still Not Wide Enough,” in John Rawls: Debating Major Questions, ed. Mandle, Jon and Roberts-Cady, Sarah (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 21–34 Google Scholar.
67 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 231.
68 Dworkin, Ronald, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 239 Google Scholar.
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70 Dworkin, Law’s Empire, 228.
71 Landemore, Hélène, Democratic Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 52 Google Scholar.
72 Coppock, Persuasion in Parallel, 3.
73 Sunstein, #Republic, 229–31.
74 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 445.
75 Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, also referenced in discussions of epistemic vice by Linda Zagzebski (On Epistemology, Centgage, 2009, 19–22) and Cassam (Vices of the Mind, 78–99).
76 Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 56.
77 These statements were made two days apart, to different public audiences, and in reference to a 2015 South Carolina mass shooting targeting black church-goers and the subsequent decision to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol building. Meg Kinnard and Matt Brown, “Nikki Haley has Called out Prejudice But Rejected Talk of Systemic Racism throughout her Career,” Associated Press (February 2, 2024).
78 Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 86.
79 I adapt a similar dilemma formulated by Zagzebski, concerning how bullshit affects the desirability of the hearer’s life (On Epistemology, 21).
80 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 131. See also the lengthier discussion of envy in Theory of Justice, 530–40.
81 On cruelty, see Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 7–44.
82 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 57.
83 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 54.
84 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56–57.
85 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 28.
86 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 58.
87 Rawls, John, Collected Papers, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 478–79Google Scholar.