Gerald Gaus
Biographic Data
| ID | 460018 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gerald Gaus |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gerald |
| FAMILY NAME | Gaus |
| SIGNATURE | GAUS G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, Second Edition is a comprehensive, definitive reference work, providing an up-to-date survey of the field, charting its history and key figures and movements, and addressing enduring questions as well as contemporary research
Is mutual advantage a general theory of justice? More domain worries
Morality as a Complex Adaptive System
This chapter focuses on Hayek’s analysis of morality as an evolved spontaneous order while updating and revising it, taking account of current research and models. While his path-breaking work requires revision, Hayek presents an analysis of a complex adaptive moral order that is far more in tune with current science than are the highly rationalistic analyses of contemporary political philosophy, which often seek to present utopian plans for the …
Moral Conflict and Prudential Agreement
Michael Moehler’s Minimal Morality is a wonderful and important book, from which I have learned a great deal. It reinvigorates rational choice moral theory in the process of confronting what I see as the most important issue in social and moral philosophy today: can those in a deeply morally divided society endorse a common moral framework to structure social cooperation? Is a rational moral order possible under conditions of deep and wide moral …
The Modern Liberal Theory of Man
First published in 1983. The primary argument of this book is that there is a coherent tradition of liberal thinking that extends from L. S. Mill, through liberals like T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, L. T. Hobhouse and John Dewey to John Rawls. The author places Rawls within a longstanding tradition of liberal thinking, while also arguing that Green and Hobhouse are not simply of historical interest but represent genuine and interesting attempts…
The Tyranny of the Ideal
This book lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. It shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. The book argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—essentially, the entir…
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent
The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is a groundbreaking work in democratic theory. This chapter argues that it is of continued relevance today, due both to its methodological innovations and its use of those innovative techniques to solve the fundamental problem of democratic justification. In Calculus, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock fuse economic methods, political theory, and the normative project of show…
Public Reason in Political Philosophy
Searching for the Ideal
Diversity and disagreement have historically been thought to be obstacles that theories of justice must accommodate. Recently, however, many democratic theorists have begun to think of diversity as something to be celebrated. This paper argues that the new champions of diversity are right, but only to a point. They are right because certain sorts of diversity, namely diversity of the sort that manifests itself in disagreement over how similar (or…
Consensus on What? Convergence for What? Four Models of Political Liberalism
As we read his work, John Rawls was developing an innovative approach to political philosophy, and Political Liberalism struggles with different ways to model these new insights. This article presents four models of political liberalism, particularly focusing on understanding the nature of overlapping consensus and its relation to public reason. Beyond clarifying Rawls’s insights, we aim to spur readers to reassemble the rich elements of Politica…
Is Public Reason a Normalization Project? Deep Diversity and the Open Society
Self-organizing moral systems
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 …
The Tyranny of the Ideal
The Commonwealth of Bees
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 …
The Tyranny of the Ideal
Tyranny of the Ideal
Public Reason
On Dissing Public Reason
This essay responds to David Enoch’s “The Disorder of Public Reason,” published in a previous issue of Ethics. I seek to set the record straight on several of the many charges Enoch makes. More importantly, having clarified some of the more basic points, I make some preliminary efforts at identifying when his brand of moral realism and my version of public reason differ—and, perhaps, where they are more compatible than one might think.
On Being Inside Social Morality and Seeing It
Social Philosophy
This accessible introductory text discusses how people in a pluralistic society such as ours can accept a common social ethic - a publicly justified morality. It presents analyses of the basic concepts, including justifications of liberty, harm to others, private property rights, distributive justice, environmental harms, help to others and offensive behaviour. Gaus acquaints the reader with the major figures in social philosophy - John Stuart Mi…
Rational choice and the original position
"Rawls proclaims that 'the theory of justice is part, perhaps the nwst significant part, of the theory of rational choice' (T]R, p. 15, emphasis added; see section 2.2.3 below). Many have refused to take this claim literally (or even seriously), by, for example, interpreting the original position analysis as a heuristic for identifying independently true moral principles (see Dworkin, "Original Position," p. 19 and Barry, Theories, pp. 271-82). I…
Public reason liberalism
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The Turn to a Political Liberalism
What Might Democratic Self-Governance in a Complex Social World Look Like?
The crisis facing democratic self-government is first and foremost a crisis of self-governance, not of democracy. Section II reviews the nature of complex systems and why our contemporary social and economic order qualifies as technically complexindeed, increasingly so—and why explicit overall, directed reform of our social world is hopeless. But hope is not easily abandoned: Section III critically looks at two continuing sources of hope. Sectio…
Contemporary theories of liberalism
The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity
We discuss whether religious reasons may be appealed to in justification and political debate in a polity whose laws must be justified to those subject to them in terms of reasons that are accessible to one and all. We argue that, properly understood, a commitment to public justification provides no grounds for the exclusion of religious reasons from politics. We trace the view that religious reasons are excluded from public reason to three basic…
Is the Public Incompetent? Compared to Whom? About What
From Mill to, most recently, Bryan Caplan, political and economic elites have been seen as the solution to the public’s ignorance and incompetence. In order to show that elites are actually more competent than the public, however, we would have to find out what type of knowledge is necessary to enact good public policy. The empirical evidence shows that economic experts have a slight advantage over the general public in knowledge of how to achiev…
Expert Political Judgment
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? By Philip E. Tetlock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 352p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.This is a wonderful and important book. Philip Tetlock is a political psychologist who has a knack for innovative research projects (e.g., his earlier work on how people cope with trade-offs in politics). In this book, he addresses a question that would scare away more timid souls: How wel…
The Rational, the Reasonable and Justification
Self-organizing moral systems
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 …
Skepticism and Freedom
Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism
Recognized Rights as Devices of Public Reason
The good, the bad, and the ugly
Green's Rights Recognition Thesis and Moral Internalism
T. H. Green claimed that ‘rights are made by recognition. There is no right but thinking makes it so’. This ‘rights recognition thesis’ is widely rejected. I argue in this article that, so far from being an idiosyncratic doctrine of 19 th -century British Idealism, the rights recognition thesis implies a compelling conception of rights, and one that, surprisingly, is more in tune with contemporary meta-ethics than are many contemporary rights the…
The Morals of Modernity
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, Second Edition is a comprehensive, definitive reference work, providing an up-to-date survey of the field, charting its history and key figures and movements, and addressing enduring questions as well as contemporary research
On two critics of justificatory liberalism
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 …
Public justification and democratic adjudication
Public and Private in Social Life
Are Property Rights Problematic?
Journal Article Are Property Rights Problematic? Get access Gerald F. Gaus, Gerald F. Gaus University of Minnesota at Duluth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Loren E. Lomasky Loren E. Lomasky University of Minnesota at Duluth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 73, Issue 4, 1 October 1990, Pages 483–503, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist1990…
Value and Justification
This important new book takes as its points of departure two questions: What is the nature of valuing? and What morality can be justified in a society that deeply disagrees on what is truly valuable? In Part One, the author develops a theory of value that attempts to reconcile reason with passions. Part Two explores how this theory of value grounds our commitment to moral action. The author argues that rational moral action can neither be seen as…
Public justification and democratic adjudication
Value and Justification
This important new book takes as its points of departure two questions: What is the nature of valuing? and What morality can be justified in a society that deeply disagrees on what is truly valuable? In Part One, the author develops a theory of value that attempts to reconcile reason with passions. Part Two explores how this theory of value grounds our commitment to moral action. The author argues that rational moral action can neither be seen as…
Human Morality
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Human Morality. By Samuel Scheffler. (New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Pp. 150. Price £22.50.) Gerald F. Gaus Gerald F. Gaus University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Bowling Green State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 43, Issue 172, July 1993, Pages 380–383, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219906 Published: 01 July 1993
Morality and Moral Theory
The Rational, the Reasonable and Justification
Justificatory Liberalism An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory
Justificatory Liberalism advances a theory of personal, public, and political justification. Drawing on current work in epistemology and cognitive psychology, the book develops a theory of personally justified belief. Building on this account, it then advances an account of public justification that is more normative and less “populist” than that of “political liberals”. Following the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, Gaus argu…
A System of Rights
Justificatory Liberalism
Justificatory Liberalism advances a theory of personal, public and political justification. Drawing on current work in epistemology and cognitive psychology, the book develops a theory of personally justified belief. Building on this account, it then advances an account of public justification that is more normative and less 'populist' than that of 'political liberals'
Reasonable Pluralism and the Domain of the Political
Under free institutions the exercise of human reason leads to a plurality of reasonable, yet irreconcilable doctrines. Rawls's political liberalism is intended as a response to this fundamental feature of modern democratic life. Justifying coercive political power by appeal to any one (or sample) of these doctrines is, Rawls believes, oppressive and illiberal. If we are to achieve unity without oppression, he tells us, we must all affirm a public…
Justificatory Liberalism
The Morals of Modernity
Liberalism at the end of the century
At the close of the twentieth century liberalism has apparently vanquished its traditional rivals. However, whatever cause for celebration liberals might derive from their political victories over conservatives and socialists, in an important respect the twentieth century has been a disappointment for liberal theory. The same antinomies or tensions that marked it at the close of the nineteenth century characterize it today. In this essay I show h…
The New Liberalism
The 'New Liberalism' of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is an unjustifiably neglected strand of the liberal tradition. By emphasising community as well as rights and liberty, thinkers such as T. H. Green, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse support, but in distinctive ways, recent challenges to the established dichotomy between communitarianism and liberalism. These essays examine new liberal thinking and conclude that liberal and communi…
What is Deontology? Part One
What is Deontology? Part Two
Backwards Into the Future
Socialism, understood as the rejection of markets based on private property in favor of comprehensive centralized economic planning, is no longer a serious political option. If the core of capitalism is the organization of the economy primarily through market competition based on private property, then capitalism has certainly defeated socialism. Markets have been accepted—and central planning abandoned—throughout most of the Third World and in m…
Contemporary Theories of Liberalism
In this text, Gerald F. Gaus provides students with a comprehensive overview of the key tenets of liberalism developed through Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Rawls to present day theories and debates
The Diversity of Comprehensive Liberalisms
Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism
Handbook of Political Theory
"This new handbook provides a comprehensive guide to political theory past and present. It brings together a group of leading political theorists to both review and contribute to contemporary scholarship and debate." "The Handbook of Political Theory is a benchmark publication. It will be essential reading for all students and academics of political theory and political philosophy."--BOOK JACKET
Skepticism and Freedom
Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism
In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political the…
Political science (50 works) · Law (46 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (44 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Epistemology (43 works) · Philosophy (43 works) · Politics (37 works) · Law and economics (32 works) · Political philosophy (19 works) · Economics (17 works)