Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to work out a principle of socioeconomic justice for reasonable contractarianism. Reasonable contractarianism is the doctrine that the first principles of justice should be capable of being the object of reasonable agreement. This doctrine is vague unless one has a clear idea about what reasonable agreement means. I suggest that reasonable agreement should be construed in light of the Kantian norm of equal respect, the view that we should always treat people not merely as means but also as ends. To treat people as ends requires us to take seriously their fundamental interest in developing and pursuing a conception of the good. I take reasonable contractarianism as demanding that we should arrange the basic structure of society in accordance with principles of distributive justice that no one, viewed as having this fundamental interest, could reasonably reject as the basis for stability. The principle of socioeconomic justice I work out for reasonable contractarianism, , has two parts: first, the optimal social minimum principle, which says that the basic structure of a free and democratic society should be arranged in such a way as to provide an optimal level of social minimum, subject to the Dworkinian constraint; and second, the principle of minimax relative unbiased concession, which adds that insofar as there are, under unfavorable conditions, alternative optimal levels of social minimum, the basic structure should be arranged so as to provide an optimal level of social minimum agreement on which requires minimax relative unbiased concession. I argue that is a principle of socioeconomic justice that no one under it could reasonably reject as the basis for stability. This thesis also criticizes Rawls's second principle of justice and its foundation, to which and reasonable contractarianism are alternatives