{"id":824,"date":"2016-11-10T11:05:01","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T11:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/?p=824"},"modified":"2016-11-22T16:31:53","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T16:31:53","slug":"louis-fletcher-a-modern-theodicy-rawls-and-the-law-of-peoples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/2016\/11\/10\/louis-fletcher-a-modern-theodicy-rawls-and-the-law-of-peoples\/","title":{"rendered":"Louis Fletcher &#8211; A Modern Theodicy: Rawls and &#8216;The Law of Peoples&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Political Theory Research Group seminar &#8211; 2 November 2016<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_825\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/files\/2016\/11\/4977555279_cf15472d5f_z.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-825\" class=\"wp-image-825\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/files\/2016\/11\/4977555279_cf15472d5f_z.jpg\" alt=\"Roman Ondak - Table (Marc Wathieu on flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)\" width=\"600\" height=\"401\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/files\/2016\/11\/4977555279_cf15472d5f_z.jpg 640w, https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/files\/2016\/11\/4977555279_cf15472d5f_z-300x201.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/files\/2016\/11\/4977555279_cf15472d5f_z-624x417.jpg 624w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-825\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Roman Ondak &#8211; Table (Marc Wathieu on flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)<\/p><\/div>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">In this week\u2019s Research Group seminar we discussed Louis Fletcher\u2019s paper A Modern Theodicy: Rawls and \u2018The Law of Peoples\u2019. Fletcher\u2019s paper deals with John Rawls\u2019 role in the world peace and democratic peace theory literatures. The main contribution of the very carefully researched paper is situating Rawls\u2019 work, particularly his later work coalescing with <em>The Law of Peoples<\/em>, around his religious and ethical commitments. The paper demonstrates how Rawls employs Kant and Rousseau to secularise his early Christian ethics in light of the modern iteration of theodicy, that is to say giving an account of the existence of God and evil concurrently. Rawls, Fletcher posits, presents two arguments to redeem humankind: the natural innocence of humans and that teleological progress will deliver humanity from evil.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The paper identifies two problems with Rawls\u2019 account. Firstly, it misconstrues the nature of human motivation, politics, and democratic peace. Secondly, it contains a problematic assumption of wanting the world to make intrinsic moral sense, against which all of Rawls subsequent propositions seek to conform. Hence, the paper argues that Rawls is symptomatic of failed conceptions of world peace in the modern era.\u00a0Reading Rawls as a Christianised amalgamation of Kant and Rousseau gives Fletcher a novel toolkit to interpret his intellectual development from <em>A Theory of Justice<\/em> via <em>Political Liberalism<\/em> to <em>The Law of Peoples<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Ensuing discussion focused on the distinctions between the debates on political realism and moralism versus ideal and non-ideal theory, the extent to which Rawls belongs to the camp of moralists, and the relation between the sections of the paper focusing specifically on Rawls vis-a-vis those on democratic peace.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Written by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pol.ed.ac.uk\/people\/phd_students\/lukas_slothuus\">Lukas Slothuus<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">****<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pol.ed.ac.uk\/people\/phd_students\/louis_fletcher\">Louis Fletcher<\/a> is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Edinburgh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Political Theory Research Group seminar &#8211; 2 November 2016<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,22,8],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":835,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions\/835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/jwi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}