Cohen and Nagel on Rawls on Sin

Josh Cohen and Tom Nagel have a piece in the TLS and Times Online on Rawls’s senior thesis on sin and faith. The piece is part of a longer introduction to A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, which also includes Rawls’s 1997 piece, “On My Religion.” I’ve shared the uneasiness felt by some about the posthumous publication of a senior thesis, but from what Cohen and Nagel discuss there are a number of interesting anticipations of ideas later worked out in a secular form in Theory and Political Liberalism, particularly the rejection of teleology and a vivid sense of the arbitrariness of merit.

Also by Cohen, Boston Review have forwarded two recent pieces on libertarianism and on the technology, journalism, and democracy that may be of interest to people.