Articles by Paul Kelleher

A paper due out any month now in the Journal of Political Philosophy by Tamra Frei has got me thinking about the redundancy objection to Scanlon’s contractualism. I haven’t followed this debate closely, but I understand that some rather sophisticated responses to the objection have been offered on Scanlon’s behalf, with Michael Ridge’s receiving much of Frei’s attention. So I may be a bit out of my comfort zone here. Nevertheless, Frei’s response, which is rather simple by comparison, strikes me as both successful and rather plausible as an interpretation of Scanlon. I also think her argument can be bolstered by pointing to a couple passages she unfortunately does not discuss. However, if this response does succeed, there will be some reason to avoid the common practice of using the language of reasonable rejection to describe Rawls’s political liberalism. I’ll touch on this at the end of the post. Read the rest of this entry »