ABSTRACTPOLITICAL LIBERALISM AND CAPABILITY ENTITLEMENTSBySteven B. Schoonover Jr.Political Liberalism and Capability Entitlements is a qualified defense of the Rawlsian political liberal approach to social justice. I defend two key Rawlsian ideas—first, the claim that a reasonable citizenry is a necessary condition of a democratic society and, second, the claim that a key feature of reasonable thinking about justice is focus on the design of major socio-economic institutions. I depart significantly, however, from Rawls concerning two features of political liberalism—first, I abandon his account of international relations as it is laid out in Law of Peoples in favor of engagement with the work of Thomas Pogge in hopes of contributing to an account of what it means to respect institutional human rights in a globalized world. Second, I criticize the Rawlsian doctrine of social primary goods as a thin political liberal account of the good and argue in favor of the capability approach as a more reasonable replacement. As a whole, then, the present work is aimed at offering an account of social justice that retains certain fundamental elements of political liberalism but rethinks global justice in terms of capability entitlements. I argue that the particular conception of social justice that Rawls called justice as fairness should be recognized as a member of the family of reasonable political conceptions of justice though it cannot be conceived as the most reasonable available conception.
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