Rawls suggests that facts about the political virtues must be part of the construction of a reasonable political conception of justice. The thesis of this article is that, if an account of political virtue is a necessary element in a reasonable political conception, then so too is an account of political vice. The political vices are those attitudes, feelings, and dispositions that systematically work against reasonableness or the other cooperative or discursive goals of political virtue. The article concentrates on several epistemic-political vices along with practical-political vices that have epistemic elements. Epistemic-political vices such as close-mindedness or gullibility are especially worrisome in the digital age, given their tendency to undermine practices of public reasoning and deliberative democracy. Each political vice is understood as a characteristic failure of one of the Rawlsian burdens of judgment. Each is in this way a more specific form of unreasonableness.

In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” John Rawls implied that a well-ordered society would be a deliberative democracy and said that public reason is essential to it. After his turn to political liberalism, he was chary about claims of truth. In Section 1, I lay out essential features of Rawlsian deliberative democracy. In Section 2, I introduce some prominent commentary on Rawls’s treatment of truth and public reasoning. On these readings—collectively “the non-permissive reading”—Rawls’s treatment of truth has problematic implications for public reasoning and therefore for deliberative democracy. In Section 3, I survey those implications. In Section 4, I argue that the texts which are taken to support the non-permissive reading support a very different reading. In Section 5, I argue that Rawls does not endorse the theses imputed to him by the non-permissive reading and that his view does not have the implications surveyed in Section 3.

This article defines and defends three Rawlsian rationales for a cultural turn in education for democratic citizenship within digitized societies. Due to the importance of political culture for realizing deliberative democracy, it is misguided to hold that a primary or exclusive focus of such education should be on learning how to use digital tools for engaging in politics. Pace this technique- or skills-oriented focus, this article argues that the educational responses to the wide-ranging cultural developments of the digital political public sphere should not be a matter of “training” but of “cultivation.” Accordingly, democratic education for digital citizenship should pay attention to nurturing citizens’ political virtues so that, when they are dealing with fundamental political questions, they are willing to comply with the requirements of public reason and a corresponding duty of civility.

Does John Rawls’s justice as fairness require virtuous citizens to eschew self-interested motivation in favor of motivation by the aim to promote justice when making decisions about their labor or investment participation in their society’s economy? Analyzing Rawls’s ideas of advantage and of legitimate ends and tracing the purpose and implementation of his difference principle, the article shows how G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s allowance of productive incentives reflects misunderstandings of Rawls’s theoretical aims and of the fundamental liberalism of Rawls’s well-ordered society. In that society, political civility permits making such decisions by appeal to each citizen’s self-interested aims and values.

Martha C. Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice was a ground-breaking work of political philosophy, and had particular influence in the field of animal ethics.1 By arguing that animals ought to be considered recipients of justice, and not just of moral concern, her book helped to launch the so-called ‘political turn in animal ethics’. The political turn accepts familiar claims in animal ethics about the moral status of animals, but extends them in at least two ways.2 First, the political turn does not just see our obligations towards animals as a matter of personal morality but claims that we also have duties of justice that demand enforcement by—and transformation of—our collective institutions. Second, the political turn asks us not only to change our collective institutions, but to also reframe our understanding of the communities that they are designed to serve. We must recognize—and formally acknowledge—that our communities are ‘multispecies’ and comprised of nonhuman animal members.

In the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” Michel de Montaigne aims to upend human arrogance about our superiority over other animals by enumerating the many wonders of the nonhuman animal world. We see birds building intricate nests; spiders thickening and slackening their webs with an engineer’s precision; ants and bees organizing themselves into complicated societies; and dogs making reasoned judgments about the likely location of their prey. Although we may be inclined to dismiss these behaviors as mere instinct, Montaigne argues that it is presumptuous “to judge that the beasts do by natural and obligatory instinct the same things that we do by our choice and cleverness.”1 And even if other creatures do act with less conscious design than we do, he asks, does that make their actions any less wondrous?

There’s a tension at the heart of Justice for Animals.1 Some humans, says Nussbaum, can realize important capabilities only through consuming certain animal products—through not adopting a vegan diet. Consequently, the entitlements of some humans conflict with the entitlements that the capabilities approach grants to the animals these humans (would) eat. After all, animal agriculture almost invariably involves killing animals, violating animals’ bodily integrity, controlling animals’ life prospects and affiliations, and limiting animals’ ability to sense, reason, and play. Is this tragic conflict resolvable? Or must we accept that one group—certain humans or certain animals—lose out?

In the summer of 2023, approximately 2,000 young, dead penguins washed up on the beaches across Uruguay. The birds were thin, their stomachs empty, and scientists suggest that this mass death was due to starvation. Without fat, the penguins can’t keep warm in the colder waters that they now have to navigate to find food. Food shortages due to overfishing in South America may have contributed to their demise. This die-off was unprecedented for the species, although the magellanic penguin population has been consistently dropping, and the species is now considered near threatened. Impacts of climate change, which contributed to these penguins’ precarity, were also likely the cause of the mass deaths of penguins in New Zealand in 2022, when hundreds of little blue penguins washed up dead. They probably died because warming oceans forced them to venture into deeper and colder waters in search of food, causing them to dive to distances that are not sustainable. These birds were also found to be thinner than they should have been. An even more drastic penguin die-off occurred in Antarctica in 2022—over 10,000 emperor penguin chicks perished when the sea-ice they were growing up on melted before they had the fat and waterproofed feathers needed to survive in the cold waters. Most of the birds drowned or froze to death. These sorts of large-scale group deaths have led scientists to suggest that the emperor penguins will be extinct by the end of the century.

Over the past few decades, the “turn to empire” in political theory has powerfully illuminated how legacies of imperialism and colonialism have profoundly shaped the conceptual history of core categories in modern political thought such as democracy, citizenship, freedom, equality, and the social contract. Early on, scholars in this vein of research focused their attention on tracing these dynamics among mostly canonical political thinkers. As the turn to empire has matured, however, a newer generation of studies is fixing its focus more significantly on the contemporary legacies of colonialism and empire in the present and alternative trajectories of political thought mounted by anticolonial activists and intellectuals in the periphery. Picking up on this tendency, the four books under review speak to each other in intriguing ways in both their differences and similarities. Thematically, all four books often share a common set of conceptual concerns despite speaking across an array of imperial and colonial contexts. Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire and Nazmul Sultan’s Waiting for the People are both interested in the entwinement of empire and popular sovereignty, yet in the different colonial contexts of the white settler colonies of the British Empire (in Valdez’s case) and British India (in Sultan’s case). Both Sultan and Sam Klug, who in The Internal Colony is writing about the post-World War II context of racial politics in the United States, are concerned with how anticolonial actors and thinkers enlisted developmental idioms and languages in their struggles against imperial rule and racialized exploitation. And both Valdez and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil grapple with the contemporary prospects of emancipation from and reparation of the harms engendered by the history of imperialism and colonial slavery.