Differences Between Rawls and Locke: From the Perspectives of Rationality and Equality

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201215.411How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Analytic philosophy, liberalism, contractarian, political theory, Rawls

Abstract

This essay intends to criticize the theory of John Rawls on justice as fairness. In order to do so, this essay chooses the strong and well-argued theory of John Locke on human rights and the civil government as a contrast. This essay holds the opinion that the choice of Rawls to base his theory entirely on a weak assumption is the main difference from Locke, and such choice ends up to be the lack of soundness in premises and the lack of logical cohesiveness. These defects in the theory might result in dangerous, however, unpredictable consequences. This essay mainly explores their theory through their views upon rationality and equality. The essay provides a solution out of such defects which might be hard to be accepted by scientific academia. That is to bring back metaphysical premises to the political philosophy. At the end of this essay, a strong accusation is made against the positivism and to defend the metaphysics in political philosophy.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wenzhang Pan
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/17
TI  - Differences Between Rawls and Locke: From the Perspectives of Rationality and Equality
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 150
EP  - 153
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201215.411
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201215.411
ID  - Pan2020
ER  -