Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charles Mills has been a vocal critic of liberal political theory and especially of John Rawls, charging that Rawls’ work, emblematic of the tradition, has been and remains silent to racial injustice. More specifically, he has argued that liberal political theory is unable to conceptualize and explain the character of white supremacy and is unable to order political, legal, and social arrangements in ways that ameliorate and address its pernicious effects on its victims. Mills’ criticisms of Rawls have been the subject of much discussion, but I am interested in a recent debate he and African-American philosopher Tommie Shelby have taken up. Shelby seeks to defend Rawls from the claim that the Rawlsian view is silent in its response to racial injustice and he attempts to extend the few Rawlsian considerations about race. Shelby claims that far from being impotent to racial injustice, Rawls’ view indispensable to realizing racial justice. Their debate raises interesting and important issues. If Shelby project is correct, for instance, it vindicates not simply Rawls’ view, but it vindicates the claim that liberal political theory is a useful conceptual and moral tool to respond to injustice. In this paper, I critically consider Shelby’s defense and extension of Rawlsian principles. I argue that his defense of Rawls is problematic and less effectively responds to Mills’ worries than he claims. I also argue that Shelby’s attempts to extend Rawlsian commitments do not illuminate or give us confidence that Rawlsian commitments are or can be indispensable to realizing racial injustice. I argue, for instance, that Rawlsian commitments ignore and cannot address the injustices that Indigenous persons experience nor do they address the racial injustices that occur in practices of migration. What traction we get with Rawlsian commitments does much less in naming and redressing racial injustice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".