If reasoning about the good is unavoidable in debates about justice and rights,is it possible? If reasoning about the good means that you must have a single principle or rule or maxim or criterion for the good life,that you simply plug in every time you have a disagreement about morality,then the answer is, no. 

 But having a single principle or rule is not the only way,not the best way of reasoningeither about the good life or about justice. Think back, think back to the arguments that we've been having here about justice and about rights and sometimes about the good life.How have those arguments proceeded? They've proceeded very much in the way that Aristotle suggests moving back and forth between our judgments about particulars, particular cases, events, stories, questions, back and forth between our judgments about particular cases and more general principles that make sense of our reasons for the positions we take on the particular cases.

This dialectical way of doing moral reasoning goes back to the ancients, to Plato and Aristotle, but it doesn't stop with them, because there is a version of Socratic or dialectical moral reasoning that is defended with great clarity and force by John Rawls in giving an account of his method of justifying a theory of justice. You remember it's not only the veil of ignorance and the principles that Rawls argues for. It's also a method of moral reasoning, reasoning about justice that he calls reflective equilibrium. 

What is the method of reflective equilibrium? It's moving back and forth between our considered judgments about particular cases and the general principles we would articulate to make sense of those judgments. And not just stopping there, because we might be wrong in our initial intuitions. Not stopping there but then sometimes revising our particular judgments in the light of the principles once we work them out. So sometimes we revise the principles, sometimes we revise our judgments and intuitions in the particular cases.  

 The general point is this, and here I quote Rawls:" A conception of justice can't be deduced from self evident premises. Its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view". And later in the theory of justice, he writes:" moral philosophy is Socratic. We may want to change our present considered judgments once their regulative principles are brought to light".

 Well, if Rawls accepts that idea and advances that notion of reflective equilibrium, the question we're left with is, he applies that to questions of justice, not to questions of morality and the good life. And that's why he remains committed to the priority of the right over the good. He thinks the method of reflective equilibrium can generate shared judgments about justice in the right but he doesn't think they can generate shared judgments about the good life, about what he calls comprehensive moral and religious question. And the reason he thinks that is that he says that in modern societies there is a fact or reasonable pluralism about the good.

 Even conscientious people who reason well, will find that they disagree about questions of the good life, about morality and religion. And Rawls is likely right about that. He's not talking about the fact of disagreement in pluralist societies. He's also suggesting that there may be persisting disagreements about the good life and about moral and religious questions. But if that's true, then is he warranted in his further claim that the same can't be said about justice ?Isn't it also true, not only that we, as a matter of fact, disagree about justice in pluralist societies, but that at least some of those disagreements are reasonable disagreements?

 In the same way, some people favor a libertarian theory of justice, others are more egalitarian theory of justice and they argue. And there is pluralism in our society as between free market laissez faire, libertarian theories of justice and more egalitarian ones. Is there any difference in principle between the kind of moral reasoning and the kind of disagreements that arise when we debate about justice and the meaning of free speech and the nature of religious liberty? Look at the debates we have over appointees to the Supreme Court. These are all disagreements about justice and rights. Is there any difference between the fact of reasonable pluralism in the case of justice and rights and in the case of morality and religion? In principle I don't think that there is. In both cases what we do when we disagree is we engage with our interlocutor, as we've been doing here for an entire semester.

 We consider the arguments that are provoked by particular cases. We try to develop the reasons that lead us to go one way rather than another. And then we listen to the reasons of other people. And sometimes we're persuaded to revise our view. Other times we're challenged at least to shore up and strengthen our view. But this is how moral argument proceeds, with justice, and so it seems to me, also with questions of the good life.

Now, there remains a further worry and it's a liberal worry, what about if we are going to think of our disagreements about morality and religion as bound up with our disagreements about justice, how are we ever going to find our way to a society that accords respect to fellow citizens with whom we disagree? It depends I think on which conception of respect one accepts. On the liberal conception, to respect our fellow citizens' moral and religious convictions, is, so to speak, to ignore them, for political purposes. To rise above or to abstract from or to set aside those moral and religious convictions. To leave them undisturbed, to carry on our political debate without reference to them. But that isn't the only way, or perhaps even the most plausible way of understanding the mutual respect on which democratic life depends. There is a different conception of respect according to which we respect our fellow citizens' moral and religious convictions, not by ignoring, but by engaging them. By attending to them. Sometimes by challenging and contesting them. Sometimes by listening and learning from them. Now, there's no guarantee that a politics of moral and religious attention and engagement will lead in any given case to agreement. There is no guarantee it will lead even to appreciation for the moral and religious convictions of others.It's always possible, after all, that learning more about a religious or a moral doctrine will lead us to like it less. But the respect of deliberation and engagement seems to me a more adequate, more suitable ideal for a pluralist society. And to the extent that our moral and religious disagreements reflect some ultimate plurality of human goods. A politics of moral engagement will better enable us, so it seems to me, to appreciate the distinctive goods our different lives expressed.

When we first came together some 13 weeks ago, I spoke of the exhilaration of political philosophy and also of its dangers. About how philosophy works and has always worked by estranging us from the familiar by unsettling our settled assumptions. And I tried to warn you that once the familiar turns strange, once we begin to reflect on our circumstance, it's never quite the same again. I hope you have by now experienced at least a little of this unease because this is the tension that animates critical reflection and political improvement and maybe even the moral life as well. 

And so our argument comes to an end, in a sense, but in another sense goes on. Why, we asked at the outset, why did these arguments keep going even if they raise questions that are impossible ever, finally, to resolve? The reason is that we live some answer to these questions all the time. In our public life, and in our personal lives, philosophy is inescapable even if it sometimes seems impossible. We began with the thought of Kant, that skepticism is a resting place for human reason. Where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. To allow ourselves simply to acquiescence in skepticism or in complacence, Kant wrote, can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.  

The aim of this course has been to awaken the restlessness of reason and to see where it might lead. And if we had done at least that, and if the restlessness continues to afflict you in the days and years to come, then we together have achieved no small thing.

Thank you.