Read on Twitter
reminding u that, by asking what ppl in the ideal speech situation, or the original position, or whatever Kant-brained thought experiment you prefer, would do, you can fully step outside the contingencies and prejudices which shape your own moral view--
--and, indeed, based on your own superior reason and morality, can justifiably declare the beliefs and views of tens and millions of co-citizens whose beliefs have been shaped in exactly the same way as your own beyond the pale
U will definitely be justified in labeling those whose moral prejudices differ from yours as 'unreasonable,' because, clearly, the fact that their bare intuitions are different from yours means that there's something wrong with them
someone may say that this is the dumbest idea they've ever heard. remind them that u have intuitions about not only politics, but also intuitions about intuitions about politics, and even intuitions about intuitions about intuitions about politics...
...u are thereby, unlike the uncultured rubes who disagree with u, able to enter a magical plane known as 'reflective equilibrium' which ensures that ur intuitions are right and theirs are wrong
they may then object that u haven't actually *accomplished* anything by galaxy-braining your way through seventeen levels of theory and meta theory, since you came out of it exactly the way you went in, with the views of a milquetoast left-liberal
Wellllllllll
Wellllllllll
Rawlsianism, Habermasianism, that entire family of left-of-center academic political philosophy, is historically contingent: it emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a legitimation device for a regime type and body of moral judgements which were then popular amongst elites.
It was the best attempt that a generation of intellectuals could come up with for defending their preferred intellectual arrangements, and the views took off because those preferred views roughly tracked those of the intellectual and midwest classes of the late 20th century.
The problem is that the generations which espoused those views and found them attractive begun to die off of old age 30 years ago. Very few of them are left. There's no longer either a consensus about the rightness of the views or the legitimacy of the regime type built on them.
There really can't be a grand theory legitimizing the *next* form of regime, because it doesn't exist yet: there's a bitter struggle between NYT woke types and Tucker Carlson right populist types over what it will be. It can't be legitimated until it exists.
My conclusion is that normative political philosophy is in a necessarily pathetic state and there's no hope of trying to change that for at least a generation or two. I moved on into doing my serious academic writing about other things!
