Masters Thesis

Communities, advertising, and democracy: moral education for reasonable social cooperation

According to John Rawls, a well-ordered liberal democratic society requires citizens to possess the virtue of reasonableness, regarding fellow citizens as standing in a relationship of reciprocity among equals. To maintain a stable overlapping consensus of reasonable cooperation, citizens need to wholeheartedly endorse a reasonable political conception of justice by accepting it as a part or module of their own comprehensive doctrines. The failure of political cooperation in contemporary liberal societies suggests the failure of some of these conditions. I argue that due to the influence of pervasive persuasive advertising, citizens are socialized into the unreasonable comprehensive doctrine of consumerism, and that in conjunction with conditions of inadequate moral education in their comprehensive doctrines and in a reasonable political conception of justice, they are committing reasonableness akrasia as they fail to consistently act from moral considerations they would endorse upon reflection at both the comprehensive moral and political levels. To solve this problem, I argue that societies must provide opportunities for comprehensive moral education in the home and community as well as citizenship moral education in public schools according to principles of liberal neutrality.

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