FEBRUARY 13, 2026
The Politics of Civic Maturity vs. the Politics of Justice: Reflecting on Bernard Williams’ Separation Thesis
Intro to Chapter 2: The objectives of this chapter are twofold. First, I aim to explain Williams’ challenge to the idea that self-knowledge and civic maturity are inevitably embedded in the politics of justice. Williams’ argumentative path to ground this challenge is elusive; however, what is clear is that he aims to defend the idea that there should be a stark separation between the politics of civic maturity, self-knowledge and the politics of justice.

I will call this thesis Williams’ separation thesis. In this chapter, I reconstruct Williams’ sceptical position concerning the possibility of control of one’s deliberation from the first-person point of view, together with the idea of the pervasive presence of moral luck in our agency, to scrutinise the key implicit arguments of his separation thesis. This reconstruction provides the strongest version of Williams’ separation thesis.

BIO: Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Professor in Moral and Political Philosophy (Jurisprudence), is the inaugural holder of the Chair of Moral and Political Philosophy (Jurisprudence) in the School of Law, University of Surrey and member of the Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy.  She studied law at Oxford University (MJur, Balliol College) and legal philosophy at the University of Cambridge (PhD, Corpus Christi College). Her research is located at the intersection of practical reason, philosophy of action and law. She draws insights from ancient, medieval and contemporary moral psychology and action theory to illuminate the nature of private law, legal authority and normativity.

Veronica is co-editor of the journal Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought and has been invited to deliver keynote lectures and papers at Yale Law School, Chicago Law School, Toronto Law School, Melbourne Law School, Georgia State University, Uppsala, McMaster University, University Pompeu Fabra, University of Girona, Freiburg, Palermo, Antwerp, Belgrade, Austral University (Argentina), Navarra, Mexico City (UNAM) and Edinburgh.

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