Stabilizing Justice: Political Liberalism and Prison Abolition

This paper argues that Richard Rorty’s philosophy of social hope may inadvertently generate the resentment it seeks to abrogate. In diagnosing the erosion of hope within the academy, Rorty recommends subordinating religious commitments to a “greater” civic good, a move that risks alienating large segments of the American public for whom religion remains morally constitutive. Contemporary prison abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore often draw upon Marxist-inflected frameworks that similarly marginalize religion’s role in sustaining utopian imagination, even as they draw from religious inspiration. This tension constrains the broader appeal of abolitionist justice. While the for-profit prison system represents a profound injustice incapable of reform, any viable utopian vision must address those who perpetrate egregious physical violence; absent such reckoning, many citizens perceive not hope but instability. Unlike Marx or Rorty, John Rawls integrates religion into his account of a “realistic utopia,” treating comprehensive doctrines as legitimate moral sources. His proceduralism offers a shared framework through which comparative religious ethicists might enable religious communities and activists to translate, negotiate, and coordinate their commitments within a fractured public sphere.