Andrew Lister, "Justice and Reciprocity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
at oculi-mundi.com while you listen. Jerry's guests include Zakiya Suwel, who's an English broadcaster and writer on Finding Albion, Jo Schmidt, who's the head of maps at the Zurich Central Library, Pat Seed, a U.S. historian on Ptolemy's World Map, John Romero, who's a legendary video game producer on The Doom Game Creator, Elif Sharak, a well-known Turkish-British novelist, and Chet Van Duser, Welcome to the New Books Network.
Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, part of the New Books Network. My name is Blaine Neufeld. I'm a professor of philosophy who specializes in political and moral theory. And I'm an interviewer here at New Books in Philosophy, along with Carrie Figdor and Sarah Tyson. A concern with reciprocity is ubiquitous in human life. Most of us react negatively to people who cut in line, don't pay their fare when they get onto the streetcar, or enjoy the coffee provided in the department office without contributing their fair share to its purchase. Political philosophers have long appealed to reciprocity in their theories. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, argued that rational persons should leave the state of nature by pursuing peace, but only when others are willing to do so as well.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that all legitimate contracts, including, of course, the social contract, must be mutually beneficial. More recently, reciprocity plays an important role in the work of John Rawls, arguably the most important political philosopher of the past 100 years, at least within the English-speaking world. Throughout his writings in The Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, The Law of Peoples, and elsewhere, Rawls appeals to reciprocity in explaining and defining many of his political ideas. Yet Rawls seems to employ different conceptions of reciprocity in different places, and rarely provides his readers with a precise definition of what he means. In a recent book from Oxford University Press, Justice and Reciprocity, Andrew Lister examines the nature and role of reciprocity in Rawls' account of justice, justice as fairness.
The book's main claim is that reciprocity is not simply a brute fact about human nature to which a theory of justice must accommodate itself, nor an ideal that can provide the foundation for our conception of justice. Rather, the book argues that we should understand reciprocity as a limiting condition and many of our duties, including those of justice. In addition to defending this thesis, the book explores the role of reciprocity as a limiting condition with respect to a number of topics, including the idea of unconditional basic income, the nature of both intergenerational and international justice. The book is thus both philosophically deep and topically broad, a rare combination. We're fortunate to have the author of Justice and Reciprocity, Andrew Lister, here with us today.
So hello, Andrew. Hi, Blaine. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Let's start our discussion by getting to know a little bit about you. Perhaps you could say a few things about who you are, where you're from, and how you became interested in political philosophy.
Sure. I grew up in Ottawa, the nation's capital, and when I turned 18, I wanted to leave for the big city, so I went to McGill in Montreal. And I was always someone who liked arguing about politics and ideology.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:21
2
What motivated Andrew Lister to study reciprocity in Rawls’s theory of justice?
9:21–24:03
3
How does Lister define reciprocity as a limiting condition on duties of justice?
24:03–36:59
4
What are Rawls’s two official definitions of reciprocity and why does Lister find one unhelpful?
36:59–50:55
5
Why does Lister argue that some duties of justice must remain unconditional?
50:55–1:04:46
6
How does the reciprocity framework affect the debate over unconditional basic income?
1:04:46–1:08:50
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)