The Most Stable Just Regime Waheed Hussain Rawls’s sketch of a just property owning-democracy remains largely silent on the question of whether we should introduce democratic forms of government into economic life. He notes that a property-owning democracy (POD) would be fully compatible with worker-managed firms (at least as these are envisioned by John Stuart Mill), and that if people prefer to work in firms of this kind, then worker- managed firms may eventually eclipse traditional capitalist firms as the dominant mode of production. 1 But his sketch does not incorporate any measures to encour- age worker-managed firms or any measures to foster economic democracy through other means. I take it that Rawls’s sketch does not incorporate any of these measures for the simple reason that justice, on his view, does not require any form of economic democracy. Societies may choose to foster democratic forms of decision making in the economy if they wish, but justice itself does not require that they do so. I will not challenge Rawls’s account of the principles of justice here. Instead, I will argue that even if he is right about what justice itself requires, there are still powerful reasons, internal to his theory, that tell in favor of adopting a form of economic democracy. The reasons I have in mind stem from the moral ideal of stability. As Rawls understands it, stability is not just a practical matter. A just social arrangement could conceivably remain just over time because its political insti- tutions give rise to a system of rewards and penalties that encourage the right patterns of behavior among citizens. An arrangement of this kind would not be stable in the morally relevant sense, however, because it would not be stable “for the right reasons.” An arrangement that is stable for the right reasons maintains its just character over time because people born into the arrangement develop a sense of justice that moves them to do what is necessary to maintain the just character of their basic institutions. As part of the argument for justice as fairness, Rawls formulates a conception of our moral nature and an account of how this nature would express itself in different institutional contexts. These ideas serve as the basis for an argument that shows how a social arrangement regulated by the two principles of justice would give rise to moral sentiments in the population that would be sufficient to maintain the just character of society’s basic institutions over time. The argument of this article takes Rawls’s account of stability as its starting point. I argue that Rawls’s views about our moral nature and its expression imply JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 40 No. 3, Fall 2009, 412–433. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.