the 20th century. He wrote a series of highly influential articles in
the 1950s and '60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and
political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to
do. His first book, A Theory of Justice [TJ] (1971), revitalized the
social-contract tradition, using it to articulate and defend a
detailed vision of egalitarian liberalism. In Political Liberalism
[PL] (1993), he recast the role of political philosophy, accommodating
it to the effectively permanent "reasonable pluralism" of religious,
philosophical, and other comprehensive doctrines or worldviews that
characterize modern societies. He explains how philosophers can
characterize public justification and the legitimate, democratic use
of collective coercive power while accepting that pluralism.
Although most of this entry will be devoted to TJ, the exposition of
that work will take account of Political Liberalism and other later
works of Rawls. TJ sets out and defends the principles of Justice as
Fairness. Rawls takes the basic structure of society as his subject
matter and utilitarianism as his principal opponent. Part One of TJ
designs a social-contract-type thought experiment, the Original
Position (OP), and argues that parties in the OP will prefer Justice
as Fairness to utilitarianism and various other views. In order to
understand the argument from the OP, one must pay special attention to
the motivation of the parties to the OP, which is philosophically
stipulated and provided with a Kantian interpretation. Part Two of TJ
checks the fit between the principles of Justice as Fairness and our
more concrete considered views about just institutions, thereby
helping move us towards a reflective equilibrium that supports those
principles. Part Three of TJ addresses the stability of a society
organized around Justice as Fairness, arguing that there will be an
important congruence in such a society between people's views about
justice and what they value. By the time he wrote Political
Liberalism, however, Rawls had decided that an inconsistency in TJ
called for recasting the argument for stability. In other ways, the
argument of TJ rested on important simplifications, which had the
effect of setting aside questions about international justice,
disability, and familial justice. Rawls turned to these "problems of
extension," as he called them, at the end of his career.
1. Biographical Sketch
John Bordley Rawls was born and schooled in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Although his family was of comfortable means, his youth was twice
marked by tragedy. In two successive years, his two younger brothers
contracted an infectious disease from him—diphtheria in one case and
pneumonia in the other—and died. Rawls's vivid sense of the
arbitrariness of fortune may have stemmed in part from this early
experience. His remaining, older brother attended Princeton for
undergraduate studies and was a great athlete. Rawls followed his
brother to Princeton. Although Rawls played baseball, he was, in later
life at least, excessively modest about his success at that or at any
other endeavor.
Rawls continued for his Ph.D. studies at Princeton and came under the
influence of the first of a series of Wittgensteinean friends and
mentors, Norman Malcolm. From them, he learned to avoid entanglement
in metaphysical controversies when possible. Rawls's doctoral
dissertation (1950) already showed, however, that he would not be
content to deconstruct our impulse to ask metaphysical questions;
instead, he devoted himself to constructive philosophical tasks.
Turning away from the then-influential program of attempting to
analyze the meaning of the moral concepts, he replaced it with what
was—for a philosopher—a more practically oriented task: that of
characterizing a general method of moral decision making. Part of this
dissertation work was the basis of his first published article,
"Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics." (1951). This was an
early attempt to tackle the central question of Rawls's mature theory:
what sort of decision procedure can we imagine that would help us
resolve disputed claims in a fair way?
Of equal significance to Rawls's turn away from conceptual analysis
and towards a more practical conception of moral philosophy was his
encounter, during a year (1952-3) as a Fulbright Fellow in Oxford,
with exciting, substantive work in legal and political philosophy,
especially that of H.L.A. Hart and Isaiah Berlin. Hart had made
progress in legal philosophy by connecting the idea of social
practices with the institutions of the law. Rawls's second published
essay, "Two Concepts of Rules" (1955), uses a conception of social
practices influenced by Hart to explore a kind of rule-utilitarianism.
Compare TJ at 48n.. In Isaiah Berlin, Rawls met a brilliant historian
of political thought—someone who, by his own account, had been driven
away from philosophy by the aridity of mid-century conceptual
analysis. Berlin influentially traced the historical careers of
competing, large-scale values, such as liberty (which he distinguished
as either negative or positive) and equality. Not long after his time
in Oxford, Rawls embarked on what was to become a life-long project of
finding a coherent and attractive way of combining freedom and
equality into one conception of political justice. Cf. PL at 327. This
project first took the form of a series of widely-discussed articles
about justice published between 1958 and 1969.
After teaching at Cornell and MIT, Rawls took up a position in the
philosophy department at Harvard in 1962. There he remained, being
named a University Professor in 1979. Throughout his career, he
devoted considerable attention to his teaching. In his lectures on
moral and political philosophy, Rawls focused meticulously on great
philosophers of the past—Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel,
Marx, Mill, and others—always approaching them deferentially and with
an eye to what we can learn from them. Mentor to countless graduate
students over the years, Rawls inspired many who have become
influential interpreters of these philosophers.
The initial publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 brought Rawls
considerable renown. This complex book, which reveals Rawls's thorough
study of economics as well as his internalization of themes from the
philosophers covered in his teaching, has since been translated into
27 languages. While there are those who would claim a greater
originality for Political Liberalism, TJ remains the cornerstone of
Rawls's reputation.
2. Rawls's Mature Work: A Theory of Justice (1971)
a. The Basic Structure of Society
The subject matter of Rawls's theory is societal practices and
institutions. Some social institutions can provoke envy and
resentment. Others can foster alienation and exploitation. Is there a
way of organizing society that can keep these problems within livable
limits? Can society be organized around fair principles of cooperation
in a way the people would stably accept?
Rawls's original thought is that equality, or a fair distribution of
advantages, is to be addressed as a background matter by
constitutional and legal provisions that structure social
institutions. While fair institutions will influence the life chances
of everyone in society, they will leave individuals free to exercise
their basic liberties as they see fit within this fair set of rules.
To carry out this central idea, Rawls takes as the subject matter of
TJ "the basic structure of society," defined (as he later put it) as
"the way in which the major social institutions fit together into one
system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape
the division of advantages that arises through social cooperation." PL
at 258. Rawls's suggestion is, in effect, that we should put all our
effort into seeing to it that "the rules of the game" are fair. Once
society has been organized around a set of fair rules, people can set
about freely "playing" the game, without interference.
b. Utilitarianism as the Principal Opponent
Rawls explains in the Preface to the first edition of TJ that one of
the book's main aims is to provide a "workable and systematic moral
conception to oppose" utilitarianism. TJ at xvii. Utilitarianism comes
in various forms. Classical utilitarianism, the 19th century theory of
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, is the philosophy of "the
greatest good of the greatest number." The more modern version is
average utilitarianism, which asks us not to maximize the amount of
good or happiness, but rather its average level in society. The
utilitarian idea, as Rawls confronts it, is that society is to be
arranged so as to maximize (the total or average) aggregate utility or
expected well-being. Utilitarianism historically dominated the
landscape of moral philosophy, often being "refuted," but always
rising again from the ashes. Rawls's view was that until a
sufficiently complete and systematic alternative is put on the table
to compete with utilitarianism, its recurrence will be eternal. In
addition to developing that constructive alternative, however, Rawls
also offered some highly influential criticisms of utilitarianism. His
critique of average utilitarianism will be described below. About
classical utilitarianism, he famously complains that it "adopt[s] for
society as a whole the principle of choice for one man." In so doing,
he suggests, it fails to "take seriously the distinction between
persons." TJ at 24.
c. The Original Position
Recognizing that social institutions distort our views (by sometimes
generating envy, resentment, alienation, or false consciousness) and
bias matters in their own favor (by indoctrinating and habituating
those who grow up under them), Rawls saw the need for a justificatory
device that would give us critical distance from them. The original
position (OP) is his "Archimedean Point," the fulcrum he uses to
obtain critical leverage. TJ at 230-32. The OP is a thought experiment
that asks: what principles of social justice would be chosen by
parties thoroughly knowledgeable about human affairs in general but
wholly deprived—by the "veil of ignorance"—of information about the
particular person or persons they represent?
i. The Conditions and Purpose of the Original Position
The OP, as Rawls designs it, self-consciously builds on the long
social-contract tradition in Western political philosophy. In classic
presentations, such as John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil
Government (1690), the social contract was sometimes described as if
it were an actual historical event. By contrast, Rawls's
social-contract device, like his earlier decision procedure, is
frankly and completely hypothetical. While Rawls is most emphatic
about this in his later work, e.g. PL at 75, it is clear already in
TJ. He insists there that it is up to the theorist to construct the
social-contract thought-experiment in the way that makes the most
sense given its task of helping us select principles of justice.
Especially because of its frankly hypothetical nature, Rawls's OP
"carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the
social contract as found, say in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant." TJ at 10.
The idea is to help justify a set of principles of social justice by
showing that they would be selected in the OP. The OP is accordingly
set up to build in the moral conditions deemed necessary for the
resulting choice to be fair and to insulate the results from the
influence of the extant social order. The veil of ignorance plays a
crucial role in this set-up. TJ at sec. 23. It assures that each party
to the choice is equally or symmetrically situated, with none enjoying
greater power (or "threat advantage") than any other. TJ at 116, 121.
It also isolates the parties' choice from the contingencies—the sheer
luck—underlying the variations in people's natural abilities and
talents, their social backgrounds, and their particular society's
historical circumstances. About their society, Rawls has the parties
simply assume that it is characterized by the "circumstances of
justice," which principally include (a) the fact that material goods
are scarce, but moderately so and (b) that there is, within society, a
plurality of worldviews—"conceptions of the good" —moral, religious,
and secular. TJ at sec. 22.
It would be too fanciful to think of the parties to the OP as having
the capacity to invent principles. The point of the thought
experiment, rather, is to see which principles would be chosen in a
fair set-up. To use the OP this way, we must offer the parties a menu
of principles to choose from. Rawls offers them various principles to
consider. Among them are his own principles (to be described below)
and the two versions of utilitarianism, classical and average. The
crux of Rawls's appeal to the OP is whether he can show that the
parties will prefer his principles to average utilitarianism.
Would rational parties behind a veil of ignorance choose average
utilitarianism? The economist John Harsanyi argues that they would
because it would be rational for parties lacking any other information
to maximize their expectation of well-being. Harsanyi (1953) Since
they do not know who they will be, they will therefore want to
maximize the average level of well-being in society. Given Rawls's
opposition to utilitarianism, it would be ironic if Rawls's thought
experiment supported it. Because Rawls's OP differs from Harsanyi's
choice situation in important ways, however, its parties will not
prefer average utilitarianism to Rawls's competing principles. The
most crucial difference concerns the motivation that is attributed to
the parties by stipulation. The veil deprives the parties of any
knowledge of the values—the conception of the good—of the person into
whose shoes they are to imagine stepping. What, then, are they to
prefer? Since Harsanyi refuses to supply his parties with any definite
motivation, his answer is somewhat mysterious. Cf. TJ at 152. Rawls
instead defines the parties as having a determinate set of
motivations.
ii. The Motivations of the Parties to the Original Position
The parties in the hypothetical OP are to choose on behalf of persons
in society, for whom they are, in effect, trustees. PL at 76, 106. The
veil of ignorance, however, prevents the parties from knowing anything
particular about the preferences, likes or dislikes, commitments or
aversions of those persons. They also know nothing particular about
the society for which they are choosing. On what basis, then, can the
parties choose? To ascribe to them a full theory of the human good
would fly in the face of the facts of pluralism, for such theories are
deeply controversial. Instead, Rawls suggests, we should ascribe to
them a "thinner" or less controversial set of commitments. At the core
of these are what he calls the "primary goods:" rights, liberties, and
opportunities; income and wealth; and the social bases of
self-respect. To give the parties a definite basis on which to reason,
Rawls postulates that the parties "normally prefer more primary goods
rather than less." TJ at 123. This is the only motivation that TJ
ascribes to the parties.
In their pursuit of the primary goods, the parties are defined as
being "mutually disinterested:" each is motivated to obtain as many
primary goods as he or she can and is does not care if other attain
primary goods. TJ at 12. The parties are motivated neither by
benevolence nor by envy or spite. Many commentators think that this
assumption of the parties' mutual disinterest reflects an
unattractively individualistic view of human nature, but, as with the
motivations ascribed to the parties, the ascription of mutual
disinterest is not intended to mirror human nature. The assumption of
mutual disinterest reflects Rawls's development of, and reaction
against, both the sympathetic-spectator tradition in ethics,
exemplified by David Hume and Adam Smith, and the more recent
ideal-observer theory. The former tradition attempts to imagine the
point of view of a fully benevolent spectator of the human scene who
reacts impartially and sympathetically to all human travails and
successes. The ideal-observer theory typically imagines a somewhat
more dispassionate or impersonal, but still omniscient, observer of
the human scene. Each of these approaches asks us to imagine what such
a spectator or observer would morally approve.
Against these theories, Rawls raises a number of objections, which can
be boiled down to this: either they involve neglecting the
separateness of persons (in roughly the same way that utilitarianism
does when it adds up everyone's happiness), TJ at 164, or, if they
seek to avoid utilitarian aggregation, they will find that
"benevolence is at sea as long as its many loves are in opposition in
the persons of it many objects." TJ at 166. In other words, all
difficult questions of human conflict will be simply reproduced within
the sympathetic spectator's breast. Rawls was determined to get beyond
this impasse. He suggests that the OP should combine the
mutual-disinterest assumption with the veil of ignorance. This
combination, he argues, will achieve the rough moral equivalence of
universal benevolence without either neglecting the separateness of
persons or sacrificing definiteness of results. TJ at 128.
As we will see, the definite positive motivations that Rawls ascribes
to the parties are crucial to explaining why they will prefer his
principles to average utilitarianism. Because the parties' motivations
are essential to the arguments bearing on this central philosophical
contest, it is important to attend to Rawls's rationale for giving
this motivation to the parties.
The primary goods are supposed to be uncontroversially worth seeking,
albeit not for their own sakes. Initially, TJ presented the primary
goods simply as goods that "normally have a use whatever a person's
plan of life." TJ at 54. Although this claim seems quite modest,
philosophers rebutted it by describing life plans or worldviews for
which one or another of the primary goods is not useful. These
counterexamples revealed the need for a different rationale for the
primary goods. At roughly the same time, Rawls began to develop
further the Kantian strand in his view. These Kantian ideas ended up
providing a new rationale for the primary goods.
iii. Kantian Influence and Interpretation of the Original Position
Rawls had long admired Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy, making it
central to his teaching of the subject. See CP essays 13, 16, 23. TJ
aims to build on Kant's central ideas and to improve on them in
certain respects. TJ at sec. 41. By insisting, as against
utilitarianism, on the "separateness of persons," Rawls carries on
Kant's theme of respect for persons. Kant held that the true
principles of morality are not imposed on us by our psyches or by
eternal conceptual relations that hold true independently of us;
rather, Kant argued, the moral law is a law that our reason gives to
itself. It is, in this sense, self-chosen or autonomous law. Kant's
position is not that morality requires whatever Ms. Smith or Mr. Jones
chooses to believe it does. Rather, his claim is that the rational (or
vernünftig) nature that each person shares shapes a single moral law,
valid for all: "the categorical imperative."
Rawls suggests that the OP well models Kant's central ideas. The OP is
set up so that the parties reflect our nature as "reasonable and
rational"—Rawls's dual way of rendering the Kantian adjective
vernünftig. Once it is so set up the parties are to choose principles.
Their task of choosing principles thus models the idea of autonomy. In
designing the OP, Rawls also aimed to resolve what he took to be two
crucial difficulties with Kant's moral theory: the danger of empty
abstractness early stressed by Hegel and the difficulty of assuring
that the moral law's dictates adequately express, as Kant thought they
must, our nature as free and equal reasonable and rational beings.
Rawls addresses the issue of abstractness in many ways—perhaps most
fundamentally by dropping Kant's aim of finding an a priori basis for
morality. Although Rawls's use of the veil of ignorance keeps
particular facts at a distance, he insists, as against Kant, that
"moral theory must be free to use contingent assumptions and general
facts as it pleases." TJ at 44. Another feature that reduces the
abstractness of Rawls's view is his focus on institutions—on the basic
structure of society. In this light, we can see his institutional
focus as carrying forward Hegel's insight that the idea of human
freedom can achieve an adequately concrete realization only by a
unified social structure of a certain kind.
The OP also addresses the second problem with Kant's moral theory—the
problem of expression. The OP, Rawls suggests, "may be viewed … as a
procedural interpretation of Kant's conception of autonomy and the
categorical imperative within the framework of an empirical theory."
TJ at 226. To be autonomous, for Kant, is to act on a law that one
gives oneself, a law adequate to one's nature as a free and equal,
reasonable and rational person. The parties to the OP, in selecting
principles, implement this idea of autonomy. How they represent
equality and rationality are obvious, for they are equally situated
and are rational by definition. Reasonableness enters the OP not
principally by the rationality of the parties but by the constraints
on them—most especially the veil of ignorance. They are also
constrained in ways not yet mentioned and that we shall not discuss
further, such as "the formal constraints of the concept of right." TJ
at sec. 23. The veil also expresses (or "models") a crucial aspect of
our freedom, namely our freedom to endorse principles in a way that is
not controlled by the historical contingencies of the society into
which we are born. TJ at 225.
Rawls's attempt to solve the problem of expression also led him
towards a fuller articulation of the parties' motivations, ascribing
to them certain "highest-order interests." An intermediate step in
this direction is his characterization of our three highest-order
powers, the "moral powers" that persons have as reasonable and
rational beings. "The rational" corresponds to Kant's "hypothetical
imperative" with its directive to take effective means to one's ends;
"the reasonable" corresponds to Kant's categorical imperative, the
moral law that demands that we do the right thing, irrespective of
what our ends are. To conceive of persons as reasonable and rational,
then, is to conceive of them as having certain higher-order powers. On
the side of the rational, there is, first, the power to frame our
ends—our "conception of the good"—and to pursue it by selecting
effective means to satisfying them. Second, we can also revise our
ends when we see reason to do so. Third, on the side of the
reasonable, we have the power or capacity to act from "an effective
sense of justice:" we can do the right thing.
This Kantian conception of the powers of reasonable and rational
persons directly supports Rawls's later account of the motivations of
the parties. The parties are conceived as having highest-order
interests that correspond directly to these highest-order powers.
Although the account of the moral powers was present in TJ, it is only
in his later works that Rawls uses this idea to defend and elaborate
the motivation of the parties in the OP.
Rawls's account of the moral powers explains why it makes sense to
postulate that the parties are motivated to secure the primary goods.
In various, complicated ways, in his later work, Rawls defends the
primary goods as being required for free and equal citizens to promote
and protect their three moral powers. This is to cast the primary
goods as items objectively needed by moral persons occupying the role
of free and equal citizens. While the list of primary goods may not be
a perfect or complete account of what is needed to support this aspect
of moral personality, Rawls claims that it is the "best available"
account that we can muster in the face of the fact of reasonable
pluralism. PL at 188-9.
In addition to providing a new rationale for the primary goods,
Rawls's account of the moral powers also became, in his later work, a
basis for elaborating the motivations ascribed to the parties. In
Political Liberalism, Rawls describes the motivation as: "The parties
in the original position have no direct interests except an interest
in the person each of them represents and they assess principles of
justice in terms of primary goods. In addition, they are concerned
with securing for the person they represent the higher-order interests
we have in developing and exercising our … moral powers and in
securing the conditions under which we can further our determinate
conceptions of the good, whatever it is." PL at 105-6. Here, the
motivation of the parties is importantly extended by postulating that
these hypothetical beings care about the moral powers of persons in
society and also, by extension, about those persons' ability to pursue
what they particularly care about or are committed to.
Rawls's assumptions about the motivations of the parties involve
frankly moral content and are justified on openly moral grounds, as he
had always avowed. His aim remains, nonetheless, to assemble in the OP
a series of relatively uncontroversial, relatively fixed points among
our considered moral judgments and to build an argument on that basis
for the superiority of some principles of justice over others.
d. The Principles of Justice as Fairness
"Justice as Fairness" is Rawls's name for the set of principles he
defends in TJ. He refers to "the two principles of Justice as
Fairness," but the second has two parts. These principles address two
different aspects of the basic structure of society: the "First
Principle" addresses the essentials of the constitutional structure.
It holds that society must assure each citizen "an equal claim to a
fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which
scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all." PL at 5. The
second principle addresses instead those aspects of the basic
structure that shape the distribution of opportunities, offices,
income, wealth, and in general social advantages. The first part of
the second principle holds that the social structures that shape this
distribution must satisfy the requirements of "fair equality of
opportunity." The second part of the second principle is the famous—or
infamous—"Difference Principle." It holds that "social and economic
inequalities … are to be to the greatest benefit of the least
advantaged members of society." PL at 6. Each of these three centrally
addresses a different set of primary goods: the First Principle
concerns rights and liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of
Opportunity concerns opportunities; and the Difference Principle
primarily concerns income and wealth. (That the view adequately
secures the social basis of self-respect is something that Rawls
argues more holistically). TJ at 477-8.
e. The Argument from the Original Position
The argument that the parties in the OP will prefer Justice as
Fairness to utilitarianism and to the various other alternative
principles with which they are presented divides into two parts. There
is, first, the question whether the parties will insist upon securing
a scheme of equal basic liberties and upon giving them top priority.
Secondly, assuming that they will, there remains the question whether
social inequalities should be governed by Rawls's "second principle,"
comprising Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle,
or else should be addressed in a utilitarian way. Making the latter
choice, and so inserting utilitarianism into a position subordinate to
the First Principle, yields what Rawls calls a "mixed conception." TJ
at 107.
Each of these parts of the argument from the OP is considerably aided
by the clarified account of the primary goods that emerges in Rawls's
later work and that has been set out above in the section on the
motivation of the parties to the OP. Regarding the first part of the
argument from the OP, the crucial point is that the parties are
stipulated to care about rights and liberties. They further know, as a
general fact about human beings, that the determinate persons on whose
behalf they are choosing are likely to have firmly and deeply-held
"religious, philosophical, and moral views." PL at 311 They also have
a higher-order interest in protecting these persons' abilities to
advance these conceptions. Accordingly, "they cannot take chances by
permitting a lesser liberty of conscience to minority religions, say,
on the possibility that those they represent espouse a majority or
dominant religion." PL at 311. Rawls admits that persons' deeply-held
views are not always set in stone, but he insists that not all
circumstances in which they may change are morally acceptable. He
argues that protecting one's ability to exercise one's highest-order
power to change one's mind about such things requires an adequate
scheme of basic liberties. PL at 312-3. In addition, he argues that
securing the First Principle importantly serves the higher-order
interest in an effective sense of justice—and does so better than the
pure utilitarian alternative—by better promoting social stability,
mutual respect, and social unity. PL at 317-24.
The second part of the argument from the OP takes the First Principle
for granted and addresses the matter of social inequalities. Its
sticking point has always been the Difference Principle, which
strikingly and influentially articulates a liberal-egalitarian
socioeconomic position. While there are questions about Rawls's
precise formulation and implementation of the principle of Fair
Equality of Opportunity, it is far less controversial, both in theory
and in practice. It is the Difference Principle that would most
clearly demand deep reforms in existing societies. The set-up of the
OP suggests the following, informal argument for the difference
principle: because equality is an ideal fundamentally relevant to the
idea of fair cooperation, the OP situates the parties symmetrically
and deprives them of information that could distinguish them or allow
one to gain bargaining advantage over another. Given this set-up, the
parties will consider the situation of equal distribution a reasonable
starting point in their deliberations. Since they know all the general
facts about human societies, however, the parties will realize that
society might depart from this starting point by instituting a system
of social rules that differentially reward the especially productive
and could achieve results that are better for everyone than are the
results under rules guaranteeing full equality. This is the kind of
inequality that the Difference Principle allows and requires:
departures from full equality that make some better off and no one
worse off.
While this is the intuitive idea behind the Difference Principle,
Rawls's statement of the principle is more careful and precise. Three
main refinements are worth noting. First, because the principle
pertains to the basic structure of society and because the parties are
comparing different societies organized around different principles,
the expectations that matter are not those of particular people but
those of representative members of broad social classes. Second, to
make his exposition a little simpler, Rawls makes some technical
assumptions that let him focus only on the expectations of the
least-well-off representative class in a given society. (These
assumptions—of "close-knitness" and "chain-connection"—enable him to
ignore, for instance, the possibility of increasing the inequality
between the rich and the middle-class without affecting those on the
bottom. For those who find these simplifying assumptions too
restrictive, Rawls offers a multi-tiered, or "lexical," version of the
Difference Principle. TJ at 72. Allowed by these simplifying
assumptions to focus only on the least well off representative
persons, the Difference Principle thus holds that social rules
allowing for inequalities in income and wealth are acceptable just in
case those who are least well off under those rules are better off
than the least-well-off representative persons under any alternative
sets of social rules. This formulation already takes account of the
third refinement, which recognizes that the people who are the worst
off under one set of social arrangements may not be the same people as
those who are worst off under some other set of social arrangements.
Cf. PL at 7n.
The Difference Principle requires society to look out for the least
well off. But would the parties to the OP prefer the Difference
Principle to a utilitarian principle of distribution? Here, Rawls's
interpretation of the OP matters. It took a while for commentators to
grasp the degree to which Rawls's characterization of the OP departed
from the much simpler one favored by Harsanyi, from the point of view
of which Rawls's argument for the Difference Principle appeared to be
a plain mistake. For parties like Harsanyi's, it would be irrational
to choose the Difference Principle. Harsanyi's parties, lack any
determinate motivation: as Rawls puts it, they are "bare-persons." TJ
at 152. With nothing but the bare idea of rationality to guide them,
they will naturally choose any principle that will maximize their
utility expectation. Since this is what the principle of Average
Utilitarianism does, they will choose it. Yet as we have seen, Rawls
departs from Harsanyi's version of the thought experiment by
attributing a determinate motivation to the parties, while denying
that an index of the primary goods provides an interpretation of what
the parties conceive to be good. Rawls never defends the primary goods
as goods in themselves. Rather, he defends them as versatile means. In
the later theory, the primary goods are defended as facilitating the
pursuit and revision, by the persons the parties represent, of their
conceptions of the good. While the parties do not know what those
conceptions of the good are, they do care about whether the persons
they represent can pursue and revise them.
With this departure from Harsanyi in mind, we may finally explain why
the parties in the OP will prefer the principles of Justice as
Fairness, including the Difference Principle, to average
utilitarianism. In laying out the reasoning that favors the Difference
Principle, Rawls argues that the parties will have reason to use the
"maximin" rule. The maximin rule is a general rule for making choices
under conditions of uncertainty. It is markedly different from the
rule of maximizing expected value, the more "averaging" sort of rule
that Harsanyi's parties employ. The maximin rule directs one to select
that alternative where the minimum place is higher (on whatever the
relevant measure is) than the minimum place in any other alternative.
Applied to the theory of social justice, maximin is an approach "a
person would choose for the design of a society in which his enemy is
to assign him his place." TJ at 133.
The parties to Rawls's OP are not "bare-persons" but
"determinate-persons." TJ at 152. They care about the primary goods
and the highest-order moral powers, but they also know, in effect,
that the primary goods that they are motivated to seek are not what
the persons they represent ultimately care about. Accordingly, the
parties will give special importance to protecting the persons they
represent against social allocations of primary goods that might
frustrate those persons' ability to pursue their determinate
conceptions of the good. If the parties knew they had in hand an
adequate sketch of the good, they might use that to assess the gamble
they face, choosing in a maximizing way like Harsanyi's parties. But
Rawls's parties instead know that the primary goods that they are
motivated to seek do not adequately match anyone's conception of the
good. Accordingly, it is rational for them to take a cautious
approach. They must do what they can to assure to the persons they
represent have a sufficient supply of primary goods for those persons
to be able to pursue whatever it is that they do take to be good.
f. Reflective Equilibrium
Although the OP attempts to collect and express a set of crucial
constraints that are appropriate to impose on the choice of principles
of justice, Rawls recognized from the beginning that we could never
just hand over the endorsement of those principles to this
hypothetical device. Rather, he foresaw the need to "work from both
ends," pruning and adjusting things as we go. TJ at 18. That is, we
need to stop and consider whether, on reflection, we can endorse the
results of the OP. If those results clash with some of our more
concrete considered judgments about justice, then we have reason to
think about modifying the OP.
Alternatively—and this is what Rawls means by working "from both
ends"—instead of modifying the OP, we might decide that the argument
from the OP gives us good reason to modify the considered judgments of
justice with which its conclusions clash. Eventually, we may hope that
this process reaches a "reflective equilibrium." If it does, Rawls
wrote, "we shall find a description of the initial situation that
matches out considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted." Ibid.
The reflective equilibrium has been an immensely influential idea
about moral justification. It is not a full theory of justification.
When it was introduced, however, it suggested a different approach to
justifying moral theories than was being commonly pursued. The idea of
reflective equilibrium takes two steps away from the sort of
conceptual analysis that was then prevalent. First, working on the
basis of considered judgments suggests that it is not necessary to
build moral theories on necessary or a priori premises. What matters,
rather, is whether the premises are ones that "we do, in fact,
accept." TJ at 19. Rawls characterizes considered judgments as simply
judgments reached under conditions where our sense of justice is
likely to operate without distortion. TJ at 42. Second, the sort of
pruning and adjusting that Rawls assumes will be involved in the
search for reflective equilibrium implies that theories need not aim
for a perfect fit with theory-independent "data." Whereas the
practitioners of conceptual analysis had raised to a fine art the
method of generating counterexamples to a general theory, Rawls writes
that "objections by way of counterexample are to be made with care."
TJ at 45. Checking a theory's fit with one's more concrete considered
judgments is only a way-station on the route to reflective
equilibrium. Reaching it might involve revising some of those more
concrete judgments. A third novel idea about justification thus
emerges from this picture: it involves arguments built in various
different directions at once. The resulting justification, as Rawls
puts it, "is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations."
TJ at 19, 507.
Eventually, the hope is that each person will reach a reflective
equilibrium that coincides with every other person's. Since it is up
to each person, however, to determine which arguments are most
compelling, Rawls stresses that the reader must make up his or her own
mind, rather than trying to predict or anticipate what everyone else
will think. TJ at 44.
g. Just Institutions
Part Two of TJ aims to show that Justice as Fairness fits our
considered judgments on a whole range of more concrete topics in moral
and political philosophy, such as the idea of the rule of law, the
problem of justice between generations, and the justification of civil
disobedience. Consistent with the idea of reflective equilibrium,
Rawls suggests pruning and adjusting those judgments in a number of
places. One of the thorniest such issues, that of tolerating the
intolerant, recurs in PL. In addition to serving its main purpose of
facilitating reflective equilibrium on Justice as Fairness, Part Two
also offers a treasure trove of influential and insightful discussion
of these and other topics in political philosophy. There is hardly
space here even to summarize all the worthwhile points that Rawls
makes about these topics. A summary of his controversial and
influential discussion of the idea of desert (i.e. getting what one
deserves), however, will illustrate how he proceeds.
As we have seen, Rawls was deeply aware of the moral arbitrariness of
fortune. He held that no one deserves the social position into which
he or she is born or the physical characteristics with which he or she
is endowed from birth. He also held that no one deserves the character
traits he or she is born with, such as his or her capacity for hard
work. As he wrote, "The natural distribution is neither just nor
unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some
particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and
unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts." TJ at 87.
In Part Two, Rawls sets out to square this stance on the moral
arbitrariness of fortune with our considered judgments about desert,
which do hold that desert is relevant to distributive claims. For
instance, we tend to think that people who work harder deserve to be
rewarded for their effort. We may also think that the talented deserve
to be rewarded for the use of their talents, whether or not they
deserved those talents in the first place. With these common-sense
precepts of justice, Rawls does not disagree; but he clarifies them by
responding to them dialectically. TJ at sec. 48. He questions whether
these common-sense claims are meant to stand independently of any
assumptions about whether or not the basic institutions of
society—especially those institutions of property law, contract law,
and taxation that, in effect, define the property claims and transfer
rules that make up the marketplace—are just. It is unreasonable, Rawls
argues, to say that desert is a direct basis for distributional claims
even if the socio-economic system is unfair. It is much more
reasonable to hold, he suggests, that whether one deserves the
compensation one can command in the job marketplace, for instance,
depends on whether the basic social institutions are fair. Are they
set up so as to assure, among other things, an appropriate
relationship between effort and reward? It is this justice of the
basic structure that is Rawls's topic.
Rawls's alternative proposal is that the common-sense precepts about
desert generally presuppose that the basic structure of society is
itself fair. When they are qualified in line with this presupposition,
Rawls supports them. To prevent the unqualified and the qualified
claims from being confused with each other, however, he uses the term
"legitimate expectations" as a term of art to express the claims of
desert appropriately so qualified. A crucial idea of Justice as
Fairness is that fundamental principles of justice must be respected
for the rules of social cooperation to be fair, and that when they
are, we should allow the free operation of the market largely to
determine people's legitimate expectations. (This dialectical
clarification of the moral import of desert, however, did not satisfy
all commentators. See Robert Nozick (1974).
h. Stability
In pursuing his novel topic of the justice of the basic structure of
society, Rawls posed novel questions. One set of questions concerned
what he calls the "stability" of those societies whose institutions
live up to the requirements of a given set of principles of justice.
The stability of the institutions called for by a given set of
principles of justice—their ability to endure over time and to
re-establish themselves after temporary disturbances—is a quality
those principles must have if they are to serve their purposes.. TJ at
398-400. Unstable institutions would not secure the liberties, rights,
and opportunities that the parties care about. If any set of
institutions realizing a given set of principles were inherently
unstable, that would suggest a need to revise those principles.
Accordingly, Rawls argues, in Part Three of TJ, that institutions
embodying Justice as Fairness would be stable – even more stable than
institutions embodying the utilitarian principle.
In addressing the question of stability, Rawls never leaves behind the
perspective of moral justification. Stability of a kind might be
achieved by arranging a stand-off of opposing but equal armies. The
results of such a balance of power are not of interest to Rawls.
Rather, the stability question he asks concerns whether, in a society
that conforms to the principles, citizens can wholeheartedly accept
those principles. Wholeheartedness will require, for instance, that
the reasons on the basis of which the citizens accept the principles
are reasons affirmed by those very principles. PL at xlii. If
stability can be grounded on such wholeheartedly moral reasons—as
opposed to ulterior reasons—then it is "stability for the right
reasons." PL at xxxix. In TJ, the account of stability for the right
reasons involved imagining that this wholeheartedness arose from
individuals being thoroughly educated, along Kantian lines, to think
of fairness in terms of the principles of Justice as Fairness. Cf. PL
at lxii. As we will see, he later came to think that this account
violated the assumption of pluralism.
The imaginative exercise of assessing the comparative stability of
different principles would be useless and unfair if one were to
compare, say, an enlightened and ideally-run set of institutions
embodying Justice as Fairness with the stupidest possible set of
institutions compatible with the utilitarian principle. In order to
standardize the terms of comparison, Rawls discusses only the
"well-ordered societies" corresponding to each of the rival sets of
principles. His notion of a well-ordered society is complex. See CP at
232-5. The gist of it is that the relevant principles of justice are
publicly accepted by everyone and that the basic social institutions
are publicly known (or believed with good reason) to satisfy those
principles.
Assessing the comparative stability of alternative well-ordered
societies requires a complex imaginative effort at tracing likely
phenomena of social psychology. As Rawls comments, "One conception of
justice is more stable than another if the sense of justice that it
tends to generate is stronger and more likely to override disruptive
inclinations and if the institutions it allows foster weaker impulses
and temptations to act justly." CP at 398. In order to address the
first of these issues, about the strength of the sense of justice,
Chapter VIII develops a rich and somewhat original account of moral
education. Drawing upon empirical research in developmental
psychology, Rawls describes the gradual development of individuals'
senses of justice as involving three stages: the morality of
authority, which is fostered in families; the morality of association;
and the morality of principles. He argues that each of these stages of
moral education will work more effectively under Justice as Fairness
than it will under utilitarianism. TJ at chap. 8. He also argues that
a society organized around the two principles of Justice as Fairness
will be less prone to the disruptive effects of envy than will a
utilitarian society. TJ at secs. 80-81.
i. Congruence
As we have seen, the veil of ignorance disconnects the argument from
the OP from any given individual's full conception of the good. The
final question addressed by TJ attempts to reconnect justice to each
individual's good, not in general, but within the well-ordered society
of Justice as Fairness. A stable society is one that generates
attitudes, such as are encapsulated in an effective sense of justice,
that support the just institutions of that society. If, in the
well-ordered society, having those attitudes is also a good for the
persons who have them, then there is a "match between justice and
goodness" that Rawls calls "congruence." TJ at 350.
In order to address this question of congruence, TJ develops an
account of the good for individuals. Chapter VII of TJ, in fact,
develops a quite general theory of goodness—called "goodness as
rationality"—and then applies it to the special case of the good of an
individual over a complete life. Rawls starts from the suggestion that
"A is a good X if and only if A has the properties (to a higher degree
than the average or standard X) which it is rational to want in an X,
given what X's are used for, or expected to do, and the like
(whichever rider is appropriate)." TJ at 350-1. This idea, developed
in dialogue with the leading alternatives from the middle of the 20th
century, still repays attention. To work out this suggestion for the
case of the good for persons, Rawls influentially developed and
deployed the notion of a "life plan." A rational plan of life for an
individual, he argued, is answerable to certain principles of
"deliberative rationality." These Rawls sets out in a low-key way that
masks the power and originality of his formulations. TJ at 359-72.
Rawls's argument for congruence—that having an effective sense of
justice built around the principles of Justice as Fairness will be a
good for each individual—is a complex and philosophically deep one. It
appeals to at least four types of intermediate good, each of which may
be presumed to be of value to just about everyone: (i) the development
and exercise of complex talents (which Rawls's "Aristotelian
Principle" presumes to be a good for human beings), TJ at 374, (ii)
autonomy, (iii) community, and (iv) the unity of the self. Rawls's
argument for congruence is spread out across many sections of TJ. Some
of its main threads are pulled together by Samuel Freeman in his
contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Freeman (2003). With
regard to autonomy, to supplement the positive argument flowing from
the Kantian interpretation of the OP, Rawls argues that the type of
objectivity claimed for the principles of Justice as Fairness is not
at odds with the idea of the autonomous establishment of principles.
TJ at sec. 78. He further argues that Justice as Fairness supports the
kind of tightly-knit community he calls "a social union of social
unions," marked by the shared purpose or "common aim of cooperating
together to realize their own and another's nature in ways allowed by
the principles of justice." TJ at 462. If Rawls is right about the
congruence of goodness and justice, these "ways" are hardly trivial.
(Not long after TJ was published, it came under attack by a set of
critics who identified themselves as "communitarians." E.g. MacIntyre
(1984); Sandel (1998). Ironically, the communitarian critique focused
largely on Parts One and Two of TJ, giving short shrift to the
powerful articulation of this ideal of community in Part Three.)
Finally, regarding the unity of the self, Rawls criticizes the
Procrustean sort of unity that could come from attaching oneself to a
single "dominant end." He notes the advantages of a conception of the
unity of the self that hangs, instead, on the regulative status of
principles of justice. TJ at secs. 83-85. The cumulative effect of
these appeals to the development of talent, autonomy, community, and
the unity of the self is to support the claim of Justice as Fairness
to congruence. In a well-ordered society corresponding to Justice as
Fairness, Rawls concludes, an effective sense of justice is a good for
the individual who has it. In TJ, this congruence between justice and
goodness is the main basis for concluding that individual citizens
will wholeheartedly accept the principles of justice as fairness.
3. Recasting the Argument for Stability: Political Liberalism (1993)
Rawls has the parties to the OP assume that the society for which they
are choosing principles is in the "circumstances of justice," which
include the presence of a plurality of irreconcilable moral,
religious, and philosophical doctrines. But his argument for the
comparative stability and the congruence of Justice as Fairness,
imagines a well-ordered society in which everyone is brought up in
ways deeply informed by the adherence by all adults to the same
principles of justice. Accordingly, his discussion of stability and
congruence in Part Three of TJ is at odds with the assumption of
pluralism. In his second book, Political Liberalism [PL], he set out
to rectify this "serious problem." PL at xvii.
PL clarifies that the only acceptable way to rectify the problem is to
modify the account of stability and congruence, because pluralism is
no mere theoretical posit. Rather, pluralism has been endemic among
the liberal democracies since the 16th century wars of religion.
Moreover, pluralism is a permanent feature of liberal or
non-repressive societies. It does not rest on irrationality. On the
contrary, within a wide range such pluralism is "reasonable" and will
not be erased by people's attempts to cooperate reasonably. That is
because a series of intractable "burdens of judgment" all but preclude
reasoned convergence on fundamental and comprehensive principles about
how to live. PL at 54-8. Accordingly, Rawls takes it as a fact that
the kind of uniformity in fundamental moral and political beliefs that
he imagined in Part Three of TJ can be maintained only by the
oppressive use of state force. He calls this "the fact of oppression."
PL at 37. Since he also—unsurprisingly—holds that oppression is
illegitimate, he refrains from offering fundamental and comprehensive
principles of how to live. In this way, his insistence on the fact of
oppression prompts a marked scaling back of the traditional aims of
political philosophy.
The seminal idea of PL is "overlapping consensus." In an overlapping
consensus, each citizen—no matter which of society's many
"comprehensive conceptions" he or she endorses—ends up endorsing the
same limited, "political conception" of justice, each for his or her
own reasons. The principal role of the overlapping consensus is to
replace TJ's description of wholehearted acceptance. Unlike TJ's
description, the overlapping consensus conceptually reconciles
wholehearted acceptance with the fact of reasonable pluralism.
Part of this newer approach is the distinction between "comprehensive
conceptions," which address all questions about how to live, and
"political conceptions," which address only political questions. This
distinction has proven somewhat troublesome. The "domain of the
political," as Rawls calls it, is not completely distinct from
morality. In concerning himself only with the political, he is not
setting aside all moral principles and turning instead to mere
strategy or Realpolitik. On the contrary, a political conception "is,
of course, a moral conception," but it is a moral conception that
concerns itself only with the basic structure of society. PL at 11.
Further, a political conception is one that may be developed in a
"freestanding" way, drawing only upon the "very great values" of the
political, rather than being presented as deriving from any more
comprehensive moral or religious doctrine. PL at 139. A corollary of
this approach is that such a political liberalism is not wholly
neutral about the good. PL at 191-3. While Justice as Fairness is one
such political conception, in PL Rawls makes a point of stressing that
it is just one member of the broader family of views he refers to as
the "reasonable liberal political conceptions."
Armed with the idea of an overlapping consensus on a reasonable
political conception, Rawls could have contented himself with
describing the historical and sociological grounds for hoping that a
reasonable overlapping consensus on a political liberalism might be
reached. Hope is indeed the leitmotif of PL. E.g PL at,40, 65, 172,
246, 252, 392. But because Rawls never drops his role as an advocate
of political liberalism, he must go beyond such disinterested
sociological speculation. He must find and describe ways of advocating
this view that are compatible with his full, late recognition of the
fact of reasonable pluralism. This attempt is what makes PL so rich,
difficult, and interesting.
The difficulty is this: to advocate Justice as Fairness or any other
political liberalism as true would be to clash with many comprehensive
religious and moral doctrines, including those that simply deny that
truth or falsity apply to claims of political morality, as well as
those that insist that political-moral truths derive only from some
divine revelation. To preserve the possibility of an overlapping
consensus on political liberalism, it might be thought that its
defenders must deny that political liberalism is simply true, severely
hampering their ability to defend it. To cope with this difficulty,
Rawls pioneered a stance in political philosophy that mirrored his
general personal modesty: a stance of avoidance. Using the "method of
avoidance," Rawls neither asserts nor denies such truth claims. CP at
395. "The central idea," he writes, "is that political liberalism
moves within the category of the political and leaves philosophy as it
is." PL at 375. Perhaps defending political liberalism as the most
reasonable political conception is to defend it as true; but, again,
Rawls neither asserts nor denies that this is so.
Developing a compelling freestanding presentation of political
morality may be possible if we may draw upon a shared set of relevant
moral ideas implicit in the "background culture" of democratic
societies. PL at 14. Foremost among such shared ideas is the idea of
fair cooperation among free and equal citizens. Much of PL is
accordingly devoted to recasting the earlier argument for Justice as
Fairness in terms that are "political, not metaphysical." Many of the
revisions concern the arguments for various features of the OP.
Although these revisions occupy much of PL, they need not be covered
further here, as most of them have been already anticipated in the
above exposition of TJ. To have structured the exposition in this way
is to have sided with those who see considerable unity in Rawls's
work. E.g., Wenar (2004). One important change, however, is that PL
goes to considerably further lengths to show that the values to which
the view appeals are political, rather than being tied up in any
particular comprehensive doctrine. For instance, that citizens are
thought of as free is defended, not by general metaphysical truths
about human nature, but rather by our widely shared political
convictions. "On the road to Damascus Saul of Tarsus becomes Paul the
Apostle. Yet such a conversion implies no change in our public or
institutional identity." PL at 31. On the contrary, our political
rights ought not to vary with such changes. To think of political
rights in this way is to think of citizens as free, in a relevant,
political sense.
Instead of seeing a fundamental unity to Rawls's work, some
commentators emphasize what they take to be PL's new focus on
political legitimacy, as distinct from political justice. E.g. Estlund
(1998); Dreben (2003). It is certainly true that Rawls prominently
deploys a "liberal principle of legitimacy" that was not present in
TJ. This principle states that
[O]ur exercise of political power is proper and hence justifiable
only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the
essentials of which all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse
in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to them as reasonable
and rational. PL at 217; cf. 137.
This principle thus appears to connect Rawls's view to that of others
working in political and democratic theory who lean on the notion of
"reasons that all can accept." E.g. Gutmann and Thompson (1996).
Rawls, however, leans more heavily than most on the notion of
reasonableness. This is apparent in a late essay, where he writes that
"our exercise of political power is proper only when we … reasonably
think that other citizens might also reasonably accept those reasons
[on which it is based]." CP at 579.
These further qualifications hint at the relatively limited purpose
for which Rawls appeals, within PL, to this principle of legitimacy.
The principle is part of his account of "public reason" in pluralist
societies. This account answers the question: how can we, in political
society, reason with one another so as to set priorities and make
political decisions, given the fact of reasonable pluralism and the
burdens of judgment that make it permanent? Finding reasons that we
reasonably think others might accept is a crucial part of the answer.
The demand that we do so makes up the core of the duty of civility
that binds citizens acting in any official capacity. Rawls's limits on
public reasoning have been highly controversial, but it is important
to remember that they form part of his revised thought experiment
about stability. The overall question of PL is similar to that of Part
Three of TJ: what grounds do we have for thinking that a political
liberalism would be stable? In this context, Rawls's duty of civility
may be seen as contributing his defense of the following conditional
claim: if citizens of a pluralist society would abide by such
restraints of civility, and if a political liberalism were the object
of an overlapping consensus, then that political liberalism would be
stable.
To this observation, some of the critics of Rawls's account of public
reason reply that accepting this kind of restraint on public dialogue
would be too high a price to pay for a stable liberalism. See
Richardson & Weithman vol. 5 (1999). Yet in his last essay on the
subject, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" (in LP as well as CP),
Rawls introduced qualifications to his duty of civility that have
mollified some. To begin with, he emphasizes that this stricture is
not meant to restrict public discussion in the "background culture" in
any way, but only to constrain certain official interactions. He
further introduces a "proviso" that allows one to rely, even in
official contexts, on reasons dependent on one or another
comprehensive doctrine, so long as "in due course" one provides
"properly public reasons." CP at 584. Even this revised account of
civility remains highly debatable. Still, it should make a difference
to the debate whether we consider the restriction only as part of a
hypothetical consideration of the stability of a given well-ordered
society (specifically, one that has reached overlapping consensus on
some political liberalism) or rather as a doctrine about what civility
requires in our society, here and now.
4. Problems of Extension
The modesty and restraint we have noted in Rawls's general approach is
also revealed in the way he set aside a number of difficult questions
that properly arise within his self-assigned topic. Complicated as his
view is, he was keenly aware of the many simplifying assumptions made
by his argument. "We need to be tolerant of simplifications." TJ at
45-6. His most prominent simplifications are the following two: the
assumption ("for the time being") that society is "a closed system
isolated from other societies," TJ at 7, and that "all citizens are
fully cooperating members of a society over a complete life." CP at
332; cf. PL at 20. These simplifications set aside questions about
international justice and about justice for the disabled. An
additional simplifying assumption implicit in the account of moral
development in Part Three of TJ, is that families are just and caring.
Relaxing each of these three simplifying assumptions gives rise to
important and challenging "problems of extension" for a Rawlsian view.
In The Law of Peoples [LP] (1999), Rawls relaxes the assumption that
society is a closed system that coincides with a nation-state. Once
this assumption is dropped, the question that comes to the fore is:
upon what principles should the foreign policy of a decent liberal
regime be founded? Rawls first looks at this question from the point
of view of ideal theory, which supposes that all peoples enjoy a
decent liberal-democratic regime. At this level, with reference to a
rather thinly-described global original position, Rawls develops basic
principles concerning non-intervention, respect for human rights, and
assistance for countries lacking the conditions necessary for a decent
or just regime to arise. These principles govern one nation in its
relations with others. He next discusses the principles that should
govern decent liberal societies in their relations with peoples who
are not governed by decent liberalisms. He articulates the idea of a
"decent consultation hierarchy" to illustrate the sort of non-liberal
society that is owed considerable tolerance by the people of a decent
liberal society. In a part of the book devoted to non-ideal theory,
Rawls impressively defends quite restrictive positions on the right of
war and on the moral conduct of warfare. Surprisingly, questions of
global distributive justice are confined to one brief section of LP.
In that section, Rawls treats quite dismissively two earlier attempts
to extend his theoretical framework to questions of international
justice, those of Beitz (1979) and Pogge (1994). Drawing on the ideas
of TJ, these philosophers had developed quite demanding principles of
international distributive justice. In LP, Rawls instead favors a
relatively minimal "duty of assistance," with a definite "target and a
cut-off point." LP at 119.
As to justice for the disabled, Rawls never attempted an extension of
his theory. He did direct some brief remarks to the topic in Political
Liberalism, noting that the view generates a salient distinction
between those whose disabilities permanently prevent them from being
able to express their higher-order moral powers as fully cooperating
citizens and those whose do not. PL at 183-6. While Rawls limited
himself to this observation, Norman Daniels' work on justice and
health care may be viewed as an attempt to extend Rawls's view in the
direction the observation indicates. Daniels (1985). Nussbaum argues
that Rawlsian social-contract theory is a deeply flawed basis for
addressing questions of justice for the disabled and cannot be well
extended to deal with them. Nussbaum (2005).
Responding to critics, Rawls did briefly address justice within the
family in "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited." CP at 595-601; LP at
156-164. He writes that he had "thought that J. S. Mill's landmark The
Subjection of Women … made clear that a decent liberal conception of
justice (including what I have called Justice as Fairness) implied
equal justice for women as well as men," but admits that he "should
have been more explicit about this." CP at 595. He there affirms that
"the family is part of the basic structure" and is subject to being
regulated by the principles of political justice. The laws defining
the rights of marriage, divorce, and the ownership and inheritance of
property by families and family members are presumably all part of the
basic structure of society, as are provisions of the criminal law
protecting the basic rights of family members not to be abused.
In the case of the family as in economic transactions, Rawls's stance
illustrates once more how his focus on institutional justice
structures his attempt to reconcile freedom and equality. Egalitarian
concerns are addressed at the institutional level, by assuring that
protection for the appropriate rights and liberties assured by the
basic structure of society. Freedom is preserved by allowing
individuals to pursue their reasonable conceptions of the good,
whatever they may be, within those constitutional constraints.
5. References and Further Reading
Principal Works by John Rawls:
* A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Harvard University Press, 1999
[cited as TJ].
* Political Liberalism, rev. ed., Columbia University Press, 1996
[cited as PL].
* Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman, Harvard University Press,
1999 [cited as CP].
* The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as LP].
* Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman,
Harvard University Press, 2000.
* Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly, Harvard
University Press, 2001.
* Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel
Freeman, Harvard University Press, 2007.
Two useful gateways to the voluminous secondary literature on
Rawls are the following:
* Henry S. Richardson and Paul J. Weithman, eds., The Philosophy
of Rawls (5 vols., Garland, 1999).
* Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
On Rawls's Life
* Thomas Pogge, "A Brief Sketch of Rawls's Life," in Richardson &
Weithman, eds., Vol. 1, pp. 1-15.
Other Works Cited:
* Beitz, Charles. 1979. Political Theory and International
Relations. Princeton University Press.
* Daniels, Norman. 1985. Just Health Care. Cambridge University Press.
* Dreben, Burton. 2003. On Rawls and Political Liberalism. In
Freeman, 2003: 316-346.
* Estlund, David. 1998. The Insularity of the Reasonable. Ethics
108: 252-75.
* Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and
Disagreement. Harvard University Press.
* Harsanyi, John C. 1953. Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics
and in the Theory of Risk-Taking. Journal of Political Economy 61:
453-5.
* MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue, 2d ed. (1st ed. 1981)
(University of Notre Dame Press).
* Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. NY: Basic Books.
* Nussbaum, Martha C. 2005. Frontiers of Justice: Disability,
Nationality, Species Membership (Harvard University Press).
* Okin, Susan. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. NY: Basic Books.
* Pogge, Thomas. 1994. An Egalitarian Law of Peoples. Philosophy
and Public Affairs 23: 195-224.
* Sandel, Michael. 1998. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2d
ed. (1st ed. 1982) (Cambridge University Press).
* Richardson, Henry S. 2006. Rawlsian Social Contract Theory and
the Severely Disabled. Journal of Ethics 10: 419-462.
* Urmson, J. O. 1950. On Grading. Mind 59: 526-29.
* Wenar, Leif. 2004. The Unity of Rawls's Work. Journal of Moral
Philosophy 1: 265-275.
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