John Rawls

The Path to a Theory of Justice

Andrius Gališanka

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674239470
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophen

An engaging account of the titan of political philosophy and the development of his most important work, A Theory of Justice, coming at a moment when its ideas are sorely needed. It is hard to overestimate the influence of John Rawls on political philosophy and theory over the last half-century. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is one of the few philosophers whose work is known in the corridors of power as well as in the halls of academe. Rawls is most famous for the development of his view of "justice as fairness, " articulated most forcefully in his best-known work, A Theory of Justice. In it he develops a liberalism focused on improving the fate of the least advantaged, and attempts to demonstrate that, despite our differences, agreement on basic political institutions is both possible and achievable.Critics have maintained that Rawls's view is unrealistic and ultimately undemocratic. In this incisive new intellectual biography, Andrius Gališanka argues that in misunderstanding the origins and development of Rawls's central argument, previous narratives fail to explain the novelty of his philosophical approach and so misunderstand the political vision he made prevalent. Gališanka draws on newly available archives of Rawls's unpublished essays and personal papers to clarify the justifications Rawls offered for his assumption of basic moral agreement. Gališanka's intellectual-historical approach reveals a philosopher struggling toward humbler claims than critics allege.To engage with Rawls's search for agreement is particularly valuable at this political juncture. By providing insight into the origins, aims, and arguments of A Theory of Justice, Gališanka's John Rawls will allow us to consider the philosopher's most important and influential work with fresh eyes.

1

Protestant Beginnings

JOHN BORDLEY RAWLS was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, to what he called a conventionally religious family.¹ His father, William Lee Rawls, was a Southern Methodist but frequented the Episcopalian Church, the congregational home of his wife and John’s mother, Anna Abell Stump. Rawls’s family was also engaged in politics. His father, a self-educated lawyer, was an unofficial adviser of Albert Ritchie, the Democratic governor of Maryland (1924–1936).² His mother was the Baltimore chapter president of the League of Women Voters and worked for the campaign of Wendell Wilkie, a former Democrat who challenged Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Republican in 1940.³

Religion did not seem to play a crucial part in Rawls’s early life, however. He attended the Episcopalian Kent School from 1935 to 1939, but in his decision to enter it, he seems to have followed his brother William rather than a religious calling. Rawls described his experiences at the Kent School as unremarkable.⁴ This relative lack of deeper interest in religion continued in his first two undergraduate years at Princeton, which he entered in 1939, again following family tradition. Initially, Rawls planned to major in art and architecture, taking classes in freehand drawing, ancient art, painting in Italy, and ancient and medieval architecture.⁵ He also wrote and served as news editor for the school newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, covering wrestling and football in his first year and then music in the later years.⁶

Rawls did, however, develop an interest in politics while at Princeton. This interest started emerging in his sophomore year and was motivated in large part by the Second World War and the puzzling popularity of the Nazi movement. Rawls’s concern with the war is evident in his first political writing, “Spengler’s Prophecy Realized,” published in June 1941 in Princeton’s Nassau Literary Magazine, now the Nassau Literary Review. In this uncharacteristically despairing and sarcastic essay, Rawls argued that the Western world is living out Oswald Spengler’s prophecy that it would fall. On the one hand, he argued, we are witnessing “the rise of great individuals to power” and thus the diminution of democracy.⁷ In Germany, “Herr Hitler has made true the fears of Spengler,” and in the United States, attributing greater power to President Roosevelt, “a so-called free people are giving their freedom to become exploited pawns in a new war.”⁸ On the other hand, Rawls thought, machinery is making redundant the virtues of human beings. Given Germany’s leadership in the latter area, Rawls concluded that “there is no hope for a successful revolt against the Nazis in Europe; at least not at present.”⁹

Rawls’s interests changed in his junior year. His interest in politics assumed a more ethical perspective, focusing not so much on actions but on the ideals that motivate them. His interest in religion and theology sparked. In the fall of his junior year, he took a religious history course titled Christian Thought to the Reformation.¹⁰ The course was part of the Committee on Religious Instruction, created in 1940. It was taught by George F. Thomas, hired to be the formative person of the committee, which would soon become the Department of Religion. The course discussed “the origins of Christian beliefs about God, Creation, Man, Evil, and Salvation as expressed in the Bible” as well as the influence of Greek philosophy on the development of these beliefs.¹¹

The influence of this course is evident in Rawls’s second publication, “Christianity and the Modern World,” also in the Nassau Literary Magazine.¹² The content and character of this essay differed noticeably from the first. Rawls now focused not on the concentration of power and the effects of technology but on the beliefs of Western societies. He argued that the Western world has departed from Christian principles. He attributed to Christianity beliefs that would reemerge in his senior thesis: God is a person; each person has equal value because of their “ability to enter into the relation of union between Nature and Grace”; and human beings inevitably fall into sin and cannot be kept from it without God’s grace.¹³ According to Rawls, no religion based on reason alone could understand the “radical evil” that was present in human beings.¹⁴ Hence Rawls’s solution to the problems of the Western world was a return to Christianity. “There are but two alternatives,” he wrote. “Either we become Christian or we become pagan.” To return to Christianity, Rawls argued, we must start with education that introduces Christianity to students, which should be followed with individual conversions.¹⁵

In the spring of his junior year (1942), Rawls took Social Philosophy with Norman Malcolm, an analytic philosopher and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, who served as instructor at Princeton from 1940 to 1942 and then again in the spring of 1946.¹⁶ The course had religious-ethical undertones: Malcolm framed it around the topic of evil, assigning Plato, Augustine, Bishop Butler, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Philip Leon. According to Robert Scoon, the chair of the Princeton philosophy department, Malcolm “has prepared himself for the course in Social Philosophy … to such an extent that we know of no other young man to whom we would prefer to give this work.”¹⁷ Much later, Rawls singled out this course as the most influential course in his undergraduate career.¹⁸

Rawls’s interest in the ethical aspects of religion, and to a lesser extent politics, peaked in his last undergraduate semester, the fall of 1942, at the end of which he submitted his senior thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.” It contained political and philosophical visions that would lay the basis for his later thinking, even when he rejected these visions in their original theological form. Politically, Rawls affirmed a nonnegotiable stance of equality: everyone was to be treated equally because everyone was created in the image of God. Philosophically, Rawls took it for granted that a philosopher’s task was analysis of experience, and that the results of this analysis—a conceptual framework—were justified insofar as they explain the Christian experience correctly. In their broadest forms, these political and philosophical visions would shape the development of Rawls’s later secular commitments and his arguments in A Theory of Justice. Respect for persons would eventually transform into the “inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override,” while reliance on Christian experience would make Rawls receptive to analytic accounts of nonfoundationalist justification.¹⁹ These developments would take time, but they were influenced by the place in which Rawls’s story began.

Here, I want to explain Rawls’s seemingly sudden interest in theology, the nature of his early philosophical and political commitments, and his eventual loss of faith. These developments are best understood against the background of American theology enmeshed in the debate between liberal Protestantism and neo-orthodoxy. Liberal Protestants understood Christianity as a movement that focused on Christian experiences and defended its theological frameworks by appeal to Christian experiences, such as those of grace, sin, and conversion. Neo-orthodoxy rejected this reliance on personal experience and brought back the emphasis on revelation that happened only once, through Christ. Debates between these traditions shaped Rawls’s teachers and, in turn, the questions Rawls raised in his thesis.

Most of the existing literature on Rawls portrays him as neo-orthodox. Eric Gregory and Robert Adams emphasize neo-orthodoxy’s influence on Rawls’s view of God as a person and on his claim that full knowledge of God is possible only through his self-revelation.²⁰ David Reidy calls attention to Rawls’s statement that the Bible is “the last word in matters of religion,” a statement he interprets as a typical neo-orthodox theme.²¹ One cannot deny the neo-orthodox influence on Rawls, especially on his political framework. However, it is worthwhile to trace the liberal Protestant influence on Rawls’s philosophical vision. It helps us explain the core aspect of this vision—his reliance on Christian experience to justify political views—and therefore illuminates his eventual commitment to reflective equilibrium.

Philosophy and Religious Instruction at Princeton

While the Second World War must have prompted Rawls’s interest in religion, his focus on theology emerged during interactions with his philosophy professors. Princeton’s philosophy department in 1939 was unusual given the dominance of analytic philosophy at the time. It was a group of philosophers of different intellectual interests and approaches. Robert Scoon, the department’s chair, was a classicist who started his Princeton career as a professor of Latin in 1919 and transferred to the philosophy department in 1923.²² Along with the introductory courses, he taught Plato, the history of philosophy influenced by Plato, and the philosophy of religion. Walter Stace was a former administrator of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), who turned philosophy from a hobby to a vocation when he joined Princeton in 1935. An empiricist, he taught mainly twentieth-century philosophy. Theodore M. Greene, writing mostly on aesthetics, taught Plato, ethics, and aesthetics. David Bowers covered Kant and American philosophy, while Andrew Ushenko taught logic and the philosophy of science. Norman Malcolm would join in 1940 to teach social philosophy.

If there was one theme that united most of these philosophers, it was their interest in religion and their belief that religion was compatible with philosophy, even if only in complicated ways. Many but not all philosophers at Princeton were liberal Protestants. Stace, for example, assigned religion to the category of mysticism. Of the Protestants, Scoon and Greene worked closely together. As an Episcopalian minister, Scoon spoke at Princeton’s chapel as early as 1917, frequently leading its services. His Philosophy of Religion course reflected his way of life. As part of this course, he offered lectures on the bases of morality, the conception of value, mysticism, individuality, sin, salvation, and soul.²³ Greene, a Presbyterian, led the first religious discussion with juniors at Princeton, focusing on the foundations of religious thought. He participated in various university-organized talks on the relationships between religions and the place of religion in the liberal arts education.²⁴ One of these conversations was published as an edited volume.²⁵ Greene’s interest in religion and its compatibility with philosophy is also evident in his translation of Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.²⁶

Scoon and Greene played an important part in the founding of the Committee on Religious Instruction, which later developed into the Department of Religion. Scoon served as an assistant clerk in writing the 1934 Report on Religious Education. He and Greene were part of the six-person committee that recommended instituting two new courses at Princeton: the Development of the Religious Thought of the Hebrews and Religious Thought in the Gospels. The Committee on Religious Instruction was formed to oversee these courses, and George F. Thomas was hired as the lead lecturer in this new program, giving his inaugural lecture, “Religion in an Age of Secularism,” in the fall of 1940.²⁷

Given Scoon’s and Greene’s involvement in religion and religious education at Princeton, it...