Extending Political Liberalism

A Selection from Rawls's Political Liberalism, edited by Thom Brooks and Martha C. Nussbaum

Martha C. Nussbaum

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231541053
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Public Law

Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. In her introduction to the volume, Martha Nussbaum discusses the main themes of Political Liberalism and puts them into the context of contemporary philosophical debates.

Extending Political Liberalism

It is extremely hard to introduce a book that is by now a classic and that is rightly regarded as one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century. An introduction ought to acquaint readers with the main ideas of the work, but Rawls does this with such clarity in his own introduction to the 1996 paperback edition, and in the text itself, that this part of the writer’s task can be executed relatively briefly. Since, moreover, the book is by now the subject of a wide and deep philosophical literature, much of it excellent in quality, it would be foolhardy to attempt to say something about each of the major issues of the work or to sort through debates that can easily be located elsewhere. I have therefore decided to focus on a small number of issues where there is at least some chance that a fresh approach may yield some new understanding of the text: the relationship of Political Liberalism to the history of philosophical debate about pluralism and toleration, Rawls’s distinction between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” comprehensive doctrines, the psychological underpinnings of political liberalism, and the possibility that political liberalism might be extended beyond the small group of modern Western societies that Rawls’s historical remarks suggest as its primary focus. At the same time, I do include a sketch of the main ideas of the work in order to give my own view of how they are related, and I offer an account of the relationship between Political Liberalism and A Theory of Justice, an issue that has occasioned, I believe, much misunderstanding. I also include a discussion of the much-debated issue of civility and public reason, which could hardly be avoided, given its prominence in the book’s reception.

This introduction should therefore be read not as a comprehensive account of the work but as one person’s attempt to grapple, incompletely and imperfectly, with a book that is as great as any philosophy has seen on this topic of great human urgency.

I. Religion and Liberal Democracy

In all modern democracies we find “a diversity of opposing and irreconcilable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines” (PL 3–4). Even though at some point in history people may have believed that these differences would disappear over time, as the true religion gradually won out over its rivals, that has not happened. Differences about religion and the ultimate meaning of life are robust, and it is implausible to think that they are the result of errors of the sort that could be dispelled by rational argument.¹ Instead, wherever we find the freedoms of speech and of religious belief and exercise, we also find religious (and secular) diversity. It would seem, then, that the pluralism we see is something reasonable—in other words, that reasonable people, using their faculties as well as they can under conditions of freedom, come out in different places with regard to these matters.²

At one time it might have been thought that the solution to this problem was the one proposed in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648: cuius regio, eius religio. Let the majority religion in each region set up shop and declare itself the religion of that state. By now, however, there is widespread agreement that this is a bad solution to the problem of pluralism, for it involves the repression or subordination of minorities in each region. Every modern society contains internally the same groups that also cause disagreements across national boundary lines: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, and others, along with agnostics and atheists of various types (humanists, Utilitarians, secular Kantians, and so forth). It seems best to try to establish a society that respects the reasonable plurality of religious and secular conceptions of life, paying more than lip service to the value of respect for people and their different ways of organizing their lives.

All modern democracies attempt to solve the problem of respect for difference, but tensions in every such nation show us how difficult the problem is to solve.³ In the United States, despite a long constitutional tradition of both religious liberty and equal respect for diverse views, Christian language and sentiments are often casually introduced in public policy statements in ways that suggest the unequal citizenship of non-Christians. In France, the state has made intolerance official state policy by banning the wearing of conspicuous religious articles of dress in public schools. Although this law purports to be evenhanded, it in fact discriminates against Muslims and Jews since Christians do not regard the wearing of large crosses as a religious obligation whereas the Muslim headscarf and (for some Jews) the yarmulke are regarded as obligatory. In India, the particular subject of much of my current writing, a democracy that once prided itself on respect for pluralism and indeed on a real love of religious and ethnic diversity has now increasingly become a Hindu state. Textbooks used by young children express a Hindu-fundamentalist conception of the nation and its history. The Muslim minority’s right to the equal protection of the laws is no longer secure. The highest levels of state and even national government condone gross violations of Muslims’ civil rights.

Rawls’s Political Liberalism asks an urgent question: Can liberal constitutional democracy, built on values of mutual respect and reciprocity, be stable—not just as a grudging modus vivendi but out of robust ethical commitment—in a world of religious and secular pluralism? Or, to use his words, “[H]ow is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” (PL 4). This question about stability, only glancingly addressed in A Theory of Justice, in which Rawls proposes basic political principles for a just society, becomes the central question of Political Liberalism.

Rawls puts the question in this way—“how is it possible”—not because he is convinced that such a thing is possible. Indeed, the introduction he added to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism in 1996 expresses real anguish on that score. The events of the twentieth century raise, he says, real doubts about the fate of justice in this world. But if the question cannot be answered in the affirmative, and people are largely amoral and self-centered, then “one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth” (lxii). We must therefore, he says, begin “with the assumption that a reasonably just political society is possible” (lxii) and with the related assumption that human beings have enough of a moral nature that they can be moved by considerations of fairness and respect. In that way, although Rawls certainly believes that history offers at least some basis for hope, the entirety of Political Liberalism is built on what Kant called a set of “practical postulates,” hopeful views for which reason can offer no sufficient justification and that are necessary to sustain our practical involvement with humanity.⁴

In our world, as the problems described by Rawls become ever more troubling and violent, we would do well to agree with Rawls in adopting those postulates rather than their contradictories, if we want to continue engaging with the world in a productive way. But if we do follow Rawls here, then it is useful to see an abstract model of what a society that might possibly fulfill his hope would look like. Abstract models of an ideal can be extremely valuable as targets on which to fix our attention as we try to make the world that way rather than its current way or some worse way. Rawls knows that his book will strike many readers as “abstract and unworldly” (lxii). But he then says: “I do not apologize for that” (lxii). He was right not to apologize since he has produced a work that, more than any other modern work of political philosophy, carries forward one’s hope for humanity in an era of religious and ideological turmoil.

II. The Main Ideas

At the heart of Rawls’s argument are two closely related ideas: the idea of respect (or equal respect) and the idea of “fair terms of cooperation.” As Charles Larmore has observed in an important essay, these ideas, though nowhere subjected to sustained analysis in their own right, “shape [his] thought at the deepest level.” Any attempt to make sense of his conception must “trace their ramifications” and grasp “the overall conception they define.”⁵ One might add to these two the closely related notion of human dignity, which Rawls expresses in A Theory of Justice when he says that “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override” (3). (Rawls does not use the term “dignity,” but I believe that it captures well the notion of the inviolability of the person that shapes his arguments throughout. And it is a concept familiar from the constitutional traditions of most modern liberal democracies.)⁶ For Rawls as for Kant, dignity is the correlate of respect: the reason respect is so central is that people are ends, have a dignity, have something about them that makes it wrong to violate them for the sake of overall well-being or to use them as mere means. Respect is an attitude that recognizes that dignity and the fact that it is equal.

Although it is easy to associate these ideas with Kant’s moral philosophy, they are ideas that are widely and deeply shared across ethical and religious traditions. (They lie, for example, at the heart of the modern human rights movement.) Some citizens will think of the idea of the soul to elaborate these ideas further; some will deny that souls exist but will agree with the religious believer that a human being has a dignity that deserves respect. Even Utilitarians, one might conjecture, are motivated at a deep level by such ideas (for example, in Bentham’s maxim “each to count for one, and none for more than one”)—despite the fact that some features of Utilitarianism (especially its willingness to tolerate extremely miserable conditions for a small number of people in the pursuit of maximal overall social welfare) suggest that it does not do full justice to that core idea.⁷

I have said that the central problem of Political Liberalism, as contrasted with A Theory of Justice, is that of stability. How, then, does the notion of respect bear on the question of stability? Rawls believes that a society will not remain stable over time—or at least not “for the right reasons” (i.e., because of full and free endorsement rather than the oppressive use of force)—if it treats individuals or groups with deficient respect. Showing people that the terms of cooperation we propose are fair to all of them is necessary for stability-for-the-right-reasons, and, if the terms of cooperation are elaborated successfully, that may turn out to be sufficient for stability as well. Stability is, then, a moral notion: it involves not merely the persistence of a set of political arrangements but the persistence of a respect embodied both in institutions and in the attitudes of citizens who support them.

Because we respect one another, we want a society in which we can live together on terms of cooperation that are fair to all and that can be publicly seen to be fair to all. Both in Political Liberalism and in A Theory of Justice, the Original Position, and the political principles that are arrived at using that device of representation, model this idea of fairness. The fact that choices of principles are made in ignorance of one’s particular attributes and place in society is a way of modeling the idea that fairness requires impartiality, a ban on special pleading. Terms of cooperation are fair only if they are suitably impartial, treating all as equals.

Impartiality is not sufficient for respect: a political conception might treat citizens as equals while still treating them badly. That is why the notion of dignity or inviolability is needed to complement the ideas of fairness and respect. The dignity of persons means that they are entitled to certain things from the world, and it is unfair that they should be deprived of those things. Ultimately, Rawls argues in A Theory of Justice, a just society will give people an extensive menu of liberties, on terms of equality, and will arrange economic matters so that inequalities are allowed only when they raise the level of the least well off.

Those two principles of justice are taken over unchanged from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism, but Rawls now casts them in a new light. Focusing on the issue of religious and secular pluralism, he makes it clear that all the ideas of the conception, including the ideas of respect and fairness, are being developed in a political context, as parts of a “freestanding” political conception that has, to be sure, a profound ethical content but that does not depend for either its content or its justification on metaphysical, epistemological, or religious doctrines that cannot be presumed to be shared among citizens.⁸ For in modern societies, under conditions of freedom, people clearly endorse incompatible “comprehensive doctrines,” religious and secular, as to the ultimate meaning and purpose of human life. The fact that in conditions of freedom reasonable people continue to disagree means that the pluralism of doctrines that we observe is not just the result of error or willfulness. For practical purposes we can regard this as a fact about the limits of reason, or what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment” (PL 54–58). And this fact entails that the pluralism of comprehensive doctrines is itself reasonable. (This important idea in Rawls’s work was developed earlier by Charles Larmore in Patterns of Moral Complexity and The Morals of Modernity.⁹ Rawls is explicit in attributing the idea to Larmore, although many readers of Rawls have not acknowledged Larmore’s contribution.) Not all of people’s comprehensive doctrines are reasonable in the ethical sense, incorporating a commitment to fairness and reciprocity; some may refuse respect to others, some may deny one or more basic liberties (PL 60n14), some may even be “mad.” But of many of them, at least, we can say that they are reasonable doctrines, doctrines that reasonable (respectful) citizens could and do hold.

But if the plurality of religious and other doctrines is reasonable, then respect and fairness require that we not build a political conception on any one of them. Politics has to prescind from divisive metaphysical or religious claims, if respect is to be preserved. And that shows us why the political doctrine must be both partial, not covering all of human life, and freestanding, justifying itself not through divisive metaphysical or religious ideas but through ideas implicit in the public political culture. In this way, the core value of respect leads directly to the hallmark of Political Liberalism, as distinct from A Theory of Justice: the claim that the political doctrine is “political, not metaphysical.” Respect for persons requires respecting the many diverse ways they choose to organize their lives and the many beliefs they hold. But that means that the political conception must limit itself to wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Extending Political Liberalism
• Notes