Rawls

A Beginner's Guide

Paul Graham

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780748122
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

'The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance'
– John Rawls, A Theory of Justice What is justice? How can we know it? How can we make our society more just? The most significant political philosopher since John Stuart Mill, John Rawls (1921 – 2002) grappled with such dilemmas. His work has been the source not only of academic argument, but also of political debate and legislative reform, arguing that we have a moral duty to organise society so as to rectify undeserved inequality.In the first introduction to Rawls's work which encompasses his entire career, Dr Paul Graham combines lucid exposition with thought-provoking criticism. Locating Rawls in the rich history of political thought, Graham explores a theory that remains fiercely relevant as the developed world sees unprecedented levels of inequality. For anyone concerned with how society works, this is a vital introduction to one of the great modern philosophers and to a subject that is crucial to how we live.

1

Life and work

When John Rawls died aged 81 in November 2002, the obituaries in the major newspapers were surprisingly extensive. Surprising because Rawls was not a public intellectual. All who knew him stressed his shyness, modesty and determined avoidance of publicity. Rare were his interventions in current events. He gave only one personal interview in the course of his career, and that was to a small student magazine. He was reluctant to accept awards. But although the audience for his work has largely been confined to the academic world, the impact therein was of such a scale that by the time of his death glimmers of awareness of his significance had broken through to the wider world. His most important work – A Theory of Justice (1971) – has sold over 250,000 copies, and been translated into twenty languages. This book on Rawls is one more addition to a huge secondary literature, amounting to an estimated 5,000 works. Who then was John Rawls?

Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice during an unusually unstable period in American history – at the height of the Vietnam War, and towards the end of the struggle for civil rights in the Deep South. Yet there is no direct reflection on these events in the book, and except for a brief footnote reference to Martin Luther King this holds even for his discussion of civil disobedience (Rawls 1972: 364n). It is true that as a professor at Harvard University he identified himself with the anti-war movement, but this activity, while not inconsistent with his writings, appears quite separate from them. Only towards the end of his life did he comment on a concrete political event, condemning, on the fiftieth anniversary, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima (Rawls 1999b: 565–72). The point is that biography is not essential to understanding Rawls’s work. This contrasts with the cases where biography is helpful and illuminating (Wittgenstein), or essential (Nietzsche). However, readers coming to Rawls for the first time may find a personal sketch of the man useful in humanizing what could appear a dry argument, although the word ‘dry’ is a mischaracterization of work that addresses fundamentally important political questions in an intellectually imaginative way, and that has generated a series of major philosophical debates. In writing this sketch I have relied upon accounts of those who knew and were influenced by him, such as Thomas Nagel and Martha Nussbaum, as well as an obituary by Ben Rogers, who in 1999 had interviewed Rawls’s friends and colleagues. In addition, since the publication of the first edition of this book there has appeared in print Rawls’s 1942 undergraduate senior thesis – ‘A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith’ – together with a brief piece, entitled ‘On my Religion’, which was written in 1997 and intended largely for family and friends rather than wider circulation. I will say a few things about the former in Chapter 8, but the latter essay is of direct biographical interest.

Rawls was born the second of five brothers in Baltimore (Maryland). His father had established himself as a highly successful tax lawyer and constitutional expert, while his mother was active in Democratic Party politics and campaigned for voting rights for women. While not part of the Deep South, Maryland was a part of the former Confederacy, and according to at least one obituary Rawls’s father, William Lee Rawls, shared the racial bigotry of his time and place. For John Rawls, the slavery of the South and the failure after the Civil War to grant effective rights to black Americans became the paradigm of injustice. Thomas Nagel describes Rawls’s background as that of an upper-class Southerner, and other commentators have suggested that as well as discomfort at the slavery heritage of his home state, he had a powerful sense of the contingency of life – the sense that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. Natural assets, such as good heath and intelligence, and socially acquired assets, such as a privileged upbringing, combine to give some people very significant advantages in life. Rawls felt that how we organize society should ameliorate rather than exacerbate natural disadvantage. Although in later revisions of his work he pulled away from this claim, in the first edition of A Theory of Justice he describes natural assets as a social resource to be used for the advantage of the least well-off, and any differences in income and other resources enjoyed by the wealthy are not deserved, for nobody creates his or her natural assets – not even the propensity to work hard (Rawls 1972: 311–12).

After Kent School, a private establishment in Connecticut, Rawls entered Princeton University. While he had only a conventional religious upbringing, during his last two years at Princeton (1941–42) he became deeply religious and considered entering a seminary to train as a minister of religion, but decided to wait: ‘I could not convince myself that my motives were sincere, and anyway I felt I should serve in the armed services as so many of my friends and classmates were doing’ (Rawls 2009: 261). After completing his degree one semester early he joined the US Army as an infantryman, and was posted to New Guinea and the Philippines. He was later to say that the Second World War overshadowed everything he had done as a student, and stimulated his interest in politics (Rogers 2002). His religious convictions changed in the last year of the war and he ceased to be orthodox (to use his own expression). Although he suggests it is difficult to explain why this change took place he does mention three incidents. In December 1944, after his Company had secured the ridge overlooking the town of Limon on the island of Leyte, the Lutheran Pastor gave a sermon in which he said that ‘God aimed our bullets at the Japanese while [He] protected us from theirs’ (Rawls 2009: 262). The statement angered Rawls, who challenged the chaplain for propagating a clear falsehood about divine providence. A second incident was the death of a comrade who was killed on lookout. The First Sergeant had sought a volunteer to give blood for a wounded soldier and another to go on reconnaissance. Rawls had the right blood type. As he says: ‘I was quite disconsolate and couldn’t get the incident out of my mind … I don’t know why this incident so affected me, other than my fondness for Deacon, as death was a common occurrence’ (Rawls, 2009: 262). The third incident was seeing the films of Allied forces liberating the concentration camps in Germany. These incidents – and especially the third – made him question the existence of God: ‘to interpret history as expressing God’s will, God’s will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be?’ (Rawls 2009: 263).

While he abandoned orthodox Christianity, unlike many political philosophers, who, to use Max Weber’s phrase are ‘religiously unmusical’, Rawls nonetheless retained a feel for religious belief and experience. One of the motivations for a shift in his work between the 1970s and the 1990s was the attempt to correct what he regarded as a defect in A Theory of Justice, namely that it relied on a conception of human agency and rationality which a reasonable Christian or Muslim might reject. The way we defend principles of justice must not rely on ‘sectarian’ humanist premises – it should be possible for reasonable Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists and those of many other beliefs to embrace the just society. His discussion of, for example, abortion, while concluding there should be a right to it, is sensitive both to religious and secular arguments for its prohibition, recognizing that the dispute over the status of the unborn child may never be resolved (Rawls 1999a: 169–71). And he concludes his reflections in ‘On my Religion’ with a defence of human reason that both theists and non-theists can embrace: ‘God’s being, however great the divine powers, does not determine the essential canons of reason … (and) the content of the judgments of practical reason depends on social facts about how humans are related in society and to one another … and this is so even if these facts are themselves the outcome of God’s creation’ (Rawls, 2009: 268).

After the war Rawls undertook a doctorate in philosophy, with a thesis on ethical decision-making. Some philosophers switch from one paradigm to another, and sometimes from one set of philosophical interests to another. Rawls is remarkably consistent in his interests, and changes in his arguments were gradual, rather than being seismic shifts. Rawls’s preferred outlet for the initial publication of his ideas was the journal article, and in 1999 all his articles were brought together in a single volume, Collected Papers. There are twenty-six articles and an interview. This is not a huge output for a career that spanned fifty years, but the articles he did publish appeared in the most prestigious journals and often provoked an immediate debate, even before they reappeared in revised form in his books. In the twenty-year period before the publication of A Theory of Justice, particularly notable articles include his second one, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (1955), which has been very influential in debates about punishment, ‘Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play’ (1964) and ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience’ (1969), which, as the titles suggest, are concerned with the closely related issues of political obligation and civil disobedience. During this time Rawls studied or worked at Oxford (1952–3), Cornell, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before finally settling at Harvard again. He spent the rest of his career in the Philosophy Department there.

The 1950s and 1960s are often portrayed as the dog days of moral and political philosophy. Under the influence of the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein it was thought that moral concepts and arguments derived their validity from the contexts in which they are used: there were language games in which people moved words around as if they were pieces on a board, and the words only had meaning by reference to the game. Furthermore, the same words could be used in different ways, such that the meaning of a word depended on context and not upon any essence. For example, the word ‘game’ itself might carry connotations of winning or losing, of rules, of competition, but none of these need be present every time the word is used. There are, at best, ‘family resemblances’ or overlap between different employments of the word. Applying this to moral language, terms such as good and bad, right and wrong, justice and fairness have meaning only in particular contexts, with the consequence that ‘theories’ are simply moves in a game. A theory only has influence on people if it causes them to act in some way. It is emotive rather than cognitive. A consequence was that the dominant meta-ethical theories of this period – a meta-ethical theory being one that attempts to explain the meaning of moral language – were ordinary language philosophy and emotivism. It would not be crude to say that ordinary language philosophy amounted to a cataloguing exercise: everyday usage of words like good and bad were listed and compared. Emotivists claimed moral communication was the expression of emotional states. The dominant ethical theories – that is, theories about what we should actually do – were utilitarianism in its various forms and intuitionism which, unlike eighteenth century versions, did not depend on metaphysical claims about a moral sense, but proposed the idea that we judge right and wrong by making intuitive judgements (eighteenth-century intuitionism was a meta-ethical rather than an ethical theory). Given the scepticism about moral objectivity engendered by the meta-ethical theories of ordinary language philosophy and emotivism, it is not surprising that utilitarianism and intuitionism were the dominant ethical theories. Utilitarianism requires minimal reliance on metaphysical claims about the nature of the human agent and the structure of reason, and intuitionism is a complete abandonment of metaphysical claims.

The development of Rawls’s work up to 1971 has to be seen in the context of these philosophical trends. Only gradually, and tentatively, does he break with them. The idea of reflective equilibrium relies strongly on an appeal to intuition and there is a strong, and explicit, utilitarian basis to Rawls’s 1955 article ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (see Rawls 1999b: 33–46). Whereas in 1955 Rawls sets out to defend utilitarianism, in A Theory of Justice he condemns it for failing to take seriously the separateness of persons, and regards both it and intuitionism as prime targets. Inspired in large part by Rawls’s theory of justice, Kantianism, which relies on a complex conception of human agency and practical reason, once again became fashionable, as did the idea of building theories, which while respectful of the capacity of ordinary people to make moral judgements entailed a challenge to everyday moral beliefs. Using his own phrase, Rawls’s work can be characterized as an exercise in ‘realistic utopianism’: he aims to uncover possibilities for social and political change latent in everyday experience. This is not a pure utopianism, disconnected from historical experience, but it is reformative.

Thomas Nagel, whose work bears important affinities to Rawls’s, dedicated his main work on political theory, Equality and Partiality (Nagel 1991), to ‘John Rawls, who changed the subject’. To knowing readers, that dedication carries a double meaning: Rawls changed the discipline of political philosophy, and he did so by changing its topic from a parochial concern with the meaning of moral terms to the framing of a big question: what constitutes a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social co-operation? The answers he provides in A Theory of Justice generated a variety of debates among political philosophers, and while the claim that he brought political philosophy back from the dead may be an exaggeration, he did fundamentally change its central preoccupation. It may be too early to assess the historical significance of the book, but it does have the makings of a great work in moral and political theory, comparable to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Stylistically, it has come in for a great deal of criticism, with commentators arguing that Rawls simply stitched together earlier journal articles. However, while it is fair to say that A Theory of Justice is not an easy read, it does have a relatively clear structure: three parts, nine chapters and 87 sections. The first part outlines the theory, the second part develops the derivation of the principles of justice and the third part focuses on questions of rationality and motivation. And, as Rogers suggests, Rawls was ‘a phrasemaker – as well as an idea-forger – of brilliance’ (Rogers 2002). The glossary of this book is full of phrases that Rawls invented: ‘original position’, ‘veil of ignorance’, ‘difference principle’ and so on. Furthermore, as many commentators have observed, all Rawls’s book have excellent indexes – his skill at constructing indexes may have its origins in work carried out as a research student on the indexes to Walter Kaufmann’s English translations of Nietzsche’s writings (incidentally, Kaufmann also influenced Rawls’s understanding of Nietzsche and ‘perfectionism’).

Rawls had modest expectations for A Theory of Justice and was amazed by the impact it made. Certainly, the work did not emerge from nowhere, for its main arguments had been trailed in journal articles, and mimeographed drafts of the book had been circulating among graduate students, many of whom were holding academic posts in other universities by the early 1970s. Nonetheless, the work was unexpectedly successful. It is interesting to speculate what Rawls might have gone on to write had the book been merely a modest success. He had planned to write a book on moral psychology, but instead was forced to defend his theory of justice. Since, in my view, the most important and enduring questions raised by Rawls’s work concern his conception of human motivation, a book on moral psychology might have been the natural next step in the development of his work. As it was, his energies were somewhat dissipated by having to defend the many claims he makes in his book, and eventually he shifted the basis of his argument away from an (underdeveloped) Kantianism to a form of relativism, which dispensed with the Kantian conception of the human agent.

Rawls’s significance must be understood, at least in part, as a consequence of the reaction to his theory of justice. And to an extent, the development of his work after A Theory of Justice was dictated by critiques of it. In later chapters of this book – especially Chapters 5 and 6 – I try to capture something of the debates generated by Rawls’s theory. The reactions to the theory came in waves, with the first ones being a sympathetic response from the social democratic left, and hostility from the Marxist left and libertarian right. In his book Rawls sets out two principles of justice, the first of which is intended to guarantee each individual a basic set of equal liberties, and the second ensuring that in terms of material resources the worst-off are as well-off as possible. Given the need for incentives to produce, the second principle will almost certainly result in an unequal distribution of income. The second principle caught the attention of social democrats, because it provided a response to the trickle-down argument of the New Right. Appealing to empirical economic evidence, such as the Laffer Curve, New Right thinkers argued that high taxes harmed the poor, for the wealthy stopped working, emigrated or at the very least engaged in tax avoidance measures such as putting capital into off-shore funds. By cutting the top rate of income tax economic activity was stimulated, thus creating more jobs at all levels of pay and increasing the tax yield. This benefited the poor. Social democrats could concede that income differentials might be productive, but they used Rawls’s argument to demonstrate that such differentials were morally justified if and only if they did indeed make the worst-off as well-off as possible.

While social democrats found intellectual support in A Theory of Justice, Marxists saw Rawls as a defender of capitalist inequality. Although he argued his theory was neutral between capitalist and socialist forms of economic organization, maintaining the two principles could be realized under either system, two aspects of his theory point to a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Life and work
• 2. Justice
• 3. The original position
• 4. Principles of justice
• 5. The difference principle in focus
• 6. The original position in focus
• 7. Civil disobedience and punishment
• 8. Political liberalism
• 9. The law of peoples
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index