A Companion to Rawls

Jon Mandle, David A. Reidy, Jon Mandle, David A. Reidy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781119144564, 9781444337105
• eBook ISBN: 9781118328415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Wide ranging and up to date, this is the single most comprehensive treatment of the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls.

• An unprecedented survey that reflects the surge of Rawls scholarship since his death, and the lively debates that have emerged from his work
• Features an outstanding list of contributors, including senior as well as "next generation" Rawls scholars
• Provides careful, textually informed exegesis and well-developed critical commentary across all areas of his work, including non-Rawlsian perspectives
• Includes discussion of new material, covering Rawls's work from the newly published undergraduate thesis to the final writings on public reason and the law of peoples
• Covers Rawls's moral and political philosophy, his distinctive methodological commitments, and his relationships to the history of moral and political philosophy and to jurisprudence and the social sciences
• Includes discussion of his monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, which is often credited as havingrevitalized political philosophy

Part I

Ambitions

1

From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory

Early Postcards from an Intellectual Journey

David A. Reidy

It is easy to kill a subject by demanding too much of it early on; a subject needs to be guided by big intuitive ideas, particularly at the start. … It is a delusion to think that rigorous analysis in a small area unguided by a large idea is of much value. One does not understand even a small thing in this way.

John Rawls, 1964, to students in his moral philosophy course

1. Introduction

Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, though, as he noted in the “Preface,” he had been circulating and teaching from earlier drafts through much of the 1960s. But TJ does not really originate in the 1960s. Its roots run at least to the late 1940s and 1950s, a period covering Rawls's years as a graduate student and then lecturer at Princeton, his year (1952–1953) as a visiting fellow at Oxford during which he first saw clearly the project that would occupy him for some 50 years, and his time as a faculty member at Cornell. Indeed, in some respects, its roots run to the late 1930s and early 1940s, the time of Rawls's undergraduate study at Princeton and his work on his now published undergraduate thesis (BI). While it was not until the mid-1960s that Rawls had in hand all the essential elements of the “painting” he sought to share in TJ and to complete in later works, he was possessed of, and by, the core of the “vision” by the mid to late 1950s.¹ And he was in important ways oriented toward it even earlier than that. In several respects, then, TJ is an early mid-century book.

This is a fact naturally overlooked by readers. A Theory of Justice did not reach a general and wide philosophical audience until the 1970s, a time very different philosophically, politically and culturally from that of its origin. While TJ clearly addresses some concerns central to that time, for example, civil disobedience and conscientious objection, in general it is not profitably read primarily against the concerns, expectations and cultural landscape of the 1970s or even the latter 1960s.

In the early mid-century many thoughtful Americans were anxious about the viability of the sort of inclusive, mass democracy that seemed to be taking root. Further, many American liberals, troubled by the ideologically motivated disasters of World War II and the Soviet system, were both eager to distance themselves from political self-understandings grounded in or animated by big ideas and inclined favorably toward more modest political self-understandings of liberal democracy as either a regulated or civilized struggle among competing interest groups or a mechanism for the rational aggregation of private preferences with an eye toward efficiency (see, e.g., Schumpeter 1942; Downs 1957).

Rawls too was anxious about the viability of the sort of inclusive mass democracy that seemed to be taking root. He worried that the country lacked the resources necessary to sustain the requisite public trust among citizens. And Rawls too was deeply influenced by the ideologically driven disasters of World War II and the Soviet system. But he worried that the modest political self-understandings on offer to Americans were not only insufficient to sustain the requisite public trust among them but also in an enduring way to draw their stable allegiance as free equals. He further worried that if internalized and effectively regulative, the political self-understandings on offer would have a corrosive effect on persons, hindering rather than helping them to realize themselves as persons in community. He sought for a polity of free and equal citizens a political self-understanding animated by a big intuitive idea capable of underwriting genuine public trust among them, reliably drawing their enduring allegiance and contributing to their self-realization as persons in community. His goal was a big intuitive idea with universal reach. A Theory of Justice is a giant first step toward expressing this idea.

There are aspects of this idea that account, I think, for some of its gravitational force, as it were – its capacity to draw persons into its gravitational field – that can be traced back to Rawls's very early work as an undergraduate in philosophical theology. And there are also aspects that can be traced back to his early work as a graduate student in moral philosophy. In this essay, I take up Rawls's journey from philosophical theology through moral philosophy to democratic theory and political philosophy and pause at, to reflect on, a few significant points early in the journey. My aim is to give a sense – I can offer here no more than what amounts to postcards – of some of Rawls's important early concerns and commitments that structure or at least cast significant shadows over his later work in political philosophy, A Theory of Justice and subsequent works.

I do not mean to suggest that Rawls's journey to TJ is marked by or best understood in terms of only the concerns and commitments I discuss. There are others. For example, Wittgenstein was a very important influence on Rawls for many decades – Rawls acknowledges this in several letters. I do not discuss this influence here. Nor do I mean to deny important discontinuities in the development of Rawls's thought over time. His movement in the 1950s away from both theism and from a kind of Millian utilitarianism merit mention here, as does his introduction in the 1980s of the family of ideas associated with political liberalism, though in this latter case I think there is less discontinuity than is often alleged. I mean only to suggest that A Theory of Justice is a more rewarding read if one attends to the aspects of Rawls's big intuitive idea that are set out here and if one keeps in mind their origins in his early-mid-twentieth century thinking.

2. The Philosophical Theology of the Undergraduate Thesis

As is now well-known, Rawls's Princeton undergraduate philosophy thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community,” sits at the intersection of philosophical theology and theological ethics.² It argues against familiar understandings of sin and faith rooted in a conception of God as our highest good and so the proper and ultimate object of our rational desire. It argues in favor of understandings of sin and faith rooted in a conception of God as the complete, self-sufficient and eternal instantiation of personality and community, neither of which can exist without the other, as well as in our capacities for participation in personality and community, dependent for their realization on the unconditional grace of God though they may be. But it is not primarily this theological content to which I wish to draw attention here, though I do want to draw attention to Rawls's conception of personality and community. Mainly it is the methodological and meta-theological context within which Rawls works out his view that I think merits notice.

Rawls's view draws on and synthesizes aspects of two traditions in philosophical theology and theological ethics with wide currency in the early twentieth century. The first is biblical historicism. The second is the neo-orthodoxy sometimes associated with what came to be known as “theology of crisis.” Biblical historicism arises in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in response to the fact that it was increasingly difficult to deny that the Bible was written by many people over an extended period of time in various contexts. Informed by these facts, those inquiring into the “meaning” of the Bible found it increasingly difficult to represent it as the articulation of a single, focal revelation that took place at one time and through one person. Biblical historicism responds to this difficulty by taking the Bible as the record of Christian experience over time and seeking through reasoned analysis of that experience, as lived in historical context, a universal truth underlying and unifying it over time and so expressing the “meaning” of the Bible or the enduring universal truth of Christianity. The Hegelian idea that Christianity expresses finally and completely the universal rational meaning of moral and religious experience is kin to nineteenth-century biblical historicism.

Neo-orthodoxy or “theology of crisis” emerges as a reaction both from within and against biblical historicism in the early twentieth century, and in particular after World War I. Skeptical of biblical historicism's ability reliably to deliver through its methods the enduring universal truth of Christianity and cognizant of the tremendous harm humans are capable of if not guided by that truth, the proponents of neo-orthodoxy put the emphasis back on the authority of the Bible as the record of a unique – one time, one person – revelation, the content of which was not accessible by human reason alone. Interestingly, some associated with neo-orthodoxy proposed an account of the content of this revelation that Rawls ultimately found quite congenial, namely that God is the complete, self-sufficient and enduring realization of personality and community, each of which requires the other; that all personal relations begin with an opening by one person to another, an invitation to community; that Christ is that invitation to communion with God; and that the invitation and our capacity to overcome pride and accept it are both functions of God's grace.

In his undergraduate thesis, Rawls appropriates this neo-orthodox account of the content of the revelation given in the Bible and argues, within a biblical historicist framework, that it best accounts for – as a kind of deep explanation of – not only Christian experience, including his own, but also the experiences of non-Christians. He pays special attention to the experiences of conversion through grace and to the forms of aloneness and despair experienced, and capacities for harm and evil exhibited, by those who have not converted. Conversion here refers to the process, itself a gift of grace, of being saved from the deep tendency in our nature toward prideful refusal of personal relations and community, of being brought to a genuine openness and orientation to both with others, including with God. Here conversion involves no affirmation of doctrinal theological content or dogma but rather a reorientation of one's moral psychology and self-understanding and so one's experience of living with others in the world. Reason and linguistic communication more generally serve as necessary media or instruments of personal relations and community, but they do not initiate or demand either. The call to personal relations and community originates elsewhere.

There are several things to notice here. One is the fact that Rawls seeks the meaning of Christianity, of sin and faith, in the best explanation – not causal explanation, but rational explanation – of Christian experience, indeed of human experience generally. Undoubtedly, he takes the Bible as an authoritative expression or record of Christian (as well as Hebrew and other) experience. But it is the experience, not the biblical text per se, that constitutes the data to be understood. And the experience is to be understood not in the space of causes, as it were, but in the space of a rational, in the sense of intelligible to a common or shared reason, moral psychology. Indeed, though Rawls does not say so explicitly, it is not unreasonable to suppose that he understood the articulation of such a rational explanation as itself a practical contribution to the realization of the universal Christian community. Without it, we cannot fully understand ourselves and so cannot with full awareness or understanding participate in communion with one another and with God.

Another thing to notice here is that notwithstanding the exclamation point that the early stages of World War II placed behind the “crisis” to which the neo-orthodox “theology of crisis” turn to the revealed authority of scripture was a response, Rawls is not drawn in his undergraduate thesis to this aspect of neo-orthodoxy. He makes no appeal to what he will a decade later in his PhD dissertation refer to as “exalted authorities.” The Bible is authoritative, but it is so as a record of a certain pattern of human experience. And it is this pattern of experience that must be rendered intelligible and properly understood in the space of reasons. If there is any appeal to authority here, it is the authority of our own self-recognition and self-understanding. Effectively Rawls asks us in his undergraduate thesis whether, having heard his explanation of the experiences of Christians and others and put it side by side with the story he attributes to Augustine and Aquinas, we do not in fact more fully and completely recognize and understand ourselves in and through his story than its alternative. There is no suggestion that this self-recognition and self-understanding by itself will or can bring about the experience of “conversion” at the center of Christian experience, an experience that is itself, on Rawls's account, a gift of grace. Nevertheless, it is essential to participating with full understanding in community with others and with God.

3. Ethics as Science

After returning from his service in World War II, Rawls began graduate study in philosophy at Princeton. In 1946, as a first year graduate student, he wrote “A Brief Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ethical Theory.” He begins by asking what it is that moral philosophers do. He argues that the way to answer the question is not to survey, but to observe moral philosophers. If we observe them, we find that they are engaged in a science of moral judgment. They seek to explain competent moral judgments in a way that would enable us reliably to predict them. They do not seek the meaning of moral terms, in the sense of identifying synonyms which might be substituted for them in any statement in which they appear without altering its truth value. Nor do they seek to uncover what one intends to assert or has in one's mind when one makes a moral judgment. Nor, further, do they seek to identify the logically basic objects and relations ingredient in the propositions expressed by moral judgments, or to select among rival logical or formal notations we might use in talking about those objects and relations. In short, Rawls concludes, moral philosophers do none of the things that had come to be associated mid-century with the tradition of analytic philosophy associated with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and the early Wittgenstein. Instead, what moral philosophers do is to construct theoretical models to explain and predict familiar, everyday, noncontroversially competent moral judgments. Rawls refers to this work as “explication” and “ethics as science.”

Of course, Rawls notes, this is work one might think more profitably done by psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists (or, today, by socio-biologists or neurologists). But moral philosophers do not approach moral judgments as mere events, mental or otherwise, to be explained and predicted within the natural causal order. Rather, they approach them as, well, moral judgments – as the publicly visible manifestation of the exercise or activity of practical reason by and among persons. Accordingly, Rawls maintains, the kinds of models of interest to the moral philosopher are something like “reasoning machines” – systems of definitions and axioms such that when fed determinate input regarding the sorts of familiar moral choices with respect to which we can noncontroversially distinguish competent from incompetent judgments, they yield theorems, or moral principles, that provide sufficient reasons for, and thereby render intelligible to us, all and only the competent judgments. These “reasoning machines” are not meant to represent or to be incorporated necessarily into any actual psychological process, what actually goes on in the mind of a person making a moral judgment. Rawls notes that very often we make competent moral judgments without, or without any awareness of, any deliberative thought process at all. We simply hear or express the “voice of conscience.” This the moral philosopher regards as, in itself, no defect in need of correction. Instead, the moral philosopher aims to represent the phenomenon of competent moral judgment as a public or visible manifestation of the activity or exercise of practical reason. The moral philosopher offers us a way of understanding ourselves, of making ourselves intelligible to one another, as persons, as rational social beings with a capacity for moral judgment. He will later in his dissertation, but does not yet in this 1946 paper, take up the contribution such a self-understanding or representation makes, when not only shared but internalized by a group of persons, to the realization of personal relations in community, relations best characterized in terms of mutual justification.

Rawls does not claim that our ability to make or to identify familiar, everyday, noncontroversially competent moral judgments depends on our successfully explicating those judgments through appeal to a “reasoning machine” worked up within ethics as science. He gestures, already in 1946, to the linguistic analogy, noting that our ability to utter and identify grammatically sound sentences seems not to depend at all on our ability to represent that ability in terms of a system of grammar worked up within linguistics as science. What is at stake in ethics as science is not our ability to make or even to identify familiar, everyday, noncontroversially competent moral judgments, but rather the nature, content and implications of our self-representation and self-understanding as beings exercising this ability.

To the extent that Rawls locates ethics as science in relation to the analytic tradition associated with Russell, Moore and the early Wittgenstein, he does so by reference to Frege's work in deductive logic, which Rawls regarded as a scientific explication, within the space of reasons rather than causes, of familiar, everyday, noncontroversially competent judgments regarding valid inference. Frege successfully represented our ability to make and identify valid inferences in terms of a “reasoning machine” capable of explaining and reliably predicting our judgments regarding valid inference. In so doing, he put us in a pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Ambitions
• Part II: Method
• Part III: A Theory of Justice
• Part IV: A Political Conception
• Part V: Extending Political Liberalism: International Relations
• Part VI: Conversations with Other Perspectives
• Index