John Rawls
A Theory of Justice
By
David Gordon
The American Conservative, July 28, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
A Theory of Justice
By John Rawls
Harvard University Press, 560 pages (1971)
John Rawls is the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. Rawls provided a comprehensive philosophical system that justified the main
preoccupations of the center-left and put
classical liberals and conservatives at a disadvantage.
Rawls was born into a well-connected family in Baltimore. He attended Princeton
University, fought in the Pacific during World War II, and thereafter led the
life of a quiet academic. For most of his career he taught at Harvard.
The dominant approach in pre-Rawls political philosophy was utilitarianism,
which says we should try to achieve the most satisfaction possible for everyone.
Rawls pointed out the problem that some people’s interests can be sacrificed if
doing so will maximize total satisfaction.
Rawls asks what we can do when faced with the fact that people do not agree on a
common conception of the good. He answers that even if people do not agree on
the good, they can accept a fair procedure for settling what the principles of
justice should be.
Rawls invokes a veil of ignorance. Suppose five children have to divide a cake
among themselves. One child cuts the cake, but he does not know who will get the
shares. He is likely to divide the cake into equal shares. By denying the child
information that would bias the result, a fair outcome can be achieved.
Rawls asks that we imagine an original position in which people do not know
their own abilities, tastes, and conceptions of the good. Under this limit,
individuals motivated by self-interest endeavor to arrive at principles of
justice.
Rawls thinks that everyone will want certain primary goods, including rights and
liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, and self-respect.
Without these primary goods, no one can accomplish his goals. Hence, individuals
in the original position will agree that everyone should get at least a minimum
amount of these primary goods.
Rawls thinks that people will agree to two principles of justice. The first
calls for the greatest liberty for each person, consistent with equal liberty
for all. Rawls thinks they will give this principle priority over the principle
of difference, which in part deals with distribution of economic goods.
The most controversial part of the theory is the difference principle. Rawls
contends that people in the original position would start by wanting to
distribute wealth and income equally, but this is soon modified. People realize
that we respond to incentives.
Rawls proposes that all inequalities must be to the advantage of the least well
off group. His theory does not rule out the competitive pursuit of excellence.
But he believes individuals cannot justifiably complain if they do not benefit
fully from the fruits of their superior achievement. He argues that people do
not deserve to reap the rewards of their talents.
Rawls never abandoned his theory of justice, but in his 1993 work Political
Liberalism, he began emphasizing that in modern constitutional democracies like
the United States, disagreements over fundamental values and issues such as
abortion can threaten the stability of society. But Rawls has simply defined a notion of social
stability to suit his theory. He never shows that something bad will happen if a
society is not stable in his sense.
By Adam Kirsch
City Journal, September 11, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
By Michael Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages
The Idea of Justice
By Amartya Sen
Harvard University Press, 496 pages
John Rawls argues that the only way for us to design a truly just society is to
imagine ourselves behind a "veil of ignorance." This veil prevents us from
knowing what our actual place in society will be. People negotiating in this
"original position" will agree, first, that the liberty of every person will be
inviolable, and second, that economic disparities will only be allowed if they
serve the advantage of the worst-off in society.
Rawls recognizes no absolute right to property or to the fruits of one's own
labor. He places the needs of the community before the right of the individual
and imagines that even personal abilities are the gift of the community. On the
other hand, Rawls recognizes that inequality of wealth and status might be the
necessary price of overall prosperity and even of liberty. What he offers
resembles welfare capitalism or social democracy.
Michael Sandel aims at readers who enjoy debating moral conundrums and current
political issues but who are not familiar with the traditional vocabulary of
political philosophy. His favorite technique is to present the reader with a
real-life dilemma, then show how our intuitive responses to it have been
anticipated, and challenged, by thinkers like Mill, Kant, and Aristotle.
Sandel shows how real philosophy's thought experiments can be. Take the runaway
trolley: should you allow it to kill five workers on the track, or divert it
onto another track where it would kill only one person? Sandel turns to a real
incident that took place in 2005. A Navy SEAL operating behind enemy lines in
Afghanistan came across some unarmed goatherds: should he kill them or let them
go, and take the risk that they would warn the Taliban? The SEAL let the goatherds go. They alerted the Taliban, his unit was ambushed,
and 19 American soldiers were killed.
Sandel uses such stories to introduce the reader to
three major schools of thought about justice: the utilitarianism of Bentham and
Mill; the deontological, rights-based theories of Kant and Rawls; and finally
the teleological ethics of Aristotle. Sandel demonstrates the inadequacies of
the first two schools so that we are led to prefer the third.
Sandel gives his least serious consideration to utilitarianism. He rejects any
theory of justice that leaves no place for inalienable rights. Nor does he
engage fully with the categorical imperative. Instead, he focuses on the absurd
conclusions to which it seems to lead.
Sandel criticizes the idea of the veil of ignorance by arguing
that we are ineluctably entangled with our communities, our pasts, and our sense
of the possible future. If we are ashamed of what our country does, or proud of
it, we are tacitly admitting that we are "claimed by moral ties that we have not
chosen and implicated in the narratives that shape our identity as moral
agents."
Sandel believes the just society can be better achieved through a more
emotional, patriotic, and even religious appeal, rather than through Rawls's
abstract liberalism.
Amartya Sen thinks "that some of the main planks of the Rawlsian theory of
justice are seriously defective." One of these rotten planks is the idea that
people can and should design any society in isolation. Sen argues that we should
try to imagine how our ideas of justice might appear to people who don't share
our background, traditions, or language.
Sen argues that Rawls is mistaken to search for justice in terms of a single set
of ideal institutions. Sen suggests that this violates "the plurality of reasons
for justice." There are times when utilitarianism counsels one course of action,
deontology another, teleology a third, so we should
focus on deciding what is more and less just in any given situation.
Sen recognizes the tension between liberalism and cosmopolitanism. He knows
better than Rawls that not all of the world's peoples would reason the same way
in the original position, which amputates the diversity of
the real world. He sees that the obstacles to the just society are far more
considerable than Rawls allows.
Both Sen's pluralist incrementalism and Sandel's communitarianism are intended
to offer more robust means to Rawls's liberal ends.
AR Rawls's theory of justice was the latest fashion when I was a philosophy student in Oxford — Judy and I wrote essays on it.
