© Roger M Tagg 2014
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This is a very detailed critique of John Rawls' 'A Theory of Justice', and - in the extra chapter added in the second edition - 'Political Liberalism'.
Despite many criticisms from other writers - many accusing him of not highlighting their own pet concerns - there doesn't seem to be anyone else who has been so highly regarded on this topic. Sandel's critique, although laborious to read, seems to me at least a fair one, and he doesn't grind too many axes of his own.
I've limited my highlights to the early parts where Rawls' chief concepts are introduced, and to the last chapter which looks at Rawls' 'improvements' in his later book.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Pref- | x | The issue seems to be "whether rights can be identified and justified in a way that does not presuppose any particular conception of the good life". |
| ace | 'Communitarianism' should be distinguished from 'majoritarianism'. | |
| xi | Sandel differentiates 'teleological' (i.e. aiming towards perfection) versus 'communitarian' views of the relation of the 'right' to the 'good'. | |
| xii | For Rawls, "Religious beliefs are worthy of respect, not in virtue of their content, but instead in virtue of being 'the product of free and voluntary choice'." But, Sandel asks, Maybe this "misdescribes the nature of religious conviction ... some may view their religious beliefs as matters of choice, others not". | |
| "What makes a religious belief worthy of respect is not its mode of acquisition - be it choice, revelation, persuasion or habituation - but its place in a good life, or the qualities of character it promotes, or (from a political point of view) its tendency to cultivate the habits and dispositions that make good citizens." [RT: I agree, but this does mean drifting back into the 'good', as opposed to the 'right' which Rawls prefers as the source of justice.] | ||
| xiii | "Should the state accord special respect to conscientiously encumbered selves?" | |
| xiv | "The moral justification for a right to religious liberty is unavoidably judgmental; the case for the right cannot wholly be detached from a substantive judgment about the moral worth of the practice it protects." | |
| xv | Regarding free speech, what's different between a Martin Luther King (MLK) civil rights march and a Neo-Nazi one, as regards allowing or banning them? Both threaten societies of "thickly constituted selves". Libertarians might allow both, communitarians neither. The answer must depend on the morality of the 'cause'. [RT: which, again, includes consideration of the 'good'.] | |
| xvi | The judge allowed MLK's march because it was "commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against". | |
| Intro | 3 | "Deontology opposes consequentialism, and also teleology (the latter in the sense of 'final human purposes'). |
| 8 | Kant's Deontology relied on the concept of the 'transcendental subject', which he claimed exists apart from appearances; we have to 'presume' it exists - it's noumenal. | |
| 9 | In this sense each of us can say we are free, that we have free choice, but without thinking of ourselves as an 'object'. | |
| 11 | The "sociological objection" to this as a basis for justice is that "liberalism is wrong because neutrality is impossible". | |
| 13 | Rawls espouses "deontology with a Humean face" - i.e., not dependent on Kant's transcendent self - and instead, "recast within the canons of a reasonable empiricism". This leads to Rawls' 'original position' (see later). | |
| 14 | Sandel's view is "that deontological liberalism cannot be rescued from the difficulties associated with the Kantian subject" - despite Rawls' best efforts. | |
| Rawls' 'reconstruction' "carries us beyond deontology to a conception of community that marks the limits of justice and locates the incompleteness of the liberal ideal". | ||
| 1 - | 18 | [RT: Sandel talks about 'liberty', but the questions is often 'liberty to do what?'] |
| "Justice as fairness stands not only against utilitarianism, but against all teleological theories as such." | ||
| 19 | Rawls: "The self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it". | |
| 'I' am "an active, willing agent, distinguishable from my surroundings, and capable of choice". | ||
| 20 | Regarding the "need to distinguish the subject from his situation, there should be some "detachment", i.e. I "have" these desires (etc), rather than I "am" them. We humans might change our situation or our desires, but not our 'I'. | |
| 21 | Rawls: "We need a conception (of self) that enables us to envision our objective from afar". But "not so far that our vision dissolves into abstraction" [RT: which Kant's 'self' might be seen to do]. | |
| 22 | "Man is by nature a being who chooses his ends rather than" (as the ancients conceived) "discovers his ends". [RT: not in line with Christian theology.] | |
| "The self owes its constitution to the concept of 'right'." | ||
| "We can only express our true nature when we act out of a sense of justice." [RT: what does this imply about those who don't?] | ||
| "The sense of justice cannot be regarded as merely one desire among others" - it must be absolutely primary. | ||
| 23 | Rawls wants to avoid Kant's "recourse to the transcendent or otherwise disembodied subject". | |
| 24-8 | Rawls' "Original Position" - see 3-coloured table below. For deciding what is 'justice', we should ignore all the 'good' in the bottom (grey) section, but know the few things in the top (white) section. Apart from this "thin theory", justice is based on priority of the 'right' over the 'good'. | |
| "Thin theory of the good" – "primary social goods" – rights, liberties etc - "… which, it is supposed a rational man wants whatever else he wants" | ||
| The 'right' – Fulfilling "the principles of cooperation that citizens would acknowledge when each is fairly represented as a moral person, as an end in himself" This arises from "our capacity to choose" our ends, NOT from our ends themselves. This is our 'autonomy'. | ||
| The rest of the "full theory of the good", covered by the "veil of ignorance"
[RT: I guess Rawls means that these are based on our limited and local
world-views.] • particular values or ends • our place in society, race, sex, class, wealth, intelligence, strength etc • our personal conception of the ‘good’, values, aims, purposes in life | ||
| 2 - | 66 | This chapter presents the 'difference principle'. This "permits only those inequalities that work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society". |
| 72 | This is in contrast to 'meritocracy'. | |
| 77 | Rawls is also in opposition to Nozick, who prefers a basis of 'desert' [RT: presumably, what is 'deserved'] and 'entitlement'. Rawls wants "to regard the distribution of natural assets as a collective asset" - and he includes intelligence in this. | |
| 3 - | I haven't done highlights for this chapter - maybe later. | |
| 4 - | I haven't done highlights for this chapter - maybe later. | |
| 5 - | I haven't done highlights for this conclusion - maybe later. | |
| 6 - | This is the chapter in which Rawls addresses Rawls' 'Political Liberalism' [RT: somewhat of a 'turn' in Rawls' views from his 'original position']. | |
| 184 |
'A Thoery of Justice' (ATOJ) "provoked not one debate but three": 1) utility-based justice v rights-based (Rawls' preference); the question 'what sort of rights override general welfare?', and the split between libertarian and egalitarian liberals; 3) the difficulty of achieving neutrality between "competing conceptions of the good life". | |
| 186 | Challengers on issue 1 are Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer - but Sandel thinks they aren't really 'communitarian'. But they do hold "that justice is relative to the good, not independent of it", whether philosophically or politically. | |
| Rawls general idea is "the priority of the right over the good". [RT: This assumes a moral agent who puts aside his own utility and thinks about what good laws should be - as in the 'original position'.] | ||
| 186-7 | But can we really be that independent? "Can we sometimes be obligated to fulfill certain ends we have not chosen - ends given by nature or God, for example, or by our identity as a member of a family or people, culture or tradition?" | |
| 187 |
In ATOJ, Rawls thought that we can, unlike Aristotle and others. Rawls: "it is not our aims that primarily reveal our nature, but rather the principles that we would acknowledge to govern the background conditions under which these aims are to be formed and the manner in which they are to be pursued". [RT: this all sounds very optimistic to me.] | |
| 189 | In Political Liberalism (PL), Rawls ditches the Kantian conception. | |
| "Central to Rawls' revised view is the distinction between political liberalism and liberalism as part of a comprehensive moral doctrine." | ||
| 190 | Now, Rawls limits himself to a "political conception of justice". | |
| "Political liberalism refuses to take sides in the moral and religious controversies that arise from comprehensive doctrines, including controversies about conceptions of the self." | ||
| Political Liberalism "seeks the support of an overlapping consensus", but it still needs some conception of the person (as with the 'original position'). | ||
| 192 | It seems to require a "political self", our "public identity as citizens". "We must bracket our encumbrances in public." | |
| 193 | But why do we have to separate our political selves? Rawls' answer is because of "the special nature of modern democratic societies". | |
| 194 | Rorty agreed with Rawls' 'turn', but Rawls didn't like Rorty's 'pragmatic' slant. | |
| 195 | The issue is about "learning to live in a pluralist society governed by liberal institutions". [RT: Some 'leaders' wouldn't like this (Roman Catholic, Islamic) - and some societies certainly don't have liberal institutions.] | |
| 196 | Sandel feels that Rawls' 'turn' comes at a cost: 1) bracketing is still difficult for many of us; 2) "reasonable pluralism" isn't a fact yet; 3) liberalism itself should not debar people from bringing their moral and religious ideals into discussions. | |
| 199 | (and up to 202): Sandel quotes the Lincoln-Douglas debates about slavery as an example of 3). | |
| 203-4 | But can it be assumed that "despite our disagreements about morality and religion, we do not have ... similar disagreements about justice"? Sandel thinks this is not clear. | |
| 204 | "We need only look around us to see that modern democratic societies are teeming with disagreements about justice." | |
| Some of the disagreements may be about 'application' of the justice, but others are more fundamental. | ||
| 205 | Libertarians will still disagree with egalitarians. | |
| "Rawls' reply must be that, while there is "a fact of pluralism about distributive justice [who gets what share of the pie], there is no fact of reasonable pluralism." [RT: i.e., they only argue from conviction, not from logic.] | ||
| 207 | "Libertarians would agree that distributive shares should not be based on social status or accident of birth ... but the distribution of talents given by nature is no less arbitrary." | |
| 211 | A problem for PL is that "the political life it describes leaves little room for the kind of public deliberation necessary to test the plausibility of contending comprehensive moralities - to persuade others of the merits of our moral ideas, to be persuaded by others of the merits of theirs". | |
| "Rawls maintains that this limitation (to the purely political) is required by the "ideal of public reason" (PubR), i.e., "in terms of 'political values' all citizens can reasonably be accepted to accept". [RT: A bit like the 'thin theory of right'.] | ||
| Rawls would still allow other issues in personal deliberations and within 'associations'. | ||
| 212 | "How can we know whether our political arguments meet the requirements of PubR?" | |
| In Rawls' ideal, people couldn't "vote for a law that would restrict abortion on the basis of moral or religious conviction". | ||
| "Catholic moral doctrine cannot be debated in the political arena defined by PL." | ||
| 213 | Sandel is puzzled by Rawls' excusing the Lincoln argument, which brought in "comprehensive moralities" to try and "hasten the day" of improving society so that it could be "conducted solely in terms of 'political values' ". | |
| 215 | It's all a bit like "restrictive rules of evidence" [RT: some things are 'inadmissible'.] | |
| 216 | What is the "moral cost of bracketing"? Isn't this at odds with PL? | |
| 216-7 | "A politics that brackets morality and religion too thoroughly soon generates disenchantment." [RT: Like the Tea Party?] | |
| 217 |
Sandel says there are 2 options for 'mutual respect': in both, we "respect our fellow citizens' moral and religious conviction", but then 1) "by ignoring them for political purposes, leaving them undisturbed, and carrying on without them"; or 2) "engaging or attending to them, sometimes by challenging and contesting them, sometimes by listening and learning from them". Sandel prefers the second. |
I think Sandel examined things pretty thoroughly and objectively. But where do we go from here?
I generally agree with his last point. No formula is going to solve all problems or avoid all differences in opinion and conviction. Overlapping consensus sounds good, but I suspect it will always need revising.
But I don't think he really objects to Rawls' ideas - he may just be saying "it's harder than we think".
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 19th November 2014
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .