If you google “john rawls, fairness, abortion” you get this:
google.com/search?ei=eV2iXI … QqZCGTYOmo
And this from the first result:
In a footnote to the first edition of Political Liberalism, John Rawls introduced an example of how public reason could deal with controversial issues. He intended this example to show that his system of political liberalism could deal with such problems by considering only political values, without the introduction of comprehensive moral doctrines. Unfortunately, Rawls chose “the troubled question of abortion” as the issue that would illustrate this. In the case of abortion, Rawls argued, “the equality of women as equal citizens” overrides both “the ordered reproduction of political society over time” and also “the due respect for human life.” It seems fair to say that this was not the best choice of example and also that Rawls did not argue for his example particularly well: a whole subset of the Rawlsian literature concerns this question alone. David M. Shaw
It’s basically just one more leap to a particular political prejudice. And then the extent one can attribute his own value judgment here to the life that he acxtually lived predisposing him [finally] to this frame of mind.
As opposed to what philosophy is able to tell him about fairness here?
Whether asking or answering the question “how ought one to live?” is or is not a philosophical problem, will depend on which philosopher you ask.
And for the moral objectivists and the political idealists among us, acknowledging that “circumstances” plays an important part here is not nearly as important as insisting that if you are “one of us” you will have come to understand those circumstances such that the “real me” is then able to be in sync with “the right thing to do”.
Or so it seems to me.
Few want to believe that because they lived their lives in a particular way, they have come to view a set of circumstances in one way rather than another. And that had they lived a very different life they might have come to see them very differently in turn. Or that in having lived very different lives, others have come to understand and react to the circumstances in ways that are just as reasonable to them as your own assessment is to you.
That makes “I” far too ambiguous, wobbly. The self ever and always embedded in contingency, chance and change. Ever and always subject to reconfiguration given new experiences, relationships and access to ideas.
Sooner or later those generalizations are going to be introduced to a particular context in which any number of conflicting moral and political narratives collide.
Then there’s how I think about that “for all practical purposes” and how others do in turn.