My purpose here is to summarize and comment upon the work of one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century, John Rawls.
Professor Rawls sets forth an elaborate defense of pretty much what I believe intuitively concerning politics and law. Furthermore, he does so with a genius that allows me always to draw inspiration and instruction from his writings in defending this very American brand of “equity liberalism” or “liberalism with social justice” against rival political philosophies, including all forms of collectivism and totalitarianism.
Regrettably, Rawls’ work is difficult. His prose is always clear and compelling, but it is also dry and dense, with few concessions to the attention-span of the reader and no visible displays of humor or wit. There are also few dazzling and dramatic examples, as in the work of Jean Paul Sartre, and none of the crispness to be found in Robert Nozick’s books nor the amiable irony of Richard Rorty’s laid back or “cool” campus pragmatism.
Is it significant that the most outstanding American philosophers are still overwhelmingly, despite the few exceptions that confirm the rule, “white males”? Probably. In any case, John Rawls is the quintessential academic philosopher – who is seemingly best read while one is sitting in a leather arm chair located somewhere in New England, wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe. This is unfortunate because Rawls’ originality and radicalism can get lost in his polite and scholarly style.
My discussion proceeds in the following steps: I begin with some biographical comments, since I believe that philosophy is always personal. It is a response to perceived problems that demand a solution and which must be connected to a particular historical and ethnic perspective on life. This is true even when a philosophy is presented in a highly impersonal and analytical style. No, this does not make all philosophy “subjective” or “relative” or some such nonsense. A philosophical work may be both personal and rigorous, the best of it usually is.
This personal quality is certainly evident in the case of John Rawls, for instance, whose formation in Protestant schools (not very different from Kant’s Pietist upbringing) and eventually as a “prep-student” at the Kent school in Connecticut, is crucial to his mature thought. So were his experiences during World War II.
I will suggest that Rawlsian liberalism should be placed BETWEEN conservatism, whether of the paternalistic or libertarian varieties, on the one hand, and both Marxist as well as fascist forms of totalitarianism on the other. Rawls is the philosopher of that form of democratic liberal centrism which is still dominant in the Western world today. It may not sound exciting on campus, but such sober and responsible political thought is more needed now and truer than ever in a dangerous world.
I identify the sources of Rawls’ philosophy first (despite his surface secularism) in Christianity; then in English liberalism and in the Critical theory of Immanuel Kant; also in American Constitutionalism as well as in analytical philosophy and in the fascinating labyrinths of modern game theory. I provide a summary analysis of Rawls’ conclusions concerning liberty and justice, along with some objections which have been raised against his views. I conclude with an assessment of Rawls’ continuing importance.
If there is any doubt about that importance at the outset, consider the remarks of Robert Nozick, one of Rawls’ strongest Right-wing critics:
“A Theory of Justice is a powerful, deep, subtle, wide-ranging, systematic work in political and moral philosophy which has not seen its like since the writings of John Stuart Mill, if then. It is a fountain of [important] ideas, integrated together into a lovely whole … it is impossible to read Rawls’ book without incorporating much, perhaps transmuted, into one’s own deepened view. And it is impossible to finish his book without a new and inspiring vision of what a moral theory may attempt to do and unite; of how beautiful a moral theory can be.”
“Anarchy, State and Utopia” (Harvard: 1974), p. 183.
I.
John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921. He studied in Princeton University, earning a B.A. in 1943, shortly before he left for the army as an infantryman, and was shipped to the Pacific theater of the war. He visited Hiroshima after the bomb fell in 1945, finding himself so altered by this experience that he refused a commission as an officer, left the army and returned to Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1949. He then taught at Princeton, Cornel, MIT, and finally, for more than 40 years at Harvard University. He died in 2002 at the age of 82. It is no exaggeration to say that his book, “A Theory of Justice” (Harvard: 1971) is simply the greatest work of political philosophy in the English language of the twentieth century.
To appreciate that work, however, it is important to have some sense of what Rawls was hoping to accomplish, what he was reacting against in the climate of philosophical ideas during the fifties and sixties, and how he met these challenges.
There were two components of that intellectual climate that Rawls rebelled against: First, the narrowing and sharpening of political philosophy that became popular in the aftermath of logical positivism and the linguistic revolution into an inquiry concerned exclusively with the meaning of political or conceptual terms and the logic of economics and social theory, while turning away from “grand theory,” which was seen as finished, was profoundly antithetical to a system-builder like Rawls. Second, the dominance of utilitarianism in moral and political philosophy was equally unpalatable to a Kantian deontologist, who regarded utilitarianism as insufficiently respectful of the dignity of persons and the priority of rights, not to mention “offensive” to justice.
Rawls’ political philosophy is individualist in its starting point, deontological rather than teleological in its moral logic; hostile to all forms of consequentialism; and focused on individuals rather than abstract social collectivities. His work reacts against utilitarianism by postulating that rights “trump” utilities on the grounds that:
“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.”
“A Theory of Justice,” pp. 3-4 (emphasis added).
The foundations for this insight are obviously and explicitly Kantian. To quote Alan Ryan:
“The similarity between Rawls’ work and that of Kant extends to … the almost architectual quality of the resulting theory, with its hierarchical structure of first principles of right and their personal and institutional implications all neatly labelled and rationalized.”
“John Rawls,” in “The Return to Grand Theory in the Human Sciences” (Cambridge: 1985), p. 108.
The premise of a unique ontological and moral significance for each human being resonates powerfully in the American tradition, in which the Bill of Rights and Constitutional adjudication have made citizens familiar with the doctrine that rights that are both anti-majoritarian and privileged against legislative encroachment.
If there is any one idea that is at the center of American political thought, then this is it. Government is a necessary evil that exists for the people and not the other way around. No collective goal, no future utopia, no will of a dictator is more important than the rights of the humblest person.
This idea still seems revolutionary and true to me. In a world in which dissidents, artists and philosophers are often tortured and killed, it is still inspiring. A nation committed to this principle – and the U.S. is devoted to this ideal, however often individual Americans may fail to live up to it in places like Abu Gharib or at home – for that reason alone deserves to be regarded as a great nation.
No one, no person in Rawlsian thinking is deemed to be merely a means to the ends of others, not even to the ends of a majority, nor even to the ends of ALL others in the state. Each individual possesses an equal moral status before the power of the State, an infinite ontological and moral worth.
Rawls gestures at the tradition of systematic political philosophy in the West by reviving the “social contract” device. This is to “join hands” with illustrious predecessors in the effort to re-imagine politics, in order to create better political arrangements for humanity as a whole. Astonishingly, Raws’ scheme purports to be both objective and universal. These others or “predecessors” include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and now many more, whose work was inspired by Rawls himself, such as Robert Nozick and Bruce Ackerman.
To say that John Rawls belongs in such company, and it now seems pretty clear that he does, is a strong claim that I do not make lightly. If this essay does nothing more than to lead one person to discover Rawls, then it will be more than justified.
II.
A. “The Original Position” and Two Principles of Justice.
Imagine a group of persons who find themselves in a state of nature. They are intelligent and self-interested agents, says Rawls, who must design political institutions to govern themselves from behind a “veil of ignorance” which prevents them from knowing what social strata each person will fall into or what specific talents and aptitudes the agent will possess, as an individual, in the post-political situation. By extention, Rawls might say that we should suppose that the agents also do not know to what gender or race they will belong.
Rawls argues that, in accordance with the logic of game theory, each agent operating in such conditions of radical uncertainty will seek, rationally, to ensure that the worst outcome of the game will be as beneficial as possible for the worst off player, since that player may be him or her.
This leads to Rawls’ formulation of the “minimax” and “maximin” principles: 1) The “minimax” or “difference” principle suggests that liberty should be equal for all members of the society, except where minimal infringements on the liberty of some, or different degrees of liberty, will result in the maximum benefit or distribution of liberty for all, especially the worst off members of the group – provided, again, that the encroachments on liberty are as minimal as possible. 2) The “maximin” principle holds that it is best to provide the maximum liberty for each agent, individually, that remains compatible with the minimal encroachment or burden on the liberty or welfare of the worst off members of the group.
In Rawls’ own words:
“I shall maintain that the persons in the initial situation would choose two rather different principles: the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, [liberties] while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.”
“A Theory of Justice,” pp. 14-15.
Those who like slogans may prefer this formulation: “Maximum liberty that is compatible with minimal inequality” is the goal. Professor Rawls writes:
"First Principle:
Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
Second Principle:
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
First Priority Rule (The Priority of Liberty):
The principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty …
Second Priority Rule (The Priority of Justice Over Efficiency and Welfare):
The second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of efficiency and to that of maximizing the sum of advantages; and fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle."
“A Theory of Justice,” p. 302.
These Rawlsian principles produce a society that is fair to the least advantaged, while also allowing for the creative achievement and corresponding unequal rewards due to the most advantaged. Hence, it is a political situation that is both egalitarian and freedom-protecting, dynamic and still flexible, taking full advantage of the talents of all by allowing for incentives and differential rewards, true, yet nonetheless providing for improvements in the justice available to the least benefitted members of the group.
In such a society, the existence of a Donald Trump or Kobe Bryant results not only in a higher standard of living for them, as individuals, but also improves the lot of the worst off members of that society, by their presence and through their enhancement of the total quantum of wealth, benefits and goods available to all.
Yet even if everyone might get richer by the murder of the poorest single member of that society, who is otherwise innocent, such a violation of that one person’s fundamental rights, is proscribed.
This is not only brilliant, but morally sound. Furthermore, Rawlsian socialism comes into play at this point in the notion that the talents of the most gifted and the rewards received because of those talents are legitimated only in terms of the resulting benefits to the worst off members of a community – and NOT because they “belong” to such persons naturally.
Rawls’ political theory has been the subject of blistering critiques from both the conservatives on the Right, who do not like this socialist idea, and the Marxists and Social Democrats on the Left, who object to Rawls’ concern with individual rights.
I shall now turn to those criticisms and to a defense of the Rawlsian scheme.
B. Criticisms and Defenses.
As a phenomenologist, however, I cannot help noticing that there are some major foundational difficulties in Rawls’ system which conflict with basic and well-established phenomenological-existential principles.
Rawls aims to be universal and objective, for example, though he is publishing in 1971, and not in 1771, so that the work of the phenomenologists concerning the inherent historical and “perspectival” limitations on knowledge claims are simply breezily ignored, together with nearly a century of logical and linguistic theory focusing upon the limits of human rationality. For Rawls, truth is singular, universal, objective and determined rationally, no matter who or where you are.
To the extent that Rawlsian theory is compatible with a general phenomenological stance, it would have to be not with a Heideggerian or a Sartrean perspective, but with a classical and highly Kantian reading of Edmund Husserl’s works. For Rawls, and this is nothing less than breathtaking, it is simply not a problem to speak in terms of what “rationality” requires at a universal and objective level, for all human beings.
It is important to notice how this is achieved: Rawls strips his choosing agents of all, and I mean ALL particularities – gender, race, nationality, economic class, and so on. These things do not exist in the “original position,” so that there are no subjective biases to obstruct or cloud the agents’ decisions. The question becomes: In what sense are these choosing agents “real” or human or relevant to human beings in the real world – who are inescapably embodied, historical creatures, filled with particularities, which are precisely what makes their political choices both difficult and meaningful? Is Rawls too academic? Is all of this just science fiction? Possibly.
Rawls might respond, however, by pointing to a “superconductor” used by particle physicists to isolate, say, subatomic particles like leptons, so as to better understand their properties and functions. Knowing that the superconductor creates a highly artificial environment and situation, scientists nevertheless make use of it, because it isolates functions that otherwise would be unobservable and relations which might have remained obscure.
Similarly, the “original position” is a useful thought experiment meant to make clear a rationality that might well be obstructed by extraneous factors or biases, or subjective preferences, that interfere with “optimally rational solutions.” The proof, Raws might insist, is in the pudding – that is, in the intuitive appeal of the results yielded by the device of the original position, together with their logical and practical plausibility after the fact.
Marxists argue, on the other hand, that Rawls is excessively individualistic. The competition and self-interest that motivates his choosing agents are not aspects of “pure” human rationality at all, but are themselves the products of capitalist distortions in the psyche. In the workers’ paradise a “new man” or person emerges, one who is uncontaminated by such characteristics as greed but who is instead, sufficiently appreciative of the value and need for community, as opposed to an individualist maximizer of self-interest. Rights and rights-talk is too individual, Marxists say, what is needed is a concern with community.
Of course, Sigmund Freud begs to differ. As Freud makes clear in his veiled criticisms of Marx – in “Civilization and its Discontents,” for example – human appetitiveness and aggressiveness are inherent aspects of the human animal. There is indeed a universal “grasping” quality in the self, so that Rawls would be right to make such things a feature of the “pure” human calculus. No alteration in political structures or economic arrangements will change such a fundamental human feature.
At this point, the conservatives enter the fray from the opposite direction and say that Rawls is wrong to limit the validity of profit from exceptional ability or even good fortune on the part of those who possess such things merely on the basis of the welfare of the “worst off” members of the community. My talents and opportunities are mine and I have every right to use them, say Robert Nozick and Allan Bloom. What is more, I may use them as I see fit and for any reason I like. If I wish to give all of my money to my cat, for instance, and let the poor starve, then I should be free to do so. As Professor Ryan explains:
“Rawls theory does not merely support the thought that those who are asked to contribute by way of taxation to the operations of the welfare state have no right to complain about the use of their income; it supports the more radical thought that it is not their income at all. …To Nozick, [Rawls] can properly reply that external property belongs in a morally less serious category than do our own abilities, and these in a less serious category than do our personal affections [or the requirements of community?].”
“The Return to Grand Theory,” pp. 113-114.
It is a sure sign that a philosopher is on to something when he or she is attacked from both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum. It is far from a weakness of Rawls’ theory, in my judgment, that it is compatible both with liberal welfare and democratic socialist arrangements, though it is not compatible with a State command economy that infringes on fundamental liberties.
It may now possible to offer a tentative assessment of Rawls’ overall importance and significance for political thought.
III.
It cannot be denied that Rawls is responsible for returning Anglo-American thinking to the grand tradition of philosophizing about what matters in human terms. Rawls returned English-language philosophy to the “public square” in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. This alone is an important achievement, but also Rawls’ recognition of the universal importance of civil liberties in society, of the right to dissent and to be “different,” to disobey unjust laws, while retaining a commitment to community over selfishness, acknowledging the priority of liberty in a political scheme that still recognizes the vital need for equality too, is a lasting legacy.
In a famous closing paragraph, Rawls writes at page 587, in “A Theory of Justice”:
“The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather, it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.”
Rawls strikes the appropriate balance here between ego and the social, between the common good and individual rights, between particularity and universality, achieving in his finished political theory a very American equilibrium between “responsible wealth” and “dignity for the poorest persons” or the least advantaged members of the polis.
John Rawls deserves to be better known. For I think that Rawls will be regarded as the greatest exponent of American political wisdom in the twentieth century and beyond, a wisdom which is more desperately needed now than ever before in a world that is still sadly divided by terror and warfare, by brutal deprivations of liberty of conscience and cruel economic inequalities too.
