Philosophy of Rawls

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

One of Rawls’s strongest critics, G. A. Cohen, wrote that “at most two books in the history of Western political philosophy have a claim to be regarded as greater than A Theory of Justice [TJ]: Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan.”1 Yet after its being at the center of discussions in political philosophy for decades, philosophers have understandably grown tired of discussion Rawls’s work. This does not mean, however, that they have gotten all of the benefit that they might out of engaging with it. For instance, Part III of TJ insightfully treats the question of the relative stability of societies, developing accounts of the good, of moral psychology, and of community that are, to this day, too little appreciated. This seminar will use recent and contemporary discussions in political philosophy to illuminate important features of Rawls’s work and vice versa. Three separate strands of criticism and non-Rawlsian theorizing importantly developed by Cohen’s work will help orient us to the body of Rawls’s theory, as developed in Parts I and II of TJ: (1) Cohen’s attack on Rawls’s idea that “the basic structure of society” is the primary subject or “site” of distributive justice; (2) the broader stream of “luck egalitarianism,” which, reinforced by the preceding line of criticism, has largely left behind Rawls’s focus on institutions; and (3) Cohen’s critique of “fact-sensitive” principles, which is at odds with Rawls’s insistence that moral philosophy should be free to invoke factual assumptions as needed. Then, in turning to Part II of TJ, we will look at two recent and opposed views about ideal theorizing about justice: Amartya Sen’s critique of ideal theory in favor of “comparative” justice (in The Idea of Justice), and David Estlund’s quite opposite view in his 2014 essay, “Utopophobia.” In relation to these, Rawls’s effort in Part III to develop the (then novel) question of the “stability” of a conception of justice can be understood as taking a middle road. Finally, we will turn to two crucial ideas from recent “public reasons liberalism” to help frame our discussion of Rawls’s second book, Political Liberalism. The first of these is the idea, found in many recent accounts of liberalism and deliberative democracy, that legitimacy demands basing laws and policies on “reasons all can accept.” We will see that this formulation is considerably more abstract and schematic than anything Rawls puts forward, for better or for worse. The second is the proposal, developed by Gerald Gaus in The Order of Public Reason (2012), that in discussing political justification, we should work with people’s values as they actually are, not as they would be in this or that “well-ordered society.” Rawls develops the idea of stability in the latter way, relying on the thought that the basic structure of a society (which, as noted above, he takes to be the primary subject of justice) deeply shapes the values of the people living in it. In examining Rawls’s suggestions about how to cope with the deep moral and evaluative disagreements among people that will persist in any free society, we will pay special attention to his radical thought that we should apply “the principle of toleration to philosophy itself.” This gives rise to his innovative and awkward but profound “precept of avoidance,” which counsels political theorists not to take a stand on any controverted philosophical question if they can avoid it.