Ralwsian Political Philosophy Today
Ralwsian Political Philosophy Today
We are celebrating this year the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Several conferences have been or will be organized worldwide as an opportunity to reflect on what remains the most important contribution in contemporary political philosophy. In France, a French-language international conference has been held this week. Over three days, more than a hundred participants have discussed and exchanged over the many issues opened by Rawls’s book, and more generally by Rawlsian political philosophy. There are of course many historical, exegetical, and theoretical aspects related to Rawls’s scholarship that are of the highest relevance. But this conference, and the 50th anniversary of the publication of TJ more generally, provide also the opportunity to reflect on what use can be made of Rawlsian political philosophy to tackle contemporary issues like climate change, populism and the democratic crisis, rising inequalities, discrimination, and so on.
The philosopher Katrina Forrester’s recent and important historical account of how Rawls’s work shaped the path of modern political philosophy offers a rather negative assessment on these matters. As a focal point, the Rawlsian framework has, according to Forrester, largely contributed to setting the agenda both for Rawlsian egalitarian liberals and critics of liberal philosophy. More importantly, it has made political philosophers ill-equipped to deal with contemporary and pressing issues:
“Many aspects of the Rawlsian vision – whether its method, its scope, or its aim – make it seem unable to deal with the current political situation, as these recent critics have suggested. Its long neglect of “non-ideal” realities, interests, and ideologies has been shown to be untenable. The assumption and aim of agreement and consensus look out of touch as the persistence of division has everywhere been revealed. The philosophical tendency to create conceptual problems out of realities that do not fit a given paradigm is an unproductive one in moment of crisis, particularly if the paradigm is consensual. Ideological divisions thus become puzzles to be solved rather than assumptions to be worked with, which makes it hard to make sense of politically divisive moments – especially when the liberal reframing of individual or group intuitions as representing the values of an entire community may itself be part of the problem. Without an account of interest, collective action, control, class, crisis – and with its assumption of potential value consensus, continued growth, and lasting stability – the Rawlsian vision looks no more capable of fully making sense of the current conjuncture than it did during the crises of the 1970s, when its proponents explored international and ecological ethics at the expense of domestic cases they might have confronted.” (Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, p. 277)
Forrester’s assessment is of course not value- and theory-free. It implicitly expresses a preference for a political and philosophical approach that emphasizes conflict and the primacy of interests and ideologies as the roots of political morality. Also, it would be unfair to criticize Rawls for having not provided a different framework more fit to account for contemporary issues such as climate change or gender inequalities. As Forrester’s narrative demonstrates well, Rawlsian political philosophy is a product of its time, shaped at the same time by academic debates (with philosophers but also economists) and by the socioeconomic, geopolitical and cultural environment in which Rawls developed his thought. It remains true, however, that there is a growing tension between the limitations of the Rawlsian framework and the attraction that Rawlsian political philosophy continues to have, especially in the academic world.
For a long time, debates within Rawlsian political philosophy have concentrated on the determination and the content of the principles of justice. Criticisms have been especially strong regarding how Rawls was characterizing the original position and the practical reasoning of persons put behind the veil of ignorance. Relatedly, the “metric of justice” used by Rawls, based on the concept of primary goods, has also been judged problematical and has attracted a great deal of attention. It is interesting however to note that most of Rawls’s work published after A Theory of Justice has been directed toward another issue which can be labeled the stability problem. This problem was already the focus of the third part of A Theory of Justice.[1] As I explain in the paper I’ve presented at the conference mentioned above – and as it is now well-established in the literature, Rawls became dissatisfied with the solution he proposed to the stability problem in terms of the congruence between the right and the good. Basically, the issue has to do with the fact that it presupposes that all members of the well-ordered society are endorsing the same conception of the good valuing particular ideals like friendship or association. This presupposition is however in contradiction with the very nature of a liberal society which tends to favor the diversity of conceptions of the good life. Rawls’s “political turn”, fully realized in Political Liberalism (published more than twenty years later than A Theory of Justice) offers a different solution, emphasizing the importance of public reason to establish an overlapping consensus.
Rawls’s second solution to the stability problem is not without difficulties. Its reliance on public reason has been in particular attacked by a bunch of post-Rawlsian scholars who argue that the Rawlsian account of “stability for the right reasons” is out of reach in diverse and open societies. As I argue in the above-mentioned paper, I think that Rawls’s solution can be saved but at some important costs. In particular, the public reasons used to foster stability become underdetermined. Relatedly, the content of the principles of justice is itself open to variation, something which Rawls himself recognized as a possibility in his later work. Finally, the stability becomes conditional on the fact that the members of the well-ordered society are prone to use a particular kind of practical reasoning, which I call “community-based reasoning”. I want to make however a different point here. What the controversies over the stability problem within Rawlsian political philosophy reveal is the importance of something that Rawls already emphasized: the fact that the members of the well-ordered society must share a common “political culture”. And this should not be any political culture, but the one that is at the roots of liberal democracy.
Among the major challenges that modern Western societies are facing, the democratic crisis and the rise of populism are particularly salient. This crisis is at the same time a symptom and a cause for the weakening of the liberal democratic political culture. It endangers the very basis on which a stable conception of justice can be agreed on. Here is one of the main limitations of Rawlsian political philosophy: it has not been conceived to think of justice outside liberal democratic societies. In some way, this observation circles back to Forrester’s emphasis on conflicts, interests, and ideologies. The problem is not openness or diversity of the society as such, but rather the fact that this diversity has developed largely as a response to the weakening of the political institutions and culture on which a stable consensus over a conception of justice could build.
To end this essay, I would like to quickly consider an illustration of the aforementioned problem. It is tempting to use the Rawlsian framework to account for the rise of populism. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler has for instance suggested that Trump’s election in 2016 could be explained by the fact that American political and economic institutions were not satisfying the demands of reciprocity as exemplified by the difference principle: while the wealthiest members of the society have been benefitting from political and economic reforms, this was at the expense of the persons in the lower parts of the income distribution. The philosopher Paul Weithman has convincingly argued that this is not the correct interpretation, however. According to Weithman, empirical evidence suggests that one of the deepest motivations for the populist vote seems to have been the fact that many members of low-medium parts of the income distribution were considering that persons belonging to the lowest parts of the distribution were unjustly receiving benefits. As Weithman insists, the failure of reciprocity stems here not from a departure of a situation satisfying the difference principle, but from a benchmark corresponding to an actual, historically contingent, and already unjust situation. This account is outside Rawls’s framework not only because it takes a different baseline to evaluate demands of justice. This is also not only because it relies on an obviously different moral psychology. In his article, Weithman suggests that the problem is related to the fact that citizens are no longer “chain-connected”. This may be due in part to the kind of public policies that have been adopted. The deepest departure from the Rawlsian framework comes however from the fact that the resentment leading to populist vote is largely fed by the feeling that persons situated below in the income distribution are no longer perceived as belonging to the same political community sharing some political culture. This favors the develoment of a form of parochialism within the society. Chain connection is as much a matter of fact as a matter of perceptions and expectations. The more a society is fragmented, the less these perceptions and expectations have a chance to satisfy the desired requirement.
[1] Here is how Rawls’s characterized it then: “Now a well-ordered society is also regulated by its public conception of justice. This fact implies that its members have a strong and normally effective desire to act as the principles of justice require. Since a well-ordered society endures over time, its conception of justice is presumably stable. That is, when institutions are just (as defined by its conception), those taking part in these arrangements acquire the corresponding sense of justice and desire to do their parts in maintaining them. One conception of justice is more stable than another if the sense of justice it tends to generate is stronger and more likely to override disruptive inclinations and if institutions it allows foster weaker impulses and temptation to act unjustly.” (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 454).