god and john rawls

7/28/2019 God and John Rawls

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God and John Rawlsby Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz on A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith by John Rawls editedby Thomas Nagel

JOHN R AWLS. A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. THOMAS N AGEL, EDITOR.H ARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 288 P AGES. $27.95.

IT IS COMMONLY supposed that liberalism — the political theory that holds that all humanbeings are by nature free and equal, that government derives its just powers from theconsent of the governed, and that government’s task is to secure the equal rights of allcitizens — is rooted in exclusively rational and secular principles. Thomas Jefferson mayhave proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that we are free and equal becauseGod created us that way and endowed us with unalienable rights. But that was the 18thcentury, when Christianity held sway and Deism thrived, and Jefferson, in any event, wasgiven to rhetorical flourishes. Two and a half centuries later, liberalism, it is widely thought,has been purified. Religious people may find religious reasons for embracing individualfreedom and human equality, but the theistic notions and religious language that werenever essential to liberalism’s core conceptions have long ago fallen away or have beendeliberately and decisively discarded. Today, liberalism can stand straight and tall on itsown reasonable and nonreligious bottom.

Accordingly, few doubt — certainly few among the professors of philosophy and politicaltheory who are paid to think critically about such matters — that the most influentialrestatement of liberal political theory over the past four decades, contained in JohnRawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993), operates independentlyof religious presuppositions. To be sure, Rawls’s liberalism defends religious toleration.

And Rawls forcefully argued in Political Liberalism that without sacrificing their obligationsto God, reasonable adherents of different religious faiths can subscribe to a liberalismconfined to common political principles and institutions. Such a liberalism proudlyrenounces reliance on comprehensive claims about man’s place in the universe. Instead, itis “freestanding”; it claims to restrict itself to elaborating fair rules of social cooperation thatcitizens, despite inevitable disagreements about first principles and ultimate salvation, canembrace.

To recognize liberalism’s capacity to accommodate and even respect religious believers iscertainly not to assert that liberalism, particularly a political liberalism, depends on religiousassumptions or ways of thinking. To most scholars such an assertion would seem utterlyforeign to the intention of Rawls’s life’s work. And it would also seem to them to fly in theface of the historical achievement of the liberal tradition — securing political justice on

rational and secular foundations.

The recent discovery and publication of Rawls’s undergraduate senior thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community,” submitted to the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University inDecember 1942, compels a reconsideration of the conventional wisdom. The thesis ispublished along with an illuminating short introductory essay by Stanford Universityprofessor of political science, philosophy, and law Joshua Cohen and New York Universityprofessor of philosophy and law Thomas Nagel that examines Rawls’s thesis in light of his

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mature political theory; an instructive extended essay by Yale University professor emeritus of philosophy Robert Merrihew Adams that places the theological ethics of theyoung Rawls in the context of 20th-century neoorthodox Protestant theology; and anintriguing brief autobiographical essay, “On My Religion,” that Rawls wrote in 1997 atage 76 but never published. The publication now of Rawls’s undergraduate thesis andpost-retirement autobiographical reflections, along with accompanying scholarly

commentaries, infuses with new interest old questions about the assumptions concerningman and morals that give life to liberalism.

THERE HAD BEEN earlier indications that Rawls’s philosophical account of justice as fairnessand his elaboration of a political liberalism as fair principles of social cooperation drewsustenance from religious sources. In2000, former students, by then accomplishedprofessors in their own right, oversaw the publication of Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy . The book contains notes — in fact, lucid, well-wrought analyses — for lectureson a class in moral philosophy that Rawls gave at Harvard University regularly between hisarrival in 1962and his retirement in the early 1990s. Those lectures center on thegreat 18th-century German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. So too did Rawls’sinterpretation of liberalism: In A Theory of Justice he emphasized that his ambition was to

refine and extend Kant’s view that morality must be understood as those principles thatcan “be agreed to under conditions that characterize men as free and equal rationalbeings.”

Therefore, it was of great interest to learn from the Lectures that in Rawls’s view, Kant’smoral philosophy, both celebrated and denounced for its rigorous rationalism, was onlyfully intelligible with a view to its religious dimension:I conclude by observing that the significance Kant gives to the moral law and our actingfrom it has an obvious religious aspect, and that his text occasionally has a devotionalcharacter.What gives a view a religious aspect, I think, is that it has a conception of the world as awhole that presents it as in certain respects holy, or else as worthy of devotion and

reverence. The everyday values of secular life must take a secondary place. If this is right,then what gives Kant’s view a religious aspect is the dominant place he gives to the morallaw in conceiving of the world itself. For it is in following the moral law as it applies to us,and in striving to fashion in ourselves a firm good will, and in shaping our social worldaccordingly that alone qualifies us to be the final purpose of creation. Without this, our life,in the world, and the world itself lose their meaning and point.Now, perhaps, we see the significance of the mention of the world in the first sentenceof Groundwork I: “It is impossible to conceive anything in the world, or even out of it, thatcan be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.”

At first it seems strange that Kant should mention the world here. Why go to such anextreme? we ask. Now perhaps we see why it is there. It comes as no surprise, then, thatin the second Critique he should say that the step to religion is taken for the sake of the

highest good and to preserve our devotion to the moral law.These religious, even Pietist, aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy seem obvious; anyaccount of it that overlooks them misses much that is essential to it.

Given the deep continuities between the Kantian and Rawlsian conceptions of justice,the Lectures made it reasonable to wonder whether scholars had overlooked the religiousaspect of Rawls’s liberalism and thereby missed much that is essential to it.The Lectures also made it reasonable to wonder why so few of the many students whoheard these lectures over the course of three decades and went into careers as professors



of political science, philosophy, and law failed to be moved, or to recognize an obligation,to explore whether and to what extent Rawls’s mature philosophy was bound up withreligious notions.1

Rawls’s undergraduate thesis does not in itself offer an answer to these fascinatingquestions, but it does provide an important piece of the puzzle. Revealing an unusually

thoughtful and exceedingly ambitious young mind, it also exhibits the imperiousness thatwas a significant if generally unremarked feature of the mature Rawls’s work. Theimperiousness consists in the laying down of assumptions and the declaration of definitions that severely circumscribe the legitimate forms of moral, political, andphilosophical inquiry. Notwithstanding the restrained language and gentleness of tone inboth his senior thesis and his seminal books, Rawls’s elaboration of rules of right methodand establishment of the range of permissible ideas in both stigmatized as not merelywrong but unreasonable a diversity of plausible and competing perspectives. Although hissenior thesis had no impact on academic philosophy, his books, which had a decisiveimpact, placed off limits inquiry into some of his own theory’s fundamental assumptionsand defining ideas. There is certainly reason to doubt that his thesis supplies thoseassumptions and clarifies those ideas. After all, as Rawls recalls in his autobiographical

“On My Religion,” he lost his faith as a result of serving in the Pacific theater in World War II and learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, fundamental features of Rawls’s mature philosophy that on reflection seem in need of further support receive itfrom the irreducibly religious doctrine developed in the undergraduate thesis.

THE YOUNG Rawls takes Christian faith as his presupposition — “We assume, then, thatGod is, and that He is the sort of God that the Bible says He is, and that He revealed Hisnature in Christ” — and aims to restate its implications for the moral life. To do this, Rawlsargues, one must free Christian thought from a tremendously influential but profoundlymistaken doctrine. “Naturalism,” according to Rawls, “is the universe in which all relationsare natural and in which spiritual life is reduced to the level of desire and appetition.” Platoand Aristotle are guilty of naturalism, he argues. So, too, are Augustine and Aquinas,

Christianity’s two greatest philosophers, whose doctrines, the Princeton senior audaciouslycharges, miss the essence of Christian teaching. And of course the preponderance of modern philosophy is thoroughly naturalistic and therefore gravely wrong about ethical life.The problem, though, is not nature itself, which is “God’s gift to man.” Rather, “the error lies . . . in extending natural relations to include all of those in the cosmos.” The challenge,to which Rawls devotes his thesis, “is to limit the sphere of nature to its proper limits, andto make room for the heart of the universe, namely, community and personality.”

Christianity properly understood supplies the correct interpretation of personality andcommunity. The properly Christian and philosophically correct view is that a person is“unique” and “not reducible to the possession of a particular body or to the sum of mentalstates.” Being part of the natural world, a person certainly has desires and appetites, but is

distinguished from other parts of God’s creation by possession of personality, or thecapacity to enter into a loving relationship with other persons and with God.

Rejecting the impersonal god of the philosophers and the personal but distant and silentGod of much traditional faith, the young Rawls, as Robert Merrihew Adams points out inhis essay, understands man, human relations, and man’s relation to God in much thesame manner as did Martin Buber in his great work, I and Thou (1923), which exercisedconsiderable influence on neoorthodox Protestant theologians. For Buber, the world is

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twofold: We usually dwell in the natural realm but are always capable of entering the realmof relations. In the natural realm, we perceive, imagine, and want, and we understandthings, including other human beings and ourselves, as “its” or objects. In the realm of relations, each individual confronts another as a Thou. Such relations are unmediated andreciprocal and in them grace and will join to allow each to become fully present to theother. Another description for this is love. At the same time, the relation of an I to a Thou

always involves a third term, or a relation also to God, the Eternal Thou. To be capable of I-Thou relations and therefore open to God’s revelation defines, from the perspective of the young Rawls, a person.

Persons flourish in community. A community is not an “aggregate of individuals,” but rather the special form of association through which individuals, in and through relations to othersand to God, become persons. In becoming a person one recognizes that other humanbeings are, like oneself, created in God’s image. “The Imago Dei,” Rawls declares, is “thatwhich in man makes him capable of entering into community by virtue of likeness to God,who is in Himself community, being the Triune God.”

Faith, sin, and grace, Rawls maintains, revolve around personality and community. Faith is

“the inner state of a person who is properly integrated and related to community.” Sin isthe destruction and repudiation of community. It receives expression in egotism, or pride,self-love, and vanity; egoism, or exclusive attention to the satisfaction of natural desire;and despair, or the nihilistic escape from the world. Grace is “the activity on God’s partwhich seeks to restore the person to community.” It overcomes sin and accomplishesconversion. Since ethics is bound up with community and personality, and community andpersonality are bound up with God, “there can be no separation between religion andethics.”

In conclusion, Rawls sketches a few implications of personality and community, sin andfaith, grace and conversion properly understood for ethics and political philosophy. Amongthe most important for understanding the relation between the theological analysis of the

young Rawls and the moral and political theory of the mature Rawls is a Socratic pointmade by the college senior. Modern thinkers go astray, he argues, because their theoriestend to be “based on superficial anthropologies”; consequently, they fail to proceed from acorrect understanding of “what man is.” This is a crippling defect:the first problem of ethical theory is to inquire into the nature of man himself. Moralphilosophers would do much better if they undertook an anthropological analysis beforedoing anything else. Unless we understand ourselves, all discussions of the good and theright are left in the air, and hover idly detached from reality. For this reason we havestressed throughout the personality and communality of man, and have repeatedly stated,almost to the point of becoming labored, that such is man’s nature. We stress this pointbecause it is at once so simple and yet so easy to forget. Although Christianity is said byall to be a very simple religion, it is surprising how few people understand it.

One can disagree with the young Rawls about Christian doctrine and human nature’sdefining features. However, his conclusion that serious moral and political theory must begrounded in, and constantly informed by, a defensible conception of human nature is ascompelling today as it was when Rawls submitted his Princeton senior thesis. Indeed, it ascompelling as it was when Plato’s Socrates made the case.



STRANGELY ENOUGH, the mature Rawls’s theory of justice and argument for a politicalliberalism appear to proceed in the absence of a philosophical anthropology or well-developed account of human nature. One possibility is that on this point the young Rawlsand the mature Rawls diverge, and that the manifest achievement of Rawlsian liberalismrefutes the young Rawls’s Socratic conviction. Another possibility is that the mature Rawlsrelied upon but suppressed the religious understanding of human nature that gives life to

his liberalism.

One possibility is that the mature Rawls relied upon but suppressed the religiousunderstanding of human nature that gives life to his liberalism.

In their introductory essay, Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel make an observation aboutRawls and religion that they present as routine but, contrary to their assurances, will startlemany students of his political theory: “Those who have studied Rawls’s work, and evenmore, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament thatinformed his life and writings, whatever may have been his beliefs.” Cohen and Nagelargue that for Rawls “political philosophy aims at a defense of reasonable faith”; areasonable faith seeks a “just constitutional democracy”; such aspirations shape

individuals’ understanding of the world as a whole; and that a proper theory of justiceenables us to view ourselves from the perspective of eternity. But though they recognizeelements in his thinking that suggest a religious temperament and note religious themes inhis writings, Cohen and Nagel never examine the possibility that the force and coherenceof Rawlsian liberalism is indebted to unstated religious presuppositions.

They do identify five “main points of contact,” in the sense of parallels between the youngRawls’s theology and the mature Rawls’s liberalism:(1) endorsement of a morality defined by interpersonal relations rather than by pursuit of the highest good; (2) insistence on the importance of the separateness of persons, so thatthe moral community or community of faith is a relation among distinct individuals; (3)rejection of the concept of society as a contract or bargain among egoistic individuals; (4)

condemnation of inequality based on exclusion and hierarchy; (5) rejection of the idea of merit.

It is also worth asking, however, whether there is a point of contact between the thinking of the younger and the mature Rawls in the sense of philosophical support provided by theformer for the latter.

Consider, for example, Rawls’s refinement of his mature views in Political Liberalism. Thatwork advances “a conception of justice that may be shared by citizens as a basis of areasoned, informed, and willing political agreement.” It aims to be a political conception of

justice for a constitutional democracy that applies only to basic social, economic, andpolitical institutions. And it seeks to be freestanding by eschewing metaphysicalcommitments, and renouncing reliance on comprehensive views of man and the world.That way it “can gain the support of an overlapping consensus” which “consists of all thereasonable opposing religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines likely to persist over generations.”

Yet to focus on the political dimensions of justice is not to render justice’s other dimensions irrelevant, and to eschew metaphysics and renounce reliance oncomprehensive views is not to escape them. We are entitled to wonder what conception of



man and the world makes it reasonable to respect, rather than level or trample, differencesof opinion about God and the greatest good, and to inscribe that respect in social,economic, and political institutions. And, as students of moral and political philosophy, weare obliged to identify standards for distinguishing “all the reasonable opposing religious,philosophical, and moral doctrines” from the unreasonable ones. To do that we must, asthe young Rawls would have recognized, acquire an understanding, if tentative and

constantly subject to questioning and revision in accordance with the mature Rawls’sappreciation of the room for reasonable disagreement, of a fitting and proper life for ahuman being. Such an understanding involves not only an account of the human desiresand passions, intellectual and moral faculties, virtues and vices that make a freestandingconception necessary, workable, and desirable but also some attention to how humannature fits into nature and the wider world.

A start is to recognize that a doctrine will not qualify as reasonable for Rawls unless itembraces in one way or another the principle that Rawls boldly states in Chapter 1 of ATheory of Justice, which restates the Declaration of Independence’s natural rightsteaching: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfareof society as a whole cannot override.” It is certainly true that for the purposes

of politics what counts is that people, for whatever reason, respect each others rights. Butfor the purposes of philosophy , including philosophical defenses of the priority of politics tophilosophy, we want to know: What makes belief in inviolable or natural rights reasonable?It is not enough to argue that each individual possesses an inalienable inviolabilitybecause all are, as Rawls holds in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, freeand equal persons. Or that our inalienable inviolability flows from our moral capacity toform and act on rational life plans. Neither our natural freedom and equality nor our capacity to form, choose, and act on rational life plans rules out that conquest anddominion over others represents the best use of our freedom.

When all is said and done, the mature Rawls’s epic intellectual labors do not illuminate thisfundamental perplexity. Indeed, those labors obscure the perplexity, even as the difficulties

are diminished — though they are far from overcome — by the young Rawls’s theologicaldoctrine. Inasmuch as it conceives of man as in but not entirely of the natural world, andpossessing a spiritual dimension or soul for which he is not responsible but which is of ultimate worth and allows him to transcend determination by nature, the young Rawls’sdoctrine fortifies a liberalism whose guiding thought is that of an inalienable inviolabilitypossessed by all individuals.

Such considerations provide more than ample reason for scholars to vigorously open or reopen the question of Rawlsian liberalism’s — and the larger liberal tradition’s — religiousroots.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,Stanford University.

1 See my essay, “The Ambiguities of Rawls’s Influence,” in Perspectives onPolitics 4:1 (March 2006).

ohn RawlsWritten by Michael Vlach.

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John Rawls (1921–2002) was one of the most important social and political

philosophers of the last half of the twentieth century. In his most significant work, A

Theory of Justice (1972), he promoted a political philosophy based on the concept

of “justice as fairness” in which justice is necessarily linked to fairness.

In promoting his theory of the ideal state, Rawls relied somewhat upon the “socialcontract” theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in which people allegedly

entered into a contract with each other to promote their own survival and good. But

instead of speculating about what societal contract people actually entered into inthe past, Rawls argued that we should focus on the type of contract we would want

to enter into now. Thus, if we could somehow start from scratch and choose our

ideal society, what standards and criteria would we choose to create this society?Rawls says we should begin with what he calls “The Veil of Ignorance.” The Veil

of Ignorance assumes that no person will know who he or she will be in this new

society. Before the society begins all factors such as race, gender, age, talents,

intelligence, education, and parents are totally hidden. Under this Veil of Ignorancewhich type of society would the people choose? Rawls argues that most people

would choose a society in which equality and fairness were the rule. After all, what

sane person would want to take a chance on receiving unequal and unfair treatmentin life. For example, a person probably would not choose a society in which slavery

existed or women were given less rights if there was a chance that he could become

a slave or a woman.

According to Rawls the ideal society would operate on two principles. First each

person would have equal rights to the most basic liberties. This means that every person would be eligible to vote or run for office. Each person would have freedom

of thought and speech. Each person also would have the right to own property and

freedom from arbitrary arrest. Second, all people would have equal opportunities in

regard to pursuing careers and economic opportunities. Rawls is not arguing for equal distribution of wealth as socialism does; instead, he states that all people

should have equal access to all jobs and economic opportunities. By implication this

would mean equal access to education that would lead to the best jobs andopportunities. Recognizing that people will have different talents and motivations,

Rawls acknowledges that some will have more economic wealth than others. This is

acceptable, though, as long as the economic inequalities will benefit society. For example, if because of hard work and intelligence a person obtains more wealth

than others, this could be a good thing if the hard work and intelligence which led to

that person’s wealth benefited society. Thus, Rawls’s society rewards excellence

while offering benefits to all of society. Rawls also believed that society shouldhave a safety net to ensure a decent quality of life for its members.

Rawls attended Princeton as a student and taught at the universities of Cornell andHarvard.



John Rawls's A Theory of Justice:

A Theory of Justice is probably the single most influential and important book in political thought written in

English during the last 130 years. It is not just a book for philosophers. It is also read and studied by lawyers,

judges, political scientists, public policy people, etc. If you want to have any understanding of political

thought during the past 35 years, you MUST be familiar with the most important parts of this text. I know it isdifficult to read. But it is worth it. Trying to understand contemporary western political thought without

reading Rawls is about like trying to understand Christianity without reading the Bible.

Section 1: The Role of Justice

A. JUSTICE AS THE FIRST VIRTUE: Rawls tells us that justice is the "first virtue" of social institutions. It

is the standard by which they are to be judged, just like truth is the standard by which statements are to be

judged.

B. ANTI-UTILITARIANISM: each person possesses an inviolability that we cannot ignore simply to

maximize social welfare (= total utility). The way to ensure this is by taking equal liberties "as settled," i.e., as

inalienable and non-negotiable.

C. SOCIETY AS A COOPERATIVE ENDEAVOR FOR MUTUAL BENEFIT: "There is an identity of

interests in social cooperation;" that is, we all benefit from being in society (as opposed to being in a state of

nature). Thus, being in society creates benefits.

D. THE ROLE OF PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE: We need a set of principles for deciding how to distributethese benefits.

E. INTERLUDE: NOGGLE’S PARABLE OF THE ORCHARD.

F. A WELL-ORDERED SOCIETY: Definition of a well-ordered society as, roughly, a society in which

people agree about what is just. This definition is important to Rawls's later work, but we probably won't get

into it here. Because most societies are not well-ordered, they need some way to settle disagreements aboutwhat is just.

G. CONCEPT VERSUS CONCEPTION: The CONCEPT OF JUSTICE is: that benefits and burdens of

cooperation are to be distributed properly. Various CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE are theories about what

"proper" means here.

H. OTHER BASES FOR CHOICE OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS: This is a methodological point: while

justice is the First Virtue of Social Institutions, we will not choose a theory of justice only on the basis of how

fairly it distributes the benefits and burdens of cooperation. We will also want to look at some of the broader consequences of accepting a particular theory of justice before we decide whether to accept it. This

methodological point is crucial for understanding the New Rawls, but we won't worry too much about it.

Section 2: "Basic Structure as Subject"

A. APPLICATION OF THE THEORY: Rawls's theory will apply primarily to the basic structure of society.

That is, it will determine what the basic institutions should look like. For example: should we have private

property, redistributive (progressive) income taxes, a capitalist economy, monogamous families, and so on. It

will also tell us about what basic rights there should be. The theory will not "micro-manage;" that is, it will

not tell us about specific laws, tax-rates, and so on.



B. AGNOSTIC ABOUT OTHER INSTITUTIONS: The theory is only meant to apply to the State. It may or

may not work for private associations like clubs, families, etc.

C. STRICT COMPLIANCE THEORY: The theory is meant to apply only in societies characterized by "strict

compliance." This is a somewhat utopian qualification which may (or may not) radically limit the application

of the theory to actual societies.

D. HISTORICAL NOTES: The rest of the section (p. 9f) is more or less irrelevant for our purposes.

Section 3: The Main Idea of the Theory of Justice

A. SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY: Rawls announces his allegiance to the social contract tradition: justice

equals fairness, and fairness is to be explained in terms of what a person could agree to "in an initial situation

of equality" if they were free and rational. Each part of this formulation is important, especially the part about

equality.

B. THE ORIGINAL POSITION: This "original position" plays the same role in Rawls's theory of Justice as

Fairness as the State of Nature plays in traditional social contract theory.

C. THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE: Description of the Veil of Ignorance (VI) and the Original Position (OP).

D. THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE, CHANCE, AND THE TWO MORAL POWERS: The initial situation

behind the VI is "fair between individuals as moral persons, that is, as rational beings ...." Three things to note

here:

1. The VI is what it is because it has to be that way to be fair. It deprives us of any knowledge of those things

about us that are true because of chance. Thus it prevents us from making decisions based on "naturaladvantages" that we may have due to luck and social circumstances.

2. Rawls claims that, for his purposes, behind the veil of ignorance, people have two main features. He calls

these the "two moral powers." The first is the ability to set and pursue their own ends, to construct and

implement a "rational plan of life," and to adopt and be guided by a "conception of the good." The second isto have and be guided by a "sense of justice." That means that they can internalize moral norms and act upon

them.

3. THE TWO MORAL POWERS ARE THE MAIN THINGS THAT ARE RELEVANT BEHIND THE

VEIL OF IGNORANCE. From behind the veil, we know almost nothing about ourselves and others except

that we have the two moral powers. We also know basic facts about the social sciences and economics. (More

detail will be added in a later section.)

E. THE ORIGINAL POSITION AS A LOCATION FROM WHICH FAIR AGREEMENTS CAN BE

MADE: The basic idea then, is that because the OP is fair, anything you would agree to in it is also fair. Inother words, if you object to anything you would have agreed to in the OP, then it must be because you would

rather have chosen in some way that you could not have behind the VI. To do that, you would have had to

exploit knowledge about your particular situation that is ruled out by the VI. And to do that, Rawls wants toinsist, would be unfair. The basic idea then, is that any society you would choose in order to gain an

advantage from your social status, gender, race, natural talents, conception of the good (e.g. your religion)

would be unfair. The VI keeps you from choosing a set of institutions that would discriminate on the basis of

any of the things the VI makes you forget. In that way, it guarantees, says Rawls, that the outcome is fair.

F. THE FOUR STAGE SEQUENCE: The OP is meant to be a decision procedure for setting very basic principles of justice. That is stage one. The idea is that once these principles are chosen, then a constitution

can be formed that will embody those principles. This is stage two. The constitution will then set up a



legislature, which will enact laws that accord with the constitution and therefore the basic principles of

justice. That is stage three. Then, judges and administrators will implement those laws. This is stage four.

(More details about these stages can be found in section 31, which is optional reading for this course.)

G. THE MOTIVATIONS OF THE PARTIES: What motivates people in the OP? They are mutually

disinterested but not necessarily egoists. They do not know what their goals are, but they do want to try to

achieve them.

H. A PRELIMINARY ARGUMENT AGAINST UTILITARIANISM: If you do not know who you will be in

society, you will not want to agree to a system that allows one person to be sacrificed for the good of others,

since you might turn out to be that one person.

I. A PRELIMINARY ARGUMENT FOR RAWLS’S TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE: Instead, he thinks

we would agree to two main principles: basic equality of rights, and (what will later be called the Difference

Principle) that social inequalities are only just if they help out the least fortunate.

J. PLAN OF THE OVERALL ARGUMENT: The argument has two parts: one is that the OP is a fair way to

choose the principles to regulate the basic structure of society; the other is that the two principles he proposes

would be chosen in the OP. These are separate arguments.

Section 4: Justification and the OP

A. BASIC CLAIM: Rawls claims that what makes a political system just is that it would be chosen in the OP.

This section will be an initial step in justifying that claim. It is not the whole argument, but rather a kind of

"preview" of the argument that will unfold in later sections.

B. THE OP AS AN UNBIASED VANTAGE POINT: The OP is a way of making vivid the idea that societies

should not advantage or disadvantage persons because of race, gender, social position, religion, intelligence,

wealth, etc. To ensure this, we imagine what it would be like to choose a society if we did no know our race,

gender, financial status, religion, etc. If we do not know these things, we cannot "rig" our decision about what

kind of society to adopt in such a way as to guarantee our own advantage.

C. A DEVICE OF REPRESENTATION: "The Original Position is at Hand:" The OP is just a metaphor, a

device to help us envision a society that set up fairly. Pretending to be in the OP is thus simply a tool to help

us think about what kind of society is fair and just.

D. REFLECTIVE EQUILIBRIUM. This idea is very important in meta-ethics and normative epistemology.

But we won't talk in much detail about it here. Reflective equilibrium is a theory about how to figure out what

moral principles are the right ones. Basically the rough idea is this: we start out with the most obvious,

unquestionable moral principles we can think of. We then produce a theory that makes the best sense of them.

If that theory conflicts with other (less obvious, more questionable) moral beliefs, then we will either adjust

the theory or change our beliefs. Once we get the theory and our beliefs to match up, then we are in

"reflective equilibrium." This applies to Rawls's theory int eh following way: we start out with certain

unquestionable moral principles, e.g., a person is not more valuable just because he is white or a male or a

Protestant. We then construct a theory that will fit this belief. This theory is the OP. We can then use this newtheory to help us answer questions that we don't know the answers to, such as: what should the basic features

of society be like. As I say, this is more meta-ethics and moral epistemology than I want to get into in much

detail. If you don't understand it, you can either see me about it during office ours, or simply ignore it.

E. MOTIVATION FOR THE OP AND ITS RESULTS: FAIRNESS: Why should we care what we would

agree to in the OP? The answer should be fairly obvious if you've been reading along, but nevertheless, many people don't get it. The answer is that the OP embodies conditions that are fair. If we care about what is fair



(as most of us do), then we should care what we would agree to in the OP, because what we would agree to

there is fair. Or so Rawls argues.

Section 11: The Two Principles of Justice

A. RAWLS’S PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE: In this section, Rawls is going to give us what he thinks is the

answer to the question: "What would we choose in the OP?" A bit later he will give you a more detailedargument as to why we would choose these two principles in the OP.

B. AN INITIAL FORMULATION: The formulation of the Two Principles of Justice he gives here is not

final. Throughout A Theory of Justice, he keeps fine tuning the formulation of the principles. Most of that

tinkering will not concern us here. For the most part we can work with this initial statement (and I'vesimplified even more here).

C. THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE:

First Principle: Each person is to have an equal right to the most freedom compatible with everyone else

having that same amount of freedom

Second Principle: any social and economic inequalities (=inequalities in the distribution of primary goods)

MUST be arranged so that:

(a) they are "attached" to positions and offices open to all (this is often called "fair equality of opportunity.")

(b) they are to everyone's advantage

D. THE DEMOCRATIC INTERPRETATION OF THE SECOND PRINCIPLE: In sections 12-14, Rawls

considers various possible ways to further refine the second principle. He considers several different ways to

"interpret" the second principle. The one he settles on (for reasons that are more technical than I want to get

into in an undergraduate course) is called "Democratic Equality." According to the democratic interpretation–

which is the interpretation that Rawls settles on–the Second Principle should be read the following way:

"The higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which

improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society. The intuitive idea is that the social

order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to theadvantage of those less fortunate." (65).

This refined interpretation of the second principle is called the Difference Principle.

E. THE FINAL FORM OF THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE: For convenience, here is the full set of

the Two Principles of Justice (2PJ) in their final form:

First Principle: Each person is to have an equal right to the most freedom compatible with everyone else

having that same amount of freedom

Second Principle: any social and economic inequalities MUST be arranged so that they are:

(a) attached to positions and offices open to all ("fair equality of opportunity.")

(b) work to the benefit of the least advantaged group in society. (The Difference Principle)



F. IMPLICATIONS OF THE DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE: The Difference Principle (DP) implies that it is

OK for some people to have more money or social power IF allowing the them to have the extra power or

wealth is good for everyone including the least fortunate, AND if each person has a fair chance of getting the

extra power or wealth.

G. THE IDEA OF THE REPRESENTATIVE MAN: DEFINING SOCIAL POSITIONS. In section 16, Rawls

considers several ways to define social groups. This is important, since the DP claims that inequalities of wealth and income can only be fair if they benefit the least advantaged group in society. Whether or not

something is to the advantage of a group will, of course, depend on how exactly one defines who is in thatgroup. Rawls looks at several possibilities. He does not settle on one particular one, but he does indicate that

either of two general methods would be acceptable:

(a) The first method would be simply to identify a relevant kind of economic "player" or "social position",

such as that of an unskilled worker.

(b) The second method would be to identify the least advantaged class simply by relative income. The

suggestion Rawls likes is to define the lowest economic class as the one which makes less than half themedian income in the society.

H. BASIC STRUCTURE AS SUBJECT: These principles apply only to the basic structure (that is, the maininstitutions) of society. They are not to be used to micro manage the economy, or tax rates, or anything like

that.

I. SERIAL ORDER: This is sometimes called "lexical" order or "lexical priority." If we cannot satisfy both of

the principles at the same time, then we MUST satisfy the first one first. (Later he introduces some exceptionsto this, mainly for under-developed societies, but we will for the most part ignore the exceptions.)

J. CONSEQUENCES OF THE SERIAL ORDERING OF THE PRINCIPLES: No one can (either voluntarily

or involuntarily) trade off her political freedoms for more power, wealth, etc. We make sure we all have equal

basic freedoms and basic rights, and then we worry about dividing up the other stuff.

K. PRESUMPTION IN FAVOR OF EQUALITY: The Two Principles of Justice are a way to make specific a

much more general conception of justice (which will sometimes be called the "general conception of justice"):all social values should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to everyone's advantage.

L. PRIMARY GOODS: Rawls introduces this term to cover all the things that the Two Principles of Justice

are going to divide up. They are things like rights, opportunities, incomes, power, and so on. More on this in

the section 15.

Section 15: Primary Goods

A. UTILITARIANISM AND MEASUREMENT OF HAPPINESS: This is one of those passages that iswritten largely in response to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says to maximize happiness. One (among many)

problems Rawls (and he's not alone in this) has with utilitarianism is that it is notoriously difficult to measurehappiness. (The first page or so of this section is a complicated way of saying this.) Rawls thinks it is so

difficult to measure happiness that his theory is not going to be a theory about how to divide up happiness.

B. WHAT JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS (RAWLS’S THEORY) WILL MEASURE: Now if we could measure

happiness, you might think that the thing to do would be to formulate the difference principle in terms of

happiness: we should all get equal shares of happiness except if inequality would make everyone (including



the least happy) happier. Instead of dividing up happiness, Rawls wants his theory to divide up "primary

goods," like wealth, political power, and so on.

C. EXAMPLES OF PRIMARY GOODS: Primary goods include three main classes of things:

1. Basic rights and liberties (what we would often call freedoms). These are the kinds of things that are

protected in the Bill of Rights: Free speech, freedom of religion, etc., including the freedom to exercise thekind of individuality that Mill argued for. Generally Rawls refers to these in A Theory of Justice as "basicliberties."

2. Non-basic rights and prerogatives that are associated with specific positions in society, especially political

positions. These would include the powers of a Congress person to vote on laws, the power of a judge to hear

cases at law, etc.

3. Income and wealth.

D. THE PRIMARY GOODS AND THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE. Remember that according to

Rawls, justice is mainly about dividing things up. The things to be divided up are, on his theory, the primary

goods. However, the different kinds of primary goods are to be distributed according to different principles.

1. The First Principle of Justice applies to the primary goods in category 1 above (the basic liberties, rights,

and freedoms). They are to be distributed equally, and in such a way that each person enjoys the greatest

"amount" of them consistent with everyone else having the same amount.

2. The Second Principle of Justice applies to the primary goods in categories 2 and 3 above: the rights and

prerogatives of political office, and income and wealth. These are to be divided up equally unless an unequal

distribution benefits the least advantaged group in society. And in any case, each person must be given an

equal fair opportunity to obtain these goods.

E. TWO FEATURES OF PRIMARY GOODS

1. First, they are strongly correlated to welfare. So in effect, they are a rough index of happiness, so that if wereally did think we should divide up happiness, a good practical approach would be to divide up primary

goods, because they tend to be correlated with happiness.

2. They are things that "the rational man wants whatever else he wants." That is, if we are in the OP, we

cannot base our reasoning on our goals and life-plans, since we do not (because of the VI) know what those

are. The primary goods are "all-purpose means." That is, they are means to whatever goals we might have.

F. PRIMARY GOODS AND THE ORIGINAL POSITION: Behind the Veil of Ignorance (VI), we don't

know what our goals are. But we do know that we care about achieving them. Since we cannot try to directly

ensure that the state we will choose will be one in which we can achieve our goals (since we don't know what

they are), we do the next best thing: we try to make sure that we have a fair share of whatever will help us

achieve our goals. These things, these all-purpose-means-to--goals-whatever-they-are, are the primary goods

(money, power, etc.). So if you don't know what you'll want behind the VI, then it makes sense to try tosecure a fair share of primary goods like money and power, since they will help you get what you want,

whatever that turns out to be. Since this is true for everyone behind the VI, we will end up dividing up these primary goods.

G. SOME TECHNICAL OBJECTIONS: Rawls then goes on to examine a couple of possible objections to or

difficulties with the idea of primary goods. None of them will concern us.



Section 17: The Tendency to Equality

A. TWO GOALS OF THE SECTION: First, Rawls wants to show how the kind of society his theory

endorses is "sufficiently egalitarian"–that is, that it treats people as equals. Second, Rawls wants to show thatit does not end up justifying a "callous meritocracy." (A meritocracy is where people get ahead based only on

their merit, e.g., their talent, intelligence, ambition, and so on. A "callous" meritocracy would be one where

the losers in this competition would get left out in the cold. "Social Darwinism" would be one form of callousmeritocracy.)

B. THE PRINCIPLE OF REDRESS: This principle is that "undeserved inequalities call out for redress." The

difference principle allows for such redress. That is, if people have been harmed by things they did notdeserve to have happen (like being born not very bright, or being sickly), and if this puts them in the least

fortunate part of society, then the difference principle will help them out.. This "redress principle" holds that

treating people equally actually tells you to pay more attention to the less fortunate.

C. THE DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE AND REDRESS: The difference principle "achieves some of the intent

of" the principle of redress. (The DP "gives some weight to the considerations singled out by the principle of

redress.") That is, it calls for allowing any inequalities that will help the least fortunate. Thus no inequality is

permissible UNLESS it benefits the least fortunate. This means that social inequalities will in fact benefit

anyone who has fallen behind in the great game of life due to a lack of talent, intelligence, etc.

D. TALENTS AND ABILITIES AS A COMMON ASSET TO BE SHARED BY THE COMMUNITY. In

effect, the difference principle ends up treating the common pool of talents as a collective commodity. That is,

we will not let you profit from your talents unless the less fortunate also get to profit.

E. JUSTICE AND NATURAL TALENTS AND ABILITIES. Rawls claims that the natural distribution of

talents and abilities is neither just nor unjust. What is just or unjust is how society responds to that

distribution.

F. THE DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE AND RECIPROCITY: At this point, the idea of justice being the

distribution of the benefits of social cooperation is so important: the talented would only agree to this

redistribution (the restriction that hey can only profit from their talents if the least fortunate also get to

benefit) if we see the profits you can get from your talents as being one of the benefits of social cooperation.

If there were no society, your talent for, say, playing bluegrass cello would not get you anything. It is only

because we have society that we can have bluegrass cello concerns that you can charge for. And since your ability to profit from your talent depends on the existence of society, we (that is, society as a whole) have the

right to decide how those profits will get used.

G. THE DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE AND FRATERNITY. The ideal of fraternity, as a political concept,

means not wanting to have more at the expense of others. The DP conforms to this principle, since it is a

refusal to allow some to be better off unless this gives the less well off more than they would have had

otherwise. Thus, it is expresses a connection, a solidarity, between those who do better with those who do less

well. The connection is that the fortunate will only benefit if it also benefits the less fortunate. This is an

example of what could be a slogan for Rawlsian (as well as other Leftist versions of) Liberalism: We’re all inthis together.

H. AGAINST CALLOUS MERITOCRACY: This fact means that a society which conforms to the 2PJ will

not turn out to be a callous meritocracy. Such a meritocracy would be one in which the talented profit from

their talents, and the untalented are left to fend for themselves. The society that conforms to the 2PJ, however,

is one in which the talents of the talented are considered as a sort of common asset. The society recognized

that the talented are "entitled" to them (in the sense that it would be wrong to try to take them away

somehow), but that they do not "deserve" them. Such a society allows the talented to profit from their talents

ONLY when their doing so makes things better for the LAG (least advantaged group–typically the group thatis relatively untalented.)

god and john rawls

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