I've been reading and thinking about constructivism today mainly as a response of some sort to it will have to feature in work I am currently pursuing. Whilst doing so, however, a question arose for me in relation to how constructivism is understood by Onora O'Neill in her criticism of Rawls. This question concerned the priority she gives, in her criticism of Rawls, to the notion of "reflective equilibrium".
The essay of O'Neill's I'm referring to is one that appears in Samuel Freeman's edited collection on Rawls. In this piece O'Neill concentrates on the way in which the constructive procedure in Rawls works looking at the range of what can be constructed according to Rawls, the justification he offers of the constructive procedure and, most importantly for her critique, the address of Rawls' construction. The view offered by her of these topics ranges across Rawls' work, moving from Theory to Political Liberalism.
In O'Neill's picture of Theory the key notion is "reflective equilibrium" which is taken to provide a coherentist test of "our considered judgments" and to rely on a conception of the reasonable that is explicitly discussed in Rawls' later notion of "Kantian constructivism". O'Neill subsequently refers to this notion of "reflective equilibrium" when she draws out that "Kantian constructivism" appeals to an idealised Kantian view of the person and rests its appeal to this notion on reference to "our moral experience". Part of what enables this appeal for O'Neill is Rawls' reliance upon a coherentist justification of practical reason in his view of "Kantian constructivism". Her view of Rawls' later "political" turn is that what happens is that the conception of practical reason as rested on a generic coherence is replaced by a closed appeal to "public reason" where the resources of public reason are simply derived from the common conceptions of a democratic culture much as the earlier appeal was to "our moral experience".
In contrast to Rawls' later political turn O'Neill sets out a view of Kantian reason as something that cannot be anchored in a given public culture but accessible in principle to anyone including "outsiders" to the culture of the West that produced Kant's own philosophy. So O'Neill's first move is to depict the appeal to "public reason" Rawls makes as a fatal concession to relativism. The point in doing so is to widen the view of what is to count as public reason suggesting that reasoning is not "completely" public when it rests on appeals to particular properties and beliefs which can appear merely arbitrary to anyone outside the original community that rests on them. In contrast to this view O'Neill states that we need justifications of claims that can be satisfied only in terms of what can be followed in principle by anyone. This is part of what motivates O'Neill's general view that the categorical imperative is not merely the supreme principle of morality but also the supreme principle of reason.
An implication of O'Neill's argument is that reason is "cosmopolitan" for Kant and does not rest on "bounded societies" as political institutions are incapable of conferring justification. This is why O'Neill argues that Kant's view of the construction of ethical principles is more demanding than the "Kantian constructivism" described by Rawls as Kant requires justification to be capable of "aiming to reach all others without restriction". This is why practical reason itself is something that O'Neill argues is capable of construction by Kant as it was not by Rawls.
Having rehearsed O'Neill's critique of Rawls I now want to suggest that there is a central problem with her view that does not apply to Rawls' constructivism and suggests a reason for thinking that Rawls' appeal to "reflective equilibrium" and to "our moral experience" may be less alien to Kant than O'Neill's arguments would lead one to suppose. The first problem that can be posed with O'Neill's view is that it is unclear from her general picture of reason how the process of public reason is to be carried out. She argues that public reason is incomplete if it involves appeal to particular beliefs held by some and thereby appears to take the reference to universal law to require abandonment of commitment to any given prior beliefs and to provide us with a de novo conception of justification. It is partly due to following a view like this however that the procedure of trying to justify the Kantian appeal to universal laws off the ground gets involved in terrible tangles. The notoriously involved difficulties in providing justifications of universalised maxims that are morally permissible arises from thinking that we need to provide an account for maxims that no one normally takes to need justification at all. Necessarily any and every type of maxim has to be looked at in terms of its permissibility if the point of appeal to universal law is to provide us with a means of assessing morality without bringing in previously agreed moral data.
Moreover, the point of appeal to public reason on O'Neill's view appears to be to arrive at a standard for what can be shown to be acceptable so that the procedure of public reason is itself the arbiter of what we agree can be done. This makes the arrival at universal agreement the ground for permissibility rather than the possibility of convergence being shown to be based upon salient factors that allow the agreement to hold. This seems to put the burden of justification in the wrong place. A second but related point concerns how the standards of public reason on a neutrally determined view of universal reason are to be set out. This point concerns not the kind of consideration that Rawls was interested in with reference to "pluralism" but rather deep problems with reasoning with some who appear to be committed to principles that are deeply antithetical to universality. Racist views for example are directly in contradiction to appeal to universality and would have to be dealt with as providing non-public reason in some sense but if this is not to be stipulative through moral content (as clearly is impossible on O'Neill's view) this has to require a structural notion of formal public reasoning to rule out certain types of reasoning from the start.
In order to rule out appeal to certain kinds of reasons as non-public there have to be ways of showing to those who adopt these reasons a basis for agreement on their behalf to a standard of reasoning that rules out appeals to their favoured principles. The means that O'Neill appears to favour is by reference to a view of agency that requires us to see the agency of others as intertwined with our own in an important way. So she refers in Towards Justice and Virtue to activity as inclusive of plurality, connection and finitude. What is meant by these notions is that we have to relate to others as independent sources of activity (plurality) who there is a real possibility we will affect by acting (connection) and that these others are limited enough to be vulnerable to our actions (finitude). Conversely we are reciprocally related to them in the same way. So rules of action should generally take these characteristics into account. It is likely that the point of these descriptors is to give a basic notion of moral standing to O'Neill but the problem is that the notion has itself to be constructed in terms of "public reasons" and there are problems with doing so. The basic sense that we would expect from her general view is that the reasons in question would have a neutral status and not require any one to adopt specific beliefs in the sense that she criticises Rawls for requiring. If that is right, however, then the notion of plurality only points to a constraint on my action if I independently have reasons to regard others as having standing as it does not itself provide them with such standing. The fact that I am connected to others and vulnerable to them provides some general prudential constraints on action but, again, is insufficient to give others serious moral standing. The only one of these three criteria that really has the significance that it would provide a reason for morally taking others seriously is the criteria of vulnerability but if I interpret it from a first-person perspective it only grounds a prudential one and requiring as a matter of reason that I see it more broadly is not to follow the basic constructivist rule.
If O'Neill's view of public reason is one that just draws on generic criteria like these it is not going to get off the ground and it requires some additional elements to be taken seriously as a guide for a normative conception of public reason. Such further elements are available if we make the appeal to common sense that Rawls makes with his notion of "reflective equilibrium" and for which O'Neill criticises him. The ability to appeal to "common sense" as a means of understanding conditions of action is part of what is at work in Rawls' discussion of such things as the "circumstances of justice" and the "strains of commitment", both of which build into practical reason the basis for the coherence requirements that O'Neill dislikes. Without them, however, she has to fall back on a generic conception of public reason that is either too thin to build anything from or to implicitly rely on normative commitments that she has not constructively justified. Either way it seems less obvious than O'Neill may think that cosmopolitan conceptions of reason can get by without appeal to some views of pre-conceived moral standards.
Not only is this so but Kant's own procedure seems not to mirror the generic requirements of practical reason that O'Neill presents. Not only does the first part of Kant's Groundwork proceed from data of common human reason but the examples of how to test maxims that are supplied by Kant in this work presuppose the normative existence of practices. This is evident in the way Kant discusses promises, suicide, the cultivation of talents and benevolence. In each case Kant proceeds from a pre-existent conception of moral views and provides a means for understanding, by reference to them, reasons for thinking certain types of maxims are impermissible. The maxims in question do not arise as de novo tests but as ones that have pertinence against the background of a set of practices which give them the sense that they have. Perhaps thus Rawls' reference to "reflective equilibrium" is rather more Kantian than O'Neill's allegedly "cosmopolitan" view of reason.
Showing posts with label Political Liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Political Liberalism. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 June 2012
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Joshua Cohen, Rawls and Occupying Philosophy
I listened to this podcast the other day. In it Professor Joshua Cohen a leading Rawlsian philosopher aligns the general outlook of A Theory of Justice to the "occupy" movement that has been significant recently both in the US and the UK. Whilst Cohen's remarks are rather slanted towards the US situation and also signally fail to address the question of whether the later Rawlsian conception of "political liberalism" fits as comfortably with the "occupy" movement as he suggests, it is, nonetheless, a very good, clear interview that outlines the general conception of "justice as fairness" very well.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Justice As Reciprocity (II)
In the last posting I did on this topic the focus on methodological devices was prominent. Rawls reaches the conclusion, however, that there is a close relationship between the principles of justice and the sense of justice. And from this connection he states some key points, including the argument that justice is "the first moral virtue" as it arises from the concept of morality being related to self-interested persons in similar situations. Effectively, if it is possible at all to transcend the bounds of rational self-interest then this is the concept that we reach when we do so.
From the "conjectural derivation" as Rawls here terms the "original position" we have an assured root of both justice and fairness in reciprocity. Reciprocity is connected to the notion of free peoples relating to each other in a situation where no one possesses moral authority over another and we find ourselves engaged in some kind of mutual endeavour. Interestingly connected to this stress on reciprocity is the sense that just principles are ones that require people to be able to affirm them when they openly face one another. So Rawls builds in a publicity constraint on the principles that can be understood as ones of justice.
This publicity constraint is one that enables communicative relations between people and without it there can only be relations between people based on force. After building in this publicity constraint Rawls distinguishes fairness and justice from each other in order to be able to connect them back together. Fairness, on Rawls' view, applies to practices where there is either a competition between people or a cooperative activity in which they have no compulsion to participate. This is why the notion of fairness applies particularly to games and yet also to trade and bargaining. Justice, by contrast, applies to practices in which there is no choice whether or not one participates. There is, that is, an element of necessity in justice which applies to institutions that are generally pervasive or to practices which, if limited in application, are nonetheless ones that have no optional character for those involved in them.
Judging practices by reference to mutual acknowledgement of principles is to engage in applying the principle of reciprocity to their justification. So if one is engaged in a practice that we can acknowledge as satisfying the principle of reciprocity and so we can accept that its rules are either fair or just then we have no grounds of complaint with regard to it. So, for example, if the rules in question limit our sphere of activity in some important respects, then we have a right to expect that others will acknowledge in their own turn the same kinds of limits. If the practice is understood to be just or fair then there is a basic sense in which we all benefit from participation in it.
When one has thus acknowledged the practice in question as satisfying in this way the principle of reciprocity then it becomes the case that one has a "prima facie" obligation to abide by its rules. This obligation is what Rawls earlier referred to as the duty of fair play. Rawls admits, however, that in terming political obligation the duty of fair play he is extending the use of "fair" here beyond ordinary usage which only relates to acting in accordance with the spirit of a practice. But Rawls regards it as a not "unnatural extension" to incorporate the general obligation to abide by the rules in question as part of the duty of fair play as it requires that expecting the benefits of a practice to accrue to one does mean agreeing to the basis of that practice.
This point involves familiar considerations of "free-riding" that arose already in Rawls' earlier paper on justice as fairness. The interesting point about listing fair play as a prima facie duty is that in so doing Rawls deliberately adopts the language of W.D. Ross' intuitionism (though without referring to Ross). The justification of the general duty of fair play is clear in relation to the earlier mentioned publicity constraint since it meshes with this constraint in a natural way. Rawls further indicates that the recognition of the duty of fair play is not only closely meshed with the publicity constraint but that it is also an essential part of the recognition of another as a person. "To recognize another as a person one must respond to him and act towards him in certain ways; and these ways are intimately connected with the various prima facie duties." In making this point Rawls explicitly attempts to take the notion of prima facie duties away from intuitionist views and incorporate it instead in a basic act of recognition.
This point about recognition is used further in relating fairness to justice in terms of the earlier distinction between voluntary and involuntary engagement of practices. If fairness applies to practices in which one engages voluntarily then it is obvious that no one willingly agrees to play in a game that is stacked against them. So in relating the notion of fair practices to justice we effectively act as if practices that were carried out necessarily had in them the freedom we express in situations of choice.
Having reached this point in the analysis Rawls turns next to a comparison between this notion of justice as reciprocity and the utilitarian view. The utilitarian view is taken to be in clear conflict with the notion of justice Rawls has advanced due to the over-riding concern of utilitarians being with efficiency in which administrators are concerned with rules that have little relation to justice. Utilitarian calculation is concerned with preferences and interests so that it engages in abstraction from the separation of persons.
Rawls presses the case about the difference by considering the case of slavery. Utilitarian calculations concerning it have to begin with the interests of all concerned and, whilst they may well produce from this analysis, a condemnation of slavery, there is a fault at the root of such a conception as it does not relate to the slave-holder and slave in terms of reciprocity. If one has reciprocity at the root then you cannot regard the slave-holder's interests as in way relevant in making out the injustice of the institution that he perpetrates. This does not mean that it could never be treated as provisionally excusable but it could only be related to as such if there was an advance in the reciprocal understanding involved in it on what had previously been established and not at all with regard to interests of a slave-holder.
The principles of justice that Rawls has specified could never select slavery as a bearable system and these principles have special weight in determining the character of reciprocity. Following on the earlier stress on the notion of recognition Rawls subsequently points out that all the elements of justice as reciprocity are involved in Kant's formula of humanity as an end in itself. The general point of the argument, however, and this is importantly different from where Rawls ends up in Political Liberalism, is to show the moral roots of the conception of justice that is being justified.
From the "conjectural derivation" as Rawls here terms the "original position" we have an assured root of both justice and fairness in reciprocity. Reciprocity is connected to the notion of free peoples relating to each other in a situation where no one possesses moral authority over another and we find ourselves engaged in some kind of mutual endeavour. Interestingly connected to this stress on reciprocity is the sense that just principles are ones that require people to be able to affirm them when they openly face one another. So Rawls builds in a publicity constraint on the principles that can be understood as ones of justice.
This publicity constraint is one that enables communicative relations between people and without it there can only be relations between people based on force. After building in this publicity constraint Rawls distinguishes fairness and justice from each other in order to be able to connect them back together. Fairness, on Rawls' view, applies to practices where there is either a competition between people or a cooperative activity in which they have no compulsion to participate. This is why the notion of fairness applies particularly to games and yet also to trade and bargaining. Justice, by contrast, applies to practices in which there is no choice whether or not one participates. There is, that is, an element of necessity in justice which applies to institutions that are generally pervasive or to practices which, if limited in application, are nonetheless ones that have no optional character for those involved in them.
Judging practices by reference to mutual acknowledgement of principles is to engage in applying the principle of reciprocity to their justification. So if one is engaged in a practice that we can acknowledge as satisfying the principle of reciprocity and so we can accept that its rules are either fair or just then we have no grounds of complaint with regard to it. So, for example, if the rules in question limit our sphere of activity in some important respects, then we have a right to expect that others will acknowledge in their own turn the same kinds of limits. If the practice is understood to be just or fair then there is a basic sense in which we all benefit from participation in it.
When one has thus acknowledged the practice in question as satisfying in this way the principle of reciprocity then it becomes the case that one has a "prima facie" obligation to abide by its rules. This obligation is what Rawls earlier referred to as the duty of fair play. Rawls admits, however, that in terming political obligation the duty of fair play he is extending the use of "fair" here beyond ordinary usage which only relates to acting in accordance with the spirit of a practice. But Rawls regards it as a not "unnatural extension" to incorporate the general obligation to abide by the rules in question as part of the duty of fair play as it requires that expecting the benefits of a practice to accrue to one does mean agreeing to the basis of that practice.
This point involves familiar considerations of "free-riding" that arose already in Rawls' earlier paper on justice as fairness. The interesting point about listing fair play as a prima facie duty is that in so doing Rawls deliberately adopts the language of W.D. Ross' intuitionism (though without referring to Ross). The justification of the general duty of fair play is clear in relation to the earlier mentioned publicity constraint since it meshes with this constraint in a natural way. Rawls further indicates that the recognition of the duty of fair play is not only closely meshed with the publicity constraint but that it is also an essential part of the recognition of another as a person. "To recognize another as a person one must respond to him and act towards him in certain ways; and these ways are intimately connected with the various prima facie duties." In making this point Rawls explicitly attempts to take the notion of prima facie duties away from intuitionist views and incorporate it instead in a basic act of recognition.
This point about recognition is used further in relating fairness to justice in terms of the earlier distinction between voluntary and involuntary engagement of practices. If fairness applies to practices in which one engages voluntarily then it is obvious that no one willingly agrees to play in a game that is stacked against them. So in relating the notion of fair practices to justice we effectively act as if practices that were carried out necessarily had in them the freedom we express in situations of choice.
Having reached this point in the analysis Rawls turns next to a comparison between this notion of justice as reciprocity and the utilitarian view. The utilitarian view is taken to be in clear conflict with the notion of justice Rawls has advanced due to the over-riding concern of utilitarians being with efficiency in which administrators are concerned with rules that have little relation to justice. Utilitarian calculation is concerned with preferences and interests so that it engages in abstraction from the separation of persons.
Rawls presses the case about the difference by considering the case of slavery. Utilitarian calculations concerning it have to begin with the interests of all concerned and, whilst they may well produce from this analysis, a condemnation of slavery, there is a fault at the root of such a conception as it does not relate to the slave-holder and slave in terms of reciprocity. If one has reciprocity at the root then you cannot regard the slave-holder's interests as in way relevant in making out the injustice of the institution that he perpetrates. This does not mean that it could never be treated as provisionally excusable but it could only be related to as such if there was an advance in the reciprocal understanding involved in it on what had previously been established and not at all with regard to interests of a slave-holder.
The principles of justice that Rawls has specified could never select slavery as a bearable system and these principles have special weight in determining the character of reciprocity. Following on the earlier stress on the notion of recognition Rawls subsequently points out that all the elements of justice as reciprocity are involved in Kant's formula of humanity as an end in itself. The general point of the argument, however, and this is importantly different from where Rawls ends up in Political Liberalism, is to show the moral roots of the conception of justice that is being justified.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Public Reason and Practical Reason
One of the frustrations of trying to read Amartya Sen's recent book The Idea of Justice has been the recurrent feeling that it is not really concerned to present any kind of theory of justice. The general organisation of the volume shows some reasons for this. Whilst the first part of the work is concerned with what are termed "the demands of justice" the basic argument of this section is for a shift in theorising away from a concentration on institutions to what are alleged to be more situational concerns. However, the situational concerns in question turn out to be extremely general and culminate in an account of impartiality that is aimed at transcending the boundaries of any given society but which does not draw out much more than an allusion to Adam Smith's notion of the "impartial spectator".
The second part of the book then moves on to discussing "forms of reasoning" and presents an argument for taking account of plural types of reasoning as advanced from many sources of concern. This argument for plurality oddly echoes the concerns of John Rawls' second major work Political Liberalism which alleged, in view of the ineluctable pluralism of contemporary society the need to abandon the search for "comprehensive" views of social justice in which moral and political considerations were considered together in favour of a "purely political" theory of public reason. Interestingly, the latter work also concludes with a "reply to Habermas" despite the general argument of Between Facts and Norms also having voiced a criticism of a type similar to that of Political Liberalism of political theories that are guided too much by concerns derived from morality.
The oddest thing about the degree of convergence between these three books is the way in which very similar concerns are expressed despite the authors having quite different aims in view in many respects. Sen deliberately sets his theory up in opposition to that of Rawls, though it is true that it is mainly the early and not the late Rawls that he has in his sights. Habermas' concentration on providing a theory of law that can be disentangled from overly normative theories is again a reply to the early Rawls whilst Rawls' own late work is a considerable revision of the theory he presented earlier on.
However, and returning to the puzzle about the lack of direct engagement on Sen's part with the question of justice, what seems most at issue for each of these works, albeit in different ways, is the exploration of what might be called the theory of public reason. Each of the works marks, thus, not a theory of justice but, at best, a prolegomena to one.
In Rawls' early work A Theory of Justice the subject matter of justice was described as "the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation" (p. 6, both editions). Such a concern was narrowed in one crucial respect that Sen complains about in his discussion of impartiality by being understood in a contractarian way as "a closed system in isolation from other societies" and, in another way, also complained about by Sen, in terms of describing a "well-ordered society" in which everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions.
These two ways in which the subject of justice were narrowed by Rawls concerned focus on institutions as the primary distributive agent of justice within one society on the one hand and a conception of the maximal way such institutions could be conceived of as delivering justice on the other hand. Sen complains both about the focus on institutions per se and on the "closed" character of such focus as concerned only with the operation of one society but his more fundamental complaint is the pursuit of perfection in the theory. It is worth looking at the contrast between Rawls' reason for advancing the theory in terms of such a search for perfection, however, and the reasons why such a search is condemned by Sen. Rawls presented the theory of justice offered in the work of this title most comprehensively as a reply to utilitarianism. Indeed he wrote quite clearly: "My aim is to work out a theory of justice that represents an alternative to utilitarian thought generally" and a characteristic of such thought, commented upon by Rawls, is precisely the comprehensive character of its response to problems of morals and politics. It is to provide a theory that covers the same degree of ground as utilitarianism that Rawls writes A Theory of Justice and yet it is precisely this ambition of it which his later work abandons and which is also the subject of criticism of the early work by both Sen and, in a different way, Habermas.
Sen's basic reason for attacking the kind of comprehensive view presented by A Theory of Justice is his argument that arrival at a set of principles on which all could agree is neither necessary nor sufficient for an account of justice. However the question that emerges at this point concerns the structure and nature of a reason that can guide a given plurality of approaches, a concern that utilitarianism addressed in its own way and which justice as fairness is intended to respond to in a different way. Both theories begin with the understanding that there exist a plurality of persons with separate systems of ends and then determine how to respond to this given situation with procedures for demarcating a public reason. The shift from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism is not one that shifts this concern since the theory of public reason is central to the latter work. Utilitarians also work with a conception of public reason. For Rawls (both early and late) and the utilitarians such a theory of public reason is at the heart of their conception of how to provide an account of legislation (though utilitarians, typically, have no specific account of justice).
Rawls (both early and late) and the utilitarians conceive of the notion of such public reason in terms of an account of impartiality. So also do Sen and Habermas. At this point we can begin to see a key set of structural parallels between the accounts that emerge from each of the theories. In a certain light, the divergence between Rawls' early and late theories can thus seem to have less importance than he gave it. It can also appear that the distance between the early theory and the concerns of Sen and Habermas have, to a degree, been overplayed.
However, what enables a return to understanding the difference between the early Rawls and the works of Sen and Habermas is the manner in which the early work arrives at the conception of public reason offered. Here the conception of public reason is derived from a contractual procedure and driven towards an account of some over-riding principles that are taken to be central to the pursuit of justice, considered as the "first virtue" of social institutions. The problem suggested in Political Liberalism is that the early view presupposes a conception of morality and, in this work, an "impartial" approach is taken towards comprehensive views of it in favour of a view of "reasonable pluralism". It is this that is supposed to mark the understanding of a "reasonable" view of the political but such a view does itself make striking presuppositions including ones favourable to "democracy". It is this that marks the theory in question as "liberal".
In making these presuppositions the later Rawls effectively conceals under the heading of "politics" some deep moral choices that are meant to guide the interaction between persons and shape the basis of public reason. In a sense, although the topic of public reason is much more to the fore in Political Liberalism than in A Theory of Justice the truth is that the former work presupposes an account of practical reason and subordinates it within its description of public reason.
Exactly the same thing occurs within the work of Sen as in Political Liberalism and it is precisely this way in which an assumed account of practical reason is effectively subsumed within the description of public reason that produces the effect in both works of a kind of pious appeal. Both works really take the essentials for granted and this follows from the abandonment, I would suggest, of the aspiration towards a theory that has a clear reference to the ideal. Take out the ideal and you are only left with a supposition about the real, a supposition that was well supplied by utilitarian calculations. In a central sense, the abandonment of the comprehensive view ceded the ground of such views back to the utilitarian picture that the early Rawls was so careful at providing an alternative to.
It would be a different matter to reply to Habermas and would require a more detailed posting but suffice it to say that the disappearance of "discourse ethics" from Between Facts and Norms is of a piece with the retreat from comprehensive views in Political Liberalism and the endless pursuit of pluralism in The Idea of Justice. All three of these works move in a non-ideal space and, whilst the need for non-ideal theory is real enough, the shape and fate of each of these works suggests strongly that the abandonment of comprehensive views was part of a structural neglect of the theory of practical reason.
Essentially, in arguing for a view of public reason that emerges from a more generic account of practical reason, I am aiming not merely at a rescue of the perspective of A Theory of Justice but also for the need to think about the manner of approach Rawls developed in this early work in relation to the classic manner in which Kant's Doctrine of Right relates to his general account of practical reason. The latter is itself a controversial topic but the need to see Kant's own conception as "comprehensive" is part of the requirement for a revival of such an approach if a theory of justice is to be defended, a theory, that is, that enables distributions to be seen from the perspective of a public reason that has been guided by an approach to practical reason.
The second part of the book then moves on to discussing "forms of reasoning" and presents an argument for taking account of plural types of reasoning as advanced from many sources of concern. This argument for plurality oddly echoes the concerns of John Rawls' second major work Political Liberalism which alleged, in view of the ineluctable pluralism of contemporary society the need to abandon the search for "comprehensive" views of social justice in which moral and political considerations were considered together in favour of a "purely political" theory of public reason. Interestingly, the latter work also concludes with a "reply to Habermas" despite the general argument of Between Facts and Norms also having voiced a criticism of a type similar to that of Political Liberalism of political theories that are guided too much by concerns derived from morality.
The oddest thing about the degree of convergence between these three books is the way in which very similar concerns are expressed despite the authors having quite different aims in view in many respects. Sen deliberately sets his theory up in opposition to that of Rawls, though it is true that it is mainly the early and not the late Rawls that he has in his sights. Habermas' concentration on providing a theory of law that can be disentangled from overly normative theories is again a reply to the early Rawls whilst Rawls' own late work is a considerable revision of the theory he presented earlier on.
However, and returning to the puzzle about the lack of direct engagement on Sen's part with the question of justice, what seems most at issue for each of these works, albeit in different ways, is the exploration of what might be called the theory of public reason. Each of the works marks, thus, not a theory of justice but, at best, a prolegomena to one.
In Rawls' early work A Theory of Justice the subject matter of justice was described as "the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation" (p. 6, both editions). Such a concern was narrowed in one crucial respect that Sen complains about in his discussion of impartiality by being understood in a contractarian way as "a closed system in isolation from other societies" and, in another way, also complained about by Sen, in terms of describing a "well-ordered society" in which everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions.
These two ways in which the subject of justice were narrowed by Rawls concerned focus on institutions as the primary distributive agent of justice within one society on the one hand and a conception of the maximal way such institutions could be conceived of as delivering justice on the other hand. Sen complains both about the focus on institutions per se and on the "closed" character of such focus as concerned only with the operation of one society but his more fundamental complaint is the pursuit of perfection in the theory. It is worth looking at the contrast between Rawls' reason for advancing the theory in terms of such a search for perfection, however, and the reasons why such a search is condemned by Sen. Rawls presented the theory of justice offered in the work of this title most comprehensively as a reply to utilitarianism. Indeed he wrote quite clearly: "My aim is to work out a theory of justice that represents an alternative to utilitarian thought generally" and a characteristic of such thought, commented upon by Rawls, is precisely the comprehensive character of its response to problems of morals and politics. It is to provide a theory that covers the same degree of ground as utilitarianism that Rawls writes A Theory of Justice and yet it is precisely this ambition of it which his later work abandons and which is also the subject of criticism of the early work by both Sen and, in a different way, Habermas.
Sen's basic reason for attacking the kind of comprehensive view presented by A Theory of Justice is his argument that arrival at a set of principles on which all could agree is neither necessary nor sufficient for an account of justice. However the question that emerges at this point concerns the structure and nature of a reason that can guide a given plurality of approaches, a concern that utilitarianism addressed in its own way and which justice as fairness is intended to respond to in a different way. Both theories begin with the understanding that there exist a plurality of persons with separate systems of ends and then determine how to respond to this given situation with procedures for demarcating a public reason. The shift from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism is not one that shifts this concern since the theory of public reason is central to the latter work. Utilitarians also work with a conception of public reason. For Rawls (both early and late) and the utilitarians such a theory of public reason is at the heart of their conception of how to provide an account of legislation (though utilitarians, typically, have no specific account of justice).
Rawls (both early and late) and the utilitarians conceive of the notion of such public reason in terms of an account of impartiality. So also do Sen and Habermas. At this point we can begin to see a key set of structural parallels between the accounts that emerge from each of the theories. In a certain light, the divergence between Rawls' early and late theories can thus seem to have less importance than he gave it. It can also appear that the distance between the early theory and the concerns of Sen and Habermas have, to a degree, been overplayed.
However, what enables a return to understanding the difference between the early Rawls and the works of Sen and Habermas is the manner in which the early work arrives at the conception of public reason offered. Here the conception of public reason is derived from a contractual procedure and driven towards an account of some over-riding principles that are taken to be central to the pursuit of justice, considered as the "first virtue" of social institutions. The problem suggested in Political Liberalism is that the early view presupposes a conception of morality and, in this work, an "impartial" approach is taken towards comprehensive views of it in favour of a view of "reasonable pluralism". It is this that is supposed to mark the understanding of a "reasonable" view of the political but such a view does itself make striking presuppositions including ones favourable to "democracy". It is this that marks the theory in question as "liberal".
In making these presuppositions the later Rawls effectively conceals under the heading of "politics" some deep moral choices that are meant to guide the interaction between persons and shape the basis of public reason. In a sense, although the topic of public reason is much more to the fore in Political Liberalism than in A Theory of Justice the truth is that the former work presupposes an account of practical reason and subordinates it within its description of public reason.
Exactly the same thing occurs within the work of Sen as in Political Liberalism and it is precisely this way in which an assumed account of practical reason is effectively subsumed within the description of public reason that produces the effect in both works of a kind of pious appeal. Both works really take the essentials for granted and this follows from the abandonment, I would suggest, of the aspiration towards a theory that has a clear reference to the ideal. Take out the ideal and you are only left with a supposition about the real, a supposition that was well supplied by utilitarian calculations. In a central sense, the abandonment of the comprehensive view ceded the ground of such views back to the utilitarian picture that the early Rawls was so careful at providing an alternative to.
It would be a different matter to reply to Habermas and would require a more detailed posting but suffice it to say that the disappearance of "discourse ethics" from Between Facts and Norms is of a piece with the retreat from comprehensive views in Political Liberalism and the endless pursuit of pluralism in The Idea of Justice. All three of these works move in a non-ideal space and, whilst the need for non-ideal theory is real enough, the shape and fate of each of these works suggests strongly that the abandonment of comprehensive views was part of a structural neglect of the theory of practical reason.
Essentially, in arguing for a view of public reason that emerges from a more generic account of practical reason, I am aiming not merely at a rescue of the perspective of A Theory of Justice but also for the need to think about the manner of approach Rawls developed in this early work in relation to the classic manner in which Kant's Doctrine of Right relates to his general account of practical reason. The latter is itself a controversial topic but the need to see Kant's own conception as "comprehensive" is part of the requirement for a revival of such an approach if a theory of justice is to be defended, a theory, that is, that enables distributions to be seen from the perspective of a public reason that has been guided by an approach to practical reason.
Monday, 6 September 2010
Rawls on Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory (III)
In my last posting on this topic I discussed the way in which Rawls' lexical priority of principles was meant to limit the role of intuition in non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory is meant to deal with conditions of non-compliance and Rawls discusses two types of way this is meant to work. On the one hand, there are natural limitations and historical contingencies. On the other hand, there need to be principles for how to "meet" injustice. If we relate the principle of liberty to principles of non-compliance, for example, we can see one of the "permanent" conditions of human life concerns the need for order and this need limits, in certain respects, the application of the principle of liberty. The "meeting" of injustice has to be assessed by, for example, considering the ways in which liberty has to deal with those who lack tolerance and in regard to them we have to draw lines that show ways in which tolerance gets limited. However the degrees of limitation of this principle of liberty are quite different to the degrees of limitation of Rawls' second principle (concerning equality) given the lexical priority of this principle over the second principle.
Rawls' discussion of historical contingencies is, however, only really appropriately part of non-ideal theory in certain respects since he makes clear that paternalistic principles (such as apply in treatment of children) are really not based on departures from ideal principles but rather on applications of them to special circumstances. By contrast, in section 26 of Theory he points to cases in which "social circumstances do not allow the effective establishment" of basic rights such as are given in the two principles. In those cases there is a sense in which they are limited by serious historical contingencies which can even effect the degree to which the principle of liberty is given appliance. (Though this has to be "essential" to changing the "conditions of civilization".) Interestingly, there is also mention in section 11 of Theory of something called the "general conception" of justice and there it is stated that the two principles are special cases of this more general conception. Rawls gives there a formulation of this general conception:
This formula even leads Rawls in section 11 to describe injustice in the most general way he gives, namely as "inequalities that are not to the benefit of all". If there is such a general conception, then what role does it play in relation to "historical contingencies" by contrast to the specific principles on the one hand and reference to non-compliance notions on the other? Rawls appears to give no specific answer to this question although we might expect that the more general principle would have to guide how we limited the specific principles especially given the lexical priority of the first of the special principles over the second.
When Rawls comes to international theory in the Law of Peoples the distinction between the two elements of non-ideal theory produces a clearer division than we appear to reach in Theory alone though the divisions of the Law of Peoples have problems of their own. Included within "ideal theory" here are the "decent peoples" that are not liberal democratic societies since the nature of the law set out in ideal theory here is meant to be one that such peoples could agree to, in line with the divergence from the strict conditions of compliance that were laid out in Theory but later somewhat attenuated in Political Liberalism. As the latter lays out a notion of a society that does not meet the strict conditions of Theory due to Rawls' intervening abandonment of the notion of "comprehensive views" so the Law of Peoples operates with a notion of ideal theory that can allow the "decent peoples" to be included within the ambit of ideal theory. Questions about that will have to wait until a different time though.
The more important point for today's posting is that the province of non-ideal theory is more sharply presented in the Law of Peoples than in Theory. Now Rawls describes non-ideal theory in such a way that its two elements relate to two different kinds of society. The society that has the unfavourable conditions referred to in Theory is now described as a "burdened society" whilst the one that outright refuses to relate to the principles of well-ordered societies are now termed "outlaw states". This division resumes the distinction from Theory and now requires the conditions of non-ideal theory to be laid out in a more determinate way in reference to more fully-rounded conceptions of the societies that operate in accordance with its two parts. However, if we apply to the former the reasoning that Rawls used with regard to the general conditions of divergence from ideal theory in Theory then it should follow that departure from conditions of ideal theory in the cases of "burdened societies" are not necessarily in themselves unjust. This raises some interesting questions with regard to how the conduct of those societies would have to assessed on Rawls' model and what is meant by describing their conditions in relation to the "general" conception of justice. I will subsequently return to these questions as we begin to look in more detail at how this distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory is meant to work in Rawls' theory of international relations.
Rawls' discussion of historical contingencies is, however, only really appropriately part of non-ideal theory in certain respects since he makes clear that paternalistic principles (such as apply in treatment of children) are really not based on departures from ideal principles but rather on applications of them to special circumstances. By contrast, in section 26 of Theory he points to cases in which "social circumstances do not allow the effective establishment" of basic rights such as are given in the two principles. In those cases there is a sense in which they are limited by serious historical contingencies which can even effect the degree to which the principle of liberty is given appliance. (Though this has to be "essential" to changing the "conditions of civilization".) Interestingly, there is also mention in section 11 of Theory of something called the "general conception" of justice and there it is stated that the two principles are special cases of this more general conception. Rawls gives there a formulation of this general conception:
All social values--liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect--are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage.
This formula even leads Rawls in section 11 to describe injustice in the most general way he gives, namely as "inequalities that are not to the benefit of all". If there is such a general conception, then what role does it play in relation to "historical contingencies" by contrast to the specific principles on the one hand and reference to non-compliance notions on the other? Rawls appears to give no specific answer to this question although we might expect that the more general principle would have to guide how we limited the specific principles especially given the lexical priority of the first of the special principles over the second.
When Rawls comes to international theory in the Law of Peoples the distinction between the two elements of non-ideal theory produces a clearer division than we appear to reach in Theory alone though the divisions of the Law of Peoples have problems of their own. Included within "ideal theory" here are the "decent peoples" that are not liberal democratic societies since the nature of the law set out in ideal theory here is meant to be one that such peoples could agree to, in line with the divergence from the strict conditions of compliance that were laid out in Theory but later somewhat attenuated in Political Liberalism. As the latter lays out a notion of a society that does not meet the strict conditions of Theory due to Rawls' intervening abandonment of the notion of "comprehensive views" so the Law of Peoples operates with a notion of ideal theory that can allow the "decent peoples" to be included within the ambit of ideal theory. Questions about that will have to wait until a different time though.
The more important point for today's posting is that the province of non-ideal theory is more sharply presented in the Law of Peoples than in Theory. Now Rawls describes non-ideal theory in such a way that its two elements relate to two different kinds of society. The society that has the unfavourable conditions referred to in Theory is now described as a "burdened society" whilst the one that outright refuses to relate to the principles of well-ordered societies are now termed "outlaw states". This division resumes the distinction from Theory and now requires the conditions of non-ideal theory to be laid out in a more determinate way in reference to more fully-rounded conceptions of the societies that operate in accordance with its two parts. However, if we apply to the former the reasoning that Rawls used with regard to the general conditions of divergence from ideal theory in Theory then it should follow that departure from conditions of ideal theory in the cases of "burdened societies" are not necessarily in themselves unjust. This raises some interesting questions with regard to how the conduct of those societies would have to assessed on Rawls' model and what is meant by describing their conditions in relation to the "general" conception of justice. I will subsequently return to these questions as we begin to look in more detail at how this distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory is meant to work in Rawls' theory of international relations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)