Rawls by Samuel Freeman

Honest question,not meant as a criticism:Why don’t more competent informed people post reviews at Amazon? I certainly don’t depend on Amazon reviews, but I do find them useful. And I am often directed by a blogger to an Amazon book that has zero reviews.

Well, I took that as a challenge as well as a question, bob, so went ahead and added this review to the site. I don’t know why people don’t do it more. Why haven’t I added my reviews from here to amazon? Mainly because I haven’t thought of it. But I agree, its helpful, and I do, sometimes, rely on amazon reviews. (Though there are odities — have you seen the reviews of WKRP in Cincinatti?)

I aree, Harry. I have just finished teaching a class on Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and I found Freeman’s book really helpful, especially in its discussion of the problem of stability and in its effort to elucidate the idea of a property owning democracy.

I don’t know that I count as “informed”. In any case, if Amazon’s policy is as it once was, once you publish your review there it is their intellectual property. I can see a lot of people having a problem with that.

Thank you for the heads up on this book. Coincidentally, I am slogging through A Theory of Justice even as we speak. A good companion volume would be of great use.

I studied Rawls’s Theory of Justice for a good month as an undergraduate, but made it all the way through graduate school to my Philosophy PhD without reading so much as a single sentence of Rawls. Nor do I recall him coming up in any classes. Granted, I clearly wasn’t pursuing a study of political philosophy, although I have read quite a bit of it since then. But for those of you who think Rawls is an interesting and important philosopher, could you please write a few sentences on why that is? I’m not trying to be snarky. I just really don’t know what it is that drives the interest. ToJ made no lasting impression on me, and the scattered various ideas I can remember – the original position, veil of ignorance, reflective equilibrium – don’t seem to have had any lasting impact on my thinking. Frankly, it all just seemed rather bland and uninspired at the time, even from a technical, logical point of view, and detached from most of the topics that make the study of human beings interesting.

in response to dan (12.):

Without being well versed on Rawls myself, I’d give the unintentionally snarky reply that it’s because everyone else reads Rawls. Philosophies of liberalism don’t generally make any lasting impressions on me so much either, but they sure do fit easily with American political culture.

He lays out nicely lots of ideal scenarios for argumentation that are nice stamps for the liberal free speech ideal.

I may be doing disservice to Rawls (again, I’m no Rawls scholar at all) by implying that he promotes liberal philosophy and pragmatic reason without attention to the critical turn or theories of ideology, but that very blindness makes for a perfect philosophy to turn to for the promotion of the liberal political ideal.

I find Rawls interesting and important. He tries to reconcile liberty and equality in a principled way, rather than arguing in favour of one against the other. He tries to find a middle ground for ethical justification between realists and their critics. He tries to establish political philosophy as importantly distinct from moral philosophizing, rather than the former being a mere extension of the latter. He provides a rich elaboration of the idea of public reason.

Well I must read it.

My current stance on Rawls is more negative than it’s been for a long time, and that’s largely because Annette Lareau’s book _Unequal Childhoods_ convinced me that the law-and-economics/rules-and-incentives conception of the social that Rawls works with is deeply inadequate. (Other aspects of Rawls still suit me just fine.) The reason this is funny, in the present context, is that Lareau is married to Freeman.

Let me agree with much of what has been said: Freeman’s book is a true achievement. If only Rawls had written as clearly…

_Imagine the dinner table discussions they must have …_

For the record, neither Lareau nor Freeman think that Lareau’s work contradicts Rawls’s in any deep or important way. (It clearly does, I think, show one way in which fair equality of opportunity might be harder to achieve than we otherwise might have thought, something Freeman is well aware of. How deep this problem is is perhaps where Chris’s disagreement comes in, though I’m not sure.) Of course authors are not deeply privilaged in deciding what the implications of their own works so the fact that Lareau doesn’t think her work is in any deep contradiction to Rawls doesn’t mean that it might not be so. But, that neither she nor Freeman think that it’s so ought to give us some reason to not think the two are in obvious contradiction.

On Pogge’s book, I’ll not comment on the substance since I’ve not read it, but it is worth noting that it’s not, strictly speaking, a _new_ book, but rather a translation (by Michelle Kosch) of a book he published in 1994 in German. As far as I can tell it’s not seriously changed from the German version though I can’t say that for sure.

I should write a long post on this Matt. Just briefly (and crudely) though….

I think that Lareau’s work made me think that just getting the rules and incentives right won’t do as much for either equality of opportunity or for equality as Rawlsians might have hoped.

This may be more of a problem for Pogge than it is for Freeman (or Rawls), because Pogge often writes as if rules+payoffs both explains social outcomes and enables determinate social engineering (and I think he’s wrong about social explanation and overconfident about social engineering).

But if rules+payoffs won’t deliver, it seems to me that Rawlsians face a stark choice. That choice involves (1) continuing to insist (on grounds of justice, rule of law etc.) that the state must limit itself to procedural methods in the pursuit of social justice, and therefore scaling back our ambition for how much we can achieve OR (2) accepting that there are cultural barriers to equality and waging war on them directly (with the risk of abandoning “neutrality” about the good).

Thanks for the clarification, Chris- that’s very useful. I’m not sure what I think about the issue, but it’s obviously one that needs to be thought about very clearly and given more attention.

On the question of why many think Rawls worth reading: I think that a lot has to do, not only with ToJ’s merits as a philosophical argument (which are, I think, significant), but its place in the history of political philosophy. I can think of several aspects of this (others who have commented here, who know Rawls’s work, its precursors and the subsequent literature far better than I, could no doubt do better. But here goes.):
1) Rawls pretty much single-handedly revived ambitious, systematic normative theorising about politics. I disagree with the notion that political theory/philosophy ‘died’ between 1945 (or 1914, or 1900, or whenever) and the publication of ToJ. But it is true that during that time one saw mainly reflections on the history of political thought (or reflections on politics which relied on the history of political thought), or analyses of the use of political concepts; there were very few attempts to work out normative principles or ideals in relation to which political arrangements could be judged and legitimated. Rawls changed all this. Even if one thinks that others — Dworkin, Nozick, Jerry Cohen — have done better, it’s hard to imagine them doing the work they did/have without ToJ.
2) Relatedly, Rawls improved the standards of philosophical argument in political theory. While he’s best known for a few easily-communicated (and thus seemingly simple) ideas – the veil of ignorance, the original position, the difference principle — ToJ is actually incredibly complex (and very, very long: it really does seek to be pretty comprehensive, and so far as I can tell, many people don’t really read the latter sections of the book). There are, in the words of one of Rawls’s acolytes, a lot of moving parts to the argument: you probably have to study it pretty closely to fully appreciate it (as I’m sure I don’t).
3)Rawls’s approach (as Loren suggested above) provided a way to think about the relationship between moral and political philosophy, which steered between the tendency to see the two as wholly separate and unrelated (thus de-moralising political thought, and leaving political theory normatively impoverished), and to see the two as wholly continuous. As I understand his project, Rawls was able to argue both that its appropriate to look to a moral theory as the basis for political legitimacy; and that, given the unique features of politics, one needs to work out a particular sort of normative theory for politics, which will be justified in a different way, and have a different content, than personal moralities. He wasn’t unique in this respect; but, again, he provided one of the fullest, best worked-out arguments for this approach.
4) Some commenters have faulted Rawls as merely providing philosophical window-dressing for American liberal platitudes (at least, I think this is a fair paraphrase of their charges). I’d say, instead, that he went beyond liberal intuitions to construct a genuinely philosophical justification for liberalism (though I do think that one can argue that Rawls’s arguments do start from broadly liberal moral assumptions — for instance, a concern for individual well-being, a suspicion of coercive authority, and a commitment to human equality. I think he provides some powerful arguments for why we’re right to care about these things, but there’s no denying that if you’re not already committed to all this, you probably won’t find his arguments very appealing.)
5) When Rawls came along, liberal theorists were largely caught between various versions of utilitarianism and Kantian, deontic morality, and were not fully comfortable with either; many appealed to rather vague notions of natural rights, without being able to provide any real philosophical justification for it. Rawls provided an alternative to utilitarianism and an innovative re-working of Kant, and revived thinking about politics in terms of social-contract theory. This has been tremendously fruitful, even if one thinks that this sort of approach isn’t, ultimately, the best.
6) Finaly, I think it’s quite arguable whether ToJ winds up pointing no further than a defense of freedom of speech and the platform of the (U.S.) Democratic Party. Actually,scratch that: I think that such a view’s just wrong. ToJ doesn’t aim to provide guidlines for policy; Rawls is working at a higher level of abstraction, and is (I think rightly) modest about how much guidance a theory such as his can give us in political practice. And there have been plausible arguments for justifying a number of different economic regimes through appeal to Rawls’s theory. But Rawls himself suggested that his theory pointed towards either a ‘property-owning democracy’ or ‘liberal socialism’ as just economic regimes; and both of these are well to the ‘left’of anything we’ve seen in the US (whether they’re to the left in the right way is another matter).
That said, Rawls’s version of liberalism is open to a lot of powerful and valid criticism (e.g. Hart’s critique of Rawls’s argument for the priority of the first over the second principle of justice). And one might think that Rawls’s whole approach to thinking (normatively) about politics is misguided. But I do think one needs to engage more deeply in Rawls’s arguments, and get a better grasp of what his approach is and why he adopted it, for one’s criticisms to have merit as argumentative points, rather than ‘irritable mental gestures’.
(I should perhaps just add that I’m not a Rawlsian myself, in either substance or approach. This may have something to do with the fact that I’m woefully ignorant of Rawls’s work. I’ll have to read Freeman’s book; thanks to Harry and co. for the recommendation.)
Sorry for the long posting.

G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawls’ TOJ is pretty devastating. I recommend providing it to students along when reading TOJ.

Also: why do we need an introduction to Rawls in the first place? His writing seems pretty accessible to me.

re: 20

cf. the bit of nerd-humour according to which TOJ is the transcendental deduction of American liberalism (or, variously, the Labour Party in 1963, the New Deal, etc.)

(Yes, yes, the theory is meant to be metaphysically neutral – Rorty actually takes this into account in his version of the joke by saying “Suppose one grants that Rawls is not attempting a transcendental deduction of American liberalism…”)

katherine – I’d guess he’s thinking of If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re so Rich, which contains an excellent chapter (which makes the CB Lareau point, though in a different way) on the limits of pursuing justice through procedural methods. He also has an excellent but long paper (his Tanner lecture, so it must be free on the Tanner Lectures site) against the difference principle as an equality licensing principle (that’s imprecise, but I’m up early, and can’t render it more precise without more thought than I am capable of right now).

Cohen also has a book manuscript titled something like Saving Justice from Constructivism (although the tentative title seems to change periodically) which is not yet published but which he’s been teaching at seminars and previewing in talks for a while now. I’ve read parts of it, and that is where Cohen’s criticism of Rawls gets its most extensive elaboration.

re: 37

I thought Cohen’s book was an elabouration of his 2003 P&PA article ‘Facts and Principles,’ which is more of an argument against the method of reflective equilibrium than against ToJ.

Someone familiar with one of the manuscripts floating around out there care to correct me?

G. A. Cohen’s forthcoming book from Harvard is _Rescuing Justice and Equality_, and it includes chapters deriving from his Tanner lecture on incentives, his paper criticizing the Pareto principle, his paper criticizing Rawls’s exclusive focus on the basic structure, as well as from the “Facts and Principles” paper, but it also includes four other chapters plus an appendix in which he replies to critics. It is sure to give Rawlsians a lot to think — and worry! — about in the years to come.

Re: 43

This is certainly true, although the case may be understated: even before 1900, the British Idealists —no friends of utilitarianism— were dominant (at least in the UK) (Green, Bradley, Bosanquet). So Hurka is certainly right, but perhaps even more so…

Re: 38

This is from the preface of the Pogge book:

“This book was originally published in German as John Rawls (Munich: Beck Verlag, 1994)… I am deeply grateful to Michelle Kosch, who has produced an outstanding translation. Taking advantage… [of a stay at ANU] I have worked through this translation carefully and, with much help from Rekha Nath, Ling Tong, Leif Wenar and Andrew Williams, updated and revised a great deal. Any discrepancies with the German text, for better or for worse, are my own responsibility.”