I just wanted to note that you’re right that I’ve not been arguing that (my understanding of) Rawls’ and Kant’s stance on the concept of justice is the right one, or better than Cohen’s. I’m trying for now to get as clear as I can on the fundamental disagreement(s) between them, which clearly run much deeper than a conflict over the difference principle. I do hope to consider some arguments as this reading group continues, and some have already been made (such as some previous commenters’ position that Cohen’s concept of justice is incoherent, which even if correct wouldn’t show that Rawls is right).

I don’t think that the relationship between the general and special conceptions is a way of making justice one value among others. If some particular society, for historical and cultural reasons, cannot support a liberal constitution, then Rawls allows that it may restrict liberties in ways not permissible in a liberal society. But it is allowed by justice to do so only for the purpose of moving that society towards a just liberalism, including especially a guarantee of the priority of the basic liberties.

Finally, while Kant, especially in the Groundwork, really does seem to think that justice is to regulate the pursuit of all other values (I see this as following from his metaphysical account of the source of value – the good will), I think that with respect to Rawls I’m only justified in making this claim about social justice. It might be that with respect to other social roles, other values can trump justice. Perhaps, on some comprehensive moral view, it is more important for me to be loyal to my family than to ensure a “proper balance of competing claims”1 for everyone in my community. And, a separate point, even in cases where we might think that justice (of some kind other than social, distributive justice) is the most important value, it is not the case that Rawls always claims that it must be purely procedural. His example of a criminal trial shows this. The procedure of trying a criminal case must aim at an independently specifiable outcome: finding the innocent to be innocent, and the guilty to be guilty. I want to emphasize, though, that this is not a form of distributive social justice.

1. This is what Rawls identifies as his concept of justice on Theory, Revised p. 9.

Wrote Pete, above.

I should have picked up on this before, but reporting that Kant and Rawls use “justice” in this way (if it is true that they consistently and exclusively do so) is not, of course, an argument for anything. Moreover, since it is manifestly the case that many deployments of “justice” (or equity, or fairness) as a value are not playing this role, there remains the issue of dealing with the value of justice and related values (in the non-Rawlsian sense) within any higher-order exercise. One might even think that when Rawls tells us that only his general (and not his special) conception of justice applies to societies in general, so that the lexical priority of the first principle gets discarded for very poor, underdeveloped societies, he is engaged in an pluralistic trade-off exercise of just the same kind that Cohen is.

That makes more sense. It doesn’t make more sense (to me!) than appeals to the heart, but it makes more sense of Rawls’ position than I’d had before.

In your first paragraph, you worry that parties in the original position might choose to accept a lottery whereby one person will be exploited for the benefit of a great many. Rawls’ argument from maximin (or, better, by analogy with maximin) is I think pretty decisive against concerns like that. It’s important to recognize that the parties in the OP aren’t considering specific sets of institutions, like a particular lottery system, but rather principles to evaluate systems of institutions, and have no information whatsoever about the probabilities of occupying one social over another in the society well-ordered by the conception of justice they come to – they don’t even know what the social positions are, since these are defined by the as-yet-unselected institutions.

Your second paragraph raises an interesting point. There are some outcomes that cannot be accepted, even if they come as a consequence of a just procedure. I agree with this, and I believe that Rawls does, too. No system of institutions is perfect, and even an otherwise just democracy can pass an unjust law. But note that for Rawls, this outcome will be judged unjust according to principles that were themselves selected through a constructivist procedure, on the basis of what we can accept as reasonable and rational persons, and not on the basis of some standard selected or determined independently of such a procedure.

So I’d say that at least some outcomes are so unjust that no procedure capable of reaching them could be a just one. If that’s the case, then (to that extent at least) outcome trumps procedure. (Cohen, in one light, argues against Rawls the complementary position that there are some procedures so unjust that no outcome, no matter how felicitous, can make them just; but he does so because the outcomes they recommend as just are not, in his view, actually so.)

Now I have got that off my chest, I promise to relate my thoughts more rigorously in future contributions to the actual arguments of Professor Cohen’s formidable book.

A Rawlsian procedure might work on a small scale—say, like how the comrades divy up the duties out at Hog Hemp Farm (I ain’t cleaning out the turkey coop, again, Chawlie)—and there’s a slight Kropotkin-esque quality to the TOJ. Rawls does not seem workable, or even applicable on a macro scale, say in regards to existing property relationships: the Peoples of Carmel will not be divying up their chateaus merely because some Harvard egghead said they have some obligation to do so.

Rawls TOJ thus turns into just another species of prudential reformist policy-speak. Raise taxes, create programs, etc. It’s understandable why both rightist-libertarians and the marxistas object to it.

Thanks for pushing me to make this more clear. I don’t mean to say, quite, that justice’s status as a higher-order value implies pure procedural justice; instead I am redescribing what it is to be a regulative value of this sort (although strictly speaking, of course, that a thing is a chair implies that it is also a place to sit, but the idea is that this is a redescription of the thing). So, justice is concerned with how we pursue other values – one way to think about this is that it sets limits on permissible means that we may use to pursue our ends, whatever our ends are – as opposed to being concerned with producing some particular, independently specifiable state of affairs. This is to say that justice is a procedural value: it is a value concerned first with correct procedure (“first” because we still can evaluate outcomes, but only as the outcome of some procedure), rather than with evaluating the procedure in terms of some independently correct outcome.

So, my claim (for better or worse) is that when we understand what it means for justice to be a higher order, regulative value, we see that this is for it to be a matter of pure procedural justice.

So, one of the things that’s bad about being at the bottom of an unequal society is the knowledge that you’re at the bottom, and the feelings of inferiority and unfairness. Therefore, it might be the case that one could make an improvement in the lot of the least well-off by redistributing some resources away from them to reduce the rate of income tax, then using the extra surplus produced by “the talented” to pay for a program of propaganda and psychopharmaceutical drugs to keep them more content about it.

Ex hypothesi, to coin a phrase, it would be subjectively nicer to be an peasant in an “opiate of the people” society than a peasant in the previous society, but it stretches the meaning of “justice” a bit far to say that the course of action I’m suggesting would be the just thing to do. Cohen could presumably take or leave the tax-cuts-n-drugs option in terms of a policy recommendation (if they were really fantastic drugs that couldn’t be produced without the tax cut, he might say that justice wasn’t the only virtue), but he’d surely be right to say that the difference principle gives an answer about justice here that doesn’t look right.

(Apologies if this is a really undergraduate textbook objection by the way; I suspect it might be given the similarity to the plot of Brave New World)

“[J[ustice is one value among many and…in the practical business of deciding what to do, it should have play an important part in our deliberations, but what we should actually do, all things considered, will depend on the people in our society, their motivations, the other fundamental values in play etc.”

I’ve seen you say this before, about justice being one value among many, and it occurs to me that this highlights a major point of disagreement between Cohen and Rawls about the role of justice. For Rawls (and for Kant), justice is a higher-order value: its role is to regulate our pursuit of all other values, in such a way as to maintain our freedom consistent with the equal freedom of others. So, distributive justice is a matter of pure procedural justice, and it is not just one value to be balanced among others. On the other hand, since Cohen identifies justice with a distribution that can be specified independently of the procedure needed to bring it about, he can balance the value of that state of affairs against the value of other ends.