In the case you mention, I do not find the initial state, where by brute luck (I take it) half of the population is blind, to be just or unjust. It is simply a fact that half of the people are blind. I think that requiring the other half of the population to each give up one of their eyes would be quite straightforwardly unjust, though it would certainly be kind of any of the sighted to make a donation of this sort. In this case justice requires that the blind be enabled as much as is possible to be full participants in the civic and economic life of the society, in such ways as are consistent with the rights of everyone else. I take it this is a much stronger requirement than a requirement to merely modify things a bit, but it does fall well short of saying that the blind deserve compensation from the sighted for their naturally occurring disadvantage.

I guess I find this formulation disturbingly vague since it trades on the idea that we might only be concerned with inequalities that result form human actions or social structures whilst leaving open the possibility that we might be required in justice to take action to mitigate natural inequalities (by providing access to buildings for disabled people, for example). I’d be interested to hear what you think about eye transplant cases Pete. If half the population have no eyes and half have two and we can easily do painless transplants to give everyone monocular vision, are we required in justice to correct the natural inequality? Or is it not unjust at all? Or are we just required to modify things a bit to make the worse lives of the blind a bit better?

I think this point is clearer in the latter case, because there is in fact nothing we can do to compensate past (i.e. no longer living) generations, so that the only option we have to address this putative injustice is to lessen our own standard of living. In the former case, it at least seems open for me to compensate B in some other way for my greater enjoyment of sunsets – here it strikes me as odd that I should be thought to have a moral reason to do so. (It is quite open to claim that, all things considered, we should not in the end do either of the things suggested by justice here, but I’m claiming something different: My intuition is that justice does not give me a reason to limit progress or lessen my enjoyment of sunsets if I am A.) I wonder, have I got Cohen’s intuition right?

I, following Rawls, am firmly committed to the idea that justice does not apply to brute inequalities, but only to how we moral beings handle these inequalities. This is just another way of saying that I don’t think that justice is about bringing about some independently specifiable just state of affairs, but rather governs how we ought to go about pursuing our ends, whatever they are.

I’d be careful what you implied about someone’s ontological positions on the basis of their comments about methods of inquiry into some field or other, especially when trying to maintain that they held an ontological rather than an epistemological position, since comments are methods of inquiry are epistemological, rather than ontological. Also, there’s good reason to think Rawls abandons the positions of Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory in Political Liberalism (and further, rightly so).

Also, isn’t reasonable pluralism – for Rawls at least (there may be some reasonable disagreement here, and so perhaps it couldn’t be a part of the doctrine itself) – a direct implication of accepting the significance of the separateness of persons (under the relatively favourable conditions that Justice as Fairness is explicitly formulated for, anyway)? The only way to mitigate the effects of the burdens of judgment in terms of generating reasonable disagreement about the sources of value in human life would be to suppress various freedoms. Suppressing those freedoms would be to not take people seriously as agents with their own lives to lead, which is precisely the point of the separateness of persons.

“By the way, Jon is surely wrong here to insist (even for Rawls) on justice as a response to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Suppose we all have the same conception of the good but this cog is individualist in content (I want to maximize my lifetime consumption of beer, and so do you). We then have no pluralism, but we do have a problem (for Rawls) of distributive justice. The separateness of persons condition is essential for Rawls but not the fact of reasonable pluralism.”

I don’t see your point. Certainly the separateness of persons condition in your hypothetical society assures that the problem of distributive justice still obtains, but since when did distributive justice = justice? The separateness of persons might be essential in creating the problem of distributive justice, but surely you’re wrong to say that reasonable pluralism isn’t essential to Rawls in (at least) his first principle.

Yes, of course that’s correct. If there were no separate persons, there would be no need for justice. But there’s more: if there were many people, but they never did, or never could, interact, there would be no need for justice. If there were many people, and they did interact – even more strongly, if they could not avoid interacting – but they never came into conflict, there would be no need for justice.

But we are human beings, and there are many of us. As human beings we value things, and have interests in bringing about those things we value. We interact with other beings, and sometimes our interests in pursuing the ends that we value do come into conflict. We cannot all be provided the resources required to achieve all of our ends. So, for us as human beings, there is a problem of distributive justice.

The fact of reasonable pluralism is important because for Rawls we have a duty of justification to reasonable persons that we do not have to unreasonable persons (though we may try to justify our positions to unreasonable persons anyway), and the fact that reasonable persons may reasonably disagree on fundamental moral, religious, and philosophical matters puts substantive limits on what may count as a reasonable justification.

I’m sorry for using the term “reasonable pluralism” – I was using the term in a non-technical way – my point is not about political conceptions of justice or comprehensive doctrines. My point was the simple one that Pete makes (#17)– in Chris’s example, there are conflicting views about what state of the world would be good. We need some way to resolve these disagreements and this is what gets the problem of justice going. This may seem trivial and obvious – and I admitted having a hard time imagining a world in which this were not the case – but Cohen is the one who thinks that justice is independent of such facts. Suppose we each like enjoying sunsets and we each can do so without interfering with each others’ enjoyment. But you take significantly more pleasure in the sunset than I do. Cohen would say that other things equal, and assuming our preferences are brute luck, you owe me compensation for the unequal levels of welfare that we achieve.

Finally, very briefly on non-subordination. I agree precisely that non-subordination requires only a threshold conception in general – and hence in the global case. It is only when there is a shared basic structure – including a system of property rights – that the assessment of those property rights requires more. But this takes an argument, and I agree that the burden is on me to show why more is required in that case.

Well yes, there is a problem and, happily, there is a solution. But if there were no separateness of persons, there’d be no problem!

I’m not clear on how my comment was perverse, exactly. Anyway, about your example of a society of good TJ Rawlsians: in a society like this, the problem of distributive justice is already solved. That is, people accept the same standards of how to distribute social resources in light of their conflicting interests. Given the way you’ve stated the example, I’m not actually sure if it is or is not pluralistic (being an atheist doesn’t imply any particular full moral and philosophical system as I understand it). I only know that there is a shared conception of justice. If some atheists value being philosophers, while others value being truck drivers (where what I mean to point to is disagreement about the form of a valuable life), then I think there is still pluralism, and reasonably so. Even if everyone endorsed Rawls’ thin theory of the good, there would still be this much pluralism.

This low-level kind of pluralism is all that is needed get Rawls’ project going, but he recognizes that reasonable pluralism in fact runs much deeper, even at the level of our most fundamental moral, philosophical and religious commitments. This problem of deep reasonable pluralism explains a lot of the machinery distinctive of PL: the concentration on public justification, the idea of an overlapping consensus, etc. etc. etc.

Oh, and I do of course agree that the separateness of persons is important.

The reason it can’t be right about Rawls is that non-subordination surely requires a less demanding distributive principle than the difference principle. A threshold principle (a sufficiency principle) would achieve non-subordination – as it does for Rawls in the global case (among peoples).

For Rawls, non-subordination is required at two levels: at the level of private interactions in society, but also at the level of the selection of principles that are going to be used to evaluate the institutional rules under which these private transactions occur. Now, it seems immediately clear that private interactions that fail to subordinate one person’s will to another person’s will can take place under institutions that conform to some kind of sufficiency principle instead of the difference principle (especially, if these institutions still conform to the rest of the two principles). I’m happy to defend this possibility of nonsubordination if others here question it, but it seems pretty obvious to me.

But I even believe that we can select some other principle than the difference principle without a problem of subordination, and I think that Rawls believed this too. He says his conception of justice is the most reasonable, not that it is the only reasonable conception of justice, and he acknowledges explicitly that the arguments for the two principles over a “mixed conception” (where, for example, the dp is replaced by the principle of average utility) are not nearly as strong as the case for the two principles over a utilitarian conception of justice. So, a principle other than the difference absolutely could be part of a reasonable conception of justice.

Now, I’ve agreed with Chris here that selecting the difference principle is not necessary to avoid subordination. Still, I think that this is basically what justice is about. Moreover, the conception of justice formed by the two principles and their justification form a very reasonable conception of justice that answers the problem of subordination as an infringement of freedom. The difference principle does not function in isolation, but in connection with the rest of the conception, and it is in this broader context that I prefer it over a sufficiency principle or the principle of average utility. So even though there are other reasonable answers to the problem of subordination, the conception of justice defended by Rawls, that includes the difference principle, is a very good answer (maybe even the best, or most reasonable, answer).

This wouldn’t just be a “difficulty”; that’s what refutation means in context.

What A values is beer for A, what B values is beer for B, and so on. B does not find A having beer to be valuable, and A does, so there is a pretty straightforward disagreement about value here.

this looks a bit shifty to me; it seems that you’re defining “pluralism” in a sense in which there can’t not be pluralism. After all, if A and B were to have exactly all the same desires in all possible situations, then it’s not obvious that A and B can meaningfully be said to be different individuals.

No, my thinking that R is an anti realist is because of textual considerations . In “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980” for example ( but there are of course lots of remarks like that ) he says that ethical inquiry is not, as rational intuitionists would have it, a matter of our finding out a body of moral facts prior to and independent of that inquiry and other pronouncements which makes it pretty obvious that R is not a realist in any useful sense. But another thing is that he cannot be regarded as a non cognitivist and that makes his position rather interesting : anti realism ( metaphysical claim ) but also a cognitivism ( epistemological claim ). Another thing of course is is the question whether this type of position is naturalist , I mean is Rawls’ metaethics naturalist ? I think the answer should probably be yes because he has to think that there is continuity between ethics and science because he takes reflective equilibrium seriously which strikes me as naturalist method.

By the way, Jon is surely wrong here to insist (even for Rawls) on justice as a response to the fact of reasonable pluralism. Suppose we all have the same conception of the good but this cog is individualist in content (I want to maximize my lifetime consumption of beer, and so do you). We then have no pluralism, but we do have a problem (for Rawls) of distributive justice. The separateness of persons condition is essential for Rawls but not the fact of reasonable pluralism.

It strikes me as funny to say that there is a shared conception of the good here. What A values is beer for A, what B values is beer for B, and so on. B does not find A having beer to be valuable, and A does, so there is a pretty straightforward disagreement about value here. Yes, then, I think there clearly is a concern of distributive justice.

Pluralism of the good is required to get Rawls’ project going, and the fact of reasonable pluralism just points to the idea that, even among people who are genuinely motivated by moral concerns, disagreements can arise about the use of our collective power to decide distributions of shared social resources.

” The second reason, which I’m not sure of by any means, is a sort of version of the open question argument. Suppose we achieve non-subordination and then we look around at the pattern of holdings that there is. We can surely ask, meaningfully, the question “but is it fair?”

This is a good question but Rawls is not making or does not have to be seen as making analytic claims : the definition of justice that is being offered is intended as a ‘reforming definition’ which is put forward as a postoriori identity claim which does not aim at ‘conceptual closure’ ( the relevant thing to focus on is that such claims do not aim at uncovering analytic truths ). The thing is that if this is what Rawls is claiming then open question argument cannot refute it. However one might raise the following difficulty : ok, fine , the definition is a reforming definition but what if the proposed definition does not capture what we felt was central to the original thing we set out to reform and capture by the conceptual redefinition / reform ? I mean would it not be a challenge to a reforming definition of P by means or in terms of Q if it was shown that Q failed to capture what was essential to P ? ( if the property that was central to P was eliminated say and disapears from Q ) . This version of open question argument might still pose problem for Rawlsian reforming definitions .