Rawls and ‘Liberalism’

Here in Switzerland ‘liberal’ means center-right, associated with big business, mostly banks and pharmaceuticals. Sorta like the US, when you think about it.

Just to add a little to Aaron_M’s very clear post: one might say that the difference between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism is that in the first, Rawls takes it that anyone, in principle, could recognise the reasonableness of his principles of justice. In the second, he retreats to the position that only people in societies with liberal and democratic traditions are likely to do so, and helps himself to many more of the specifics of those traditions. The move is towards Michael Walzer’s version of cultural relativism, and away from A Theory of Justice‘s ambition to see things sub specie aeternitatis. The two books both talk about what we can agree on, but give different answers to ‘who’s we, paleface?’.

Perhaps this is tied up with the history of the term ‘liberal’ in the US. When did this become a term of abuse? It is strange for an outsider, especially one from a country in which the conservative party is called the Liberals.

Liberal became a term of abuse in the U.S. as the result of a decades-long media campaign. Liberalism became identified with illicit sex and drugs, military defeat, government largesse to unworthy, poor recipients, and amoral, lax and indulgent childraising, education, and criminal justice. The accuracy of these accusations is somewhat beside the point by now, since a considerable majority of the population accepts them to some degree.

This was a rejection of the liberal Democratic tradition running from FDR to LBJ (1932-1968). While liberals never dominated the Democratic Party, they were very influential during this period.

Why the term “liberal”? My theory is that FDR realized that Americans would never accept socialism, so that he shoehorned a weak kind of socialism (i.e. fascism, thank you Jonah) into liberalism by calling it a freedom: “Freedom from Want” in the Four Freedoms. This was not a freedom recognized by earlier liberals.

As a footnote, around 1930 Minnesota’s governor Floyd B. Olson of the Farmer-Labor Party declared himself to be a socialist while stating his willingness to work with liberals. But a high proportion of Minnesotans at that time were first or second generation German, Scandinavian, or Slavic immigrants who did not feel the American antipathy to Socialism.

Today’s right traces back (through William F. Buckley and others) to people who never accepted Roosevelt’s liberalism, and as we have seen with the Social Security “reforms”, they really want to turn the clock back 77 years or more. (George Will wants to go back even further, to the per-Teddy Roosevelt era).

To defend Sam C’s interpretation, Rawls’ project of political liberalism seems to be a bigger move towards Walzer than Matt allows for. This is because Rawls appears to be working more in the spirit of interpreting what he takes to be standards of social justice in a certain political culture and backs away from universalistic interpretations.

This is not always obvious in PL, but in The Law of People Rawls is explicitly defending a diversity of political cultures in a way that does appear to be communitarian. He argues that decent hierarchal peoples (i.e. hierarchical political cultures) and liberal peoples are to be viewed in a law of peoples as self-authenticating sources of claims (i.e. ends in themselves). Individuals in decent hierarchical societies are “not regarded as free and equal citizens, nor as separate individuals deserving equal representation,” while they “can recognize when their moral duties and obligations accord with the people’s common good idea of justice” (LoP, p. 71). The upshot is that Rawls is advancing a theory that justifies the interests of communities to have their ends, at least to some extent, take priority over the ends of individuals. This is not a liberal standard of justice. Still, what dictates the standards of social justice individuals have access to in their respective political communities is dependent on what kind of political culture the society happens to have, with some limits for a fairly basic notion of human rights (i.e. what is to count as a decent hierarchical society against a non-decent one). Thus, if we think of what the argument in the LoP attempts to justify from the perspective of individuals in hierarchical societies the move towards communitarianism is made apparent.

On the above interpretation one might suspect another reason for Rawls’ increasingly using the term liberal in his latter work. In the ToJ stuff there was no need to use the label because that is how the theory was clearly going to be interpreted, while in his later work he advances a theory that seems to challenge key liberal tenants and thus there is more need to use the name. Well maybe this is part of the reason, but it is just a wild guess.

Of course some argue that Rawls has from the beginning been advancing an interpretive theory for liberal democratic states in his domestic theories of justice.

Aaron_M- I’d argue that while your reading of _The Law of Peoples_ is also a common one (found in many good works by Tan and others) that it’s also not right. Rawls thinks that “decent hierarchical societies” are _unjust_ and never says otherwise. The mistake in the approach you favor, I think, is seeing _LP_ as presenting a theory of _global justice_ while what it means to present is a theory for the international policy of a liberal society. So, the question is not, “are decent heirarchical societies just?” (Rawls’s answer to that is clearly “no”.) but rather, “Should we be willing to cooperate with DHS on equal terms”? To that Rawls says yes. Now, that migth be wrong (though I think not) but it’s not a move that involves relativism in any deep way at all. (To my mind the best essays helping bring this point out are the two on _LP_ in Samuel Freeman’s _Justice and the Social Contract_.)

But is Justice as Fairness a liberal fascist conception?

Matt:

It seems right that Rawls’s theory can’t be a theory of what a fully just world would look like, since it allows for (admittedly) unjust decent societies. But I don’t think we need move all the way to the ‘foreign policy only’ interpretation to admit this point. One interpretively plausible middle-ground position would be to take LP to be a theory of justice for the global basic structure; where that last is (normatively) understood primarily in terms of relations among peoples. It doesn’t seem crazy to suppose that a global basic structure of this kind could be just even though not all of the societies participating in it are just; witness domestic basic structures, which can , I’d argue Rawls’s theory implies, be just even if they contain unjust associations (church hiearchies, schools, families to some extents, etc…)

There may also be an argument to be made that a theory of just foreign policy presupposes a theory of justice. How, after all, would you know that the foreign policy was just in the global context, if you didn’t know what justice was for that context?

Regarding the initial question, Matt is right. The focus on “liberalism” gains prominence in “Political Not Metaphysical.” There Rawls is concerned to explain how a society can avoid “autocratic” uses of political power, by which he means (admittedly still cryptically) uses of political power that can’t be justified in terms that it is “reasonable to expect all citizens reasonably to endorse.”

In “Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus”, Rawls attempts to explain how what he there calls a “political liberalism” can avoid using citizens’ corporate political power “autocratically.” Here the notion of “liberalism” is at the center of the discussion, and I think a lot of this has to do with Rawls’s appreciation of many of the points made in Waldron’s “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism” (Rawls cites Waldron in a footnote in “Domain”). The aim of addressing justifications of the use of political power to each citizens “common human reason” is associated with liberalism by Waldron. Since Rawls is concerned with the best way so to address each citizen, he appears comfortable appropriating the idea of liberalism for this project.

Matt,

Matt,

Too little time to write my own answer

I have included some long quotes from GLOBAL JUSTICE AFTER THE FALL: Christian Realism and the “Law of Peoples” by Edmund N. Santurri that may help explain my interpretation of Rawls.

And I promise stop now and not include such long quotes or posts in the future, but I just could not let it go this time.

The problem

“Rawls admits that from the vantage point of reasonable liberal peoples and, it would seem, from the perspective of justice ideally considered, decent hierarchical societies are less than fully just inasmuch as they lack the full array of basic democratic institutions that would be affirmed by self-interested rational contractors in the original position set out in the first stage of the argument described earlier in this article (Rawls 1999a, 62, 78, 83).
This admission of Rawls’s, naturally, raises the question whether allowing representatives of unjust, albeit decent, societies as parties in deliberation about principles of international justice might not necessitate a compromise of the ideal in the eventual principles chosen. And if the perspective of “outlaw societies” is judged irrelevant to the determination of international principles of justice in ideal theory, why is the perspective of unjust, albeit decent, societies permitted in the ideal formulation of those principles of international justice especially given reason to believe that such an allowance would affect the determination of principles in a theoretically significant way? For example, since a decent hierarchical society typically will privilege, in the Rawlsian account, particular religions or “comprehensive doctrines” through the establishment of religious qualifications for political office, representatives of such a society would not assent to a principle of international justice that identified discrimination of this sort as in violation of a fundamental human right to equal liberty of conscience. Accordingly, Rawls indicates that such a principle would not be included in the Law of Peoples. Yet Rawls also contends that in the first stage of “justice as fairness” hypothetical individual contractors who are fairly deprived of specific knowledge about their religious convictions would indeed settle on equal liberty of conscience as a fundamental principle of justice, and such would seem to suggest that the principle ought to be recognized generally as a standard of just international association, given the attractiveness of the standard under fully impartial conditions of deliberation (Rawls 1971, 205–11)” (Santurri, p. 788)

Rawls approach to explaining the influence of DHSs in ideal theory is:

“decent peoples are said to warrant our moral respect because they acknowledge and support a range of human rights, accord their citizens a consultation role in public policy, and “allow a right of dissent” matched with procedures of “respectful reply” by governmental and judicial officials (Rawls 1999a, 61). Though decent hierarchical peoples are not fully just and though liberals rightfully hope that these societies will reform in liberal directions, the moral respect decent societies should elicit argues against their being subjected to political, economic, or military sanctions designed to advance liberalization. On the contrary, moral respect for decent hierarchical peoples argues for their “self-determination,” affirmation of which follows particularly from “fair equality and a due respect for other peoples” (Rawls 1999a, 61–2, also 85, 111–2). Thus, toleration of nonliberality, given this line of argument, is a matter of moral principle, where considerations of “mutual respect” trump considerations of justice (Rawls 1999a, 62)” (Santurri, p. 798).

Saying that DHS are ‘unjust’ but that ‘morality trumps justice,’ seems to simply be an offside semantic manoeuvre that does not change the fact that Rawls appears to be offering a principled defence of political culture taking priority over the interests of individuals.

“It is one thing to say that liberal foreign policy must set aside certain demands of justice, given the exigencies of international political reality. It is another thing to say that in contractarian determinations of international principles of justice for ideal theory, the principles chosen must be acceptable to representatives of unjust, albeit decent, peoples even if the content of the principles chosen will be compromised by admitting the perspectives of those representatives” (Santurri, p. 799).

Doing the later is a whole lot different than the pragmatic interpretation you are advancing of Rawls.

“Again, none of the occurrences has a clear ‘mine is a liberal theory’ character.”

I guess, but by the second (substantive) page of the book Rawls has asserted the primacy of justice over considerations of order and efficiency; he’s linked justice to the inviolability of persons; and he’s insisted that the rights secured by justice be removed from the vagaries of political bargaining or a “calculus of social interests.”

If it walks like a duck …

I have learned that this doctrine is as full of contradictions and open to interpretation as any other, or more.

“…decent hierarchical societies, although not just, do have a legitimate political order” – a bit heavy on semantics, isn’t it.

The following TJ passage might be relevant to the original question; as it seems to entail, at least, the Rawls-of-TJ doesn’t take being liberal and being just to be the same thing:

A conception of social justice, then, is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed. This standard, however, is not to be confused with the principles defining the other virtues, for the basic structure, and social arrangements generally, may be efficient or inefficient, liberal or illiberal , and many other things, as well as just or unjust. (TJ 9)

“Legitimate”, as I understand, could mean “lawful” or it could mean “just”.

When it became clear that conservatives have no interest in justice as fairness and greatly prefer the personal morality narrative that stems from justice as individual accountablity?

At the dressed-up, philosophical, justification level “accountability” is the buzzword, but at the gut level I think that American conservativism at least only needs the establishment of hierarchies by some sort of comepetition, and you don’t have these hierarchies if the losers and sinners and failures aren’t punished. The people punished might be lazy, criminal, immoral, genetically or racially inferior, untalented, or just unlucky, but their existence is part of the happiness of the successful winner, and their goal is not only to accept their lot, but also to unquestioningly accept that they deserve their suffering.

Meritocratic and moralistic versions of this kind of schadenfreude are easiest to justify, but Calvinistic notions of God’s mysterious grace stress the arbitrariness of God’s judgement, and one major GOP faction — the high-stakes gambler types — live to see someone’s fate decided by the turn of a card or the flip of a coin. That’s how completely profane whoremongers manage to fit so neatly into a Christianist political party.

Sorry, #33 is referring to TJ p.9 quoted in #28.

He probably didn’t mention it because he felt it went without saying. What else would a liberal believe? I am a liberal *because* I believe in justice as fairness. As a pragmatic matter, I think equity is more achievable than equality, and arguably more desirable, and Rawls appeals on that basis.

There is similarity between the problem Rawls faces in Political Liberalism ( ie in modern society people may hold different philosophical and mtaphysical doctrines which are all ‘reasonable’ and that in the face of this fact we cannot justify political policy on metaphysical basis since such grounds are not acceptable to all ) and what confronts Kant in the opening argument of the 3rd section of the Groundwork when he is looking at the foundation of the categorical imperative : Kant thinks that there is a kind of contradiction here since the will has to be autonomous but it must also be based on a principle but such law / principle cannot be imposed from outside. So he thinks the will must adopt a principle for itself ( but this is a problem because it looks like the free will by imposing a principle upon itself is forced to restrict its own freedom. ).

In other words Kant’s and Rawls’ problems are similar because in both cases we are looking for principles to ground out action/policies but the very set up of the situation forbids us to choose any *specific* principles.

What is interesting is that Rawls approach to this problem ( PL 89-125 ) is also similar to Kant’s approach : constructivism ( does it work ? ).

I think you’re right, Josh. A quick search for entries in the 1960s in philosophy in JSTOR found many references to “the liberal tradition”. There was a consensus that Mill and Locke were part of it, but there was some controversy about Kant. My sense – again, speculative and subject to correction – is that what made a philosophical position “liberal” wasn’t entirely clear, and the dominant use of the term came from political science, policy, and maybe even economics. Barry’s 1965 Political Argument has an explicit discussion where he is trying to pin down a properly philosophical definition of liberalism.