I’m not a Rawlsian, though I would admit to certain affinities, and, indeed, I’ve used the device associated with Rawls (though not invented by him) of the veil of ignorance in my own work. But when I disagree with Rawls, I hope I at least take the trouble to get him right. Sadly, one can’t say the same of the former Cambridge academic, political theorist and professional podcaster David Runciman. To be fair to him, Runciman’s podcasts are usually informative and entertaining and I’ve discovered things through them that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. He also often has some really good guests. That’s usually enough to make up for the annoying tics that litter his output, most notably his habit of telling us that “X was rather like Y, but also the complete opposite of Y”, as a way of introducing some thinker or other.
My patience has been somewhat tested, though, by his latest series on What is Wrong with Political Philosophy?, a series of conversations with the King’s London political theorist and historian of political thought Paul Sagar on Aristotle, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Bernard Williams and Judith Shklar (I’ve not yet listened to the one dealing with the last two). Now I don’t have much complaint about the positive exposition of these figures by Runciman and Sagar, and that’s a useful public service. Nor do I much mind, even though I disagree, with their view that political philosophy ought to be about something like giving useful guidance to those engaged in politics. But this view, and its associated claim that politicians need to draw more on history and psychology to develop their practical wisdom is set up via an opposition to a caricature of normative political philosophy.
The substance of this caricature is that political philosophy as practised in the academy and particularly by its dominant figure John Rawls essentially consists of the application to politics of a moral standard that is external to it and that this is a hopeless venture and recipe for conflict and civil war because people disagree about morality. The misrepresentation is so blatant that I wonder whether Runciman has ever read Rawls carefully at all, or just finds it convenient, for the sake of a good chat and to produce a foil for his own polemic, to hold up some sort of mythical “Rawls”, an invention of Cambridge political theory. You just wouldn’t guess from anything he says that John Rawls put the fact of moral disagreement at the centre of his political philosophy, nor that he took liberalism to be, historically, a response to the disastrous blood-letting of the 17th century where people did, indeed, attempt to impose their moral vision on one another by violence. Even if we focus narrowly on justice and leave Rawls’s view about legitimacy to one side, the view that Rawls applies and external ethical standard to politics just doesn’t fit with the fact that he’s in the business of developing normative principles that are proper to a context where people no longer co-ordinate their actions face-to-face according to shared morals but rather via institutions that mediate their often anonymous co-operation at a vast scale: i.e. a world of politics, law, and markets.
At the same time, Runciman and Sagar are content to talk about “democracy”, as a label for the institutions that we’ve had recently in many successful countries, which they take to be a successful model for the pragmatic containment of disagreement. Well those institutions are the very ones that Rawls is trying to think through. One possible rejoinder, I suppose, is to say that they accept (though they don’t say so) that Rawls is theorising under conditions where we have moral disagreement but their focus is on the value of “justice” specifically, which Rawls wants to impose, so the complaint goes through. But I don’t think this move works at all because “justice” doesn’t function for Rawls as a pre-institutional value in this way but is rather a property of the system of co-operation as a whole. It is just weird to spend time, as they do, telling us that Aristotle used the term “democracy” quite differently from the way they do when labelling our existing institutions, but then to reference Aristotle as a critic of the idea that “justice” could be the central political value without asking whether Aristotle and Rawls use the term quite differently to one another. (It is, of course, a key point in GA Cohen’s critique of Rawls that Rawls gives the name “justice” to what are merely rules of regulation.)
When Runciman and Sagar come to draw on modern political examples, one person they complain about is Keir Starmer, whom they suggest appears to have no beliefs at all. I’m not going to disagree with them about that, but it does rather raise the question of what beliefs Starmer ought to have. As far as I can see Labour in power has been happy to backslide on those commitments that fall under Rawls’s rubric of the basic liberties, while attempting to pursue a policy of economic growth that continues to be intensely relaxed (as Peter Mandelson used to say) about inequality as such. Without firm normative beliefs, Labour drifts around rudderless, while the people who voted for it defect to other parties in disappointment and disgust. I can’t be sure things would have gone better if they’d been more Rawlsian, as they might have been under Ed Miliband, but at least there would be some sense of their moral compass giving them direction. Now one can’t expect that Conservative politicians would endorse the more redistibutive elements of Rawlsian justice but we’ve seen them also weaken commitments to basic liberties and the rule of law in recent years and it is hard not to think that a firmer commitment to the shared ground-rules that underpin democratic politics would also have served us better. That’s hardly a moralistic imposition of ethical principles that come from outside the political system but rather an insistence that everyone recognize the principles that make peaceful political contestation possible.
{ 40 comments }
Murali 02.13.26 at 2:14 pm
There’s always the liberal democrats. They seem consistently principled, but perhaps only because they’re never in power.
Michael Kates 02.13.26 at 4:03 pm
Very interesting post! I was intrigued by your opening claim that even though the veil of ignorance is associated with Rawls, it wasn’t invented by him. Who did invent it then?
engels 02.13.26 at 6:17 pm
Runciman’s podcasts are usually informative and entertaining… That’s usually enough to make up for the annoying tics
I trust he doesn’t end each episode by saying “my name’s David Runciman and we’ve been Talking Politics,” anymore.
Chris Bertram 02.13.26 at 6:31 pm
@Michael Kates, Harsanyi, I believe.
Old Mole 02.13.26 at 6:59 pm
Joseph Heath has just posted an interesting essay on this topic:. See https://dailynous.com/2026/02/11/a-brief-appreciation-of-rawls/
Paul Sagar 02.13.26 at 7:55 pm
Yes, Chris, I’m just too thick to understand Rawls. It’s definitely me that’s getting it wrong, can’t think outside my narrow paradigm indoctrinated into me as a graduate student.
Yes, definitely me that’s wrong.
If only there was a meme for this kind of thing.
ES 02.13.26 at 8:19 pm
How are those provisional fixed points holding up?
Michael Kates 02.14.26 at 12:12 am
Thanks, Chris! Totally forgot about that.
Simon 02.14.26 at 2:58 am
Regarding who came up with the veil of ignorance, interesting you think it was Harsanyi. I thought he took the idea of of the impartial spectator from Adam Smith and then later wrote that the impartial spectator was very similar to people behind the veil of ignorance. So, Rawls was first unless we say something like it was suggested by Smith?
JPL 02.14.26 at 6:19 am
“The substance of this caricature is that political philosophy as practised in the academy and particularly by its dominant figure John Rawls essentially consists of the application to politics of a moral standard that is external to it and that this is a hopeless venture and recipe for conflict and civil war because people disagree about morality.”
“That’s hardly a moralistic imposition of ethical principles that come from outside the political system but rather an insistence that everyone recognize the principles that make peaceful political contestation possible.”
I think what I would say is that the problem with the caricature is that the role of political philosophy is framed using the terms ‘moral standard’ and ‘morality’. When it comes to thinking about a possible theory of governance, it seems to me to be necessary to distinguish between the problem areas of morality and ethics. Morality would seem to be something best studied by fields like anthropology and social psychology, since morality is usually considered to include values determined by the cultural history of a community, which may or may not be widely accepted in other communities, among other non-ideal considerations. Ethics, at least as I like to use the term, is about ideal principles that actually govern communities, and have an objectivity similar to logico-mathematical principles or physical laws, the ones that actually determine the causal structure of the world, like symmetry principles, which it is the aim of science to discover and understand. I say “actually govern communities” in the sense that, insofar as certain ideal principles are, often only intuitively, put in practice, things work out, while insofar as they are violated, things don’t work out, and then people notice. This kind of thing seems to be the proper business of philosophy. For ethics, principles of equivalence and reciprocity, for example, would be important. These ideal principles can be discovered, for example, by looking at the norms governing and making possible the production of meaning by speech communities. The Kantian question would be, how is the world, as an intentional object and a troublesome puzzle, understood by the linguistic system of the language used by the speech community that uses the language to describe or make sense of it? What are the principles that allow this to succeed?
I don’t know much about John Rawls, but I think he at least made the distinction between the theoretical pursuit of an understanding of ideal principles, and the grappling with problems that involve the practical coordination of the interests of communities that include people from different cultural traditions, and that the development of the latter should be based on a good understanding of the former. And that’s why I quoted your final sentence, since it seems to recognize something like what I’ve just tried to express. Disagreements and arguments in a discussion of ethics should be different from disagreements and arguments about what people consider the proper morality, and the latter can proceed effectively only when there is a measure of agreement about a foundation in the former. The problem with Trump’s Satanist reign of error is that we seem to have lost a shared sense of ideals held in common in this community, and we worry about how to get this back.
Chris Bertram 02.14.26 at 9:51 am
@Paul “Yes, Chris, I’m just too thick to understand Rawls.”
I said nothing of the kind. IMO Rawls was seriously misrepresented in your conversations with Runciman, that does not imply a judgement on your capacity to understand him.
J-D 02.14.26 at 12:03 pm
Doesn’t this suggestion conceal a normative presumption against conflict and civil war?
Doesn’t this suggestion conceal a normative presumption against blood-letting and violence?
<
blockquote>… they take to be a successful model for the pragmatic containment of disagreement.
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blockquote>Doesn’t this suggestion conceal a normative presumption in favour of the containment of disagreement?
Doesn’t this suggestion conceal a normative presumption in favour of having beliefs?
Doesn’t this suggestion conceal a normative presumption against rudderless drift?
Doesn’t this suggestion conceal a normative presumption in favour of peaceful political contestation?
I raise these points not in order to quarrel with the normative presumptions I think I have detected, but as examples of what seems to me to be an obscurantist practice I think I have encountered before, a practice of concealing normative presumptions under other disguises so as to deny that any normative presumptions are being made, a display of a spurious ‘objectivity’ or ‘realism’, and a practice against which I have a normative presumption of my own, one I am not attempting to conceal but rather am explicitly avowing.
J, not that one 02.14.26 at 2:46 pm
I’ve yet to see a discussion of “institutions” and so on they didn’t presuppose the normal situation in even a large society is for everyone to share something like a worldview, that in fact people do share one right now that they could access if they tried, and that in fact people used to share but don’t anymore and have to be reminded of, perhaps quite forcefully but at least with strong words. I’ve yet to see a discussion of “pluralism” that didn’t amount to either little museum-communities dotted across the landscape, caste-like systems, or large ungoverned regions.
I imagine my own belief that the desire to make this real is giving us Trump is not shared by everyone.
If I understand him correctly Larmore (who taught my Intro Phil class lo these many years ago) argues Political Liberalism is a pluralistic correction to ToJ but isn’t fully successful in doing that.
Tm 02.14.26 at 5:30 pm
“The substance of this caricature is that political philosophy … essentially consists of the application to politics of a moral standard that is external to it and that this is a hopeless venture and recipe for conflict and civil war because people disagree about morality.”
Out of curiosity, what do Runciman and Sagar (who has entered the forum with a very constructive and convincing contribution at 6) think is a moral standard internal to politics, if any exists? This sounds to me like a version of the socalled “realistic” paradigm that politics is nothing other than the naked exercise of power and to expect otherwise is foolish. It seems to me however that the politically powerful have almost always claimed to act in accordance with some kind of political morality, even when they didn’t. It was generally seen as essential to the lgitimacy of political power to be seen to accord with the moral values of the community. I think this is relevant.
G. Branden Robinson 02.14.26 at 6:43 pm
“…it is hard to think that a firmer commitment to the shared ground-rules that underpin democratic politics would also have served us better.”
Should there not be a “not” after “hard” in the OP?
LFC 02.14.26 at 7:17 pm
From the OP:
I think Chris is right that this is a completely inaccurate caricature. One of Rawls’s arguments in ToJ is that the large majority of human beings have a “sense of justice,” which does not mean that they all start off agreeing about the meaning of justice but rather that they usually “acquire a skill in judging things to be just and unjust , and in supporting those judgments by reasons” (p. 46, 1st ed.), and that they “ordinarily have some desire to act in accord with” those judgments. At the same time, however, a “correct account of moral capacities will certainly involve principles…which go much beyond the norms and standards cited in everyday life….” (47)
Though he doesn’t put things exactly this way, Rawls can be read as arguing that these more complicated principles are implicit in the everyday sense of justice and emerge from it, once a person with this everyday sense of justice has had a chance to consider and weigh and reflect on “various proposed conceptions” of justice. (48)
Even if this argument is wrong and it is not likely that a kind of agreement on what Rawls later called a political conception of justice can be arrived at, the argument does not apply a moral standard that is external to politics. Rather, partly because the principles of justice he proposes are seen as being connected (though not identical) to the everyday sense of justice, those principles are better thought of as being very much connected to, hence “internal” to, politics. The principles are not imposed on politics from outside of politics, but rather are rooted in, and offer an answer to, the political question of how, in Rawls’s words, “the benefits and burdens of social co-operation” should be distributed.
engels 02.14.26 at 9:15 pm
Labour in power has been happy to backslide on those commitments that fall under Rawls’s rubric of the basic liberties, while attempting to pursue a policy of economic growth that continues to be intensely relaxed (as Peter Mandelson used to say) about inequality as such.
Methinks the infamous Mandelson line “I’m intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” is actually rather similar in sentiment to the Difference Principle (tl;dr “be intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as it benefits the least advantaged”).
engels 02.14.26 at 9:47 pm
Btw whatever you think of Rawls he surely deserves credit for being a star academic at Harvard who wasn’t friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
steven t johnson 02.15.26 at 1:27 am
“…the disastrous blood-letting of the 17th century where people did, indeed, attempt to impose their moral vision on one another by violence.” It is a little disconcerting to see the Thirty Years’ War reduced to a struggle of ideals. It may be that this is instead a reference to the English Civil War condemning it as a (Puritan) Revolution, resonating especially with admirers of the Glorious Revolution? I am also perplexed about Louis XIV’s moral vision.
Jdop 02.15.26 at 2:06 am
Rawls’s commitment to reasonable pluralism (the view that rational agents disagree over the good life) is a founding tenet of post-Rawls political philosophy. In fact, you might even characterize pre-Rawls political philosophy as just that, attempts to apply a moral standard (like Utilitarianism) to institutions.
You see this commitment in his students, and I wish we had more of it stateside.
John Q 02.15.26 at 9:08 am
Murali @1 “There’s always the liberal democrats. They seem consistently principled, but perhaps only because they’re never in power.”
Assuming you mean the Liberal Democrats, their inglorious period in coalition with Cameron is a good demonstration of the second part. But their position on Brexit has been consistently unprincipled AFAICT, having supported a referendum, then revocation without a referendum (while refusing to support Corbyn), then waffling
Chris Bertram 02.15.26 at 9:20 am
@G. Branden Robinson Correct, and thank you. I’ve edited accordingly.
J, not that one 02.15.26 at 3:51 pm
engels,
On the one hand there presumably no reason some of the more practical or intermediate parts of the theory, like what economic policies raise the level of the worst off, and what practices help the society cohere and conduce to the economy working as it ought to. Philosophy is presumably too high level for philosophers to dictate those.
On the other hand, Rawls presumably had a very specific idea of society in mind and we pretty much know what that was: American, liberal, but decidedly left of what most Americans would think is plausible, given realities. (I’m not entirely convinced this image isn’t a caricature invented by Ayn Rand but ISTR there might be support for it in early 1970s journalism. He seems like a centrist do-gooder or bien-pensant type in a lot of ways, though I suppose in a lot of places that’s as good as being a Communist. But the left at the time was the Marxist New Left, I think.)
How helpful that is for regular politics, I don’t know, but a lot of people on the left do seem to be familiar with Rawls and seem to think he’s directly applicable to convincing people what we should want.
J-D 02.16.26 at 1:43 am
Even ‘I’m going to do whatever is best for me’ depends on normative presumptions about what’s good for me. A ‘realist’ explanation that Frederick the Great set out to seize Silesia without regard to normative considerations because he thought it was in the interest of Prussia conceals a normative presumption about what constitutes an interest.
Tm 02.16.26 at 8:00 am
“It is a little disconcerting to see the Thirty Years’ War reduced to a struggle of ideals.”
It would obviously be wrong to “reduce” it to ideological disagreements, but iirc the war started when the Bohemians tried to disposed their Habsburg king. Why? Because the Bohemians favored the reformation, and the Habsburg king and emperor was a fervent Catholic who forced them to recatholicize. Even after he put down the Bohemian revolution (by slaughtering the Bohemian nobility at the White Mountain), his fanaticism needlessly prolonged the war. No need to pretend that religious ideology didn’t play a huge role, although of course wasn’t the only factor.
Daniel Elstein 02.16.26 at 11:48 am
On the issue of Rawls’ moralism or otherwise, OP is of course correct that Rawls aims to supply a view about justice (and the best way of organising the basic structure of society) that would be compelling to people with a wide variety of substantive moral views. I hope that “realist” critics do understand that this was his goal (and if they don’t that is indeed pretty poor reading comprehension).
But I imagine the more likely thing is that they judge this aspect of Rawls’ project to have failed (and, rightly or wrongly, they treat its failure as relatively uncontroversial). One well-known worry (which the OP mentions) is that in fact the substantive conclusions that Rawls draws about political justice are indeed based on moral commitments of his that are not plausibly subject to an overlapping consensus. This applies most notoriously to his argument for the Difference Principle. But I imagine that “realists” also think that Rawls assumes too much consensus on the shared political values that he considers to be essential to having society of mutual respect and cooperation.
Maybe the complaint about the influence of Rawls on political philosophy is that he encourages political philosophers to think that they do not need to defend the application of morality to politics because Rawls has shown liberal political theory does not need moral foundations. If Rawls’ project does fail in this respect, then this would be a problematic way for his influence to be felt. But one of the points of the OP is that most political philosophers would not respond to being convinced of the failure of this Rawlsian project by becoming “realists”; rather they would try to defend the application of morality to political theory in a more upfront way. And of course many political philosophers already do this!
LFC 02.16.26 at 1:59 pm
engels @17
Rawls argued that everyone should have a roughly equal chance to participate in politics and thought that, for instance, millions of dollars (pounds, euros, whatever) sloshing around in campaigns and contributed by the wealthy made that difficult or impossible. So even if some inequalities benefited the worst-off materially and thus (arguably) passed muster under the difference principle, those inequalities would still be ruled out by Rawls if they deprived people of an opportunity to participate as rough equals in the political process.
engels 02.16.26 at 8:17 pm
I’ve said this before I think but “the liberty principle means Rawls is a strict egalitarian and the difference principle is a MacGuffin” is actually my favourite Rawls fork.
steven t johnson 02.16.26 at 8:32 pm
Tm@25 Richelieu’s cooperation with the Grand Turk was not fanatical. Also, in the seventeenth century, control of the church was control of church lands, church courts, church tithes, church sinecures and by the way much of communications to the people in the pews and much of the education. I find it difficult to separate genuine personal spiritual convictions from the role of the church (whether Catholic or Protestant) as instruments of wealth and power.
Tm 02.17.26 at 7:16 am
stj: “I find it difficult to separate genuine personal spiritual convictions from the role of the church”
I find this debate pretty useless. Many agents in that time clearly were strongly motivated by religious beliefs to the point of being willing to kill and being killed for those beliefs. You mention Richelieu, otoh Gustav Adolf died on the battle field and was considered a martyr for the protestant cause. Of course it’s always a conglomerate of motivations and interests. Nobody would seriously dispute that I hope.
Anyway I’m not sure what you are even arguing. You wouldn’t deny that ideology played a role in the 17th century, would you? In the case of the English civil war you wouldn’t deny it?
Tm 02.17.26 at 1:33 pm
Let’s lighten up a little…
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/640
steven t johnson 02.17.26 at 5:06 pm
“…the disastrous blood-letting of the 17th century where people did, indeed, attempt to impose their moral vision on one another by violence…” vs. “It would obviously be wrong to “reduce” it to ideological disagreements…” and “Of course it’s always a conglomerate of motivations and interests.” I’m sure you’re clever enough to know that if you disagreed with Chris Bertram’s one sentence here, you could explain why. But you’re arguing with me instead, which suggests your position is much closer to the one Chris Bertram took there. (And it’s not even certain Chris Bertram is still entirely satisfied with this claim being abstracted from the context of a Rawls discussion, not intending it to be such a sweeping generalization?) It seems to me you’re the one who is not quite clear on what is being argued.
John Q 02.18.26 at 8:26 am
Engels @17 Since we rarely agree, I’m happy to say you are spot-on here,
Tm 02.18.26 at 12:55 pm
stj, I don’t think anybody here suggested that the wars of the 17th century, or any other period, can be “reduced to a struggle of ideals” (as opposed to saying that religious fanaticism did play a role), as you put it at 19. Methinks you are strawmanning and that’s why this exchange is useless and shouldn’t be continued.
J, not that one 02.18.26 at 2:19 pm
This post https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-persistence-of-nothing was interesting. His criticism of Rawls is the same as Sandel’s: liberalism is worse than communitarianism. (In practice, this means that women should stay in the home because thinking of all people as essentially the same is mean to them.) He also thinks Adrian Vermeule deserves a fair hearing (presumably from someone else). Seems like our choice is joining the white male liberals who say gender, race, and class don’t matter if you’re the right sort of people, or joining the populist male conservatives who want to rule the roost at home. But since the government is way above our heads anyway and nothing we so can really influence the constitution, it’s really moot, a purely academic exercise.
And if we think we can influence the constitution, we just don’t get it? Not sure. The way things are going we’re headed for violent civil war sparked by a disagreement on the correct understanding of “Original Sin.”
J, not that one 02.18.26 at 3:00 pm
Of course, it won’t be anything like that definite. People won’t say “You don’t accept the absolute and total depravity of humankind!” “No, you don’t accept the absolute necessity of the sacrament of reconciliation!” Instead, both/all sides will fight under the same banner, being “You don’t get it! You don’t understand anything, do you?”
“That Senator is corrupt.” “You just don’t get it!”
“That action would create a de facto government religious establishment, which is contrary to the Constitution.” “You are SO stupid!”
A war of nihilisms over who gets to rule by recognizing the nihilism in the correct way.
MisterMr 02.20.26 at 11:25 pm
Question from someone who never read Rawls: what is Rawls opinion of a situation where there are various parties who notionally have equal rights/interests but practically one is structurally advantaged VS the other?
For example, a democratic system where the “capitalist party” gets much more funding from donors, or favourable coverage by the media that is owned by capitalists? Or a disagreement about, say, the level of wage where the worker if fired might starve, while the capitalist would only be mildly inconvenienced?
If we frame liberalism as a situation of equal rights, or as an agreement on eqaulity of rights before we reach a conclusion of specific issues, then there is a great difference if we frame these rights as substantial (so in practice the worker have to be somehow equalized to the capitalist, and liberalism becomes a very egalitarian logic) or one in which said rights are only freedom from the state so that in practice the capitalist can force more or less what he wants.
From what I read here on Rawls, it seems to me that there is an ambiguity where he perhaps was closer to a substantive view of liberalism (that becomes very leftish) but argumented it more like a negative right sort of thing (something like you can’t push ideological stuff on people).
LFC 02.23.26 at 3:46 pm
MisterMr @37
Rawls doesn’t argue primarily from a “negative” view of rights or liberty. In R’s view, freedom of speech and thought is necessary but not sufficient.
This is from ToJ 1st ed., pp. 225-26 (and probably the passage is the same in ToJ revised ed.):
See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Rawls, esp. this section:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc
MisterMr 02.24.26 at 9:49 pm
@LFC 38
Thanks, it seems that Rawls is for what I call “substantial” rights.
I like him more this way, but then this creates a second problem where, if the rights are defined in a very expansive way, then violent action (like Marx style revolution) is very easily justified (or either Rawls is just saying what he likes but doesn’t worry about how we get there).
LFC 02.25.26 at 12:44 pm
MisterMr @39
“Doesn’t worry about how we get there” is a reasonable criticism, but R. didn’t see that as a main part of his project. There’s a recent book by Chandler (which I haven’t read) that may address that. See the Stanford Encyclopedia entry’s bibliography for the title etc.
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