I want to be friends with whoever created John Rawls’ A THEORY OF JUSTICE: THE MUSICAL. It features Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand as the villains, and is the greatest musical ever. If you like political philosophy, you are going to love it. Also I want to write a musical with these people.
Justice as Fairness?
The judge is a muffin of a man, gut mushrooming through his suspenders, jowl jiggling like jello as he candidly quips about his personal judicial philosophy. “I treat all my defendants as if I were in their shoes,” he says righteously, pointing a fleshy digit pejoratively at the ground before him, conjuring a humbled miscreant hoping for mercy. Nostalgia grips his somber tone as he recalls his own modest origins, “Both my parents were doctors.”
“Zur genauen Definition eines Gleichgewichtszustandes müssen die Grenzen und die Eigenschaften des Systems genau angegeben werden. Es kommt auf drei Dinge an: erstens die Festlegung des Systems und die Unterscheidung zwischen inneren und äusseren Kräften; zweitens die Definition der Zustände des Systems (ein Zustand ist eine bestimmte Konfiguration der Eigenschaften des Systems); drittens die Angabe der Gesetze, nach denen die Zustände aus einander hervorgehen ”
—J. Rawls; Eine Therie der Gerechtigkeit (“Der Begriff der wohlgeordneten Gesellschaft”)
“We should assess policy with a Rawlsian lens, asking how it affects those least well-off among us. We should champion the 47 percent.”
—In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday, Tea Partying Texas Senator Ted Cruz makes a forceful case for what he’s calling “opportunity conservatism”: “a single-minded focus on easing the ascent up the economic ladder.”
Early on in the piece, Cruz name-checks philosopher John Rawls, effectively suggesting that the GOP should take to heart Rawls’ message that policies ought to work to the advantage of the least well-off in society.
The trouble for Cruz is that he seems not to have read Rawls, or at least not to have fully understood him.
One of Rawls’ arguments is that social and economic inequalities are permissible but only insofar as they redound to the benefit of the least well-off. He makes the case that this is a principle of justice that anyone would choose if (s)he was making a choice without knowledge of (the many) morally arbitrary personal characteristics that ultimately end up shaping the way we think about particular policies.
But here are the specific policy proposals that Cruz puts forward:
Republicans shouldn’t just assail excessive financial and environmental regulations; we should explain how those regulations kill jobs and restrict Americans’ ability to buy their first home.
Don’t just say no to new taxes — fundamentally reform the tax code so that every American can file his taxes on a postcard. Eliminate the corporate welfare and complexity that enrich only accountants and lawyers.
Don’t just criticize union bosses; explain how closed shops confiscate wages and make it harder for low-skilled workers to get jobs.
Don’t talk generically about education; advocate school choice to empower parents and expand opportunity for children struggling to get ahead.
Don’t just dwell on the long-term solvency of Social Security; promote personal accounts to allow low-income Americans to accumulate wealth and pass it on to future generations.
The problem for Cruz is that he doesn’t bother to explain how these policy changes would benefit the least well-off members of our society; he simply says that they will and that policies preferred by Democrats will not.
But this isn’t particularly surprising because Cruz isn’t considering these policies from the perspective of someone at the bottom; he’s thinking about them from his own position as a newly-elected Tea Party-backed United States Senator. And from that perspective all that matters is convincing those who voted for Democratic candidates in 2012 that they ought to vote for Republican candidates next time around.
Whether or not the policies he supports will actually benefit the least well-off in society isn’t of nearly as much interest to Cruz as whether or not he can convince the least well-off that those policies will benefit them. Perhaps he actually believes that these changes will help those at the bottom rungs of our societal ladder.
But it’s awfully hard to see how putting an end to unions, financial and environmental regulations, free (and non-religious) public education, Social Security, and the like will benefit those who are the least well-off in our society. Of course, it’s also hard to see how politicians like Cruz have any hope to convince them that such policies are in their best interest in any way.
At least Mitt Romney was honest with his comments about abandoning the 47%. Cruz, here, doesn’t make a single change to a single policy in the hopes of speaking to the people who didn’t vote Republican in 2012; he just tells his fellow politicians they need to work harder to sell these policies to people who almost certainly know better.
“Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant action and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. He does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonably so; he believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistaken conception of justice altogether. While his action is conscientious in its own terms, he does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since he thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, he seeks by wellframed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since he is not prepared to accept the legal consequences of his violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that he believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which he is opposed. ”
—- John Rawls: Civil Disobedience - “Theory of Justice”. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972.Rawls on Wall Street
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comSeemingly in response to my blog post from this morning, about what philosophy can or should add to the Occupy Wall Street movement, though most likely just a coincidence, Steven Mazie has a blog post over at The Stone that demonstrates the many ways in which John Rawls provides the ideal philosophical background for the movement:
[T]o move forward and make a difference, Occupy Wall Street needs specific goals backed by a more coherent, more inspiring vision for American democracy. To their credit, protestors have recently begun debating which specific demands the movement should make, but their conversations appear to be unguided by any deeper wisdom. A perfect intellectual touchstone would be the work of John Rawls, the American political philosopher who was one of the 20th century’s most influential theorists of equality. Rawls named his theory “justice as fairness,” and emphasized in his later writings that its premises are rooted in the history and aspirations of American constitutionalism. So it’s a home-grown theory that is ripe for the picking.
While there is certainly much in Rawls that seems to line up quite nicely with some of the central tenets of the movement, most notably and obviously Rawls’ Difference Principle (which states that inequality is only permissible insofar as it benefits the least well-off members of society), I think Mazie makes one critical mistake and one critical omission.
First, the mistake: Mazie suggests that the protesters ought to hold up Rawls’ A Theory of Justice as their weighty tome of choice. He cites Atlas Shrugged, so beloved of Tea Partiers, as proof that people are still reading long, dense texts for philosophical inspiration and so the Occupiers ought not to be deterred by its 600+ pages. But why not simply point people to Rawls’ final restatement of his argument, Justice as Fairness, which sets out the same argument (with helpful additions from Rawls’ other great volume, Political Liberalism) in fewer than 250 pages? If your goal is to get a whole bunch of people to read Rawls and familiarize themselves with his arguments — as is my goal when I teach Justice as Fairness in contemporary political theory course — it makes far more sense to use the shorter and more up-to-date version of his argument. I’m not saying that the Occupiers can’t read A Theory of Justice; I’m hypothesizing that most of them won’t.
Now, the omission: Nowhere does Mazie discuss the concept of the Veil of Ignorance, which is both critical to Rawls’ theory and so fitting when we think about the many problems raised by the Occupiers. The basic idea is simple: If we’re attempting to reason together about principles of justice that will inform the basic structure of our society, we ought to begin from a position in which we ignore all the morally arbitrary or irrelevant features that we know about ourselves. Since we don’t know about our natural talents and endowments, our race, class, or gender identity, or other such features that determine a great deal about how we tend to fare in society, Rawls argues:
that the most rational choice for the parties in the original position are the two principles of justice. The first principle guarantees the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good. The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and prerogatives of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.
I don’t think it’s too difficult to see the ways in which the Veil of Ignorance might shape some policy proposals that the Occupiers could put forward. Even though there’s no such thing in the real world, it’s clear that encountering Rawls’ thought experiment highlights the myriad injustices present in our society today, ones with which we would all be dreadfully uncomfortable if we could simply do the work of imagining ourselves behind Rawls’ Veil.
So, though I ultimately think that Mazie’s conclusion about the Occupiers’ affinity with John Rawls makes good sense — we’ve been talking about it in my class for weeks now — I also think he might have strengthened his piece considerably by making just a couple of points that he failed to set out. In brief, the affinity between the Occupiers and John Rawls seems pretty clear to philosophers; now philosophers might work at making it easier for other people to see.
HT: Zack Beauchamp.
