Illiberal Justice:
John Rawls vs.
the American Political Tradition,
by David Lewis Schaefer
(Missouri, 368 pp., $24.95) |
St. John of Harvard Yard
EDWARD FESER
Harvard philosopher John Rawls’s death in 2002 generated obituaries even more embarrassingly pompous than the sort academics usually write for one another. He was, his colleagues averred, possessed of an almost superhuman kindness and humility. Several described him as “saintly” and judged that “we are privileged to have lived in his time.” One of them related how Isaiah Berlin had been moved by Rawls’s goodness to “liken him, mischievously, to Jesus,” and another confessed that when Rawls had once telephoned him “it was as if God himself had called.” The basis for such hagiography? Rawls was known to invite grad students for coffee, and to discuss their ideas with them over pizza. He would send a copy of one of his books to a colleague who was interested in it. And as clinching proof of supererogatory virtue, a favorite anecdote, told with reverent awe, has him standing in front of a window during a doctoral-dissertation defense, so that the candidate wouldn’t be bothered by light in his eyes.
Evidently, the standards for canonization are considerably relaxed in the small-stakes-and-large-egos world of academe: Just being a normal, pleasant fellow suffices. Still, Rawls can be said to have provided the traditionally requisite miracle as well, having passed off the cloudy water of his prolix and vaguely argued writings as the finest philosophical wine. Indeed, he is often claimed (by Rawlsians, anyway) to have been the greatest political thinker of the 20th century, and to have rescued political philosophy from the dormancy into which it had purportedly fallen before his book A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971. This might come as a surprise to readers of Aron, Hayek, Oakeshott, Popper, and Strauss — thinkers active long before Rawls came on the scene, and whose works exhibit a detail of argumentation, clarity of expression, and breadth of historical, philosophical, and social-scientific learning that Rawls did not match. But then, I have neglected to mention that Rawls fulfilled one last criterion for contemporary academic sainthood: He was (unlike the other thinkers mentioned) very definitely a man of the Left.
Rawls’s bloated reputation is long overdue for puncturing, a task David Lewis Schaefer undertakes in his important new book. Examining in detail both the large themes and myriad side issues addressed in Rawls’s various books and articles, Schaefer clearly intends a complete demolition. Some of the criticisms he raises will be familiar to those acquainted with the vast literature on Rawls. Others, made previously by such right-of-center philosophers as Allan Bloom, Antony Flew, John Kekes, Wallace Matson, and Robert Nozick, are less well known — because Rawls and his disciples have largely ignored them. (For Rawlsians, it seems, only criticism from the left — by Marxists, feminists, and communitarians, for example — is worth taking seriously.) Schaefer does a service in collating these various pre-existing criticisms into a single sustained case, and adding some new points of his own. He is particularly keen to emphasize how radically at odds Rawls is with the American political tradition and the assumptions that have informed it historically and at present, Rawls’s pretense to the contrary notwithstanding.
Rawls is best known for his defense of what he calls “justice as fairness,” a theory according to which a society counts as just only if its “basic structure” is determined by principles that would be chosen behind a “veil of ignorance” in the “original position.” By the original position, Rawls has in mind something like the “state of nature” of classical-liberal political philosophy, a condition in which moral, social, and political institutions do not yet exist and individuals have to create them by agreeing to a social contract. By the “veil of ignorance,” he means that those within this idealized condition who are to choose the principles to guide the institutions in question ought to be thought of as knowing nothing about themselves — such as their race, sex, religion, or “conception of the good” — that might bias their decision in their own favor. Rawls realizes, of course, that no such circumstance ever has existed or could exist, but he thinks it nevertheless instructive to ask what people would choose if they could choose in this way, for the situation he describes would in his view be a maximally “fair” one.
His answer to this question is that parties in the original position would choose, first, that society be governed by the principle that everyone should have a right to the most extensive system of liberties compatible with everyone else’s having the same right; and second, that the only inequalities in wealth and power allowable be those that somehow benefit the least advantaged members of society — this is Rawls’s famous egalitarian “difference principle” — and that these inequalities be attached to positions and offices that are open to everyone equally. Rawls studiously avoided ever saying too much about what these principles might entail in practice, but it is clear enough from A Theory of Justice, and increasingly explicit in his later writings, that their import is intended to be fairly radically leftist. For example, for Rawlsians the first principle would guarantee, among other things, rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and more or less the entire agenda of sexual libertarianism. And to fulfill the second, Rawls came to believe that even welfare-state capitalism would not suffice: A far more extensive redistribution of wealth, either “liberal socialism” or something he called “property-owning democracy,” would be necessary.
If it isn’t obvious why those in the abstract “original position” scenario Rawls describes would choose exactly these principles, it must be noted that Rawls was quite explicit that we must conceive of their motives and deliberations in a way that will guarantee this outcome. He did not intend to convince those who didn’t already basically agree with him; his aim was only to spell out in a systematic way the consequences of the “intuitions” about justice that “we” in a modern liberal democracy have in common. Since the majority of citizens in a country like the United States quite obviously would not agree with Rawls, it is evident that the “we” in question more or less refers to the narrow circle of liberal American college professors. In any event, the result, as Schaefer emphasizes, is little more than a gigantic circular argument.
This is a pattern manifest throughout Rawls’s work. His later book Political Liberalism argues, in dense prose and at interminable length, that his theory of justice is neutral between all the “reasonable” moral and religious points of view existing within contemporary pluralistic society — but where being “reasonable” entails (as becomes evident as one works through the details of Rawls’s tortuous argument) accepting Rawls’s conception of justice. The entire long-winded procedure is a sustained and shameless exercise in begging the question, as fraudulent as it is flatulent.
As Schaefer demonstrates, even this fatal objection to Rawls’s oeuvre is only the tip of the iceberg. When kept, as they usually are, at a high level of abstraction, Rawls’s claims are either hopelessly vague or pointlessly tautological. But even when he does descend to the level of concrete application or empirical prediction, the result is sheer undefended assertion, often little more than a banal rehearsal of the liberal conventional wisdom. Rawls insisted, without evidence, that a person’s self-esteem cannot withstand the contempt or even indifference of others, so that a just society must ensure that we give equal respect to diverse ways of life. He claimed, again without evidence (and in a manner reminiscent of Marx), that in a society governed by his favored principles, people would inevitably come to understand their own good in terms of his egalitarian conception of justice, and that no one would need to pursue monotonous and routine occupations. In defense of the practical workability of his system, armchair psychology, armchair sociology, and armchair economics were all Rawls had to offer.
Given the glaring defects in his philosophy, it might seem puzzling that so many of his academic colleagues have afforded Rawls such over-the-top praise. But his appeal, as Schaefer’s book shows us, is not to be found at the level of reason. What Rosalynn Carter unfairly said of Ronald Reagan’s supporters applies with perfect justice to the admirers of John Rawls: He made them comfortable with their prejudices.
Mr. Feser is the author of Locke and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek.
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