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Geuss’s Skepticism about Rawls

Brian Leiter

I have been reading around in Raymond Geuss’s quite interesting and iconoclastic set of papers, Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005), and found the essay on Rawls, "Neither History nor Praxis" especially striking.  Responding to Rawls’s autobiographic statement that his service in World War II stimulated his interested in the theory of justice, Geuss comments (p. 31):

One can easily imagine a person confronted with the events of the Second World War being motivated to ask various questions, for instance about European history, about the dynamics of political systems under stress, about the economics of competitive international markets, about human social psychology and the structure of collective action.  What, however, would one have to believe about the world to think that "What is the correct conception of justice?" is the appropriate question to ask in the face of concentration camps, secret police, and the firebombing of cities?  Are reflections about the correct distirbution of goods and services in a "well-ordered society" the right kind of intellectual response to slavery, torture, and mass murder?  Was the problem in the Third Reich that people in extermination camps didn’t get the slice of the economic pie that they ought to have had, if everyone had discussed the matter freely and under the right conditions?  Should political philosophy really be essentially about questions of fairness of distribution of resources?  Aren’t security and the control of violence far more important?  How about the coordination of action, the sharing of information, the cultivation of trust, the development and deployment of human individual and social capacities, the management of relations of power and authority, the balancing of the demands of stability and reform, the provision for a viable social future?

Geuss, to be sure, has specific, substantive doubts about the resulting Theory of Justice.  Why, he asks, think that there would be any agreement in an "original position":  "No matter how long they discussed matters, there might remain at the end different groups with different views" (p. 32).  And even if there were an agreement, why should it "have any relevance whatever to us, who do have concrete ‘identities,’ parts of which sometimes can be of importance to us, and who live in a concrete situation in a complex real world" (p. 32)?  The "difference principle," Geuss suggests, both (1) helps explain why the theory’s "political effects..has been close to zero" (p. 33), since it "turns out to be extremely difficult to assess in practice whether or not a certain existing inequality is or is not allowed by the difference principle" (p. 33), and (2) is itself "morally very repellent" since "increases in the absolute standard of living of the poor can, in principle, justify very great inequalities" (p. 33).

Geuss is no fonder of the argument of the later Law of Peoples, noting that Rawls believes that,

Outlaw
states may not be exterminated ad libitum, but "liberal" states have a
right to keep and deploy nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes, and
may attack outlaw states with military force under certain
circumstances if that is necessary to prevent violation of human
rights.  This does not even purport to be a view from an anonymous
universal "original position," but is, even on the most superficial
inspection, a specifically American political position–more
enlightened, perhaps, than that of George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice,
but generically the same kind of thing.  Of course, no one can object in principle to
citizens helping to elaborate the national ideology (provided it is not
actively vicious), but philosophy has in the past often aspired to
something more than this.  (p. 34)

Noting that the huge growth of the academic industry surrounding Rawls’s A Theory of Justice coincided with increasing inequality and a rightward turn of the Western industrial democracies, Geuss asks (p. 38):

Is it,…or should it be, of any significance that the "normative" moral and political theory of the Rawlsian type has nothing, literally nothing, to say about the real increase in inequality, except perhaps "so much the worse for the facts"?  This is not a criticism to the effect that theoreticians should act rather than merely thinking, but a criticism to the effect that they are not thinking about relevant issues in a serious way.

Geuss favors an approach to political philosophy in which one studies,

history, social and economic institutions, and the real world of politics in a reflective way.  This is not incompatible with "doing philosophy"; rather, in this area, it is the only sensible way to proceed.  After all, a major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one’s own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason.  The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias….

One of the great uses of history is to show us what, because it has in the past been real, is a fortiori possible.  This can give rise to various illusions.  Something can be thought to be politically possible now because it actually existed in the past, but it may have been possible in the past because of circumstances that have meanwhile changed.  This is a case in which further development of the very historical consciousness that gave rise to the problem will contribute to clearing it away.  (pp. 38-39)

From the preceding reflections about how to approach political philosophy, Geuss concludes:

For those of us with views like these, Rawls is not a major moral and political theorist, whose work self-evidently deserves and repays the most careful scrutiny.  Rather, he was a parochial figure who not only failed to advance the subject but also pointed political philosophy firmly in the wrong direction.  (p. 39)

I’m curious what philosophers think.  I have given, of course, only excerpts from the Geuss essay, and it is obvious enough how Rawlsians might respond to some of the particulars of Geuss’s doubts about the theory of justice.  But what about the more general criticisms of this approach to political philosophy and its relevance and value?  Post only once; posts may take awhile to appear.  Non-anonymous postings preferred, though, anonymous or otherwise, only substantive contributions will be approved.

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45 responses to “Geuss’s Skepticism about Rawls”

  1. Jacob T. Levy

    "Aren't security and the control of violence far more important? How about the coordination of action, the sharing of information, the cultivation of trust, the development and deployment of human individual and social capacities, the management of relations of power and authority, the balancing of the demands of stability and reform, the provision for a viable social future?"

    While I certainly don't endorse the full indictment of Rawls, and I'm among those who find him "a major moral and political theorist, whose work self-evidently deserves and repays the most careful scrutiny," my own desire to study themes more like those Guess mentions and less like thought experiments in the original position is part of why I opted for political theory (complete with some training in social science, which one wants in order to think about "history, social and economic institutions, and the real world of politics in a reflective way") rather than political philosophy.

    I find it to be one of the virtues of the North American division of labor between political theory and political philosophy that one can have both Rawls-style analysis of what our moral ideals about politics *mean*, analysis that it typically in conversation with ethics and meta-ethics, and decidedly non-ideal-level normative theorizing that's in a closer conversation with social science.

    Reply
  2. Simon Cabulea May

    With respect to the question of Rawls's experiences in WWII, I think there is something wrong and something right in what Geuss says.

    Rawls is not offering a theory of justice simply as a way to determine what the fair shares of the abstract economic pie might be. That sort of moral book-keeping would be a strange response to WWII. Instead, he says that it's part of a project of reconciliation with the world, such that "political philosophy may try to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history …" (JF, 3). There's a suggestion that the possibility of justice is an essential part of the redemption — if that is the right word — of humanity. If there could be a just society, then there is something decent about us which we can try to keep faith with; we're not doomed to endless conflict, red in tooth and claw. Why is it justice that offers this hope? I suppose because other virtues may just be too fleeting, or ineffectual against the kinds of divisions that have caused the great evils of history. A just society is supposed to be stable against various political shocks. So a reasonable theory of justice could legitimately be some solace to a person confronted with a world filled with war dead.

    What I think is right in what Geuss suggests is not so much a criticism of Rawls, but a criticism of the dominant place of the concept of justice in political philosophy. Even if Rawls is right to regard it as the first virtue, and even if tying justice to the project of reconciliation makes sense, it doesn't follow that the concept of justice is the appropriate tool to use in the indictment of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Surely the problem with the concentration camps is not a problem of injustice, still less unfairness. That understates the horror. Nor does switching to the language of human rights help if we still try to justify those rights by appeal to something like the original position, given that the original position is there to model our intuitions about fairness. But political philosophy does not really have any richly developed moral theory of atrocity, nor a well-developed justificatory basis for human rights that differentiates between those violations which are merely a cause for indignation and those which are truly chilling. (I think some of the human rights minimalists want to push in this direction, but the flip-side of that position is to give up a commitment to a robust list of the just entitlements of all people, which is a pity.) I don't know if this can really be done, but it would be a relief in some way if our political philosophy could sometimes be more wrenching.

    Reply
  3. Avery Kolers

    It would be nice to be told what Geuss thinks provides a useful counterpoint to Rawls — a work that meets the criteria Geuss proposes, while avoiding the criticisms he levels at Rawls. This would help me get a clearer sense of what the alternative model of political philosophy is that he has in mind.

    Surely the concluding reflections present a false dichotomy. One can both regard Rawls as a major figure who advanced the field, and believe that attention to lived political engagement contributes to good work in political philosophy (not just "theory"). Indeed one reason for regarding Rawls as a major figure is precisely that he is not limited to the "meanings of the words," but is trying to articulate and justify the moral worldview underpinning the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the Great Society–and doing so by appeal to economics, law, the history of political thought, etc. That the right has been ascendant for 30 years since TJ is hardly reason to think Rawls failed at doing something that we can expect a scholar (qua scholar) to do.

    Finally, on that initial point, one way that participation in World War II might have stimulated Rawls's interest in justice is that Rawls was among those deployed in the Pacific who would have taken part in an invasion of Japan, had the Japanese not surrendered unconditionally after the US dropped nuclear bombs on them. Many Americans, of course, respond to this by saying, "the bombs were justified, because otherwise more Americans would have been killed." Rawls does not take that to be a valid inference, and indeed comes out against the use of the bomb. Given where he was at the time, that takes an impressive capacity to abstract from one's own particular interests. Obviously I am in no position to say what Rawls meant by the statement, but I find Geuss's bafflement puzzling.

    Reply
  4. Corey Brettschneider

    It's strange that Guess, at least from what you quote here, misses the fact that Rawls is concerned with the relationship between justice in distribution and issues of liberty. There are two principles chosen from behind the veil. Certainly the lack of civil liberties had something to do with what went wrong and what was wrong in Nazi Germany.

    More generally, I take it that part of the point of ideal theory is to offer something to hold it up against the world and that can be used in thinking about not only whether something is wrong but about what makes it wrong. I wonder what the alternative standard is that Guess thinks we should use when we look at injustice. I agree with Jacob that we a theory of justice is not necessary to tell us that genocide is wrong. But Rawls is attempting to point to an alternative to fascism as a whole and to offer a justification of the kind of liberal democracy that existed in Weimer, and which never had a suitable and well-developed defense or justification. (Theorists such as Kelsen had tried but without success.) Rawls project offers an answers to the theoretical critiques of liberal democracy that were prominent on what we now think of as the extreme right and the extreme left at the rise of Nazism. The ambition of developing a framework from which those critiques could be answered was certainly laudable at the time, given the fall of Weimer and rise of Nazism that Rawls had witnessed.

    –Corey Brettschneider

    Reply
  5. Jacob T. Levy

    For what it's worth, I agree with Avery (and Simon too) on the indictment of Rawls. And I was careful to describe the Rawlsian project as being about the meaning of our *ideals*, not the meaning of the words– I think we gain primarily moral insight from Rawls, not primarily semantic insight.

    Reply
  6. Sam Rickless

    I haven't read Geuss's essay, but I'm already peeved. Only a small man would say that Rawls is not a major moral and political theorist. The device of the original position is one of the most powerful and enduring of Rawls's legacies, and his genius was to parlay this beautifully simple idea into an elegant theory of social justice. It is not for nothing that hundreds, indeed thousands, of social and political theorists have thought it necessary to grapple with Rawls's theory.

    I was an undergraduate at Harvard and took Rawls's TJ course as a junior in 1985. It was, hands down, the most intellectually stimulating and eye-opening course I have ever taken. Unlike Geuss, Rawls was humble and self-effacing. He approached the history of political philosophy by trying to see what might be right about the works of the greats. When he criticized, it was only after having painstakingly reconstructed the strongest argument for his opponent's views. Would that Geuss had taken this advice to heart before writing such a small-minded piece.

    Consider Geuss's comments about the original position. He says that even after deliberation, there might remain at the end different groups with different views. Why? The original position, as Rawls often notes, is a decision-making device. We are to put ourselves in the position of a hypothetical person behind the veil of ignorance who chooses principles of justice for the basic structure of society. There need be no more than one such person. The idea that there are many individuals behind the veil is a mere heuristic device.

    Geuss takes issue with the idea that a hypothetical agreement would be relevant to us, who have concrete identities. But this is silly. The central idea here is that a just system is one that would be chosen by free and equal persons with moral powers behind the veil of ignorance. This central idea resonates, and will continue to resonate, I dare say, for as long as there are philosophers around to think about justice, long after Geuss's own ideas are forgotten. It resonates for those who have concrete identities, and for those without. This is because it is an abstract idea (is that a problem for you, Raymond?), an idea that is available to anyone capable of thinking beyond the world of concreta.

    Geuss tells us that Rawls's theory of justice has had no political effects. Ho hum. And I suppose that because Plato's and Aristotle's theories of justice had no political effects, they are not major moral and political theorists either. This is another piece of silliness. Whether a theory has had political effects is much more a reflection on actual politicians than it is a reflection on the theory itself.

    Geuss claims that the difference principle is morally repellent because it justifies great inequalities. There may be the germ of an objection here, but by itself this just begs the question. What's so great about equality? Some have done their best to justify the claim that equality is an independent value. But they haven't convinced me yet. The bottom line here is that it is hardly OBVIOUS that there is something INHERENTLY unjust about great inequality. It doesn't bother me that Bill Gates is hanging around. This is because I'm doing just fine, thank you. The problem with billionaires is not that they exist; the problem is that they exist in the midst of penury.

    Here's a final thought. If you couldn't say it to Rawls himself, then don't say it at all.

    Reply
  7. Matt

    Whether I count as a philosopher or not yet here I can't say, but I would say that I find these criticisms pretty superficial and a bit silly, really. On the first, if Rawls had sat down in his fox-hole or in the ashes of Nagasaki and started writing _A Theory of Justice_ that would seem very strange, but quite obviously that's not what happened. Rather, he started thinking about justice and changing his own views because of these experiences. It's a really rather shockingly unsympathetic and, frankly, silly response by Geuss, one not really worthy of him, there. The other remarks are also more snide than insightful, I think- of the form "isn't is interesting that X happened after Rawls wrote his book?" Well, not really, unless we get some argument. I read this particular paper quite a while ago but I don't remember seeing any real argument in it. Again, I found it quite disappointing for a philosopher of Geuss's level. And, of course, Rawls had studied economics and institutions, both while at Princeton and later. The stuff about the Law of Peoples is also a pretty vulgar miss-reading. It's a short and sketchy book, one written when Rawls wasn't very healthy, but even given that it's a pretty unsympathetic reading, one that reads a lot more in to the text. In all it's not one of Geuss's better papers and not one that I found to be very serious.

    Reply
  8. Mark van Roojen

    Geuss generally has interesting things to say and it took me a very long time to see the virtues in TOJ, but nowadays I think it has a lot going for it that the above quotations anyway seem to miss. Here's one point. To the extent that the original position has a role to play in the argument for the conception of justice Rawls champions (that all primary social goods are to be distributed so that the least representative share is as great as possible) it is as an expository device and not really as an essential feature of the overall argument. Rawls is concerned to justify a set of social institutions to each of the members or society. To that end he structures the OP to make sure that the fictional people in it will be risk averse – in other words that they will try to make sure that each representative social position will be satisfactory if at all possible. If that's the right way to read what's going on (and it would take a longish argument to show as opposed to say that it is) we can ask the relevant questions without invoking the OP: What would a society look like if it did its best to make each and every position in it as acceptable as possible? If you have doubts about agreement in the original position you should still be able to address this question directly.

    On the point about using the difference principle to justify anything. I don't buy it. It is an empirical question whether the inequalities in our society are to the benefit of the least well off, but it isn't a hard empirical question. They obviously are not. The claim that tax cuts are good for the poor has no more credibility than our dear leader's claim that we "don't torture".

    Reply
  9. Jussi Suikkanen

    Interestingly enough I was a while ago reading Burton Dreben's paper 'On Rawls' from Freeman's Cambridge Companion to Philosophy that addressed this very question. He seemed to think that a certain parochiality is a virtue in Rawls. As Dreben saw it, what was valuable in Rawls's project was the attempt to investigate whether our ideals concerning a liberal democracy constitute a coherent whole.

    On this view, the original position is to speak to us who share those ideals – it is a way of testing whether they are in a reflective equilibrium. This seems to be a worthy question in political philosophy -it should help us in understanding our own political views. It seems to me that the best thing to say about real inequalities is to get to everyone see that *they themselves* think that there is something immoral about such distribution.

    Dreben makes it clear that arguments such as the original position one were not intended to speak to the fascists. He has this hilarious passage about what Rawls would say to Hitler presumably about all the evil. Dreben's answer on behalf of Rawls is that the thing to do is to shoot him and not to argue about the original position. Someone who is so far away from the liberal democratic ideals is beyond the pale. This seems to be 'the right kind of intellectual response to slavery, torture, and mass murder'.

    Geuss seems to be also a bit unfair to Rawls. The difference principle as a principle of fair distribution is only the third on the lexically ordered list principles. The freedom principle does come first. It, and the maximal amount of mutually compatible freedoms, is meant to address the questions of safety, violence, political power, and so on which Geuss lists as most important. I agree with Corey that this does capture a lot of what went wrong in Germany.

    Reply
  10. Mike Otsuka

    1. Perhaps the political effects of A Theory of Justice have been ‘close to zero’ to date. But a work of political philosophy does not stand or fall on the basis of its immediate relevance. The political effects of Locke’s Second Treatise and Mill’s On Liberty were also close to zero in their days. These were nevertheless great works of political philosophy. Moreover, Locke’s work went on to have considerable influence upon the American founders (as is clear from the text of the Declaration of Independence, for example). And Mill’s book influenced that committee of American lawyers, judges, and law professors who set about to rewrite the criminal law into the form of a Model Penal Code in the 1950s and 60s, which Code in turn has had a fair amount of influence on legislators and judges. On Liberty was also influential in the cause to decriminalize homosexual acts in Britain at around the same time. In time, Rawls’s work might have a similar influence.

    2. I agree that it is not baffling for someone to be moved by reflection on fascism, Hiroshima, fire bombings, secret police, concentration camps in Germany, and internment camps in America to an interest in a theory of justice according to which:

    “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” (from the first two pages of the main text of A Theory of Justice)

    Reply
  11. Robert Johnson

    I'm a bit dumbfounded by Geuss' remarks. I quite admire much of his other work, and it is difficult to square with such peevish comments about Rawls. Much of what is wrong with what you quote here has been rightly pointed out above. But one thing in particular is galling: Rawls pointed political philosophy in the wrong direction?? With regard to what question? The idea that TJ is somehow a diagnosis or response to WWII would be looking in the wrong direction; sure, you need history for that. But how could anyone take TJ as something like that? It may be that political philosophers should *also* try to read the tea leaves of history and pronounce on its lessons. But should political philosophers not be asking what justice is?

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  12. David Reidy

    The general trajectory of previous comments seems to me to be just about right. A few further thoughts: 1) JR's experiences in WWII did not in the main or immediately drive him to theorize justice. He did not write his post WWII dissertation on justice. Indeed, it was not until he spent a year at Oxford in the early 50s that he began to think systematically about questions of justice. He was at that point (at least writing as) more or less a utilitarian (of a Millian sort). The experience of WWII did leave him without his earlier Christian theology and impressed upon him many lessons about both the strengths and fragility of liberal democracy as well as the ease with which populations might be institutionally organized into large scale forces of injustice. The early 50s saw JR growing more attuned to the need in liberal democracies for a sound public political philosophy and worried about the ability of utilitarianism to get the job done. 2) Not only is the difference principle subordinate to the liberty principle and the fair equality of opportunity principle, it's also (like the two just mentioned) a principle that applies to the basic social structure and not to individual transactions or to allocations of goods to individuals within that structure. A just basic social structure functions as a device of pure procedural justice so that the 'allocation' (JR distinguishes between allocation and distribution) of entitlements to individuals brought about in and through it are, by virtue of arising within a just basic social structure, just. Assessing the justice of a basic social structure never involves assessing allocations of entitlements to particular individuals. With respect to assessing whether a basic social structure satisfies the DP, the question is whether there is a way of organizing the economy (at the level of structuring property rights, markets and tax policy, say), consistent with the priority of liberty and fair equality of opportunities (the latter we haven't yet secured), so that the typical unskilled worker does better (in terms of expected lifetime share of wealth and income) than does the typical unskilled worker under the status quo. Is that an inquiry beyond the reach of economics or the social sciences generally? 3) The OP is a heuristic only (and can be set aside in favor of other modes of argument/presentation) and for only one question: How ought we, as democratic citizens, organize our polity. It functions as a heuristic there by bringing to the surface and modeling the relations between the idea(l)s latent in the question posed (social cooperation, free and equal citizens, etc.). There is no reason to expect the OP in this form to be recapitulated when it comes to questions of international relations or a just foreign policy for liberal democracies. There the question is: How ought we, as a constitutional liberal democracy, interact with other polities (first, other liberal democracies; second, other polities either nonliberal or nondemocratic or both)? JR's approach in LoP is again to try to draw out and model the relations between the idea(l)s latent in the question at hand. The issue between JR and his best critics here is over whether this is the right question to be asking. A large part of JR's defense of his taking this as the salient question to ask is that it is the most basic practical political question we as a people face in our relations to the rest of the world. This is par for the course for JR. From the late 1950s/early 1960s he was engaging what he took to be the most basic practical political questions we faced — questions without an answer to which we were as political agents all too likely to be dangerously like rudderless ships, or worse, to become politically hopeless and thus apathetic or fanatic. 4) JR takes history seriously both as a source of ideals — with the end of the wars of religion in Europe a new, previously (nearly) unthinkable, and morally attractive possibility presented itself, namely institutionalized religious toleration, and takes history seriously as a source of information regarding the limits of the possible — free institutions yield reasonable pluralism, to hope for more, for doctrinal consensus in morality, religious, philosophy, under conditions of freedom is to set oneself against the world.

    All this said, the Guess essay voices a perspective that is not uncommon. David Schaefer's recent book comes to mind as well.

    Reply
  13. Paul

    Two quick comments:

    (1)In Rawls' Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, he makes some remarks about the goals of political philosophy. If I remember correctly, he does not imagine that policy makers will be referencing Rousseau as a manual. He imagines that educated people might have political philosophy in the background as they form opinions, vote, approach history, etc. Rawls is taught in many lower-lever philosophy courses, and it seems reasonable to think that his book might affect young people who live in a society where the "distribution of wealth issue" is debated vigorously.

    (2) Thomas Pogge is someone who has taken Rawls seriously and tried to use a Rawlsian framework to address concrete issues. If Pogge's work is worth anything, then this speaks in favor of Rawls as well.

    Reply
  14. Porphyry

    Brian L. asks an honest question about the value of Rawls’s approach to political philosophy compared to the approach favoured by Geuss. My honest answer is that Geuss’s dichotomy is not real. Political philosophy in the style of Rawls is perfectly compatible with addressing historical and concrete questions of the type Geuss favours.

    Geuss’s quoted remarks suggest that two key virtues of a political philosophy are that it emphasize historical consciousness, and that it strongly concern itself with the issue of economic equality. By that standard, Marxism is a good political philosophy (whether or not Geuss himself is a Marxist). Given that Marxism passes the Geuss test, if his dichotomy is real, then we should expect to find that Marxists and Rawlsians have irreconcilable ways of philosophizing. But that is not what we find. There are lots of thinkers who draw on both Marxism and Rawls-style liberalism. Of the top of my head, I recall that Will Kymlicka, in his widely used introduction to political philosophy, argues for a fusion between the two traditions (and, if memory serves, that his bibliography contains references to other thinkers who take a similar view).

    Similarly, if Geuss’s dichotomy were real, we should expect that when we pick up a book by a proponent of a “good” philosophy such as Marxism, and compare it to work by a Rawlsian, we will discover that they embody radically different approaches. But again, that is not what we find. Were we to compare Rawls work to that of, say, G. A. Cohen, arguable the most prominent Marxist philosopher around, we would not encounter two fundamentally different styles of arguing. Cohen certainly has major disagreements with Rawls, but they are substantive rather than methodological. When it comes to method, both Rawls and Cohen mix historical and abstract analysis (Political Liberalism for example addresses the historically specific issue of religious pluralism, while a Theory of Justice has a discussion of civil disobedience, a timely issues when the book came out). This should cause us to realize that there is no conflict between methods Rawls uses and conclusions of the type Geuss favours.

    Other things Geuss says suggests that he misunderstands Rawls’s philosophy. Rawls for example is aware that human beings have “concrete” identities. Geuss would appear to misread the Original Position as putting forward a theory of personal identity, when it is really a modelling device Rawls asks us to use when deliberating over principles of justice. The point about people behind the Veil of Ignorance potentially not coming to agreement is even more off base (as Sam Rickless points out above). The whole point is to stipulate the agreement as hypothetical and then ask what its outcome would be, not try to convince us that people would reach such an agreement in reality.

    Geuss’s challenging the possibility of reaching agreement is the same type of response first-year students sometimes give when they are presented with trolly problems in ethics courses. Instead of choosing one of the alternatives the trolly problem is designed to highlight, they make up some third alternative that allows them to avoid the dilemma (i.e. “I yell down to the people on the track and tell them to move”). By disregarding the stipulations built into the exercise, the students show they do not grasp its purpose. Gauss makes the same mistake with Rawls’s contract.

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  15. Colin Farrelly

    Very interesting post. I am actually very sympathetic to Geuss's comments. Like Guess, I believe the Rawlsian project has taken political philosophy firmly in the wrong direction.

    The reason I hold this view is that I think proponents of the kind of abstract theorizing that dominants a good deal of contemporary political philosophy exercise the wrong kind of skill set (one not becoming of a political philosopher). This skill set is predominately concerned with what Adrian Vermeule calls “first-best conceptualism”. As such it impoverishes (rather than enhances) our deliberations concerning what would constitute a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

    For those interested in these issues, I have a book coming out next month criticizing ideal theory (especially Rawls), and I have posted a couple of detailed blog posts before on my concerns about these issues. See

    http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-justice-requires-many-things.html

    http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/2007/05/political-philosophy.html

    http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-is-political-theory.html

    http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/2007/09/taking-people-for-what-they-really-are.html

    Whether or not one agrees with Geuss, I think these methodological questions concerning what constitutes good/weak normative theorizing are among the most interesting issues theorists are now tackling. So there are a number of important issues here worth considering, no matter which side of the debate one feels inclined to defend.

    Cheers,
    Colin

    Reply
  16. anon

    I want to attest to Paul's first point above, that it is reasonable to think Rawls influences some of the many undergraduates who read him. Rawls not only got me interested in philosophy, he also convinced me to significantly revise my political views. I really don't think there's any question that Rawls has this latter effect on people at least as much as any other philosopher of the last hundred years.

    But as for the bigger question Mr. Leiter poses, regarding the value and relevance of Rawls' approach: it matters to me whether the position I'm advocating meets various standards. Some of these standards happen to be more abstract. Nothing in the Geuss passages suggest to me that there's anything wrong with this. So I conclude that Rawls' approach is valuable and relevant.

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  17. Tom Hurka

    Surely one reason TJ hasn't had much practical influence is that it's such a perfect illustration of Hegel's remark about the owl of Minerva.

    By the time the book appeared, the ascendancy of liberal political ideas, which had run from the late '50s through the late '60s, was coming to an end, at least in the U.S. Nixon was in the White House, to be succeeded by Carter (small-c on domestic issues) and then of course Reagan. The book theorized a set of ideas whose political influence was by then dying; it offered a new understanding of a "shape of life" that, at least outside universities, had already "grown old."

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  18. Sean Aas

    Wasn't WWII understood, at the time, as an ideological struggle between just and unjust societies? It seems to me that it's not at all hard to see why someone who took the value of justice to be a reason to kill and risk being killed would be interested in the nature and importance of that value.

    It's also not clear to me that Rawls understood justice to be concerned primarily with the 'fair distribution of resources'; indeed, the priority of the Liberty principle over the Difference principle suggests that he took civil liberties very seriously in thinking about justice- as, indeed, one might expect from someone who fought in a war that was understood, at least in part, as a struggle to protect those liberties.

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  19. Sam

    As Prof. Hurka notes, TJ is among other things a kind of philosophical translation of the aspiration of immediately preceding American liberalism. One will recall that until the Supreme Court's reversal in the early 1970s, ie, at the moment TJ appeared, it was on the brink of constitutionalizing social rights. One will also recall that Frank Michelman took TJ to be essentially the philosophical warrant for this move. Just as Marx called Schelling's work "Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae," one might see the early Rawls as doing something similar for a specific variant of postwar American liberalism. Of course, there is also the later Rawls's historicist turn, for better or worse.

    "We can now understand what would otherwise remain a paradoxical feature of the dominant political philosophy. It wants to transcend its historical situation, sometimes more, sometimes less. … However, it wants to accomplish this liberation from the moment and the circumstance at the outset of its arguments, by a methodological move … That is why so much of the speculative political philosophy of the day turns out in retrospect to give a metaphysical gloss to the tax-and-transfer practices of established social democracy. A pessimistic reformism, skeptical of institutional alterations and resigned to compensatory measures, directs the seemingly abstract campaigns of this speculative political philosophy." (R. Unger, *What Should Legal Analysis Become?*, 5-6.)

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  20. Tom Donahue

    I've written a paper challenging Geuss's background assumption that there is some deep conflict between the normative inquiry pursued by Rawls and the critical inquiry Geuss favors:
    http://ssrn.com/abstract=936775
    Comments welcome!

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  21. Adam Potthast

    I don't have Rawls' autobiographical remarks in front of me for context, but is it possible Geuss is making Rawls' comments much less banal than they were meant to be? I would think anyone in an infantry (particularly an under-supplied infantry) would find him or herself interested in the distribution of resources. Many people jump to the conclusion that any mention of WWII is mention of the Holocaust, but few people knew the horrors of the camps until after the war. Fighting in the Pacific would make one even less likely to hear about those events. Perhaps Rawls is simply referring to his actual service.

    But even then, the introduction to TOJ seems more than adequate to explain the connection between the difference principle and problems about the general organization of society.

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  22. David Watkins

    While I agree with at least some of Guess' substantive criticisms of Rawls (or, more accurately, the exalted position of Rawls and Rawlsianism in contemporary political philosophy, which we often forget is really not his fault–we collectively certainly could have paid less attention to him!), his comments comments regarding Rawls thoughts seems deeply unfair. I consider myself quite fortunate to have not lived through the horrors of war myself, and I'm rather inclined to refrain from suggesting what sort of thoughts ought to occupy one's mind as one is struggling to live through it. Perhaps the value of security and stability during such a time seemed so obvious as to not warrant any particular deep thoughts on the matter; perhaps he dealt with his environment by imagining the more appealing political challenges of a possible happy outcome to the war; who knows?

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  23. anon

    I am sympathetic to the idea that Rawls is not only an apologist for American post-war liberalism, but that this is also an incredibly damaging turn for political philosophy, since its job then essentially consists of proving that the present worldwide socio-political arrangement is all for the best for everyone, masking the evident ways in which it is clearly not, and framed for the interests of only a relatively small group. Also, looking at Kymlicka and Cohen as examples of Marxism is misleading. Marxists who could have posed a strong and plausible methodological alternative to Rawls, as Marxist theory demands, were and continue to be shown the door of the academy.

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  24. Andreas Follesdal

    In addition to the learned – and I think sound – observations about interpretations of Rawls' theory, and his possible reasons for holding that his WWII experiences stimulated his interest in issues of justice, it may be of some interest to question whether Geuss is correct in holding that Rawls' work has – and will continue to have – "nothing, literally nothing, to say about the real increase in inequality, except perhaps "so much the worse for the facts"?". To some extent, it may be too early to tell – since his books may mainly impact at the training stage of those who become political authorities later in life. And to some extent, I think his theory has had some discernable impact – leaving aside important questions of choice of indicators and measures.
    For those interested, I would recommend a collection of articles on "Rawls in Europe," a Special Issue of European Journal of Political Theory 1, 2.
    Two statements concerning conflict of interests:
    1) I wrote one piece in this, on "Rawls in the Nordic Countries", available at
    http://folk.uio.no/andreasf/ms/Rawls-nordic.rtf – a partial abstract below; and
    2) I wrote my dissertation, on international distributive justice, with Rawls as main supervisor in the 1980s.

    Section 1 identifies some legal, political, and cultural features that would lead us to expect little interest in Rawls’s work: Scandinavian Legal Realism, the Social Democratic Welfare state regimes, and pervasive ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Section 2 gives an overview of the reception of Rawls’s work, both in the academy and in public fora, on the basis of extensive but not exhaustive searches. Section 3 offers some conclusions and speculates that Rawls’s contributions – and political philosophy in general – will increase, largely due to Europeanisation.

    Andreas Follesdal

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  25. John Turri

    Geuss's worry that nothing would get settled in the original position seems to be the most worrisome for a Rawlsian. I take it that Brian L. wanted to steer clear of this, though, and focus on the criticism that Rawls focused on the wrong question, or at least ignored many important questions, and so his approach is discredited.

    SIMPLE RESPONSE: So what? Who doesn't ignore many important questions?

    SUBTLE RESPONSE: All, or at least most, of the alternative issues Geuss brings up can easily fall within the scope of the Rawlsian approach (and not merely take place as another project alongside the Rawlsian project). BASIC IDEA: refer to the list of liberties and goods and find them there; if they're not there, append them.

    Take security and control of violence: "freedom from psychological oppression and physical assault and dismemberment (integrity of the person)" is one of the basic liberties.

    Take the development and deployment of human individual and social capacities: refer to Rawls' discussion of the primary good of self-respect and the Aristotelian Principle. Expand if necessary.

    As for historically-informed theorizing, Rawls himself said: "It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to give a complete specification of these liberties independently from the particular circumstances–social, economic, and technological–of a given society." He hypothesized that a general and roughly correct "form of such a list" could be properly devised a priori. But that was just an hypothesis. Revise or discard if necessary.

    Take the provision for a viable social future: no information about generation is allowed in the OP, which is an attempt to make sure that principles are selected which do respect the obligation to responsibly provide for future generations. Whether this will actually work is a separate question; if it appears that it won't work, revise as necessary.

    I'm no Rawlsian, but I don't see why Rawlsians couldn't respond in the way just indicated. Perhaps someone will enlighten me.

    (I have nothing to say in defense of the bit about countenancing nuclear weapons as a "deterrent.")

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  26. David Ekstrand

    As someone who has been politically active in Sweden, I would just like to second the general outline of Prof. Föllesdal's very interesting paper. One of the first things you're told when you become an active member of the Swedish Liberal Youth (Liberala ungdomsförbundet) is "Liberals work for the worst-off, the have-nots rather than the haves". As Föllesdal points out, in a country such as Sweden, Rawls can quite easily be put to work against extreme forms of egalitarianism prevalent on the left, and be used to support tax cuts for the (comparatively heavily over-taxed) lower middle and lower income brackets (the LO collective, for anyone familiar with the Swedish labour market). It is really quite an interesting question whether the predominance of left-liberals among contemporary liberal theorists has led to an over-emphasis of the egalitarian nature of Rawls' work.

    Anyway, this would surely rebut Geuss' claim that Rawls has nothing to say on economic (in)equality. His argument may be relatively formal, but that is, the way I see it, a strength: it allows for transposition to different national contexts (though always within the framework of a liberal democracy). It is only when he starts going concrete, and discuss e.g. specific Supreme Court cases, that he stops becoming applicable to any society than the American one of his own time.

    As for Geuss' general comments on political philosophy, though, I would at least partially give him the benefit of the doubt as to the lack of sensitivity to real-world politics that political philosophy sometimes portrays (not to mention obliviousness to the results of empirical political science research), though I am very unsure whether Rawls should be seen as the primary target (after all, Rawls did realise, through the course of the 1980s, that questions of stability were of the highest importance for his theory of justice). One is rather more tempted to think of some democracy theorists advocating the "political life" as, almost by definition, the supreme form of human life, obviously without having ever had any political office or knowledge of the day-to-day political game in real-life communities, or so it would seem at first glance. (Their point is probably more subtle than this, but still.)

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  27. David Velleman

    No doubt, Geuss was comparing TOJ to post-War works of great moral seriousness such as Language, Truth, and Logic or The Language of Morals.

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  28. Brian Berkey

    I agree with A.M. that Geuss has presented a false dichotomy. I see no reason why ideal theory of the Rawlsian sort can't be pursued alongside the important questions within non-ideal theory that it seems Geuss would prefer that political philosophers focus on.

    In fact, it seems to me that ideal and non-ideal theory should complement each other in several ways, and that both those who focus exclusively on ideal theory and those who focus exclusively on non-ideal theory tend not to recognize this. In focusing exclusively on non-ideal theory, many fail to recognize that our conclusions about what ought to be done in particular cases need to be informed by, or at least be consistent with, more general views about what justice consists in. Ideal theory can help us to structure our views about particular cases in ways that avoid the inconsistency that those who ignore ideal theory often exhibit. Conversely, those who give insufficient attention to non-ideal theory often come to conclusions that have implausible implications for non-ideal cases. I think this is true of Rawls in TJ (in particular of his normative dualism), though I don't think this renders that work uninteresting or suggests that, overall, it led political philosophy in the wrong direction.

    Ideal theory alone does not get us answers to the pressing practical political questions that we face, and this suggests that, at the very least, ideal theory must be supplemented by non-ideal theory. And I think that it is a constraint on any ideal theory that it have plausible implications for non-ideal cases, and that it is a constraint on any non-ideal theory that its demands be consistent with our ideal theory (these constraints on the two approaches make it the case that they must complement each other).

    Geuss is wrong, then, if he thinks that political philosophers should not address questions in ideal theory at all. But there are important criticisms that I think need to be made of many of those, including Rawls, whose focus on ideal theory to the relative exclusion of non-ideal theory. For one, given what little Rawls says about non-ideal theory (e.g. what justice demands of individuals in a situation in which just institutions don't already exist), his ideal theory seems thoroughly Utopian, in the sense that the only way to achieve a just society would be through a massive campaign of supererogation. This, I claim, makes his ideal and non-ideal theories incongruent, given that we want our (ideal) account of justice to be normative rather than Utopian.

    I've addressed this issue in a couple of papers, the content of which overlap to some degree:

    http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/file/251/The_Demandingness_of_Morality_and_the_Unity_of_the_Normative_Realm.pdf

    http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/file/257/The_Priority_of_Morality.pdf

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  29. Errol Lord

    "I am sympathetic to the idea that Rawls is not only an apologist for American post-war liberalism…"

    I take that to mean that Rawls was in some way trying to justify the post-war distribution of wealth in the United States. I have seen that idea expressed in several places, and it I always think that it sounds crazy. To think that post-war America maximized the worst off position (not to mention provided an adequate scheme of basic liberties!) is wrongheaded. The implementation of Rawls's two principles would have been a radical change for post-war America. I take it that is an empirical fact, and thus that objection is seriously misguided.

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  30. Micah Schwartzman

    Perhaps this has been remarked above already, but, in case not, it's also worth mentioning the connection between Rawls' experience in WWII and the importance of luck, arbitrariness, and perhaps also a sense of guilt. By his own account, Rawls was deeply impressed by the fact that whether a soldier lived or died often turned on senseless distinctions, whether you had a certain blood type, spoke a particular language, happened to be good with radios, etc. Under those circumstances, it's not hard to imagine a soldier saying, "There by the grace of God, go I." But Rawls rejected that thought because of the divine cruelty it implied. Instead his response was to ask how we could structure our relations to mitigate the moral arbitrariness of the world, that we might (as Simon suggested above at 9:16) reconcile ourselve to it. Maybe this connection between Rawls' experience in WWII and his subsequent work is too attenuated for some, but it seems to me a profoundly moral reaction, with lasting implications for political philosophy.

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  31. uri

    A side remark: Geuss observes that the explosion of Rawlsian theory in political philosophy has largely coincided with a sharp rise in economic inequality.
    It is somewhat amusing and also a little troubling (for political philosophy in general), to find a predominant Rawls student making the same observation – this time about the capability approach.

    Here is Thomas Pogge (in 'can the capability approach be justified'):

    "I am not suggesting, of course, that the ascent of the capability approach contributed to the appalling economic history of the 1990s. But I am suggesting the reverse: That the large increase in global inequality and the consequent persistence of massive severe poverty in the developing world have contributed to the stunning success of the capability approach in international organizations as well as in popular and academic discourse. Capability metrics tend to conceal
    the enormous and still rising economic inequalities which resource metrics make quite blatant. And they may also exaggerate the relative aspects of poverty, hereby lending new respectability to the old nationalist exhortation that protecting our own poor (in the rich
    countries, where our normative reflections are produced and consumed) must take precedence.
    This suggestion is not evidence against the claim that the most plausible public criterion of social justice will turn out to employ a capability metric. Rather, it is meant to show that the amazing rapidity with which the capability language gained currency during the 1990s need not be a testament to its greater suitability with respect to the task of developing a plausible public criterion of social justice".

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  32. Thom Brooks

    Several posts above have commented on Geuss's claim that "Rather, he was a parochial figure who not only failed to advance the subject but also pointed political philosophy firmly in the wrong direction."

    In reply, it must be said that whatever we may make of Rawls's TJ and later works most of us might never have become interested in political philosophy as a subject worthy of special attention if Rawls had not brought it back to life.

    Therefore, Rawls clearly pointed political philosophy firmly in the right direction by firmly putting this area on our philosophical radars.

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  33. David Reidy

    I can't resist a brief follow up to Micah's post (and I wonder whether he'll agree with me here). There can be no doubt that numerous experiences, many prior to his experiences in WWII, impressed upon JR the inability of desert considerations to explain or justify many of the most important aspects of how persons fare in their journey through life. And there can be no doubt that this thought deeply informed JR's theory of justice. However, the luck egalitarian reading of JR doesn't follow. The demands of justice arise out of considerations rooted in our ideals of fair social cooperation and so on. To be sure, a just basic social structure puts the 'morally arbitrary' distribution of natural endowments to use for the common good of all and for the greatest good of those who benefit least, and it secures for all an entitlement to a basic social minimum. But that's not so as to mitigate bad luck. It's rather to express the ideal of fair social cooperation under democratic conditions (where considerations of reciprocity, fraternity, publicity and so on are salient). Where bad luck gives rise to special cases of need, JR appeals to a moral principle responsive to needs, not to the principles of justice. My own feeling is that the 'luck egalitarian' reading of JR did a great deal of harm to the viability of justice as fairness as a public political philosophy in the US, UK, etc. As Reagan and Thatcher banged the drums of individual responsibility, it appeared that the primary intellectual spokesman of left liberalism was banging the drum of some cosmic duty to justice to rid the world of the effects of bad luck (of course, on my view, he wasn't — Sheffler, Liz Anderson, Samuel Freeman et al. are right about that). Can there be any wonder that in that contest, the Reagan/Thatcher rhetorical tropes emerged culturally dominant?

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  34. seth edenbaum

    What we need first are not theories but histories of justice. Naturalist epistemologies demand the former for the clarity they provide, but its a false clarity.
    Whatever his hopes the form of rawls' discussions are more symptomatic than enlightening.

    Said this all before

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  35. Derek Bowman

    I wonder why people are so comfortable talking about 'ideal theory' and 'non-ideal theory' as though they were clearly distinct kinds. It just seems obvious that doing any kind of theory whatsoever requires some form of idealization, and to the extent that 'ideal theory' can be understood to address itself to human beings (as opposed to, say, integers) it cannot be based on a complete abstraction.

    If this is right, then it seems useless to frame the debate in such crude terms; instead we should be addressing charges that this or that form of idealization is helpful or harmful, given the function we hope the theory in question to serve. And unless we expect that 'political philosophy/theory' is itself a single monolithic enterprise, we shouldn't be surprised to see that different levels of idealization are appropriate for different purposes (or even, as others have suggested above, at different stages of a unified project).

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  36. Tom Hurka

    Language, Truth, and Logic isn't post-war, unless you mean WWI. And Dick Hare too said his moral philosophy was shaped by his WWII experiences, which were far more serious than Rawls's, since they involved being imprisoned and forced to work on the Burma railway.

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  37. Adam H

    It's common to say, as Tom Hurka does above, that Rawls' theory just makes coherent a set of “liberal political ideas” which have now disappeared from American politics. But this talk of disappearing “liberal political ideas” elides the distinction between liberal *policies* and their best *justification*. To be sure Rawlsian policies are pretty unpopular but this is no reason to think that ideas he uses to justify them are gone forever.

    Rawls appeals to the values of freedom and equality which are nearly always present in political debate in a democratic society, even on the right. For instance, in opposing the estate tax Norquist complained that the tax is motivated by discrimination which “has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally”. Rawls agrees that a democratic society must treat people equally, he just thinks that does so requires an economic system that works to the benefit of each.

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  38. Jonathan Quong

    I’d like to respond to David Reidy’s comment on Micah’s post. I agree with David that Rawls was not a luck egalitarian in the strict sense in which G.A. Cohen is, but I didn’t read Micah as providing a ‘luck egalitarian’ reading of Rawls. What Micah said is that the arbitrariness of war, and the inability of (at least the Christian) religion to make sense of it, may have led Rawls to try and understand how human institutions could mitigate the effects of luck on individual lives. A pure luck egalitarian is not interested in mitigating the effects of luck on individual lives, but rather eliminating the effects of brute luck. While I agree with most of David’s interpretation of Rawls, I’m not sure that the aim of mitigating the influence of luck can be completely detached from the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation between free and equal citizens. After all, why treat the distribution of natural talents as a common resource other than because this mitigates the arbitrary way marketable talents get distributed via the social and genetic lottery? Rawls is pretty clear in section 17 of TOJ that the difference principle ‘gives some weight to the considerations singled out by the principle of redress [luck egalitarianism]’. Rawls’s theory differs from strict luck egalitarianism in the sense that he doesn’t allow the aim of redressing luck to dominate his theory – it’s only one aim to be balanced among several others, and so justice as fairness only seeks to mitigate, and not eliminate, the effects of arbitrariness on people’s life chances. When the principle of redress conflicts with a potential pareto improvement, Rawls tells us that justice requires we opt for the pareto gain (whereas a luck egalitarian like G.A. Cohen would say that while we might, all-things-considered, opt for the pareto gain this is still unjust since justice is concerned purely with the elimination of arbitrary inequalities).

    I also think, for what it’s worth, that we should be very wary of buying into the story that luck egalitarianism (and its misattribution to Rawls) had some causal effect on the nature of politics in western societies. I seriously doubt the philosophical works of Ronald Dworkin and G.A. Cohen had much influence on US politics in the 80’s and 90’s, and furthermore, luck egalitarians were not banging a drum solely about eliminating the inequalities caused by brute luck – they were trying to make justice sensitive to responsibility and this is something people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum tend to agree on in the abstract. The dispute is really over what people can reasonably be held responsible for, not the bare idea of making justice track responsibility.

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  39. anon

    In response to Errol Lord:
    One can certainly be both an apologist for American post-war liberalism AND advocate the need for (mere) reform of the existing distribution of wealth (or even the scheme of basic liberties). It certainly is hard to perpetuate the illusion that a state is just when there is a visibly obscene gulf in the levels of wealth between the best and worst off in society- better to make the gulf a bit easier to hide. I think a case can also be made that Rawls's concern to justify civil disobedience was in some measure a response to real political events in the United States and thus a mark of his belief in the powers of internal reform present here. In other words, Rawls felt America was certainly just enough to not require a revolution, but not so just that it couldn't hurt to try to appeal to liberal (i.e. bourgeois) politicians to make it a bit better, and to cement into the political process a way for people to harmlessly blow off steam.

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  40. David Reidy

    Thanks Jonathan Quong for the excellent reply. My guess is that JR's views here evolved over time. For there are some differences between TJ and JasF. Of course, desert and responsibility are distinct notions. In both TJ and JasF, JR holds that no one deserves their place in the distribution of natural endowments. Indeed, the very idea of a determinate and well-defined distribution of natural endowments from better to worse seems to presuppose some basic institutions as background context. Absent background institutions, all we can say is that natural endowments will differ in some way still evaluatively underdetermined. Of course, with background institutions, there will be a relatively determinate and well-defined distribution of natural endowments with some better and some less well endowed. The key point, I take it, is that no one deserves natural endowments evaluatively different from others. In JasF, JR says that from the perspective of democratic equality the inevitability of evaluatively different natural endowments is a kind of misfortune or unhappy fact. (JasF, 21.4) The question is whether it is possible to reconcile this inevitability with the normative commitment to democratic equality. The difference principle, which treats the distribution of natural endowments as if it were a common asset, does this. And the OP argument for it turns primarily on considerations of reciprocity, fraternity, stability and publicity. I don't see concerns related to mitigating bad luck doing justificatory work here at all (though I concede there is some language to that effect in TJ). A just basic social structure faithful to the ideal of democratic equality functions as an instance of background pure procedural justice (by virtue of their conduct within a just basic social structure individuals generate a determinate allocations of entitlements all have reason to accept as just). To be sure, a just basic social structure will insure that whoever happens to enjoy a more favorable place in the evaluatively determinate distribution of natural endowments it underwrites is able to gain from that more favorable starting point only so long as others gain as well. I don't deny that there's a significant whiff of 'there but for the grace of god…' here. But the justificatory basis of the difference principle seems fully articulable without any reference to mitigating the effects of luck. Indeed, JR seems to have moved in this direction over time, unless I'm forgetting key pieces of JasF (always a possibility).

    I agree that Cohen and Dworkin did not likely have a large impact on US politics (though some, indirect, influence to be sure). What I meant to draw attention to is the possibility that Reagan/Thatcherites might not have fared so well had they been forced to confront a candidate public political philosophy more faithful to the Rawlsian line.

    But we're more or less off the Guess essay now, so why don't we continue this (Micah, you're invited) offsite if you like.

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  41. George Klosko

    I disagree with Geuss's comments, for reasons that have been expressed by many contributors. One possible observation. A striking feature of Rawls's work is his concern with "stability," especially his idea that relatively small differences between the principles of distributive justice a society adopts can significantly affect people's willingness to comply. I have always thought this idea highly improbable, and so have been puzzled by Rawls's deep concern with it. The depth of his concern is especially clear in Justice as Fairness, A Restatement, and even more in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.

    The idea seems to me so peculiar that a psychological rather than a philosophical explanation may be necessary. This discussion may provide it. It is not unlikely that the catastrophe of WWII helped turn Rawls to questions concerning the relationship between social justice and the stability of democratic societies (in the conventional sense, i.e., political stability). One thing he hoped to accomplish was to work out principles that would contribute to the latter, a hope that may have insinuated itself into some of his central arguments.

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  42. loren

    I've arrived late to this delightfully rich conversation, and only want to share Brian and Derek's concern about the haste with which some folks draw the ideal/nonideal distinction (most often with an eye to pointing out the perils of obsessing over the former without due attention to the latter). I find Rawls's use of the terms "non-ideal theory" and "partial compliance theory" somewhat distracting. When we think about how to respond to injustice, I'd think that's best done as part of theorizing about justice (which Rawls pretty much asserts), moving from ideal to nonideal much as Rawls would have us move back and forth between considered judgements and principles in ideal theory (which Rawls does not actually claim, but which offhand doesn't seem an implausible extension of the procedure of reflective equilibrium). Of course if you are already sceptical of reflective equilibrium (and constructivism in ethics) then mine is not an especially interesting point. But if you take Rawls on his own terms, I don't think his approach leads us to draw a sharp division of labour between dealing with ideal and nonideal concerns.

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  43. Errol Lord

    What does it mean to say that Rawls was an "apologist for American post-war liberalism"? I take it that he must (i) intentionally wish to conform to the ideals of American post-war liberalism and (ii) he must carry that intention out by arguing for a theory that conforms to said ideals. I am curious to know what you take those ideals to be. It might be that those who are sympathetic to Rawls wouldn't find American post-war liberalism as abhorrent as you do, and thus they still wouldn't feel the pull of this objection. Or it might be that there really isn't a clear set of ideals that American post-war liberals held, and thus the objection would be illusory. In any case, I'll let you speak to what those ideals were.

    "It certainly is hard to perpetuate the illusion that a state is just when there is a visibly obscene gulf in the levels of wealth between the best and worst off in society- better to make the gulf a bit easier to hide."

    Questions: Why do you think that Rawls's two principles merely hide injustice? Moreover, why do you think that was his intention?

    "In other words, Rawls felt America was certainly just enough to not require a revolution, but not so just that it couldn't hurt to try to appeal to liberal (i.e. bourgeois) politicians to make it a bit better, and to cement into the political process a way for people to harmlessly blow off steam."

    It seems plausible to me that America was just enough not to require a revolution, and I think that Rawls's argument for that conclusion is fairly persuasive. But everything in the second half of that sentence sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Why would you think that Rawls's intent was merely to appeal to bourgeois politicians to make it better because "it couldn't hurt" to try. And what do you mean when you say that his intention was to"cement into the political process a way for people to harmlessly blow off steam"?

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  44. DAO

    I would like to suggest that Geuss' essay has been somewhat misunderstood by most of the respondents posting on this wall (I would add that I am unusual in the sense that i am far more familiar with Geuss' work than with Rawls', and so may be able to put what he has written about Rawls in context).

    First, Geuss is writing from a tradition informed by Genealogy. A genealogical approach (informed by history, as he puts it) makes one highly suspicious of the virtues of abstract theorizing, and especially of the possibilities of reaching some sort of load-bearing timeless concept such as justice. Naturally Foucault is helpful in understanding this approach, and the introduction to Geuss' 'Public goods, Private Goods' outlines his genealogical method very clearly.

    Second, I think Geuss is reacting against what he sees to be a wider misunderstanding (represented and encouraged by Rawls) about what political thinking should be focussed on. Early authors (Hobbes naturally springs to mind) were interested in solving the serious problems of conflict; his argument was firmly rooted in an (attempt at an) understanding of what humans were like. For Geuss, Rawls can tell us little about what to do about the problem of conflict (hence the example of Rawls' experience in WW2): he can really only encourage us to view conflict in a particular way.

    It will be said in response to this that Rawls' theory gives us some sort of target to aim at. However, in addition to what Geuss has to say about the unhelpfulness of abstractions, I would suggest that he is criticizing modern political theory's failure to address the problems of political causality and efficacy. It is such concerns that can be found so vividly in Hobbes work, and which have been lost sight of in the work Geuss is criticizing. Two authors that i am sure have informed Geuss' thinking in this direction are Bernard Williams (esp 'Realism and moralism in politics') and John Dunn.

    The passages about the justification for unjust economic practices and similar are in fact secondary in my view.

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  45. Etienne Brown

    Let’s face it, Geuss’s style of writing is very (maybe too much) provocative. Claiming that “Rawls is not a major moral and political theorist” is certainly not the best way to convince the contemporary anglo-american theorists of justice that a debate on the nature of political philosophy is needed. But bypassing the insulting comments, I think we must agree that Geuss proposes very pertinent questions: Does contemporary political philosophy should essentially be a matter of defining ideals of justice and if so, why? Should the task of defining justice bring us to try to concretely realize this ideal? If so, shouldn’t we agree with Geuss that political philosophy also needs to think notions like power or motivation to act?

    Without sharing Geuss’s radical hostility towards the theorizing of justice, I think his work still helps us to understand that political philosophy could be a broader field than what it actually is, could stop limiting itself to the notion of justice. What exactly could it be then? It seems that even Geuss doesn’t have the exact answer to this question. But there sure are many other topics considered by contemporary political thinkers outside of the analytic tradition (democracy, crime against humanity, modernity, ideology, human recognition). Given this, I don’t see why the anglo-american tradition in political philosophy shouldn’t give itself the possibility to seriously consider the worth of these other kinds of questioning and to explore other ways to approach the political phenomena.

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