Rawls as a critical theorist: Reflective equilibrium after the ‘deliberative turn’

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 173-191

  Ron, Amit ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

distributive justice; immanent criticism; John Rawls; justice as fairness; political liberalism; public reason; reflective equilibrium

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247655099     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706061091     Document Type: Article

References (106)

1. For a discussion of Rawls as part of the ‘canon’ of deliberative democracy theorists, see James Bohman and William Rehg, ‘Introduction’, in James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. xvi–xvii.
2. See also, Joshua Cohen, ‘For a Democratic Society’, in Samuel Freeman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 100–3.
3. This process-oriented character of political philosophy is captured by what Rawls calls the second task of political philosophy, that of ‘orientation’ — ‘political philosophy may contribute to how a people think of their political and social institutions as a whole, and their basic aims and purposes as individuals, or as members of families and associations’. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 2–3; hereafter cited as JAF:R.
4. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Making Philosophy Matter to Politics’, the New York Times, 2 December 2002: section A, 21.
5. Already in 1983 Arthur DiQuattro articulated the importance of these themes in Rawls' work. Arthur DiQuattro, ‘Rawls and Left Criticism’, Political Theory 11(1) (1983): 53–78.
6. For an earlier generous leftist interpretation of Rawls, see Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice: the Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), chapter 6.
7. For more recent ones, see R. G. Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)
8. and Jon Mandle, What's Left of Liberalism? An Interpretation and Defense of Justice as Fairness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000).
9. Lawrence Connin discusses such an interpretation. Lawrence Connin, ‘On Diquattro “Rawls and Left Criticism”’, Political Theory 11(1) (1983).
10. See also Diquattro's discussion of the plausibility of such an interpretation: Arthur Diquattro, ‘Rawls Versus Hayek’, Political Theory 14(2) (1986): 307–10.
11. JAF:R, p. xvii.
12. See, for example, JAF:R, pp. 149–50.
13. A similar claim is elaborated in Percy B. Lehning, ‘The Coherence of Rawls' Plea for Democratic Equality’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 1(4) (1998): 1–41.
14. For a discussion of Horkheimer's notion of ‘immanent criticism’ see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 184.
15. Compare with Ian Shapiro's claim that Richard Rorty's ‘is not remotely plausible as a reading of Rawls’. Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 29;
16. Richard Rorty, ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’, in Merrill Peterson and Robert Vaughn (eds) The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 257–82.
17. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 242; hereafter cited as TOJ.
18. TOJ, p. xv;
19. JAF:R, pp. 135–40.
20. The difference between the two ideas and the radical implications of property-owning democracy are discussed in Richard Krouse and Michael McPherson, ‘Capitalism, “Property-Owning Democracy,” and the Welfare State’, in Amy Gutmann (ed.) Democracy and the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 79–105.
21. In JAF:R, p. 135, n. 2
22. Rawls cites this discussion as ‘[a]n instructive discussion to which I am indebted’. Some of the more radical statements that Rawls makes can be found in his footnotes. For example, in JAF:R, p. 44, n. 7, Rawls endorses R. G. Peffers's Marxist interpretation of ‘justice as fairness’ as a plausible one.
23. ‘The requirements of the prior principles [first principle and fair equality of opportunity, A.R.] have important distributive effects. Consider the effects of fair equality of opportunity as applied to education, say, or the distributive effects of the fair value of the political liberties. We cannot possibly take the difference principle seriously so long as we think of it by itself, apart from its setting within prior principles’ (JAF:R, p. 46).
24. JAF:R, p. 4.
25. This interpretation is even repeated by Brian Barry in Rawls' obituary where he is described as producing ‘the philosophical basis for European social democracy that it had always lacked’. Brian Barry, ‘The Philosopher Who Transformed his Subject: Obituary John Rawls’, Financial Times (London), 28 November 2002: 23.
26. While Rawls considered socialist democracy as a plausible alternative to property-owning democracy, neither is similar to European social democracies (JAF:R, pp. 138–40).
27. Rawls emphasizes the distinction in his later evaluations of A Theory of Justice. The first time that he revisits this issue is in the preface for the 1989 French edition of A Theory of Justice. John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 419–20; hereafter cited as CP.
28. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 397, where the term ‘misunderstanding’ refers specifically to the view that the decisions about constitutional essentials are in fact made behind a veil of ignorance, so that ‘real’ members of society do not have a say; hereafter cited as PL.
29. See PL, p. 369, for an earlier statement of the same claim.
30. Ben Rogers, ‘Obituary: John Rawls’, Guardian, 27 November 2002.
31. In other places Ben Rogers describes Rawls' theory as radical. Ben Rogers, ‘Portrait: John Rawls’, Prospect (June 1999): 50;
32. and ‘Behind the Veil: John Rawls and the Revival of Liberalism’, Lingua Franca (July/August, 1999): 57–64. Rawls opposed the Vietnam War, participated in anti-war conferences, and taught a course on international law as it applies to Vietnam.
33. In what follows, I benefited from the insightful discussion in Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), chapter 2.
34. TOJ, p. 14;
35. also TOJ, p. 47.
36. CP, p. 320.
37. JAF:R, p. 136;
38. also TOJ, p. 171.
39. TOJ, p. 228; emphasis added.
40. Surprisingly (given the common understanding of Rawls), Alasdair MacIntyre offers a similar insight in arguing that moral philosophy presupposes sociology and ‘that we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be’. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 23.
41. TOJ, p. 231.
42. TOJ, p. 216.
43. See also TOJ, p. 240, for using the principle of efficiency in the same way.
44. The first (‘trimming’) quote is from Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), chapter 2 (the title).
45. The second quote is from Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), chapter 3.
46. See also, Roberto Alejandro, The Limits of Rawlsian Justice (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 115–36;
47. Glen Newey, After Politics: the Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 171–5.
48. PL, pp. 372–434;
49. see also Mandle, What's Left, pp. 275–83.
50. For one such idealist interpretation of Rawls, see: ‘My main conclusion will be that these theorists [Rawls and Habermas, A.R.] provide conceptions of political design which are post-political; the societies they describe are societies after politics. These conceptions, if implemented, would contain little political content.’
51. Newey, After Politics, pp. 159–60; emphasis added.
52. PL, pp. 26, 28;
53. also JAF:R, p. 17.
54. See Mandle, What's Left, p. 276.
55. TOJ, pp. 176, 314–15.
56. PL, p. 397; emphasis added. Also, ‘In justice as fairness there are no philosophical experts. Heaven forbid! But citizens must, after all, have some ideas of right and justice in their thought and some basis for their reasoning. And students of philosophy take part in formulating these ideas but always as citizens among others’
57. (PL, p. 427);
58. also ‘The point of view of civil society includes all citizens. Like Habermas' ideal discourse situation; it is a dialogue; indeed, an omnilogue’ (PL, p. 383).
59. See Mandle, What's Left, pp. 277–8 for a defense of such a role for philosophers (against Habermas).
60. See also Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Enduring Significance of John Rawls’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 July 2001.
61. TOJ, p. 16.
62. See also, PL, p. 45 — ‘Our feeling coerced’ by the original position ‘is perhaps being surprised at the consequences of those principles and standards, at the implication of our free recognition’.
63. Wayne Norman characterizes this strategy as one of an ‘optimist’: Wayne Norman, ‘“Inevitable and Unacceptable?” Methodological Rawlsianism in Anglo-American Political Philosophy’, Political Studies XLVI (1998): 283.
64. I think that the strategy should be understood as part of Rawls' critical standpoint of drawing radical implications from widely accepted values. Rawls is saying that there is no need to interpret radical critique of existing institutions in terms of a clash between different value systems. It is sufficient to hold existing institutions to the values that they claim. Terrence Kelly suggests that Rawls' reflective equilibrium is similar to Habermas' rational reconstruction (and then argues that Rawls does not follow the requirements of the method). But while successful rational reconstruction should leave the agents that follow the practice uninterested (since these are the rules that they already follow), successful reflective equilibrium should surprise or upset real members of society. Terrence Kelly, ‘Sociological not Political: Rawls and the Reconstructive Social Sciences’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 31(1) (2001): 3–19. Kelly follows Habermas' own view of reflective equilibrium as a case of rational reconstruction.
65. See Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 60.
66. Rawls offers slightly different characterizations of what count as considered judgements. See CP, pp. 5–6, 289;
67. TOJ, p. 41;
68. and discussion in T. M. Scanlon, ‘Rawls and Justification’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 141.
69. ‘Satisfactory explication’ appears in CP, pp. 7–8.
70. CP, pp. 286ff. for a discussion of ‘moral theory’. Rawls uses an analogy to Chomsky's attempt to reconstruct ‘native language’ to illustrate this point, TOJ, p. 41;
71. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), pp. 3–9. This analogy makes Terrence Kelly's comparison between reflective equilibrium and Habermas' rational reconstruction all the more convincing since Habermas uses Chomsky's work as a model for rational reconstruction. Kelly, ‘Sociological not Political’.
72. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 15.
73. The characterization of reflective equilibrium as a form of explication is, in my view, more accurate than drawing an analogy to the way scientists try to distinguish real laws from accidental generalization. See Norman Daniels, ‘Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory of Acceptance in Ethics’, The Journal of Philosophy 76(5) (1979): 256–82;
74. Andrew George Biggs, ‘Rawls as the “Newton of Morals”: the Use of Scientific Method in “A Theory of Justice”’ (PhD diss., LSE, 1995).
75. See also Norman, ‘“Inevitable and Unacceptable?”’, p. 290 (esp. n. 63).
76. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 37–9.
77. Scanlon, ‘Rawls and Justification’, pp. 142ff.
78. CP, pp. 1–19, 286, 302;
79. TOJ, pp. 42–5.
80. I borrow these descriptions from Jon Mandle, who is critical of such interpretation of reflective equilibrium. Mandle, What's Left, p. 47.
81. CP, p. 1. Reflective equilibrium is often described as Rawls' ‘method’ of moral justification. However, I could not find a single place in which Rawls refers to reflective equilibrium as a method. He comes close to it in two places. In his first publication, ‘Outline of a Decision Procedure of Ethics’ (1951), Rawls speaks about a decision procedure in ethics as a method, but he does not refer to it as a process of reflective equilibrium. In the preface to Theory of Justice, he writes that he has ‘avoided extensive methodological discussions’. The sections that he designates as containing ‘brief considerations of the nature of moral theory’, include the one that deals with reflective equilibrium (TOJ, p. xix). In his essay ‘The Independence of Moral Theory’, he relies on Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics to bring out the point that ‘we want to put aside the urgency we feel to discover the true method of determining what we ought to do’ (CP, p. 290). The point is important because reflective equilibrium should be understood as a philosophy of justification rather than as a method. For a similar distinction made in relation to Quentin Skinner's alleged ‘method’ of interpretation, see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1979), chapter IV.
82. PL, p. 381 and especially n. 11.
83. PL, p. 384, n. 16.
84. JAF:R, p. 31.
85. For the notion of ‘background culture’, see PL, p. 14.
86. JAF:R, p. 30.
87. In this sense, I believe that the characterization of reflective equilibrium as ‘inevitable and unacceptable’ captures the difficulty with the traditional interpretations of this notion. G. R. Grice, ‘Moral Theories and Received Opinions’, Aristotelian Society, supp. 52 (1978): 1–12;
88. Norman, ‘“Inevitable and Unacceptable?”’.
89. See Joseph Carnes' defense of ‘reflective disequilibrium’. Joseph H. Carnes, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice and Evenhandedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4.
90. I endorse Neil Levy's view of reflective equilibrium as ‘the appropriate methodology for [immanent] interpretive criticism’. However, Levy maintains the traditional view that beliefs (and practices in his view) of ordinary citizens are the ‘input’ for this process. Neil Levy, ‘Wider Still: Reflective Equilibrium and the Explanation of Political Radicalization’, International Journal of Politics and Ethics 1(2) (2001): 147–57.
91. In A Theory of Justice Rawls says that he discusses matters of political economy ‘from the point of view of the citizen who is trying to organize his judgements concerning the justice of economic institutions’ (TOJ, p. 234).
92. PL, pp. 8, 13–14, 97–8;
93. CP, pp. 393–4.
94. Onora O'Neill argues that Rawls misdescribes reflective equilibrium as a process of abstraction because it is in fact a process of unvindicated idealization. In my interpretation, reflective equilibrium is indeed a process of idealization, but its purpose is to provide a standpoint for an immanent criticism of existing institutions, not to secure universal principles of moral reasoning. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 2.
95. PL, p. 402. Rawls refers to Habermas' view of the constitution as a project.
96. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 443–6, 445.
97. PL, p. 398.
98. CP, p. 395.
99. PL, p. 407.
100. G. A. Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
101. G. A. Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), pp. 260–329. I grant that Cohen will concur with the general gist of this claim.
102. JAF:R, p. 26; the idea of public justification has three other ideas related to it: reflective equilibrium, an overlapping consensus, and public reason.
103. JAF:R, p. 89; emphasis added.
104. PL, pp. 54–8.
105. JAF:R, p. 91;
106. see also CP, pp. 576–7.