John Rawls's Contribution to the Modern Political Philosophy

Akademische Arbeit , 2022 , 12 Seiten

Politik - Sonstige Themen zur Internationalen Politik

John Rawls is the best-known political philosopher in the modern period. The purpose of this article is to determine John Rawls’s contribution to modern political philosophy. This article opens with a biography of Rawls. From thereon, it introduces and discusses John Rawls’s four roles of political philosophy, and this article provides an introduction to Rawls’s writings in political philosophy. It provides an exposition on the fundamental ideas of Rawls’s ‘Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993)’, and at the end of this article, discussed the basic ideas of ‘Law of people’ (1999).

Abstract

John Rawls is the best-known political philosopher in the modern period. The purpose of this article is to determine John Rawls’s contribution to modern political philosophy. This article opens with a biography of Rawls. From thereon, it introduces and discusses John Rawls’s four roles of political philosophy, and this article provides an introduction to Rawls’s writings in political philosophy. It provides an exposition on the fundamental ideas of Rawls’s ‘ Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993)’ , and at the end of this article, discussed the basic ideas of ‘ Law of people’ (1999) .

Key Words: Political Philosophy/ Social Justice/ Liberalism

1. Life

Rawls (b. 1921, d. 2002) was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a prominent lawyer; his mother was a chapter president of the League of Women Voters. Rawls studied at Princeton and Cornell, where he was influenced by Wittgenstein’s student Norman Malcolm; and at Oxford, where he worked with H. L. A. Hart, Isaiah Berlin, and Stuart Hampshire. His first professorial appointments were at Cornell and MIT. In 1962 Rawls joined the faculty at Harvard, where he taught for more than thirty years.

Rawls’s adult life was a scholarly one: its major events occurred within his writings. The exceptions were two wars. As a college student, Rawls wrote an intensely religious senior thesis ( BI ) and had considered studying for the priesthood. Yet Rawls lost his Christian faith as an infantryman in World War II on seeing the capriciousness of death in combat and learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. Then in the 1960s, Rawls spoke out against the draft for the Vietnam war because it discriminated against black and poor Americans. The Vietnam conflict impelled Rawls to analyze the defects in the American political system that led it to prosecute so ruthlessly what he saw as an unjust war and to consider how citizens could conscientiously resist their government’s aggressive policies.

Rawls’s most discussed work is his theory of a just liberal society, called justice as fairness . Rawls first set out justice as fairness in systematic detail in his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice . Rawls continued to rework justice as fairness throughout his life, restating the theory in Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999), and Justice as Fairness (2001).

Rawls saw problems for the justification of liberal democratic order in American society during his times. In this context, he offered a theoretical scheme for the systematic reconstruction and defense of the values of liberal democracy. In doing this Rawls demonstrated that because of the dependence and urgency of the political questions, they cannot be primarily philosophical and they should be studied about other social sciences, especially economics. He insisted that the method of political philosophy was essentially ‘normative and impure’ in nature. Another important fact is that Rawls was deeply influenced by liberal thinkers like John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Hume, and others.

2. Four Roles of Political Philosophy

Rawls sees political philosophy as fulfilling at least four roles in a society’s public culture. The first role is practical: philosophy can propose grounds for reasoned agreement when sharp political divisions threaten to lead to violent conflict. Rawls cites Hobbes’s Leviathan as an attempt to solve the problem of order during the English civil war, Locke’s Letter on Toleration as responding to the Wars of Religion, as well as the philosophy that emerged from the debates over the US Constitution, and from debates over the extension of slavery before the American civil war.

The second role of political philosophy is to help citizens to orient themselves within their social world. Philosophy can meditate on what it is to be a member of a certain society—in a democracy, an equal citizen—and offer a unifying framework for answering divisive questions about how people with that political status should relate to each other.

The third role is to probe the limits of political possibility. Political philosophy must describe workable political arrangements that can gain support from real people. Yet within these limits, philosophy can be utopian: it can depict a social order that is the best that we can hope for. Given humans, as they are, philosophy imagines laws as they might be.

The fourth role of political philosophy is reconciliation: “to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us how its institutions… are rational, and developed over time as they did to attain their present, rational form” ( Kelly, E., 2001 ). Philosophy can show that human life is not simply domination and cruelty, prejudice, folly, and corruption; but that, at least in some ways, it is better that it has become as it is.

Rawls views his work as a practical contribution to resolving the long-standing tension in democratic thought between liberty and equality, and to limning the limits of civic and international toleration. He offers the members of democratic countries a way of understanding themselves as free and equal citizens of a society that is fair to all, and he describes a hopeful vision of a stably just constitutional democracy doing its part within a peaceful international community. To individuals who are frustrated that their fellow citizens and fellow humans do not see the whole truth as they do, Rawls offers the reconciling thought that this diversity of worldviews results from, and can support, social order with greater freedom for all.

3. Theory of Justice (1971)

Indeed, John Rawls’s core contribution to modern political philosophy is writing this ‘Theory and Justice’ book. The term 'justice' originates from the Latin word jus , meaning a tie or a bond in English. Ernest Barker says: “The function of justice may be said to be that of adjusting, joining or fitting the different political valuesit is the reconciler and synthesizer of political values in their union in an adjusted and integrated whole...” Barker also says: “The idea of justice resides in all minds, and it has been created and developed through the ages by a process of historical social thought, which has made it a common inheritance ... it is not an abstract conception but a social reality: an actual content of actual minds...” (Barker, Ernest., 1951).

To Rawls, “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”

Rawls was worried to see the disagreement within the liberal democratic system regarding the way basic social institutions should be arranged if they were to conform to the freedom and equality of citizens as moral persons. To justify political liberalism Rawls attempted to work out a theory of justice that would be appropriate for a ‘well-ordered society.

The necessity of a theory of justice arises from the fact that although “a society is a co-operative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests.” From the commonsense of sociology, society must require a set of principles for choosing between the possible arrangements for distributing advantages and for justifying an agreement on the ‘proper distributive shares’. For Rawls a society is “…well-ordered when it is not only designed to advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. According to Rawls a well-ordered society or a good society should have two major aspects:

i. Everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principle of justice, and
ii. The basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles” (Rawls, John., 1971).

According to Rawls, justice should be regarded as a virtue of institutions, or ‘practices’, rather than of particular actions or persons. Therefore, he recognized justice as fairness. To him, it was one among many virtues and not an all-inclusive vision of a good society. To him, “The question of fairness arises when free persons, who have no authority over one another, are enjoying in a joint activity and amongst themselves settling or acknowledging the rules which define it and determine the respective shares in its benefits and burdens.” Not only that, Rawls was concerned with the distributive form of justice. To him, it “… is upon a correct choice of a basic structure of society, its fundamental rights and duties, that the justice of distributive share depends.” To find out the best possible way to make such a ‘correct choice’ Rawls revived the notion of social contract against the then-dominant theories of utilitarianism and intuitionism. As to him, utilitarianism sacrificed individual freedom for the sake of the common good. And intuitionism was also a weak theory to him as it left little for an individual’s judgment guided by his reason. Social contract theory allowed for the separation of justice – the right, from the notions of what would produce the best. They should be separated because there can be no natural agreement in modern states over competing ideas of the good. The virtue of justice is that it creates the possibility for competing ideals of the good to coexist within a relatively stable political order – which can be termed as a ‘well-ordered society’ (Rawls, John., 1971).

For achieving such a society, ‘Justice as fairness’ could only be accounted for from the standpoint of a hypothetical contract, which is not a device for entering a particular society or setting up a particular form of government, but the context in which the principles of justice appropriate for the basic structure of society are formulated. Here, Rawls was influenced by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.

The following are the four conditions that Rawls advocated for the successful conduct of a contract leading to the formulation of the basic principles of justice for a well-ordered society.

A. ‘Circumstances of justice’ or ‘natural fact’: Under the influence of Hume Rawls considered that men are bounded by incomplete knowledge, limited attention, and limited capacity of judgment – these conditions are ‘natural’, not artificial, alterable, or modifiable.
B. ‘ Original/initial position’: According to Rawls, “… what would emerge from such a hypothetical condition would be those principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their interest would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.”
C. ‘Veil of ignorance’: He also said: “Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like. I shall even assume the parties do not know their conception of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”
D. ‘Maximin rule’: In such a condition as mentioned above, Rawls, under the influence of the ‘game theory’ of modern economics, expected the rational individual would rank alternatives by their worst possibilities. Those alternatives will be adopted the worst outcome of which is superior to the worst outcomes of the others. A person would choose for the design of a society in which even his enemy is to assign him his place (Rawls, John., 1971).

Thus, Rawls expected that two principles of justice would be chosen based on the 'original position':

i. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.
ii. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all.

Later on, Rawls modified these principles and presented them in the following way:

i. Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all,
ii. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. First, they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

Furthermore, Rawls advanced two cases of 'priority rules' in respect to the above principles:

i. A less-extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberty shared by all;
ii. A less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those citizens with lesser liberty.

Rawls also emphasized that there is no need for economic equality for implementing the principles of justice, but the need is for a pattern of economic distribution to the benefit of the least advantaged and as complete as possible openness of all positions of authority. To him there is no favorite economic system for the implementation of these principles, it depends on the 'traditions, institutions, and social forms of each country.

Significantly, this theory aims at setting out an 'Archimedean point' in terms of which different societies would be assessed. It aims to arise at a state of affairs that Rawls called as 'reflective equilibrium. But he always insisted that the theory was open to further modification, which he did during the late nineteen (Kelly, E., 2001).

4. Political Liberalism (1993)

In a free society, citizens will have disparate worldviews. They will believe in different religions or none at all; they will have differing conceptions of right and wrong; they will disagree on how to live and on what relationships to value. Citizens will have contrary commitments, yet within any country, there can only be one law. The law must either establish a national church or not; women must either have equal rights or not; abortion and gay marriage must either be permissible or not; the economy must be set up in one way or another.

Rawls holds that the need to impose a unified law on a diverse citizenry raises two fundamental challenges. The first is the challenge of legitimacy: the legitimate use of coercive political power. How can it be legitimate to coerce all citizens to follow just one law, given that citizens will inevitably hold divergent worldviews?

The second challenge is the challenge of stability, which looks at political power from the receiving end. Why would a citizen willingly obey a law that is imposed on her by a collective body whose members have beliefs and values so different from her own? Yet unless most citizens willingly obey the law, no social order can be stable for long.

Rawls answers these challenges of legitimacy and stability with his theory of political liberalism. Political liberalism is not yet Rawls’s theory of justice (justice as fairness). Political liberalism answers the conceptually prior questions of legitimacy and stability.

4.1. Legitimacy:

In a democracy, political power is always the power of the people as a collective body. In light of the diversity within a democracy, what would it mean for citizens legitimately to exercise coercive political power over one another? Rawls’s test for the acceptable use of political power in a democracy is his liberal principle of legitimacy :

“Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised by a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason” (Rawls, John., 1993).

According to this principle, political power may only be used in ways that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of political power must fulfill a criterion of reciprocity : citizens must reasonably believe that all citizens can reasonably accept the enforcement of a particular set of basic laws. Those coerced by law must be able to endorse the society’s fundamental political arrangements freely, not because they are dominated or manipulated, or kept uninformed.

The liberal principle of legitimacy intensifies the challenge of legitimacy: how can any particular set of basic laws legitimately be imposed upon a pluralistic citizenry? What constitution could all citizens reasonably be expected to endorse? Rawls’s answer to this challenge begins by explaining what it means for citizens to be reasonable .

Reasonable citizens want to live in a society in which they can cooperate with their fellow citizens on terms that are acceptable to all. They are willing to propose and abide by mutually acceptable rules, given the assurance that others will also do so. They will also honor these rules, even when this means sacrificing their particular interests. Reasonable citizens want, in short, to belong to a society where political power is legitimately used.

Each reasonable citizen has her view about God and life, right and wrong, good and bad. Each has, that is, what Rawls calls her comprehensive doctrine . Yet because reasonable citizens are reasonable, they are unwilling to impose their comprehensive doctrines on others who are also willing to search for mutually agreeable rules. Though each citizen may believe that she knows the truth about the best way to live, none is willing to force other reasonable citizens to live according to her beliefs, even if she belongs to a majority that has the power to enforce those beliefs on everyone. After all, Rawls says mentioning the inquisition, oppressive use of state power will be necessary to unite society around any comprehensive doctrine, including the comprehensive liberalism of Kant or Mill ( Rawls, John., 1993 ).

4.2. Stability

Rawls places his hopes for social stability on an overlapping consensus. In an overlapping consensus, citizens all endorse a core set of laws for different reasons. In Rawlsian terms, each citizen supports a political conception of justice for reasons internal to her comprehensive doctrine. Rawls sees an overlapping consensus as to the most desirable form of stability in a free society. Stability in an overlapping consensus is better than a mere balance of power (a modus vivendi) among citizens who hold contending worldviews. After all, power often shifts, and when it does the stability of a modus vivendi may be lost.

In an overlapping consensus, citizens affirm a political conception wholeheartedly from within their perspectives, and so will continue to do so even if their group gains or loses political power. Rawls says that an overlapping consensus is stable for the right reasons: each citizen affirms a moral doctrine (a liberal conception of justice) for moral reasons (as given by their comprehensive doctrine). Abiding by liberal basic laws is not a citizen’s second-best option in the face of the power of others; it is each citizen’s first-best option given her own beliefs.

Thus, Rawls does not assert that an overlapping consensus is achievable in every liberal society. Nor does he say that once established, an overlapping consensus must forever endure. Citizens in some societies may have too little in common to converge on a liberal political conception of justice. In other societies, unreasonable doctrines may spread until they overwhelm liberal institutions. Further, Rawls does hold that history shows both convergences in beliefs and deepening trust among citizens in many liberal societies. This gives hope that an overlapping consensus is at least possible. Where an overlapping consensus is possible, Rawls believes, it is the best support for social stability that a free society can achieve.

5. The Law of Peoples (1999)

With the theories of legitimacy and justice for a self-contained liberal society completed, Rawls then extends his approach to international relations with the next in his sequence of theories: the law of peoples . Rawls describes the main ideas motivating his law of peoples as follows:

Two main ideas motivate the Law of Peoples. One is that the great evils of human history—unjust war and oppression, religious persecution and the denial of liberty of conscience, starvation, and poverty, not to mention genocide and mass murder—follow from political injustice, with its cruelties and callousness… The other main idea, obviously connected with the first, is that, once the gravest forms of political injustice are eliminated by following just (or at least decent) social policies and establishing just (or at least decent) basic institutions, these great evils will eventually disappear (Rawls, John., 1999).

In this discussion, Rawls discusses the most important feature of the “realistic utopia”, that Rawls envisages in The Law of Peoples is that the great evils of human history no longer occur. The most important condition for this realistic utopia to come about is that all societies are internally well-ordered: that all have just, or at least decent, domestic political institutions.

Apart from that, Rawls puts forward eight principles for ordering the international basic structure:

i. Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples.
ii. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
iii. Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.
iv. Peoples are to observe the duty of nonintervention (except to address grave violations of human rights).
v. Peoples have a right to self-defense, but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defense.
vi. Peoples are to honor human rights.
vii. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.
viii. People must assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime (Rawls, John., 1999).

Rawls’s conception of peoples within the law of peoples parallels his conception of citizens within justice as fairness. Peoples see themselves as free in the sense of being rightfully politically independent, and as equal in regarding themselves as equally deserving of recognition and respect. Peoples are reasonable in that they will honor fair terms of cooperation with other peoples, even at cost to their interests, given that other peoples will also honor those terms. Reasonable peoples are thus unwilling to try to impose their political or social ideals on other reasonable peoples. They satisfy the criterion of reciprocity concerning one another.

Rawls describes the fundamental interests of a people as follows:

i. Protecting its political independence, its territory, and the security of its citizens;
ii. Maintaining its political and social institutions and its civic culture;
iii. Securing its proper self-respect as a people, which rests on its citizens’ awareness of its history and cultural accomplishments.

Rawls contrasts peoples with states. A state, Rawls says, is moved by the desires to enlarge its territory, or to convert other societies to its religion, or to enjoy the power of ruling over others, or to increase its relative economic strength. Peoples are not states, and as we will see people may treat societies that act like states as international outlaws. According to Rawls, people are of two types, depending on the nature of their domestic political institutions. Liberal peoples satisfy the requirements of political liberalism: they have legitimate liberal constitutions, and they have governments that are under popular control and not driven by a large concentration of private economic power. Decent peoples are not internally just from a liberal perspective. Their basic institutions do not recognize reasonable pluralism or embody any interpretation of the liberal ideas of free and equal citizens cooperating fairly. The institutions of a decent society may be organized around a single comprehensive doctrine, such as a dominant religion. The political system may not be democratic, and women or members of minority religions may be excluded from public office. Nevertheless, decent peoples are well-ordered enough, Rawls says, to merit equal membership in international society (Rawls, John., 1999).

6. Conclusion

Ultimately, considering all of these contributions of Rawls made a radical departure from his predecessors in the field by not getting concerned with mere conceptual analysis, but by constructing a theory of justice to face real political problems and issues, and his theory is deeply rooted in liberal democratic traditions as he revived the idea of Social Contract as depicted by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant in contrast with utilitarianism and intuitionism. Therefore, John Rawls is considered by many to be the most important political philosopher of the 20th century and a powerful advocate of the liberal perspective. His work continues to be a major influence in the fields of Ethics, Law, Political Science, and Economics.

Bibliography

Audard, C., 2007, John Rawls, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Barker, E. (1980). Principles of social and political theory. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Edmundson, W., 2017, John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, E. (2012). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. (ed.), Harvard University Press.

Lass Man, Peter. (1992). ‘John Rawls, Justice and a Well-ordered Society’. Tivey, Leonard. and Wright, Anthony. (ed). Political Thought Since 1945: Philosophy, Science and Ideology, Backwell Publishing.

Pettit, Philip. (2006). ‘Rawls’s People’, Martin, Rex and Reidy, David A. (ed). Rawls’s law of peoples a realistic Utopia? Backwell Publishing, pp. 38-55

Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press.

Rawls, John., (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rawls, J. (1995). Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas. The Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), p.132.

Rawls, John., (1999) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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• Autor: Sakunthala Jayamaha (Autor:in)
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2022
• Seiten: 12
• Katalognummer: V1188129
• ISBN (PDF): 9783346620002
• ISBN (Buch): 9783346620019
• Sprache: Englisch
• Schlagworte: john, rawls, contribution, modern, political, philosophy