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| Image credit. Continued from Amartya Sen on Justice (3) - Rawls and Beyond (a) |
More Needling
Sen cannot help patronising his readers by instructing them that Rawls theory of justice is
about the most influential theory of justice in modern moral and political philosophy.
(Sen, A.(2009), The Idea of Justice, p. 59)
Has not Hayek had more impact, or at least as much, swaying the likes of Reagan and Thatcher? Has Buchanan-type of Public Choice been of lesser impact? Who says what is to count as political philosophy? The academics? The patriarchal Amartya Sen? Who outside of academe has ever heard of Rawls, let alone studied his theories? Yet, there are countless people who do think about justice, moral and political philosophy, without referring to or being influenced by John Rawls. So far, my impression is that we should count ourselves lucky that people (constitutional and practising lawyers, civil servants etc.) do concern themselves - in practically effective ways - with justice while being unaffected by Rawls' ivory tower exercises. In particular, considering that Sen speaks of moral philosophy, I find it hard to believe that contemporary thought in that field can be meaningfully said to have accepted Rawls' contribution as "the most influential theory of justice."
The Two Rawlsian Core Principles
Quoting from Sen (p. 59), Rawls offers these two foundational principles of his theory of justice as fairness, supposedly to be hit upon inevitably by everyone stripped off his human identity, thus moved into a "position of origin" and congregated with people of the same fate behind "the veil of ignorance."
a. 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.
b. 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; second, they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
Reasoning without Reasoning Subjects
To begin with, how such findings should be necessarily arrived at by congregating people in any form chosen, including association behind a veil of ignorance, and more importantly, how such conclusions should be inevitable if people are assumed to have subtracted from their profile what makes them human, deserving and capable of being placed as free and equal individuals in society, is entirely unaccounted for in Rawls argument.
How am I to reason at all, if I have no frame of reference, no identity-building set of experiences, preferences, conceptions and preconceptions - in a word all the features that Rawls removes from an audience supposedly reasoning about justice? Rawls' artifice-men have no resemblance with the real people whose actions and intentions are significantly mixed into the emergence of fairness, impartiality, and justice.
Before, we are to judge the putative upshot of the reasoning of the audience that Rawls constructs for himself, we must warn the reader that the Rawlsian audience is not equipped with the faculties that are required for any reasoning to take place at all.
Whatever any imagined philosopher may wish to argue in favour of reasoning without reasoning subjects, Rawls clearly depends in his deductions on the ability of reasoning subjects to reason about justice. So, Rawls' patent inability to present us with subjects qualified to reason should disqualify his theory of justice at the outset. The book ought to be shut at this point. However, I suspect, Rawls will be drawn out extensively by divining about what he may or may not have wished to imply in the many terms that do not appear in explicit form in the above quote. So he becomes "one of the greatest thinkers" by virtue of the carcass of his theory being pick at by other academics. It doe not matter that it is dead. What matters is that people pick at it.
Rawls and Liberty - A False Start
Whereas it may appear at first sight that liberty - understood to be a system of liberties - holds a, perhaps even the central, position in Rawls' system of principle, whatever the as yet undefined term(s) means, Rawls has in fact divested his unreasoning reasoners of liberty's indispensable core: the right to reason independently, to disagree, to learn from disagreement, and the negotiate and compete for a common regime of feasible freedom. Rawls simply asserts that people reaons the way he says they reason, and that
a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties
precludes that they hold views differing from Rawls' views, and that they are constitutively incapable of disagreeing that, say, there can be a uniform and stable notion of "the greatest benefit for the most disadvantages," that each term in this phrase can be contested, interpreted, and theoretically construed differently, subjected to varying empirical evidence etc.
Pronouncing his two pivotal principles is simply a dictatorial act, based on silencing the pleas of real people.
He conjures away the possibility, indeed the need and the fundamental right of debating his assertions. He spirits away the person who points to a contradiction in the demands of (a) and (b) in that in a free society there will tend to be upward mobility, the least advantaged will tend to ascend and be replaced temporarily by another short-term generation of least advantaged, and that this revolving event is perfectly compatible with (a) but could be frustrated by (b).
But then, Rawls terms are so elastic that he might even accommodate the idea that, speaking in a stylised manner, 20% of the population having to wait for improvement for 15 years is compatible with his demand that inequalities are to be
to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
To be continued in Amartya Sen on Justice (5) - Rawls and Beyond (c)
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