Posts Tagged ‘John Rawls’

Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has shaped the conversation about justice. Rawls’s writings have attracted many followers and equally many critics. Rawls’s “difference principle” is one aspect of his theory of justice which has been especially critiqued. Since delivering his Tanner Lecture critiquing Rawls on this score (”Incentives, Inequality, and Community”), G.A. Cohen spent nearly the last twenty years further scrutinizing Rawls’s methodology. His arguments can be found in two books–If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? and Rescuing Justice and Equality. I’m very sad to have learned that Jerry Cohen passed away this morning after suffering a massive stroke sometime yesterday afternoon.

I was very fortunate to have heard Cohen while I was at Harvard. He first delivered a paper on conservatism. (As he wrote in his paper, “Things ain’t what they used to be.”) The next day he debated UCLA’s AJ Julius on the topic of justice. (Julius has a fantastic paper, “Basic Structure and the Value of Equality,” in which he engages Cohen’s critique. He also had a handout which looked somewhat similar to this. [I also think there's no greater respect you can pay your teacher or someone you've learned from then working on a large project engaging one of their ideas.]) I was intending to leave after the debate but some of my friends who had previously gone to Oxford told me to stick around. They told me that when Cohen was an undergrad at McGill he was so poor that he’d do standup comedy to get some money together. So, after dinner, Cohen went to the front of the auditorium where, a couple of hours earlier, he’d locked his intellectual horns with Julius’s, and did some of the funniest comedy I’ve ever heard. His books aren’t easy to to read, and you’ll need to be familiar with Rawls to understand the latter two, but his writing is first-rate philosophy.

The role one’s religion should play in political decision-making remains a debated issue. John Rawls believes ideally that religious reasons shouldn’t be used in political argument. In Political Liberalism, citing the examples of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., he does make exceptions based on his “proviso.” But he believes firmly in his ideal of “public reason.” On his view, public reason is “characteristic of a democratic people: it is the reason of its citizens, of those sharing the status of equal citizenship. The subject of their reason is the good of the public: what the political conception of justice requires of a society’s basic structure of institutions, and of the purposes and ends they are to serve. Public reason, then, is public in three ways: as reasons of the citizens as such, it is the reason of the public; its subject is the good of the public and matters of fundamental justice; and its nature and content is public, being given by the ideals and principles expressed by society’s conception of political justice, and conducted open to view on that basis… As an ideal conception of citizenship for a constitutional democratic regime, it presents how things might be, taking people as a just and well-ordered society would encourage them to be. It describes what is possible and can be, yet may never be, though no less fundamental for that.” Nicholas Wolterstorff, contra Rawls, has other ideas about the role religion and faith should play in citizens’ decision-making and liberal democracy. Here he is speaking with Miroslav Volf.