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.
