Rawls's Political Liberalism

By Columbia University Press

Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression.

This anthology of original essays suggests new, groundbreaking applications of Rawls's work in multiple disciplines and contexts. Thom Brooks, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill (University of Cambridge), Paul Weithman (University of Notre Dame), Jeremy Waldron (New York University), and Frank Michelman (Harvard University) explore political liberalism's relevance to the challenges of multiculturalism, the relationship between the state and religion, the struggle for political legitimacy, and the capabilities approach. Extending Rawls's progressive thought to the fields of law, economics, and public reason, this book helps advance the project of a free society that thrives despite disagreements over religious and moral views.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231527729

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Martha C. Nussbaum

It is extremely hard to introduce a book that is by now a classic and that is rightly regarded as one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century. An introduction ought to acquaint readers with the main ideas of the work, but Rawls does this with such clarity in his own introduction to the 1996 paperback edition, and in the text itself, that this part of the writer’s task can be executed relatively briefly. Since, moreover, the book is by now the subject of a wide and deep philosophical literature, much of it excellent in quality, it would be foolhardy to attempt to say something about each of the major issues of the work or to sort through debates that can easily be located elsewhere. I have therefore decided to focus on a small number of issues where there is at least some chance that a fresh approach may yield some new understanding of the text: the relationship of Political Liberalism to the history of philosophical debate about pluralism and toleration, Rawls’s distinction between reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive doctrines, the psychological underpinnings of political liberalism, and the possibility that political liberalism might be extended beyond the small group of modern Western societies that Rawls’s historical remarks suggest as its primary focus. At the same time, I do include a sketch of the main ideas of the work in order to give my own view of how they are related, and I offer an account of the relationship between Political Liberalism and A Theory of Justice, an issue that has occasioned, I believe, much misunderstanding. I also include a discussion of the much-debated issue of civility and public reason, which could hardly be avoided, given its prominence in the book’s reception.

This introduction should therefore be read not as a comprehensive account of the work but as one person’s attempt to grapple, incompletely and imperfectly, with a book that is as great as any philosophy has seen on this topic of great human urgency.

I. RELIGION AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

In all modern democracies we find a diversity of opposing and irreconcilable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines (PL 3–4). Even though at some point in history people may have believed that these differences would disappear over time, as the true religion gradually won out over its rivals, that has not happened. Differences about religion and the ultimate meaning of life are robust, and it is implausible to think that they are the result of errors of the sort that could be dispelled by rational argument.¹ Instead, wherever we find the freedoms of speech and of religious belief and exercise, we also find religious (and secular) diversity. It would seem, then, that the pluralism we see is something reasonable—in other words, that reasonable people, using their faculties as well as they can under conditions of freedom, come out in different places with regard to these matters.²

At one time it might have been thought that the solution to this problem was the one proposed in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648: cuius regio, eius religio. Let the majority religion in each region set up shop and declare itself the religion of that state. By now, however, there is widespread agreement that this is a bad solution to the problem of pluralism, for it involves the repression or subordination of minorities in each region. Every modern society contains internally the same groups that also cause disagreements across national boundary lines: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, and others, along with agnostics and atheists of various types (humanists, Utilitarians, secular Kantians, and so forth). It seems best to try to establish a society that respects the reasonable plurality of religious and secular conceptions of life, paying more than lip service to the value of respect for people and their different ways of organizing their lives.

All modern democracies attempt to solve the problem of respect for difference, but tensions in every such nation show us how difficult the problem is to solve.³ In the United States, despite a long constitutional tradition of both religious liberty and equal respect for diverse views, Christian language and sentiments are often casually introduced in public policy statements in ways that suggest the unequal citizenship of non-Christians. In France, the state has made intolerance official state policy by banning the wearing of conspicuous religious articles of dress in public schools. Although this law purports to be evenhanded, it in fact discriminates against Muslims and Jews since Christians do not regard the wearing of large crosses as a religious obligation whereas the Muslim headscarf and (for some Jews) the yarmulke are regarded as obligatory. In India, the particular subject of much of my current writing, a democracy that once prided itself on respect for pluralism and indeed on a real love of religious and ethnic diversity has now increasingly become a Hindu state. Textbooks used by young children express a Hindu-fundamentalist conception of the nation and its history. The Muslim minority’s right to the equal protection of the laws is no longer secure. The highest levels of state and even national government condone gross violations of Muslims’ civil rights.

Rawls’s Political Liberalism asks an urgent question: Can liberal constitutional democracy, built on values of mutual respect and reciprocity, be stable—not just as a grudging modus vivendi but out of robust ethical commitment—in a world of religious and secular pluralism? Or, to use his words, [H]ow is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines? (PL 4). This question about stability, only glancingly addressed in A Theory of Justice, in which Rawls proposes basic political principles for a just society, becomes the central question of Political Liberalism.

Rawls puts the question in this way—how is it possible—not because he is convinced that such a thing is possible. Indeed, the introduction he added to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism in 1996 expresses real anguish on that score. The events of the twentieth century raise, he says, real doubts about the fate of justice in this world. But if the question cannot be answered in the affirmative, and people are largely amoral and self-centered, then one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth (lxii). We must therefore, he says, begin with the assumption that a reasonably just political society is possible (lxii) and with the related assumption that human beings have enough of a moral nature that they can be moved by considerations of fairness and respect. In that way, although Rawls certainly believes that history offers at least some basis for hope, the entirety of Political Liberalism is built on what Kant called a set of practical postulates, hopeful views for which reason can offer no sufficient justification and that are necessary to sustain our practical involvement with humanity.⁴

In our world, as the problems described by Rawls become ever more troubling and violent, we would do well to agree with Rawls in adopting those postulates rather than their contradictories, if we want to continue engaging with the world in a productive way. But if we do follow Rawls here, then it is useful to see an abstract model of what a society that might possibly fulfill his hope would look like. Abstract models of an ideal can be extremely valuable as targets on which to fix our attention as we try to make the world that way rather than its current way or some worse way. Rawls knows that his book will strike many readers as abstract and unworldly (lxii). But he then says: I do not apologize for that (lxii). He was right not to apologize since he has produced a work that, more than any other modern work of political philosophy, carries forward one’s hope for humanity in an era of religious and ideological turmoil.

II. THE MAIN IDEAS

At the heart of Rawls’s argument are two closely related ideas: the idea of respect (or equal respect) and the idea of fair terms of cooperation. As Charles Larmore has observed in an important essay, these ideas, though nowhere subjected to sustained analysis in their own right, shape [his] thought at the deepest level. Any attempt to make sense of his conception must trace their ramifications and grasp the overall conception they define.⁵ One might add to these two the closely related notion of human dignity, which Rawls expresses in A Theory of Justice when he says that Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override (3). (Rawls does not use the term dignity, but I believe that it captures well the notion of the inviolability of the person that shapes his arguments throughout. And it is a concept familiar from the constitutional traditions of most modern liberal democracies.)⁶ For Rawls as for Kant, dignity is the correlate of respect: the reason respect is so central is that people are ends, have a dignity, have something about them that makes it wrong to violate them for the sake of overall well-being or to use them as mere means. Respect is an attitude that recognizes that dignity and the fact that it is equal.

Although it is easy to associate these ideas with Kant’s moral philosophy, they are ideas that are widely and deeply shared across ethical and religious traditions. (They lie, for example, at the heart of the modern human rights movement.) Some citizens will think of the idea of the soul to elaborate these ideas further; some will deny that souls exist but will agree with the religious believer that a human being has a dignity that deserves respect. Even Utilitarians, one might conjecture, are motivated at a deep level by such ideas (for example, in Bentham’s maxim each to count for one, and none for more than one)—despite the fact that some features of Utilitarianism (especially its willingness to tolerate extremely miserable conditions for a small number of people in the pursuit of maximal overall social welfare) suggest that it does not do full justice to that core idea.⁷

I have said that the central problem of Political Liberalism, as contrasted with A Theory of Justice, is that of stability. How, then, does the notion of respect bear on the question of stability? Rawls believes that a society will not remain stable over time—or at least not for the right reasons (i.e., because of full and free endorsement rather than the oppressive use of force)—if it treats individuals or groups with deficient respect. Showing people that the terms of cooperation we propose are fair to all of them is necessary for stability-for-the-right-reasons, and, if the terms of cooperation are elaborated successfully, that may turn out to be sufficient for stability as well. Stability is, then, a moral notion: it involves not merely the persistence of a set of political arrangements but the persistence of a respect embodied both in institutions and in the attitudes of citizens who support them.

Because we respect one another, we want a society in which we can live together on terms of cooperation that are fair to all and that can be publicly seen to be fair to all. Both in Political Liberalism and in A Theory of Justice, the Original Position, and the political principles that are arrived at using that device of representation, model this idea of fairness. The fact that choices of principles are made in ignorance of one’s particular attributes and place in society is a way of modeling the idea that fairness requires impartiality, a ban on special pleading. Terms of cooperation are fair only if they are suitably impartial, treating all as equals.

Impartiality is not sufficient for respect: a political conception might treat citizens as equals while still treating them badly. That is why the notion of dignity or inviolability is needed to complement the ideas of fairness and respect. The dignity of persons means that they are entitled to certain things from the world, and it is unfair that they should be deprived of those things. Ultimately, Rawls argues in A Theory of Justice, a just society will give people an extensive menu of liberties, on terms of equality, and will arrange economic matters so that inequalities are allowed only when they raise the level of the least well off.

Those two principles of justice are taken over unchanged from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism, but Rawls now casts them in a new light. Focusing on the issue of religious and secular pluralism, he makes it clear that all the ideas of the conception, including the ideas of respect and fairness, are being developed in a political context, as parts of a freestanding political conception that has, to be sure, a profound ethical content but that does not depend for either its content or its justification on metaphysical, epistemological, or religious doctrines that cannot be presumed to be shared among citizens.⁸ For in modern societies, under conditions of freedom, people clearly endorse incompatible comprehensive doctrines, religious and secular, as to the ultimate meaning and purpose of human life. The fact that in conditions of freedom reasonable people continue to disagree means that the pluralism of doctrines that we observe is not just the result of error or willfulness. For practical purposes we can regard this as a fact about the limits of reason, or what Rawls calls the burdens of judgment (PL 54–58). And this fact entails that the pluralism of comprehensive doctrines is itself reasonable. (This important idea in Rawls’s work was developed earlier by Charles Larmore in Patterns of Moral Complexity and The Morals of Modernity.⁹ Rawls is explicit in attributing the idea to Larmore, although many readers of Rawls have not acknowledged Larmore’s contribution.) Not all of people’s comprehensive doctrines are reasonable in the ethical sense, incorporating a commitment to fairness and reciprocity; some may refuse respect to others, some may deny one or more basic liberties (PL 60n14), some may even be mad. But of many of them, at least, we can say that they are reasonable doctrines, doctrines that reasonable (respectful) citizens could and do hold.

But if the plurality of religious and other doctrines is reasonable, then respect and fairness require that we not build a political conception on any one of them. Politics has to prescind from divisive metaphysical or religious claims, if respect is to be preserved. And that shows us why the political doctrine must be both partial, not covering all of human life, and freestanding, justifying itself not through divisive metaphysical or religious ideas but through ideas implicit in the public political culture. In this way, the core value of respect leads directly to the hallmark of Political Liberalism, as distinct from A Theory of Justice: the claim that the political doctrine is political, not metaphysical. Respect for persons requires respecting the many diverse ways they choose to organize their lives and the many beliefs they hold. But that means that the political conception must limit itself to what citizens of many different sorts can share wholeheartedly. Otherwise, whatever appearances (and intentions) may be, it does not fully respect them.

The political conception, we said, is partial, not comprehensive. Rawls describes it as a module (PL 12–13, 145) that can be attached by citizens to their different comprehensive doctrines and claims that it will thus form just one part of each citizen’s more global view of what is most important. Politics, however, as Rawls conceives it, deals with matters of profound importance for the whole of a human life: the extent and nature of personal liberty, the availability of economic benefits and opportunities, the social bases of self-respect, in general with the prerequisites of living a flourishing life in one’s own way. This being the case, the political conception needs to use some idea of the person, in terms of which to make sense of the point and purpose of the goods that politics will be distributing, and some view of these goods. Rawls at this point invokes the idea of a political conception of the person, according to which people are characterized by two moral powers, a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good (PL 19). Each person also has some determinate conception of the good. Political planning gets traction and direction from this idea of the person, for, we think, what are persons going to need if that is what they are like? Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the conception of the person is not a metaphysical theory of human nature; it is a political conception that in theory can be endorsed by people whose views of human nature, the soul, etc. vary greatly.

The idea of primary goods, the goods to be distributed by the political conception, was introduced in A Theory of Justice as an account of all-purpose means to whatever ends citizens might have. Rawls now subtly modifies his conception, stating that the primary goods (liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, the social conditions of self-respect) are to be understood in connection with the political conception of the person, as an account of things that it would be reasonable for persons so conceived to want. Thus, he no longer makes the controversial and possibly false claim that all citizens would (for example) want more money rather than less, regardless of their conception of value and plan of life. He claims only that, from the point of view of the political conception, it is reasonable to treat people as wanting these things, if we think of them as having a conception of the good that they want to execute. Given that the parties in the Original Position are ignorant of their determinate conception of the good, they will proceed as if more of these goods is in general better than less, provided that the distribution meets the test of fairness.

The entire exercise of selecting principles of justice is envisaged as an attempt to describe the basic structure of society, meaning the way in which the major social institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape the division of advantages that arises through social cooperation (PL 258). Rawls treats this characterization as equivalent to the system of institutions that influence people’s lives pervasively and from the start of a human life. Although A Theory of Justice implicitly focused on the basic structure so defined, Political Liberalism gives this focus new explicitness and importance. The focus on the basic structure suggests a division between political fundamentals and other matters that will be governed, perhaps, by different principles; thus, Rawls insists that the economic principles of the basic structure do not apply to voluntary organizations within society. This division suggests, in turn, a further distinction: between political deliberation that touches on these fundamental matters and other political debates that go on in what Rawls calls the background culture. This distinction will be crucial to an understanding of his doctrine of civility (see section VIII).

The distinction between the basic structure and other aspects of social life is connected, once again, to the underlying ideas of respect and fairness. If we propose a comprehensive set of principles regulating all aspects of human life, as Utilitarianism does (PL 260–262), we behave illiberally and, to that extent, disrespectfully, for we tell people how to arrange all their choices and all the nonpolitical aspects of their lives, even when they hold comprehensive conceptions of the good that give them different organizing principles (for example, principles based on religious authority or on the maximization of utility). Thus, the focus on the basic structure is part of the abstemiousness of the theory, which, in turn, is dictated by its respectfulness. Although the resulting theory is in that sense liberal, protecting crucial spheres of liberty, it is by no means libertarian, advocating a minimal state. Rawls, indeed, argues that libertarianism has no special role for the basic structure and its responsibilities (PL 262ff.) and, to that extent, gives bad guidance. Instead, Rawls’s political conception provides firm protection both for a set of major liberties and for basic economic and other opportunities.

When considering the abstemiousness of the theory, however, it is important to bear in mind that in Rawls’s view the family is a part of the basic structure (PL 258), on the grounds (entirely plausible) that it is part of the system of institutions that does determine people’s life chances pervasively and from the start of a human life. So Rawls’s emphasis on the basic structure is not a way of importing into the theory the classical but rightly criticized idea of a distinction between public and private. For example, Rawls’s theory clearly entails that violence within the family is just as much a public and political problem as violence in the public square. Whether Rawls carries out this insight in a fully consistent way may be doubted; I cannot pursue the issue further here since Rawls develops his insights on the family in his important article The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, which he intended to incorporate into Political Liberalism but had not yet done at the time of his death (see section V). In Political Liberalism, however, it is very clear that the family is to be treated as a political institution that forms part of the basic structure.¹⁰

The most important further new concept that Rawls develops in Political Liberalism is that of overlapping consensus. This idea can best be understood by thinking, once again, of his image of the module. Many different reasonable comprehensive doctrines will approve of the political conception, including it as a module inside their own overall view. Thus the views of citizens, while differing in many respects, will overlap in the key areas that involve the basic principles of justice. (Rawls later said that the overlap pertained not to one determinate conception of justice but, rather, to a family of such conceptions: see section V.) Overlapping consensus is, in effect, the ultimate answer to the question of stability. Because citizens will see that the political conception respects them, both by respecting their liberties and opportunities and by respecting their comprehensive doctrines, they will give it more than grudging allegiance. What might at one time in history have been a mere grudging, and therefore unstable, modus vivendi becomes whole-hearted endorsement of the conception.

Citizens will endorse the political conception for themselves, as something compatible with (and indeed a part of) whatever comprehensive doctrine they hold. At the same time they will endorse the conception as the basis for a mutually respectful and reciprocal life with one another. Recognition of the burdens of judgment plays a key role in this acceptance, for without this recognition citizens might hold out for a political conception that builds in more of their own personal political doctrine, believing that their fellow citizens will soon see the error of their ways. As it is, having a sense of justice and seeking fair terms of cooperation, and realizing that it is highly unlikely that a homogeneity of comprehensive doctrines will emerge under conditions of freedom, they want a conception by which they can live with others fairly, in ways that are respectful of the doctrines of others as well as their own.

III. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS: HOBBES, LOCKE, ROUSSEAU, KANT

Rawls had the greatest respect for the history of philosophy.¹¹ His teaching typically focused on historical texts rather than current debates. He believed that the best way of developing one’s philosophical ideas was to engage systematically with the great texts of the tradition. His own ideas about respect, toleration, and political liberalism were in many respects shaped by a long tradition of thought on these topics; because he rarely mentions these texts, it may be useful to give readers a sense of that larger historical context.¹²

All subsequent thinkers in the tradition have to grapple with Thomas Hobbes, and Rawls’s meditation on political stability in Political Liberalism may be read as an extended rejoinder to Leviathan (1651). Hobbes holds that a tolerant pluralistic state is bound to be dangerously unstable. Stability can be ensured only by vesting in the sovereign (whether an individual or a group) all power to regulate belief as well as conduct. The civil sovereign, argues Hobbes, must be the head of the church as well as the state and must be seen as commissioned by God to run both. It is from the sovereign that all other ministers derive their right of teaching and preaching; thus they exercise their functions iure civili, on account of civil authority, and only the sovereign exercises his function iure divino, by divine authority. Any subject who deviates from the opinions taught by the sovereign is thus violating his religious faith because he is defying God’s regent. Nor can an opinion publicly authorized count as heresy; heresy is defined by Hobbes as an obstinate private opinion that goes against the public view promulgated by the sovereign. In this way he can deny that so-called martyrs are really admirable, for they are simply going against divine authority. There is no conflict between obeying God and obeying the state: obedience is always just and in accord with divine authority. Indeed, there is no tension between two realms: The Laws of God therefore are none but the Laws of Nature, whereof the principall is, that we should not violate our Faith, that is, a commandement to obey our Civill Soveraigns, which wee constituted over us, by mutuall pact one with another.

At the