A Naive Response to John Rawls

Reacting to Fair and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society, by Daniel Chandler

In my America & the Enlightenment class, I start each semester by having students read excerpts from John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, followed by John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. I like to start with Winthrop because his very first paragraph presents a shocking idea: the reason that there is economic inequality  in the world is because God intentionally made some of us rich and some of us poor. This notion disorients my largely LDS student body, who are wary to ascribe economic inequality to the Almighty. When they read Locke, they feel more at home with idea of natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

But, I point out, why has God made us unequal? Winthrop says: “That every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection…Therefore, God still reserves the property of these gifts to himself as (quoting Ezek. 16:17) he there calls wealth, his gold and his silver, and (quoting Proverbs 3:9) he claims their service as his due, honor the Lord with thy riches.” In other words, all property comes from God, and he has distributed them to us unequally so that we can then redistribute them to become more equal, and in the process become “all knit more nearly together” (yes, that is Mosiah 18 language showing up two hundred years before).

And why, I go on, does Locke argue that we have natural rights? To explain that “the great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” In other words, government is not in the business of providing uplift to the poor, of guaranteeing equal opportunity, nor of improving society for the weak and dependent. No, it’s number job is to make sure nobody take’s your stuff.

These two texts point to a paradox at the heart of American political impulses: we want to be that city upon a hill, we want to be an ideal society that lifts everyone up, but we also want to be left alone and free to pursue our bottom line as we see fit. We want to be a country that guarantees everyone has a shot at the American Dream, regardless of their position at birth, but we are also saturated in the language of individual rights. This is how we get in the rhetorical bind of speaking of a “right to healthcare,” a concept that is motivated by the good intentions of ensuring no one dies in the streets but that is wholly unintelligible to the Lockean tradition of rights.

Is it possible to synthesize these two perspectives? After reading Fair and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society, by Daniel Chandler, I think that such a synthesis was the attempt of the American political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls, who wrote between 1970 and 1990, is considered to be one of the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, and is credited with reintroducing into the field the “normative” tradition—meaning, theorizing about what goals governments should pursue, what type of world we should use politics to create.

At least, I think that’s what it means! And I think that Rawls is as famous and important as I just said. But the truth is that I don’t really know. Outside of reading some seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century works, I have never studied political theory, and it is unlikely that I am going to crack open A Theory of Justice anytime soon.

However, my naive sense is that Rawls has heavily influenced modern-day liberalism and its twin objectives of expanding individual freedoms and redistributing wealth. And since this type of liberal politics is so central to American political debates, I thought having a primer on Rawls would be useful for understanding these arguments. Chandler’s book offers just that: a brief introduction to Rawls’s political theory, a response to his critics, and then an elaboration of how his philosophy should inform (in the eyes of Chandler) Western political policies.

So my goal here is to think through Rawls’s idea via Chandler’s book. Is Chandler representing Rawls effectively? Have I really understood his ideas? I don’t know! Hence the title.

Three points about Rawls’s biography that I didn’t know that seem especially relevant: two of his younger brothers died, including one who contracted diphtheria from him; he originally planned to become an Episcopal priest after theological studies at Princeton; but he lost his faith after serving in World War II and turned to philosophy.

These life events suggest the possible genesis of two key principles of Rawls’s thinking: 1) there is nothing inherently “just” about why some thrive and others don’t; 2) humans have a responsibility to create a better world for one another, to create a “realistic utopia.”

How do we do that? The answer lies in the most famous feature of Rawls’s thinking: the “veil of ignorance.”

The veil of ignorance goes like this: imagine a society like one we live in today. You are about to be born into that society, but you don’t know what type of person or in what position you will be born. Maybe you’ll be rich; maybe you’ll be poor. Maybe you’ll be white; maybe black. Maybe you’ll be gay, or you might be straight.

Not knowing these details in advance, so the thought experiment goes, your next step is to imagine what the ideal form of politics would look like. That is, not knowing whether you might be a religious or sexual minority, or whether you might be differently abled, or whether you might be the one and only Lebron James, how would you want society to organize its power and resources?

Rawls argues that from behind this veil of ignorance, we would agree on three principles. The first principle (revised in 1982, sometimes known as the “fairness principle”): “Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties.” Second principle (the “difference principle”): “Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. First, they must attach to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they must be to the greatest advantage of the least advantaged members of society.” Third principle (“just savings principle,” quoting Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here): “Each generation should save for future generations at a savings rate that they could rationally expect past generations to have saved for them.”

Simple, but a lot to unpack. A lot hinges on what the “basic liberties” of the fairness principle includes. For Rawls, this includes personal, political, and procedural freedoms: everything from the freedom to believe what you want to the freedom to own property to the freedoms to create a family and to speak your mind. As the first principle, it takes precedent over equality: we should strive for a more equal society, but not at the expense of basic liberties.

But outside of owning property and occupational choice, basic liberties do not include economic freedoms, like the right to contract. Rawls justifies his priority by arguing that basic freedoms are those necessary for deciding on and pursuing our sense of what is good for ourselves and what is good for society. So being able to own a house and to write books and to choose what job we will have are basic liberties, while “freedom from taxation or the freedom to run a business without regulation” are not, since you could pursue individual flourishing and political participation without them.

Why might we want to curtail these freedoms? To pursue the second principle: rectifying inequality, wherever it is possible and not harmful to do so. This principles calls for more than just “formal” equality, where traits like race or sex or economic background are ignored, but for “fair” equality of opportunity that addresses discrimination and deprivation—quoting Chandler quoting R.H. Tawney, “true equality of opportunity ‘depends not only upon an open road but upon an equal start.’”

The third principle is pretty straightforward: you should ensure that how you organize this society is replicable for future generations. This implies environmental sustainability and economic growth.

So how does Rawls provides a Winthrop-Locke synthesis? For one, Rawls cannot do without the social contract theory of Lockean liberalism. It’s impossible to imagine a normative political theory that would be acceptable in our modern age that does not start with the premise that governmental authority comes from the people.

But liberalism has a hard time coming up with moral aims for government besides keeping the peace and protecting people’s stuff. The best it can do is maintain law and order and then cross its fingers that associations and religions and communities will fill flourish and create an utopia-ish world on their own. This leaves a lot up to chance, especially if you end up in one of the marginalized or disadvantaged or unlucky positions that are inevitable.

Rawls’s innovation is to push that social contract “backwards,” to a position prior to the one you currently hold, requiring you to make that social contract not as you are right now but as you might have been if you had been born in entirely different circumstances. Knowing in advance that inequality and unfreedom were possible, even inevitable (as Winthrop assumes), Rawls argues that you, like Winthrop, would want society to be organized towards pursuing the good of everyone, especially those most vulnerable. You keep Locke’s idea of contract, but you are now agreeing to a society that aims for more than just natural liberties, but one aspiring for the common good.

With this set-up, here are some of my reactions, naive they may be, to Rawls’s ideas:

Even though I suggested that Rawls’s theory is a type of synthesis of two thinkers from the 1600s, it seems impossible that Rawls’s theory could have been imagined anytime before, say, the 1930s. Not only because it presumes a secular society but also because it presumes a modern nation-state whose horizon for action is virtually limitless. Not that nation-states are inherently totalitarian, but they tend to presume that government could act in all areas of life—that is, it would be justified if we allowed them to do so, and it would be possible thanks to the resources and technology at a government’s fingertips. Rawls’s ideas make the most sense in a post-“frontier” world, in which everything has been mapped and portioned out.

It also seems to imagine a static idea of national identity; while it is possible to imagine yourself as a state-less refugee, it is not clear that you would be justified in giving such a person a say in the social contract.

While Rawls does not appear to have been interested in political application of his ideas, most of his advocates (like Chandler) would prefer greater governmental intervention is most aspects of political and social life. They presume that governments can achieve the goals they aim for without unintended downsides or mismanagement. It seems possible to interpret Rawls’s theory in ways that are more skeptical of government’s ability to achieve its purported goals without making a mess of things, to prefer prefer a limited form of government even from behind a veil of ignorance, that seems like a minority position.

This preference for governmental action might be the product of a risk aversion bias inherent to the “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. Our intuitive brains tend to view losing as much worse than winning, even if the potential gains from winning far exceed the costs of losing. This bias might lead us to overreact to the possibility of being born into a disadvantaged position, and it might incline us towards forming a society that does more to protect against the worst possible outcome than would be ideal. Of course, encouraging that bias might be an advantage of the Rawls’s thought experiment, since allowing for some to be truly destitute in society is far worse than making everyone marginally better off (Ursula Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” provides insight into the problem with such an approach).

Rawls, like Locke and most normative political theorists, has to take some principles as a given. His “original position” assumes that we share a commitment to fairness first, and the basic liberties it entails, and to the pursuit of equality in so far as it is possible. Rawls (like other liberals) is committed to a set of political values (what he calls “public reasons”) that does not depend on religion, metaphysics, ideas of the good, or any other system of values that we inevitably fight about. In fact, one of the reasons Chandler praises Rawls is Rawls’s theory does not deal in absolutes. Instead, achieving fairness and equality is a balancing act that adapts to circumstance and context.

But it is not clear that you really can move beyond the most abstract definitions of “fairness” and “equality” without picking sides in culture-war debates over Truth and Goodness with capital letters. For instance, Chandler responds to Robert Nozick’s libertarian/neo-Lockean critique of Rawls by arguing that while freedom of occupational choice is essential for individual freedom, “we don’t need absolute freedom to accumulate wealth without limit, or to hire people on whatever terms we like, in order to think and live freely.” But what if wealth accumulation is aimed towards doing good in society? What if we want to become the next Bill Gates, not just in terms of being a billionaire but also in terms of being a philanthropist? Now, there might be a case that the law of diminishing returns means that the first $50,000 a year you earn is more necessary to being a free person than the next (or the next, or the next) $50,000, but Chandler neither makes that case, nor is it clear that Rawls does.

Another example is Chandler’s discussion of rights in the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado case. He writes, “In these situations, the freedom for LGBTQ+ citizens to walk into a shop or apply for a job without fear of discrimination should take priority, since this is an essential precondition for their civic equality and self-respect. If this means that some of us feel we cannot pursue certain careers—such as running a cake shop—because of our faith, then so be it; each of us has to take responsibility for the consequences of our beliefs.” Setting aside the facts of the case, which would complicate the idea that LGBTQ+ citizens could not access the wedding-cake marketplace, it presumes certain ideas of “civic equality” and “self-respect” that go unexplained. At the very least, there is no pragmatic balancing here; the once sacrosanct freedom of occupational choice is sacrificed without discussion. Such a sacrifice might seem obvious to Chandler, but it is not clear that it is justified by “public reasons.”

One limitation of using “public reasons” as the boundaries for legitimate political arguments is that it shifts the battleground to defining what “public reasons” are in the first place. At one point, in an effort to stress the pragmatic side of Rawls, Chandler argues that whether transgender women should be housed in women-only prisons should be based on “evidence-based assessment,” before dismissing those critical of such practices as exaggerating the evidence or being beyond the pale. Chandler might be right here—I am even more naive about the safety or dangers of such a practice as I am about Rawls—but it is clear that one way of winning the “public reasons” debate is to claim all the reasonable evidence for your side and thus undermine your opponents’ attempt to even get a voice at the table.

Maybe this sounds like my argument is more with Chandler than with Rawls. But it is not clear to me how you can isolate the debate about public reasons sufficiently to avoid the types of metaphysical questions that Rawls wants to table for the purposes of establishing a shared idea of the original position.

All that being said, I find Rawls’s thought experiment both intuitive and useful for as a rule-of-thumb for measuring political goals. I don’t know if it is as philosophically defensible as Chandler would like it, nor am I on board with Chandler’s eagerness to deploy Rawls’s insights to radically transform our political systems towards his brand of progressive ends. But in so far as it encourages me to ask, “How might I feel about this policy or political idea if I were a very different person?”, then Rawls’s thought seems like an important contribution to modern political debates.

Finally, perhaps Rawls’s greatest achievement is his (unintended?) defeat of Marxist thinking. As Joseph Heath details in this Substack post, the long-term defeat of classical Marxism in both politics and academia was brought about both in part by the weaknesses of Marx’s original theory and by the alternative utopia that Rawls’s A Theory of Justice offered to theoretically-minded egalitarians. If Rawls had the effect of vitiating more radical political experiments, especially those which have historically had disastrous outcomes, then that counts as a win.