Introduction
After an energetic discussion at the Kingston Philosophy
Café about the eminent American philosopher John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, it was decided that it would be worthwhile to
look into the definitions and meaning of key terms he uses including justice,
fairness, politics and society. The
comments below begin with this, and go on to develop the outline of a more
detailed critique of Rawls’ theory.
1. Is Justice the same as Fairness?
The best way to think of justice according to John Rawls is
as fairness. This seems innocuous
enough at least initially as we all understand that fairness is something that
justice aspires to. But does that mean
that justice is the same as fairness?
To begin with there seems to be a grammatical problem. We speak of justice being done, something
active, whereas fairness is a passive principle and you can’t talk of doing
fairness, so they seem to be different things. If we look at what people generally mean
when they call for justice to be done, as they regularly do especially in the
tabloid press, it’s pretty clear that what they are calling for is not
fairness, but retribution and punishment.
They think someone has transgressed and they are not interested in
reversing the transgression (which is what fairness would require) but in
punishing the transgressor, using force of some kind to discourage him or
others from offending again, or maybe just for revenge. It’s clear that justice though it may hope
to be fair, also involves control, revenge and punishment and that a theory
that neglects these darker aspects of justice, as Rawls’ does, is missing a
very significant part of the picture.
Rawls would certainly object that viewing justice as fairness in not the same as saying
justice is fairness, “any more than the
phrase ‘poetry as metaphor’ means that the concepts of poetry and metaphor are
the same” and he does in fact take pains always to speak of “justice as
fairness” and never to say “justice is fairness”, presumably to side-step the
charge of reductionism. This seems a questionable
distinction. If one was to speak of
poetry as metaphor in a work titled A Theory of Poetry, there seem to be only
two options: either metaphor is one
aspect of poetry and the theory must also mention the other essential aspects,
or if it doesn’t, then the theory must be that poetry is metaphor alone. A theory of justice that speaks of justice
as fairness likewise should either mention other essential aspects of justice,
or if like Rawls’ Theory it does not
(though he does in later works make reference to their existence), it seems
fair to conclude that it is saying at the very least that fairness is the
criterion by which justice is to be judged.
This latter seems to me equivalent to the strong claim that justice is fairness, and that is how I have
interpreted it in what follows as if it is not making this claim it is hard to
see that it is making any claim at all, as you could hardly call the notion that
fairness is one of the many attributes of justice the core of a meaningful
theory of justice, especially if those other attributes don’t feature anywhere
in the theory.
If you add to this
the fact that justice can sometimes be unfair, when for example it hands out an
unusually severe sentence to “make an example”, it doesn’t seem that the notion
of fairness is anywhere close to a complete account of justice. Fairness doesn’t encompass the whole of
justice, since it leaves aside retribution and punishment, and it is not even a
quality justice necessarily has to have.
It’s neither sufficient, nor necessary. This is a very shaky foundation for a
theory, and it is hard to imagine any theory based on a definition of its titular
subject matter that only a little reflection shows to be neither necessary nor
sufficient rising to the top of any other academic discipline, but this has
happened in philosophy and it raises the question of whether there is something
about contemporary philosophy that allows this. I’ll return to that question later (7 below),
as well as to the distinction between justice and fairness (section 4) but
first let’s look at the places where those virtues are found.
2 Is the State the same as Society?
There is an aspect to our lives that can be termed the
social. It corresponds to a sphere of
activity sometimes referred to as Civil Society, or perhaps the Public Realm. It’s that area of our lives where we are
free to do as we please, and where we can form associations and alliances with
others to achieve common goals. It
includes friendships and clubs (like this philosophy group for example) as well
as all commercial life. In many
European languages and perhaps others for all I know, the word for “Company” is
the same as the word for “Society” and indeed our own word Company is not so
far removed. Because we are free in
this field it is where we can and do make contracts. Where we have no obligations, we can agree
to do something because we expect something in return, and this is the basic
form of a contract, which can have many shapes but in everyday life most
commonly takes the form of a purchase or sale. Where we have duties and obligations,
things that we have to do, we don’t have that freedom and we can’t contract to
do something that we have to do regardless.
Freedom and limitation are essential to contract. I have to be free to enter into the
agreement, and I also have to be able to define the agreement, which means
saying when it has been fulfilled, which means specifying its limits. You can’t have an unlimited contract; that
would be something more like slavery and would contradict the freedom that is
essential to contract.
In contrast to this social sphere are two other aspects of
community, namely the State, and the Family, two great institutions if you
like, indeed Civil Society itself can also be viewed as an institution, the
third essential part of the structure of our lives. The state and the family share in common
two features not found in Civil Society.
You belong to both by virtue of birth and for life, so you do not enjoy
the freedom to choose whether or not to belong;
and you have certain obligations by virtue of belonging, things that
cannot be subject to contract because you are not free to choose whether or not
to perform them.
Two simple points follow.
Firstly the state and society are fundamentally different things (we’ll
return to the difference shortly, 5 below) and secondly, any attempt to ground
either the family or the state in some kind of contract, however imaginary this
may be, is inappropriate because contract is only appropriate in civil society,
and we must have the state before civil society can exist. Indeed
some thinkers put enforcing contract as among the highest and most important
functions of the state. The notion
that it could be the other way around, that there could first be a civil
society and contract without a state and that the state could emerge from this
as a result of a contractual agreement puts the cart before the horse. The existence of civil society depends on
the existence of the state, not vice versa.
You can make a similar argument regarding the family, that it exists
independently from civil society and cannot be seen as some sort of extension
of it, perhaps created by some form of contract. Of course there is a contract at the heart
of the family, the contract of marriage. There is no contract though to be a
parent or child or any other kind of kin, and the marriage contract itself is a
strange form of contract. The elements
of freedom and limitation that are essential to contract are both lost in
marriage, and there is no specific thing that I commit to do in entering into a
marriage. If there were, there could
come a time when I say that I have fulfilled my contractual obligation and
therefore I have completed the contract and am now free, but this can never be
the case with a marriage and if I want to undo it I have to go through a special
legal process, I can’t just give notice.
If marriage is a contract at all, it is a contract that commits the
parties to moving out of the sphere of civil society (in which of course they
met) and into another sphere, the family, where contract no longer applies, a
contract in other words to transcend contractual relations.
In short, the idea of the “social contract’, the notion that
government is based on an implicit contract between it’s citizens, on which
almost all modern political theory relies, is a combination of two terms
specific to the sphere of Civil Society, but entirely inappropriate for family
or state, and cannot be a useful tool in furthering our understanding of the
political. The term “social justice” which Rawls also
uses widely is equally a muddle of two terms, one appropriate to civil society,
and one appropriate to the political, and Hayek for example reasonably argued against
Rawls that the phrase has no meaning
(Hayek and Rawls were potential allies and there is even a small
movement of “Rawlsekians” who try to amalgamate the two into a grand
libertarian theory). To put it another
way, the two essential elements of contract, freedom and limitation, are absent
in the sphere of the political where we are not free but subject to law, and
where there is no limitation to our obligation to comply with that law. Rawls is just one of many to make this error
of confusing the social and the political, contract and obligation.
3. What if Rawls is right, and justice is
fairness?
Let’s imagine though for a moment that Rawls is right, and
that justice is indeed fairness. What
then? If the original question was
“what is justice?” and we have answered it by saying “justice is fairness”,
have we actually answered the question?
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that we have just given it a new
name? After all if justice and
fairness are the same thing, we still need to know what that thing is, don’t
we? A philosopher, you might hope,
would go on to ask the original question again, with its new name, “what then
is fairness?” And, while we are at it,
“what is so great about it?” You
won’t find any answer to that in Rawls however. He is satisfied that by saying justice is
fairness he has stated his case, and all he has to do now is to flesh it out,
an entirely empirical process.
The answer to the question “what is fairness?” though turns
out to be quite a simple one, and much easier that the more elusive one “what
is justice?”. Fairness depends on
rules being applied equally to everybody, in other words it depends on
abstraction and generalisation or universality. These are the key features of reason, which
also, like mathematics, depends on abstraction and universality. We love fairness because we love reason and
we can say that fairness is a virtue that depends wholly on rationality.
4. The Veil of Ignorance.
Let’s delve into this a little further. Rawls says that what we need to do to
decide what is just is to imagine that we are able to decide what the rules of
the game should be without knowing how we will be affected by the outcome. For example, if we want to decide whether
or not we should have private property, we shouldn’t do so from our current
position, because if we are well off we might be more likely to support private
property than if we are not, but instead should forget about our current actual
position and instead just imagine from behind a “veil of ignorance” whether in
general we would accept a system of private property that allowed us to lay
claim to certain possessions as our own.
In other words we should apply the rational criteria of abstraction and
generalisation. The answer in this
case seems to be broadly speaking yes, though Rawls rightly notes that his
theory would also be consistent with communal property; and
you could see Rawls’ argument as a conservative one that supports acceptance of
the situation we live in where power and wealth are intensely concentrated in
the hands of a very few in a way that seems quite unfair, on the grounds that,
had anyone taken the trouble to ask, we might have agreed to establishing the
rules that allow this to happen. Rawls
himself backs away from this rather extreme laissez-faire view and adds a pair
of principles that he thinks a rational agent would accept if he were consulted
that modify this and only allow a certain amount of difference in reward
consistent with maintaining incentive but also protecting the least favoured,
but it has to be said that these principles seem arbitrary and many critics of
Rawls have proposed alternatives that may be just as valid. The rational agent who “would agree”
doesn’t have to be consulted of course, because his conclusion can be deduced
from reason alone (meaning incidentally that he’s not a moral agent, because he
has no choice in the matter), although it is unclear how any concrete
conclusion can be reached in such a way and Rawls’ principles do not in fact seem
to have been deduced from pure reason, but from reason plus something else as
yet undefined. ( It’s worth stressing
perhaps that the original position, the veil of ignorance, justice as fairness,
and the two principles constitute pretty much the whole of Rawls’ theory. Everything else is detail and justification
for these basic propositions. And, as
David Schaefer finally asks in his book on Rawls Illiberal Justice , after a long, scrupulously polite and serious chapter
by chapter critique of A Theory of
Justice, “How could anyone with a serious grounding in the history of
political philosophy ever have believed that merely asserting two principles
that, reduced to their essence, “promote equal liberty” and “help the poor” …
could entitle one to the status of a philosopher, let alone the authority to
dictate the goals of statesmanship?”).
Now, the question was, would we accept the rules if we had
been consulted at their hypothetical inception? The criterion we have been given for
making this decision is fairness. We
run into a problem. If fairness is the
criterion, then we have to accept any rule whatsoever, because all rules are
fair. They apply equally to everyone,
i.e. obey the rational rules of abstraction and generalisation. An unfair rule, e.g. one that applies
differently to blue-eyed and brown-eyed people is an irregularity, and rules
must be regular, that’s just a tautology, which means an unfair rule is an
impossibility. This brings the Rawlsian
argument to an impasse. If justice is
indeed fairness, then there is no way to distinguish one set of rules from
another. If on the other hand I am able
to say that I would accept these particular rules, but not those ones, then I
am introducing a criterion that allows me to distinguish them and that
criterion cannot be fairness, because you can’t make such a distinction on the
basis of something that applies equally to all of them.
It’s true of course that we can distinguish the rules we
like from others we don’t, but in order to do so we have to invoke a criterion
other than fairness. And what is that
criterion? We have to consider what
the rules are for if we are going to
distinguish between them, which means asking what is their purpose? And what is that? It is, precisely, justice, because in
selecting one set of rules over another you are saying that you think this set
of rules is just, the other one less so.
And in order to use this criterion, you must accept that it is a
different one from fairness, meaning that the original assertion that justice
is fairness has been shown to be false.
The relation between justice and fairness can be expressed quite
succinctly. Fairness is a virtue of
reason, and it regulates and gives shape.
We can’t do without regulation, rules are an essential part of the
picture and we can call them the formal
cause. In order to distinguish
good rules from bad ones we need another criterion, we need to ask what they
are for, and what they are for is justice, which is therefore their final cause, their purpose, and the
thing that gives them meaning. So we
can say that not only are justice and fairness not the same thing, but also
that they differ from each other precisely as formal and final cause, which
classical philosophy held to be irreducibly separate. (Quick recap: Plato gave us the notion that there are
four cardinal virtues, namely wisdom, courage, temperance and justice; and Aristotle the notion that there are four
causes: material, efficient, formal and final. If you want to explain something you have
to say what causes it and you will need to take into account each of the four
causes: the stuff it is made of, the
energy that went into it, its shape, and its purpose. So for example if it’s a building, you need
to talk about the building materials, the builders, the architect, and the use
to which the building will be put. If
it’s “the good” you need to talk about the material cause (wisdom), efficient
cause (courage), formal cause (reason) and final cause (justice).) Fairness gives regulation, which in turn
gives shape, while justice contributes purpose or meaning, and both are
essential and separate aspects of the good.
Any meaningful theory of justice needs to take cognisance of this
fact. A theory of justice that reduces
justice to fairness is one that not only becomes so abstract as to be without
real meaning, because it can’t say why one set of rules is any better than
another one, but worse, is literally devoid of meaning because the basis of all
meaning, which is final cause or purpose, has been cut off from it because it
denies that final cause has any existence independent of reason and instead
sees it just as a result of reason itself, i.e of fairness. It hasn’t just failed to reach any
meaningful conclusion, it has made any meaningful conclusion impossible because
it denies the existence of final cause, without which there can be no meaning.
In case this seems a bit abstract, let’s flesh it out with
an example. Say I propose introduction
of a law that anyone convicted of theft should have his right hand cut
off. If I succeed in getting this
enacted, it would certainly be fair, because it would apply equally to everyone
irrespective of position or status, and it would be well known so everyone
would know equally where they stood and what is likely to happen to them if
they transgress. But it is just? We have to consider its purpose, perhaps to
prevent crime and provide suitable punishment. Some, including maybe many who live under
regimes where this is indeed the case, might argue that this is just, and point
to the very low rate of property crime to show its effectiveness. Most of us would demur and say that this
punishment seems disproportionate and not quite just. Now,
if fairness is the only criterion of justice, we couldn’t say this. To say something is disproportionate is
not the same as to say that it is unfair.
It is to say that that it seems too
harsh, draconian, an excessive use of force, medieval in its brutality, in a
word, unjust. This illustrates a
second important distinction between fairness and justice. We can say with some certainty whether or
not something is fair, which is really an either/or question, i.e. is everyone
treated the same, or not; but we cannot
say with the same certainty whether something is just. It is a more subjective judgement that really
depends on a system of justice and such systems can differ, and still be equally
just. Rawls’ plan on the other hand is
to lay down the law as to what actually is or is not just. This
is hubristic. Philosophers are not
possessed of a higher moral sense and do not know better than anyone else what
is just, in fact in most cases, including the present one where justice is
confused with fairness, they seem to know a good deal less. It is not our job to tell those in power what
to do, or even to lay down general principles we think they ought to follow. If philosophy can contribute anything, it is
knowledge of what justice is in itself, and that is not a question that is addressed
by Rawls.
5. Government and Power.
While we are on the topic of causes, there are two more in
the classical picture one of which in particular is conspicuously absent in
Rawls, and that is efficient cause or power.
Power is the essence of government, the one thing it can’t exist
without. Nobody has power over me in
civil society, and though I may have to do the things I have contracted to do,
my job for example, I always have the option of terminating the contract if I
don’t want to comply any more with its demands. It’s different with the state, and the
government above all rules, and if I decide not to comply it can bring down on
me the full force of the state apparatus of physical power if necessary. I may have the option not to comply but if I
take it I run the risk of punishments that include removal of my right to participate
in civil society, and I certainly don’t have the right to terminate my contract
if I don’t want to obey the law, or even to opt out by emigration (I may be
permitted sometimes to do that but it is never a right, and I wherever I emigrate
to I still have to obey the local law).
Power is what turns a rule, determined by consent, into a law, which is
not.
Modern political theory doesn’t much like the concept of power
which it sees as irrational and prefers the view that we comply with the rule
of law because we agree to rather than because we have to, which may be true
but doesn’t change the fact that if we don’t want to comply then we may be
forced to. It’s not optional. Looking
at the history of political theory we can trace a gradual diminishing of the
concept of power in the modern period, a gradual fading of truth into
abstraction. In Machiavelli, who is
really pre-modern, power is still fully integrated into his political thinking
and his is a true political theory that fully understands the specificity of
the political, never muddling it with the social as so many subsequent thinkers
do. In Hobbes the separation of power
from the rest of the theory is beginning and though power is important, and
Hobbes is especially clear that the difference between the rules of a club and
the laws of a state is precisely the power that the latter are supported by, it
is nevertheless secondary and required only because men cannot be trusted to
keep to their agreements. In an ideal
world for Hobbes power would not be needed and though Hobbes has no illusions
about such a world being possible it means that the relationship between
government and power has become an external one, and power something that has
to be added subsequently to the original contract that creates government,
while Machiavelli understood that without power government is nothing. With Rousseau power plays a lesser role,
but with his chilling talk of “forcing a man to be free” it remains an
unfortunate necessity. By the time of
Kant it is becoming irrelevant and in Rawls we can say that it has almost
entirely vanished. The state is just
the same as a club or a business, just writ large, in fact it is a part of
civil society, not distinct from it:
state and society are the same thing, all based on contract. This theory of justice is not a political
theory at all, because it does not distinguish the state from civil society, or
justice from fairness (same thing), and in a later work on international law The Law of Peoples Rawls declines even
to speak of nations or states: they
are just “peoples”, the plural of the plural of a person, mere aggregates. There is no polity that a political theory
could be about. At best this theory of
justice is a moral theory directed vaguely towards those in office, as well as
towards citizens encouraging them to dutiful behaviour (except when they know
better, when they can and maybe should acquaint the government with the error
of its ways through civil disobedience); and because of the impasse identified earlier
it’s not much good as that either, certainly no better than the Kantian
categorical imperative from which it is of course derived. It’s
questionable even whether it functions as a moral theory, since it depends on
rules (“principles”) and someone who is governed only by rules is an automaton,
not a free agent, and has no moral agency.
What is the basis of the power of the state? Ultimately it rests on one thing which is
military power, and that means it depends on the service of armed men willing
to put their lives in danger to protect it, which means that it depends on the
virtue of courage. Courage is the
efficient cause of the state and without courage the state, its laws, its
justice, could not exist, in other words it is not just a cause but an
essential cause, a sine qua non,
something without which justice would remain just an ideal, an abstraction,
never a real thing. Any theory of the
political that does not take into account efficient cause, or power, and the
virtue of courage it rests on, is one that will be condemned to remain forever
abstract and ineffectual, impotent in fact.
So we can say that salient features of Rawls Theory of Justice are that
it has no final cause (lacks meaning) and no efficient cause (lacks force).
6. Four Quadrants.
We can piece this together into a theory of four
quadrants. The truth, which is also
the good, is the whole, represented as a circle, which is divided into four
sections corresponding to the four cardinal virtues and the four causes. The first quadrant, the beginning, is the
material cause and the virtue of wisdom, absent from Rawls who is intent on
abstracting away from any empirical data or context. The second, the efficient cause, is the
virtue of courage, for reasons we have seen, and likewise absent from Rawls. The third is formal cause, which is reason
with its virtue of regulation, or temperance as it is usually translated in the
classical theory and the only part that features in Rawls’s thinking; and
the fourth, the final cause, purpose or meaning, is justice. It looks something like this:
THE GOOD
It’s a simple enough theory with only four elements, but it
is more complex than modern theories that with only a few exceptions assert or
assume the dominance of the third quadrant, reason and formal cause, and imply
that all the others can be expressed as manifestations of these. Now the point of both the cardinal virtues
and the four causes is precisely that they stand alone and cannot be reduced to
each other. If justice were indeed a
manifestation of reason, then justice would not be a stand-alone cardinal
virtue, but just a sub-category of reason, and the theory of the cardinal
virtues would fall, and if final cause could be deduced from formal cause, then
the same would follow for the four causes.
(If you are interested in looking further into the notion of four
quadrants it’s worth checking out the work of the US psychologist Ken Wilber,
or perhaps the German esoteric Wolfgang Dobereiner, whose work I have drawn on.).
One could reasonably expect an eminent professor of
philosophy to be aware of these fundamental principles of classical philosophy,
and indeed if it could be shown that justice can be deduced from reason and
final cause from formal cause, so that the classical theories are wrong, this
would be an original and hugely significant contribution to philosophy. Unfortunately you will look in vain for such
a critique of classical thinking in Rawls or indeed anywhere else that I am
aware of. What you find instead is
just an assumption of the primacy of reason, the third quadrant, and one that
appears to be unaware of its own existence as an assumption, let alone its
profound opposition to basic principles of classical philosophy. “Rawls” as Habermas said “is a product of a
school which thinks that it invented philosophy”, and which takes it for
granted that earlier thought is nothing more than a more primitive and less
enlightened version of its own.
Underlying Rawls’ theory are two reductions. Firstly the
good, which in the four quadrants is the whole, is reduced to justice, quadrant
4, so that the good is “congruent with” the just, pretty much by definition as
the good in Rawls is simply what you would choose in the original position. Secondly the just is immediately reduced to
the fair, quadrant 4 to quadrant 3, so that the just is nothing more than the
fair, again pretty much by definition as what you would choose in the original
position is what seems to be fair. The
good and the just in fact simply evaporate, because they can everywhere be
replaced by the fair, which represents their truth. The good, in Rawls’ account, is nothing more
than “that which it is rational to want”.
Quadrants 1 and 2, wisdom and
courage, are passed over. How could one
“rationally want” to sacrifice one’s life in battle? What benefit could wisdom offer when all
moral values can be deduced from fairness, especially when to figure out what
is fair, you need to impose a “veil of ignorance”, the opposite of wisdom? You
don’t need any empirical knowledge or context at all, in fact you need to suppress
it: everything can be worked out from
rational principles alone. Courage and
wisdom are not virtues apparently, and the only virtue is fairness or
regulation, following rules, self-control, which is the same thing as justice
so that’s not a virtue in it’s own right either.
The development of
modern philosophy in general in this picture can be seen not as a gradual
process of refinement and improvement, culminating in the perfection of
analytical philosophy, but one of increasing erosion and abstraction, where the
virtues and causes in particular gradually fade away, like the Cheshire Cat,
leaving only the grin of fairness and reason.
Where we might like to find distinct, clear concrete notions we find instead
critically important ideas such as justice, fairness, society, the state, laws,
rules, contract, consent, obligation, family, and even the good itself all
mushed up together into a kind of porridge in which these and other ideas lose
all independent meaning and merge into each other, all simply manifestations of
the same abstract, empty notions of fairness and reason.
7. Rationalism and Philosophy
So we can return to the question I asked at the outset, how is
it that this mass of indistinct ideas, lacking both meaning and power, can be
the best that contemporary philosophy has to offer in the area of political
theory? One answer I would suggest is
that contemporary philosophy is in thrall to the ideology of rationalism, the
belief that he truth is to be found in reason, and reason alone, which
encourages a peculiarly narrow approach to philosophy. This is not something it is aware of as a
belief, but an unquestioned assumption, as the most effective ideologies
usually are. Rationalism may not be universal,
see for example Michael Oakeshott’s famous essay Rationalism in Politics, but it is very dominant in modern thought. After all, you might think, if you can’t
believe in reason, what hope is there for philosophy? But rationalism isn’t a belief in reason
so much as a belief that reason gives rise to truth, and the antidote to
rationalism is not irrationality or superstition, but an understanding that
reason is a tool that we can use in trying to discover the truth, but not the
truth itself or its source. This was
Plato’s view exactly. And actually,
when you look at the assertion that reason is the source of truth, it’s not
hard to see that it is a mistaken one.
Reason, at least for modern philosophy, like mathematics depends on
abstraction and generalisation and while it can express certainty, it cannot
express any concrete truth precisely because it has to be abstract and general
so is by its nature cut off from the particular and can’t say anything specific
at all. This is true in general of modern philosophy (ever
since Descartes led it up the rationalist blind alley when he made the mistake
of equating certainty and truth) and we saw in particular, just to cite a
concrete example, that it was true of Rawls’ theory of justice which was stuck
in the impasse that the abstract criterion of fairness applies equally to all
rules so it couldn’t on that basis distinguish between them, in other words it
could not make the transition from the general to the particular which is
required if it is to say anything true.
So what is philosophy in fact, if not the application of
reason? In the classical definition attributed
to Pythagoras it is a love of knowledge that does not claim to be possession of
knowledge, and it was defined in particular as the opposite of sophism, which
did make such a claim. Now, I’d be the
first to agree that words can change their meanings over time and even turn
into their opposites. It seems clear
that few people use the term “philosophy” in its classical sense nowadays and
indeed it does seem to have turned into its opposite, sophism, as modern
philosophy, much as it cannot agree about the truth or even whether such a
thing exists, nevertheless in particular instances such as the present one does
lay claim to true knowledge, in this case that justice is fairness, which
formally is just the same as Thrasymachus’ sophist argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the interest of
the stronger, in other words a claim to know the truth. So if the word philosophy has changed its
meaning, what is its meaning currently? What
are the criteria by which we say x is a work of philosophy, and y is not? Is the new definition of philosophy a useful
one? I don’t know the answer and from my limited
reading of contemporary philosophy I’m not sure anybody else does either, and this
may be not so much an unanswered question as an unasked one. We know what philosophy is because we know
what is on the syllabus, when really we should know what it is first so we can
then say what should be on the syllabus and why. “Sophism”
seems apt, but has pejorative connotations.
How about “Rationalism”? Belief
in the power of reason, the supremacy of the third quadrant, does seem to be a
uniting factor in all those diverse notions that one comes across under the
heading of philosophy these days so perhaps it has the virtue of accuracy at
least. It’s consistent too with
another modern fancy about philosophy, that it has to do with abstract
thinking, which is a characteristic of reason, but shouldn’t be one of
philosophy (Rawls characterises his argument as taking Kant’s to a higher level
of abstraction, apparently taking it for granted that a higher level of
abstraction is a good thing). The problem with that is that as soon as you
have understood that rationalism is not just a reflection of reality, but a
belief, it is but a short step to the realisation that it is a mistaken one,
that reason is just one quarter of the truth and that all four quadrants have
equal value and independence and must all be part of any account that is true; and that realisation would take us back to
the classical definition of philosophy as love of the truth.
8. Mysticism and magical thinking.
It is often objected to the classical view, and in
particular to Plato’s notion that ideas (such as justice and courage, to put
this in the context of the current discussion) exist independently and in their
own right, rather than for example as mere manifestations of reason, that
ultimately it is a mystical one, and this is true enough. Life is full of mystery and the way we
share ideas and values, indeed the notion of value itself, is one of the
greatest. In mythology it is the power Adam gained
when he ate the apple, the power of discrimination, the knowledge that marks us
out as different from the rest of creation, but which also has the significance
of being a curse, of propelling us from the blissful womb-like state of
paradise into the fallen condition we actually live in. Plato
thought that ultimately philosophy could only scratch the surface of these
profound mysteries and I too would say that although in saying that justice is
the final cause of the good I am saying something concrete and meaningful about
that great philosophical puzzle, whereas Rawls says nothing at all (if he says
anything it is about fairness, a different concept), I also recognise that it
is only a sketchy beginning. In one
sense, because I am comfortable using the word justice, I must know what its
meaning is, but I’m equally aware that if I try to pin that meaning down in a
reductive way, by trying to define it as perhaps fairness or as the interest of
the stronger, it will elude me, and the philosophical alternative which is to
try to describe it as it is in itself – perhaps as Plato did by trying to
describe an ideal state – is also an elusive and difficult task. But that speculative task is what falls to philosophy,
and it is something Rawls does not consider.
To those of you who feel that any mystical view is to be
opposed at all costs, perhaps because of your commitment to reason and
rationalism, I think it is worth drawing the distinction between mysticism,
which can be profound and thoughtful as well as based solidly in reason, and
magical thinking, which is neither and is what most of you mean when you invoke
the spectre of mysticism. An
interesting thing about this is that the down to earth rationalist empiricism
in philosophy which you might support as an antidote to mysticism is itself
full of magical thinking. There are
some good examples in Rawls. The “difference
principle”, which says it’s OK for you to have a bigger slice of the cake than
me as long as mine also increases a bit, a trick which is possible because your
big slice makes the whole cake grow by incentivising you to greater productive
activity which benefits me too, seems like wishful thinking at best, especially
if you are a banker, and is certainly unverifiable. Or consider for example his idea that in
the hypothetical original position there is no notion of the good and it is
only in the process of making an agreement that the good is defined. If this were true it would really be magic,
something coming from nothing, which is one of stage magic’s staples. But in this case it’s only conjuring,
because the truth is the opposite, that you can’t make a contract unless you
already have the notion of the good, because you can’t make a contract unless
you can discern that outcome x is better for you than outcome y. You pulled the good out of the hat, but
could only do so because it was hidden in there in the first place. (Rawls himself seems unclear about this, for
example here where he seems to both deny and assert the notion of the good in
the original position in the same sentence:
“While the persons in the original position do not know their conception
of the good they do know, I assume, that they prefer more than less of the
primary goods”. The confusion here
seems to be between the notion of the good, which must exist in an original
state, otherwise you couldn’t talk of primary goods because you wouldn’t know
what good means, and the many examples of the good you can experience once you
have the notion. When Rawls says they
don’t know their conception of the good what he seems to mean is that they
still have to develop concrete examples of what specifically is good for them; but they cannot do this if they don’t “know
their conception of the good”. This is
a category error, confusing the notion with examples of it, or with those
things you can experience once you have the notion, but cannot experience
without it, the form of the good with its content). Contractarian theory in general is based on
magical thinking. Nobody now argues that
there was ever an actual original contract that founded government or a real
“original position” that preceded it. The argument is “counterfactual” (itself a word that seems to have been
invented for the case, to avoid having to say “imaginary” or “untrue”) and says
that even though it is not true, it is somehow helpful to think about things as
if it were. This is an argument that
is completely detached from reality, and if you believe in it that can only be because
you want to, even though you know it’s not real, and that is pretty much the
definition of magical thinking. “ Where
no Gods are, spectres rule”. I don’t
believe in magic, but I do put my hand up to being a mystic, or at least not an
atheist, because reason forces me in that direction, just as it did the
founding fathers of philosophy. We may
believe that we with our modern ways are more enlightened now than those ancient
thinkers, but that is a conceit that is not warranted by the facts, and it
turns out that they anticipated our current errors thousands of years ago, certainly
in the realm of political theory.
9. The Reality of
Moral Choice
Hopefully by now you are detecting a common theme, which
goes beyond Rawls and includes wider aspects of contemporary philosophy. There’s a small problem, and a bigger
one. The small problem, which perhaps isn’t
so small, is this. If a theory of justice has to work out what
justice means, and previous theories such as the utilitarian one are false,
this means that until we have worked out what justice actually does mean, we
are stuck in a limbo where we don’t know the meaning of this critically
important concept. If we talk about
justice in daily life, we don’t really know what we are saying, because we are
not party to the great philosophical theory that is required to explain what the
concept actually means. This means
that we are being irrational and that the concept we use is not really valid at
all because it hasn’t yet been validated by philosophy (Rawls is explicit on
this point: his argument in his view trumps our everyday understanding) and if
philosophy hasn’t yet made sense of it, how can we? This surely is back to front. If philosophy has a value it must be to
elucidate what we really do mean, and not to tell us that we are wrong. But if Rawls’ theory is right, what we
generally mean by justice (retribution, punishment, control) is radically
mistaken. What are we to make of a
theory that tells us that the meaning of a word is actually quite different
from what we think it is when we use it?
It sounds like something that only Humpty Dumpty could make sense of.
That’s the small problem.
The big problem is this. For
modern ethical philosophy the challenge is to say what is right. It interprets this as giving a direct answer
to the question: what is right is x, where x is a certain
predicate of the right: it speaks of
the content of the right, not its form.
For Rawls x is fairness, for
others it is utility, or something else.
It means that once you have decided what x is, you have your answer.
This means that the decision of what is and is not right is
decided. For Rawls it is fairness, and
using your two fundamental principles derived from fairness, you can in
principle decide a correct answer to every moral question. Now, if your answer is correct, and Rawls
uses this term quite freely, you can’t rationally disagree. If you act otherwise, this is an irrational
act. The question of what is moral or
not is only a question of whether you obey the rules, respect the principles,
or not. As long as you decide to obey
the rules, i.e. to be rational, not irrational or preferring your own private
interest to the general interest, you are perfectly good. There is no wrong beyond irrationality,
self-interest, “noncompliance” (there’s a striking passage in A Theory
of Justice #66 where in characteristic make-it-up-as-you-go-along style
Rawls explains that the unjust, the bad, and the evil are to be understood as
varying degrees of noncompliance).
The idea that you can be perfectly good is rarely expressed
directly, but it is a consequence of most modern ethical theories. These theories after all try to set out for
you rules that decide whether or not your actions are good, and this is
certainly true of Rawls. But if you
follow rules, you have no free will, no moral agency. There is no right or wrong, only
rationality and irrationality (fairness or unfairness in this case), and as
long as you are rational and follow the rules, you will be perfectly good,
beyond criticism. For morality to be
a reality though there has to be a real choice between right and wrong. This means that the right and wrong have to
be real things, not just abstractions ultimately derived from reason, and you
have to have a real choice between them.
This intuition, which is the basis of all morality, is expressed,
perhaps paradoxically, in the notion of original sin, the idea that you cannot
be perfectly good and that the bad is also part of your nature. Often seen as a negative view of humanity,
the notion that we are all tainted with sin properly understood is the basis of
all morality, because if you don’t have a real choice between good and bad then
you don’t even have the potential for moral action. At
best you have the potential to avoid the irrational, in other words to avoid
following your passions, oddly enough something that is widely seen as a praiseworthy
as well as pleasant thing to do in most circumstances. The reality of daily moral life, the kind
of dilemmas we find expressed in stories from great literature to soap operas
and gossip, where the participants don’t have an absolute answer but
nevertheless have to make a choice are simply not allowed for in these abstract
theories. Morality may be a beautiful thing, but
perhaps like all beautiful things, justice in particular, it is nothing without
its dark side, and you cannot be moral if you do not acknowledge the dark side
within yourself. Without that morality
is just smugness. In four quadrant
theory, ethics belongs in quadrant four, whereas modern ethical theories like
Rawls’ are worked out in quadrant three, and cannot touch the ethical dilemmas
that don’t have perfectly logical solutions that are the stuff of ethical life,
because they operate only in the quadrant of abstraction and generalisation, of
reason and fairness, and not in the quadrant of justice where ethical life
actually takes place.
The notion that what philosophy has to do, in relation to
the question “what is justice?” is almost universally in modern philosophy
understood to be to give a definitive answer, justice is utility, or fairness,
or the interest of the stronger, or whatever, and to derive from that principles
that will give you a correct answer to every moral question, if only you have
enough information to make the correct calculation. Classical philosophy has a different
view. The point is not to give a
definitive or predicative answer to the question, so that no choice remains, but
to respect the notion of justice, and to try to understand what it is in
itself. This means accepting that you
can’t reduce it to something else, or define it, but also understanding that
this doesn’t mean you don’t know what it means.
On the contrary, your notion of justice, intuitive as it may be, is the reality of justice and is already
ahead of the understanding of those philosophers who try to turn it into
something else, or to explain to us that it is something different. Plato made a fine job in The Republic of
trying to describe justice without reducing it to anything else by describing his
view of an ideal state and while nobody would argue that that state would be ideal
today, or maybe even in his own time, it is also the case that his speculative approach
to the great question of what is justice is a truly philosophical one. A theory of justice must address the
question of what justice is in itself, and must resist the temptation to change
the subject by redefining justice as something else, such as fairness, and
talking only about that and leaving the critical question of what justice actually
is untouched, but this is unfortunately exactly what happens in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, as well as in most
modern moral and political theories.
