Political liberalism
Not the same as a comprehensive liberal. Rawls is a political liberal. In theory of justice it is about comprehensive liberalism.
What binds parties to the contract they will sign is the considered judgement, the best reasons. It is not really a new duty that we didn’t have before. In the talk we do not bring up new duties. We are trying to understand what our duties to each other are already. For each conception of justice, each theory, there can be a way to construct the original position in such a way that its principles will be chosen. If you have a theory of justice that says you want a christian society, then you can make sure that you tell the parties that they are christian. This would lead to a society in which christians would be advantaged. But it is because we believe that different religious identities should be equal that we don’t bring this up.
If you bring this up, we have circularity. Because we have to initially have people behind the veil of ignorance to decide the best society, but the way it is set up already depends on those things you find important for justice. Rawls says he realises this is circular, but that is why we hide certain things away. It is by design circular.
He lets the parties choose between the most important theories since modernity. The parties must act and decide based on what is rational for them (so not reasonableness). Rationaltity here has to do with me picking those courses of life which are good for me.
Why do the parties choose the 2 principles of justice?
It is because of 4 reasons that Rawls provides. These are all really grounded in the first reason. So in a way it is one.
-
Faced with a choice between utilitarianism and rawlsian principles, the parties will choose rawlsian principles because of maximin, the most to the least, because the utility principle does not provide absolute protection of basic liberties, nor of the difference principle. All your values/future projects are at stake in the OP. Because people want to make sure that even if they end up in the worst position imaginable after the veil of ignorance, it will be the best possible worst position. So it would be irrational for Rawls to pick utilitarianism because it doesn’t necessitate that you are protected from eg. being mauled by a lion for the greatest happiness of others.
-
there must be willing compliance: in a utilitarian or perfectionist society where you end up at the losing end, you will have difficulties agreeing and complying with the chosen principles. You can only follow the laws by being forced incase you don’t actually agree with the principles.
-
Public knowledge of the utlity allocations would be impossible, because the least advantaged, who are used for the good of others, would protest. And publicity is crucial.
-
Self-respect is a primary good. And violating self-respect leads to animosity/jealousy, which challenges stability. It will lead to chaos and revolution etc.
These all follow from the idea that we gamble in the wrong way. What drives the project is the idea that if we think of the basic structure and consitution, it has to have been done from an impartial position; that is because of maximin.
Even if there are 200 different countries, each country should go through and make their own duties and conceptions of justice from the original position, so there is no problem with nationalism.
Yael Tamir writes a text about liberal nationalism, and this is similar to how Rawls thinks of it. The conception of justice that the US will follow is not the same as the one of Belgium. Maximin has to be internally. There is no cross-country taxation in Rawls. However, going to war between nations is also not really allowed, even if that would be just for one people. Instead all nations sign the law of peoples. It is a second original position, in which the national parties are going to talk to each other knowing that they represent a country. One of the main principles that they would end up with there is sovereignty. For Rawls, each country is an ethno-state.
Economic systems Rawls likes and dislikes.
Dislikes soviet communism because it violates both principles. There is no basic liberty since we limit economic choice. If we reject a market and the state does both production and distribution, there is no incentive structure.
Dislikes libertarianism because it will allow for excessive property and excessive wealth to the property-owning class. It will thus violate the liberty principle. Political power will be in the hands of the property-owning class and so there will be no real democracy. In respect to the second principle it violates the difference principle, there is no maximin.
Later in life he came out against welfare state capitalism. Ie. a society that allows for people to earn a lot of money but through taxation the least advantaged get a good deal too. It violates the fair values of political liberties since political power is still in the hands of the capitalists. Allows for one group to really set the terms in society. There is no reciprocity in society under a welfare state.
He endorses two economic systems which are in line with his 2 principle of justice.
- property-owning democracy
It’s a society where the ownership is well-divided over the population. There is a widespread private possession of the means of production. There is private property. But laws of groups of people have private property. There is no small class that owns all the factories, it is rather wide-spread human capital. And the means of capitalism are owned by many different groups. It is not more specific than this.
- liberal socialism (market socialism)
The idea that there is no private property but that the public owns the means of production. Think of the oil fields and gold mines, etc. These are all owned by the state, and the state can get a rent from cooperatives who will use it to produce wealth. It’s state-owend but executed by competetive cooperatives in a market.
His real opinion is that other people should determine what actual political systems will go best with his principles. What Rawls really thinks of his own contribution are the two principles and how to arrive at them.
When you read political liberalism it is very different. New topics suddenly emerge. It is no longer about the least advantaged. It has to do about pluralism. How should we publicly reason in society? In political liberalism, he says that the historical origin of liberalism is the reformation and religious toleraiton. Liberalism has come from those religious wars of the middle ages. Crucial is the idea that the fact of religious division remains. Political liberalism assumes the fact of reasonable pluralism as a pluralism of comprehensive doctrines. This pluralism is not seen as a disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions. In a normal situation you always want to respect the basic liberties.
This is largely where the idea of the overlapping consensus comes about. Rawls thinks there is a public reason that we all engage in when we discuss the essentials of the consitution. It is different than the kind of reason I use elsewhere in life. He belives citizens in a liberal democratic society should use a specific form of reason of speech. Public reason which respects other people. We need to think about a society made up of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. The reasonable doctrines two people endorse may be totally incompatible, despite being reasonable. No power should be used for one to be realised over the other. What would be unreasonable is to make sure that everyone is forced not to follow their own chosen comprehensive doctrine.
Rawls talked about a conception of the good life, and later he calls the conception of the good life a comprehensive doctrine. It is me summarising all my convictions. These are the result of the free operations of reason in free insitutions.
In a situation of reasonable pluralism, comprehensive doctrines, should no longer serve as public frameworks of referens. If your comprehensive doctrine is the public doctrine, there is some problems. It must then be maintained by coercion and oppression. It is impossible to force people to keep believing the same thing as me. He even considers Justice as fairness as a comprehensive doctrine. Initially he thinks of it as the best way to think of reality. He sort of changes his position later. He himself endorses the original position. But he does not think it is possible to make others believe in it. The reasons why he believed it has to be changed.
The point is not to make these doctrines disappear. It is about no longer having them be the basis of the public political culture.
Instead:
Background culture: the culture of the social and many different associations. We think of associations where people go to, like church, as carrying some comprehensive doctrine. These do not need any kind of public reason. We have to get rid of these. We have come to split non-public culture from political principles endorsed by a constitutional regime. Think of the consitution of a liberal country. It can be endorsed by people of different comprehensive doctrines. Through the centuries we have come to understand that we have pluralism. Ideally we already have institutions that are fair to different background cultures. The kind of thing he means is eg. the supreme court justice. They only reason from constitutional principles. It would be a problem if they ruled on the basis of comprehensive doctrines. Each liberal society needs to think about what their public political culture consists of. The problem is to find a shared basis for all the comprehensive doctrines.
Rawls claims that his theory has been able to provide a grounding for the political culture, which is fair to all the background cultures. The utilitarian should be able to see that in Rawls’ principles, there is something more fair and better than in the ideas they themselves provide.
We need to draw a line between political liberalism and comprehensive doctrine; the free standing line. At some point political liberalism and comprehensive doctrines may have been jumbled but now they are not.
A political conception of justice for Rawls differs from a comprehensive doctrine in terms of scope and action.
The Cds concern the whole of life. They are gigantic. Only a small section of your life should be about your political life. The political conception concerns not the whole life. The government will not tell you what to do with your life.
Before he was unhappy about justice as fairness becaues it was his private liberal concern. Now he no longer states that it is closer to the truth, or is closer to truth. Rathern justice as fairness embodies the reasonable, not the truth. The entirety of justice as fairness is instead based on the vague notions of public political culture. The ideas do not come from the mind of 1 person with comprehensive doctrines, but should come from the public political culture. This seems to be a concession to communitarianism. Rawls says that the whole exercise of having personal ideas, which are not found in the ideas of the public political culture of society, is unreasonable. It is only reasonable to politically apply the ideas that are publicly relevant. The grounding now seems to be in the particular liberal society in whic you live. So the ideas in each country will really differ.
We cannot ground society in one comprehensive doctrine, even if it is the best. The political conception of liberalism is not a comprehensive doctrine.
Final truths are something for comprehensive doctrines, whilst the political community has no final ends to which it can be attached.
Here Arendt differs entirely from Rawls. Society is for Rawls a meaningless framework. It ensures justice but it does not offer an answer to what the good life is. You have to engage in the background culture to have significance in your life. Without that, social life would lack a point.
Arendt’s civil humanism is not compatible with justice as fairness. They say it is crucial that you engage in political life, you go to vote, go to townhall meetings etc. A political liberal like Rawls will say that this is not a specific thing you should be forced to do. If you hate politics you don’t have to. A republican like Arendt argues for citizenship virtues a la Aristotle.
Tocqueville has emphasised in his political theory of engaging politically. But if you read him carefully you will see that he says that citizens need to have political virtues to protect their rights. Indeed Tocqueville worried about (something along Benjamin Constant, the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns) the idea that there is a danger that citizens forget about political power because of the way in which they forget their political power. This can lead to tyranny quite easily. This is the main worry of Tocqueville. Political virtues are something we need to maintain democracy. He thinks a despot could take power; a bad king; a president etc. But at the end of his life he worried more about the tyranny of the majority. What if there are a few people who don’t agree with the majority? What happens to them? To combat this, we need civic virtues. We need to make sure that political citizenship is crucial. He thought that american federalism was really awesome because it created smaller scaled units in which one could be politically active.
For Rawls, if we apply Tocqueville to what he had to say, and to uphold political liberalism, we need civic education that teaches people to be politically active. This is not oppression, because it is simply necessary to make the system run. Future citizens of the country must be in a position to uphold the institutions. Whilst instead he thinks Arendt returns to the liberties of the ancients. Arendt belives that participating in politics is a way of reaching a great life. Politics is a way of overcoming the very limited nature of life, it is a place in which you can become immortal.
The problem of the French revolution, inspired by Rousseau, was to make everything political again. Rawls critiques Arendt for the same reasons. And so in a sense he acts like a contemporary Constant.
Public reason and overlapping consensus.
Public reason is an idea he introduces in the second part of theory in which there are two things: what should happen? And how people should reason and argue in a democracy, in a public setting?Participants to a political debate must refer to arguments of which they can think that everyone else must in principle assume. Citizens realise that they cannot reach agreements on the basis of incompatible comprehensive doctrines. I cannot plead for things that assumes my doctrine. I need to take this into consideration. When I speak I have to get away from my own comprehensive doctrine. It is not public reason eg. to say that something is the truth and something that we have to believe in. Most of us will not believe something because we are told to.
’ the proviso’:
Maybe it is fine if sometimes a group uses non-public arguments if in due time they give good arguments as well.
This leads later to overlapping consensus.
After we have philosophically exposed justice as fairness as freestanding, we are going to ask the question of stability. It could be that we have this perfectly fair reasonable system, grounded in public legal culture, but then people don’t care about it. At some point some comprehensive doctrine may start a political movement, and they may reach majority, would it not then be entitled to use state power and change the state apparatus? No we do not want it. This would be a modus vivendi. Rawls wants to block this possibility. Each comprehensive doctrine should support the political conception from within its own vision and ideals. He is going to ask all comprehensive doctrine to endorse justice as fairness in non-public terms. Once that happens, we will have overlapping consensus. The homework is to endorse political liberalism in every comprehensive doctrine. If we don’t do it we will have a modus vivendi in which other groups will change the system once they take power.
Liberalism comes into existence through its own modus vivendi. This leads to a consitutional consensus. The constitutional consensus then forces or convinces every comprehensive doctrine to accept the consitutional consensus for itself as well. It asks us to even in talking about the bible, using arguments based on the bible, to accept it.
Someone who is a comprehensive liberal has to basically change nothing. Whilst others, like a comprehensive communist, would have to change more.
There are people who are comprehensive liberals who do not agree with Rawls’ political liberalism. If you reject autonomy in your private life as a value, why should you accept a society that will privilege those that do so? These people remain comprehensive liberals like Rawls used to be. Non-liberal citizens, perhaps citizens from nonliberal countries, have to undergo a socialisation process to be liberal. Citizens have to be liberals in their private life. One such is Will Kymlicka.