Introduction

In §40 of TJ, Rawls tells us that “there is a Kantian interpretation” of justice as fairness “based upon Kant's notion of autonomy” (TJR, p. 221), and goes on to say:

Likewise one of Rawls's aims in “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” is “to set out the Kantian roots” of justice as fairness by showing how it incorporates “the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism” (CP, p. 303). Those features he summarizes as follows:

This is to say that Kantian constructivism deploys a Kantian conception of the person as free and equal agents with different rational and moral capacities, and that this conception of the person is the basis of a deliberative procedure incorporating different requirements of practical reason that is used to justify a set of normative principles. In justice as fairness, of course, the deliberative procedure is the rational choice in the original position. Furthermore, within a constructivist theory the standard of correctness for a set of normative principles is that they result from the employment of this procedure. In PL, where Rawls sees the need to develop justice as fairness as a political conception of justice, he pulls back from its Kantian lineage to present it as a free-standing political view that does not presuppose any comprehensive moral doctrine. Here he stresses the contrasts between political constructivism and both Kant's moral constructivism and intuitionist moral realism. Still, the structural parallels between justice as fairness as a form of political constructivism and Kant's moral constructivism remain.