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Rawlsians, Pluralists, and Cosmopolitans*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
Some of us were introduced to political philosophy as an activity of identifying, criticising, and revising the moral basis of existing social institutions. We asked questions about the nature of the good or the just society, and some few of us thought that once we knew and advocated the truth, it would win out. We, or some appropriate revolutionary or reforming group or class, would with reason, truth, and history on our side, bring about the society of our ideals. When we first read John Rawls's A Theory of Justice we read it as continuing the traditional tasks of political philosophy. Justice as Fairness was a moral theory which addressed a political subject matter. From the moral point of view it told us what any just society aiming to realise the values of liberty and equality would be like. This comported nicely with liberal cosmopolitanism, and also with more widely shared philosophical views that the task of political philosophy is to construct a vision of an ideal society, perhaps more sensitive to justice in implementation than would be required in pre-modern, pre-democratic societies, but nevertheless an ideal which in the long run we would hope to see all societies converge on. That kind of liberalism gave those of us who think that Rawlsian justice is the right or true justice a license to go on the offensive in promoting liberal ideals and practices in our own society, and, at the very least, a critical vantage point from which to judge other societies.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1996
References
1 The conception of justice presented in Theory. For the most recent restatement of the principles of justice as fairness, see (Rawls, 1993, p.5).
2 I assume with Rawls that the most appropriate conception of justice for a democratic society will be, in essentials, liberal. That is to say, it will protect individual rights and give them a special priority. See Rawls (1993, p. 156). This is not to prejudge the question of socialism versus liberalism, whatever that now means, for as G. A. Cohen has remarked ‘a defensible socialist constitution must contain a bill of individual rights which specifies things which the community cannot do to, or demand of, any individual’ (Cohen, 1986, p. 87).
3 I use the term ‘non-liberal’ to refer to doctrines that give low priority to individualist (liberal) values like autonomy, choice, individuality, individual experimentation, critical and independent thought, and the like. Such views may be tolerant or intolerant of internal dissidents and of traditions other than their own. Illiberal views are intolerant in one or both these cases. The distinctions between liberal and non-liberal and between liberal and illiberal are matters of degree. For an exposure of oppressive elements in classical liberalism, past and present, see Parekh (1994). Illiberal doctrines drop out of contention for the political conception as I show below.
2 I assume with Rawls that the most appropriate conception of justice for a democratic society will be, in essentials, liberal. That is to say, it will protect individual rights and give them a special priority. See Rawls (1993, p. 156). This is not to prejudge the question of socialism versus liberalism, whatever that now means, for as G. A. Cohen has remarked ‘a defensible socialist constitution must contain a bill of individual rights which specifies things which the community cannot do to, or demand of, any individual’ (Cohen, 1986, p. 87).
3 I use the term ‘non-liberal’ to refer to doctrines that give low priority to individualist (liberal) values like autonomy, choice, individuality, individual experimentation, critical and independent thought, and the like. Such views may be tolerant or intolerant of internal dissidents and of traditions other than their own. Illiberal views are intolerant in one or both these cases. The distinctions between liberal and non-liberal and between liberal and illiberal are matters of degree. For an exposure of oppressive elements in classical liberalism, past and present, see Parekh (1994). Illiberal doctrines drop out of contention for the political conception as I show below.
4 For an exception, see note 6 below.
5 An example is the Constitution of Ireland.
6 ‘The nation to which is ascribed a moment of the Idea … is entrusted with giving complete effect to it …That nation is dominant in world history during this one epoch, and it is only once …that it can make its hour strike. In contrast with this its absolute right of being the vehicle of this present stage in the world historical mind's development, the minds of the other nations are without rights, and they, along with those whose hour has struck already, count no longer in world history’ and ‘The civilised nation is conscious that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality’ (Hegel, 1952: sect. 347, p. 218 and sect. 351, p. 219).
7 Moral cosmopolitanism does not entail a global political community. Empirical as well as normative considerations bear on questions about institutional structures and political boundaries (see Beitz, 1979, p. 183).