John Rawls and the History of Political Thought

Jeffrey Bercuson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317815532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, Jeffrey Bercuson presents the immense, and yet for the most part unrecognized, influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on John Rawls, the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. While the well-documented influence of Immanuel Kant on Rawls is deep and profound, Kantian features and interpretation of justice as fairness do not tell the whole story about that doctrine.

Drawing on Rawls's Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy and his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Bercuson presents the reader with a more nuanced, accurate account of the moral and political philosophy of Rawls in light of these under-appreciated influences. This new, richer image of Rawls's political philosophy shows that Rawls's notion of reasonableness – his notion of the kind and extent of our obligations to those fellows with whom we are engaged in social cooperation – is conspicuously more demanding, and therefore more attractive, than most interpreters and critics assume. Rawls turns to Rousseau and to Hegel, both of whom provide attractive images of engaged citizenship worthy of emulation.

Written accessibly, and contributing to key contemporary debates of global justice, this book will be read by scholars within the fields of social and political theory, ethics, and philosophy.

1
Beyond Kant

Every human being has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened, and kept in awe by an internal judge; and this authority watching over the law in him is not something that he himself makes, but something incorporated into his being. It follows him like a shadow when he plans to escape.

—Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 1797

We begin by turning to Rawls’s extensive engagement with, and appropriation of, Kant’s moral philosophy. Of course, there is no shortage of literature on the important affinities between the two thinkers (Baumrin 1975, Darwall 1976, Pogge 1981 and Hill Jr. 2000). And Rawls himself is out-spoken on the many Kantian dimensions of justice as fairness. Nowhere is Kant’s influence clearer than in Rawls’s repeated emphasis on the “reasonableness” of citizens. To be reasonable here means that citizens are committed to treating their fellows in a way that respects their status as free and equal. We will flesh out this Kantian interpretation of reasonableness in considerable detail.

But the main task of this chapter is to examine Rawls’s self-professed departures from Kant’s moral and political philosophy. Indeed, the central claim of the present chapter is this: that Rawls’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant informs these departures and that this is what compels the commentator seeking to better understand Rawls’s oeuvre to consider alternative, underacknowledged influences—namely, Rousseau and Hegel, to whom we turn in Chapters 2 and 3. Indeed, what we shall ultimately find is that an exclusive focus on the Kantian heritage of justice as fairness leaves too much out: we get a much more nuanced, sophisticated and complete image of Rawls’s moral and political philosophy—and of reasonableness, in particular—when we import the questions and concerns of these other, underappreciated influences.

What are the limitations of a strictly Kantian approach to understanding Rawls? As we shall see, Rawls’s Lectures repeatedly highlight the insufficiently political character of Kant’s thought: what matters most, for Kant, is a priori moral feeling, not conscientious political activity. Of course, this claim will give many readers pause: Kant does have a well-developed political philosophy, one that grows organically out of his moral theory; any account of his thought that (for the most part) ignores his politics is (at best) radically incomplete or (at worst) simply wrong (see e.g. O’Neill 1986, 524). If that is in fact the case—and it is difficult for any reader to deny Kant’s deep interest in political questions—another important task for this chapter is to identify some of the important limitations of Rawls’s account of Kant.

Consider this telling fact: of the ten lectures devoted to Kant in Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, which total 186 pages, the political essays receive attention in only two sections (§X.3 and §X.5). Together, these two sections total approximately three— three!—pages. And this political philosophical lacuna reappears in a number of Rawls’s other writings, most notably in Rawls’s “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1999c), which is the subject of a lengthy discussion later in this chapter. Our task in this chapter, then, is three-fold: (1) to outline Rawls’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant’s philosophy and (2) to briefly contrast that interpretation with a compelling alternative, what I shall call the anthropological reply.¹ This second task is an important one: the truly idiosyncratic nature of Rawls’s reading comes into sharp relief when we contrast it with this alternative account.²

More importantly, we also get a clearer sense of how Rawls’s comparatively narrow understanding of Kant affects the development of his own political philosophy: if Rawls regards Kant’s philosophy as best characterized by its principled transcendence of the world—and if, as I hope to show, Rawls regards this as a fundamental flaw in Kant’s thought and sees his own work as an attempt to overcome this flaw—then we ought not be surprised by Rawls’s turning to Rousseau and (especially to) Hegel for inspiration in this endeavour. The third and final task of this chapter is (3) to illustrate how Rawls’s interpretation of Kant—which eventually leads to important departures from him—informs Rawls’s own normative philosophy (as well as his approach to the practice of political philosophy). By emphasizing some of the “un-Kantian” features of A Theory of Justice (1971) and of Rawls’s later works, we open up new interpretive space for Rousseau and for Hegel. In doing so, to reiterate, we get a much more thorough, accurate portrait of Rawls’s political philosophy and of reasonableness in particular.

I

In our attempt to draw out both the a priori and empirical dimensions of Kant’s thought, the following quote from the Preface of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals sets the stage nicely: “All philosophy so far as it rests on the basis of experience can be called empirical philosophy. If it sets forth its doctrine as depending entirely on a priori principles, it can be called pure philosophy” (Kant 1964, Preface: 3; see also Kant 1996, 6: 217). In which kind of philosophical inquiry does Kant engage—empirical or pure? The conventional wisdom points to the latter: Kant’s ethical thought is characterized by its thoroughly abstract quality. The transcendental status of the moral law and the a priori recognition of the obligations implied by it affirm the image of Kant the pure philosopher, uninterested in the contingencies of social and political life.

As we shall see in detail throughout this chapter, this is very much the view of Rawls, whose own moral and political philosophy is often characterized— wrongly, as I shall try to demonstrate—by its similarly abstract quality. In this context, we turn our attention to the following passage from the Groundwork, which provides compelling evidence for adherents of the pure view: “When applied to man [moral philosophy] does not borrow in the slightest from acquaintance with him (in anthropology), but gives him law a priori as a rational being” (Kant 1964, Preface: 7). To be human, for Kant, is to be in possession of a conscience: the appeal— the power—of Kant’s moral philosophy, on this account, is its belief that we are naturally, spontaneously subject to moral dilemmas. The conscience is alive, on this view, even in a vacuum or a tyranny.

But Kant continues (immediately after the previous passage): “These laws admittedly require in addition a power of judgment sharpened by experience […] for man, affected as he is by so many inclinations, is capable of the idea of pure practical reason, but he has not so easily the power to realize the Idea in concreto in his conduct of life” (ibid.). This is the entry point for the recent turn in Kant scholarship towards an “impure” or anthropological account of Kant’s ethics. Rather than emphasize the transcendental, a priori orientation of the Groundwork, as Rawls does, the anthropological Kantians look for Kant in the world.³ How, for instance, do the norms, rules and practices of particular groups— my community—conduce to (or prevent) the recognition of the dictates of the moral law? Is there a place in Kant’s ethics for mediate ideas and institutions that educate agents to an awareness of what is required by the moral law? Or, returning to the pure view, does this constitute a form of heteronomy (as Kant understood the term)? We may happen to act in morally permissible ways—having been properly educated to an understanding of right and wrong—but genuinely moral action, for Kant, is motivated solely by respect for the moral law and not its arbitrary confluence with certain canons of moral meaning and judgement. If freedom is acting from the law—not merely in accordance with it—it follows, on this pure account, that an essential precondition of autonomy is our natural and immediate consciousness of the moral law as supremely authoritative for us as moral agents (see e.g. Kant 1956, 5: 4n and 1964, Preface: 3). At issue, in other words, is whether our consciousness of (what is required by) the moral law is a process or a fact (O’Neill 1986, 533 and 536).

In the end, we shall find a considerable amount of evidence for both views: both the transcendental and the anthropological emphases are grounded in certain aspects of Kant’s thought. Indeed, in Kant’s eyes, as the earlier quotes from the Groundwork emphasize, both are equally necessary. Rawls, though, falls firmly into the former, pure camp: the strong interpretive emphasis in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, is on the a priori status of the moral law and on the immediate, intuitive nature of moral judgement. In his other writings on Kant, however, Rawls expresses reservations over what he takes to be the wholly abstract, wholly a priori quality of Kant’s moral philosophy. Indeed, Rawls is unconvinced by the supposed natural immediacy of the moral law, and when Rawls himself acknowledges the socializing or pedagogical function of group practices, values and (most importantly) institutions, he sees this as a turning away from Kant. Again, Rawls’s eventual rejection of Kantian transcendentalism has important consequences for his own political philosophy: Rawls’s interpretive emphasis shifts from the abstract and a priori to a kind of empirical analysis of this or that political community—its genesis and history, its traditions and prevailing practices—and of the attachments and obligations that membership entails.

II

I begin this section with a disclaimer: it is here that we undertake our most detailed exposition of Rawls’s lectures on Kant’s moral philosophy. The views expressed are Rawls’s, and the passages highlighted in this section are cited by him as evidence for his views. References to Kant in Section II are references to Rawls’s Kant. And, as I have already indicated, those views are deeply idiosyncratic. Why? Because they show only one side of Kant’s thought: the transcendental, a priori, abstract side. In Section III, we will spend a bit of time fleshing out the other side, the empirical or anthropological dimension, which Rawls’s Lectures conspicuously neglect. In doing so, the narrowness of Rawls’s interpretation comes into full light, and we will be better equipped to understand the precise nature of Rawls’s departures from Kant.

According to Rawls, then, the central motif of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals—a natural starting point for a study of Kant’s ethics, for its aim is “to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality,” the moral law—is its strong emphasis on the validity of ordinary, intuitive moral judgements (Kant 1964, Preface: 13). Indeed, throughout the Lectures, Rawls emphasizes the natural immediacy of conscience, as well as the nondeducible character of the moral law, in Kant’s ethics: “The power of choice is directed immediately by pure reason’s idea of the moral law” (Rawls 2000, 263, italics added). Again: “In our common moral consciousness we recognize and acknowledge the moral law as supremely authoritative and immediately directive for us” (Rawls 2000, 273, italics added). In his attempt to show the a priori immediacy of the moral law, Rawls highlights two important passages from the second Critique: “The moral law is given, as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious, even if it be granted that no example could be given in which it had been followed exactly” (Kant 1956, 5: 46 ff., italics added). Again: “The a priori thought of a possible universal lawgiving […] without borrowing anything from experience or any external will, is given as an unconditioned law” (Kant 1956, 5: 31, italics added; see also Kant 1970b, 70–71 and 80–86).⁴

Our consciousness of the moral law, on this account, is not the outcome of moral experience or of our exposure to the justice principles that guide our shared public order. Instead, the moral law is “authenticated” by the “fact of reason” (Rawls 2000, 267; see also Kant 1956, 5: 16, 5:27 and 5: 30). Practical reason is thus fully suited to the task of assessing the moral worth of actions. Says Kant, in this vein, in the Preface to the Groundwork: matters of morality are “easily brought to a high degree of accuracy and precision even in the most ordinary intelligence” (Kant 1964, Preface: 11). Again, Kant: “We cannot possibly conceive of reason as being consciously directed from the outside in regards to its judgements” (1964, III: 4). “Practical reason,” echoes Rawls, “is manifest in our everyday moral thought, feeling and conduct” (Rawls 2000, 162). We may at times be tempted to act for the wrong reasons—the subjective disinclination to follow the moral law is a permanent fact in Kant’s ethics, and this is a rare moment of agreement between the pure and anthropological Kantians. But that does not obscure the essential truths that the Groundwork attempts to convey: that practical reason is fully capable of recognizing the duties and obligations associated with the moral law— that we are immanently free regardless of sociopolitical circumstance—and that we are equally capable of sophisticated moral reflection.

The Groundwork, then, is not an attempt to teach right and wrong: Kant must dismiss such an endeavour as “presumptuous,” says Rawls, for our duties and obligations are rendered fully intelligible to us by practical reason itself (Rawls 2000, 148). Instead, the Groundwork is Kant’s attempt to illuminate the underlying principle—or principle s, if we take into account Kant’s three distinct formulations of the categorical imperative⁵—that informs everyday (intuitive) judgements of moral worth (Kant 1964, I: 20; see also Kant 1956, 5: 3). What makes such knowledge (and self-conscious ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond Kant
• 2 The Hegelian Dimensions of Justice as Fairness
• 3 The Rousseauvian Dimensions of Justice as Fairness
• 4 Bringing Robust Reasonableness into View
• 5 The Width of Public Reason
• Conclusion
• Index