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Interpreting Rawls: An Essay on Audard, Freeman, and Pogge

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Abstract

This review essay on three recent books on John Rawls’s theory of justice, by Catherine Audard, Samuel Freeman, and Thomas Pogge, describes the great boon they offer serious students of Rawls. They form a united front in firmly and definitively rebuffing Robert Nozick’s libertarian critique, Michael Sandel’s communitarian critique, and more generally critiques of “neutralist liberalism,” as well as in affirming the basic unity of Rawls’s position. At a deeper level, however, they diverge, and in ways that, this essay suggests, go astray on subtle questions of interpretation: Freeman overemphasizes reciprocity, Pogge miscasts Rawls as a consequentialist, and Audard exaggerates the Kantian aspect of Rawls’s core, continuing commitment to “doctrinal autonomy.”

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Notes

  1. I am grateful to Leif Wenar and to anonymous referees for detailed comments.

  2. Freeman and Pogge, at least, as students of Rawls’s in the 1980s, would have heard the lectures on political philosophy in a form not so distant from their published form. Freeman, of course, edited them for publication. Although Pogge’s book is based on (Pogge 1994), which was published in German, the English edition has been ‘updated and revised a great deal’ (P, xi).

  3. I should make clear that I by no means intend to disparage Rawlsian insiders. I was a student of Rawls’s myself, overlapping with Freeman and Pogge, and am the author of a longish encyclopedia entry on Rawls (Richardson 2005).

  4. Nozick (1974, 205,) does note that Rawls intends his principles to apply only to the basic structure of society, and there criticizes this restriction, using the categories of part and whole: ‘Are the fundamental principles of justice emergent in this fashion, applying only to the largest social structure and not to its parts?’ This categorization, however, misses the way in which the rules of the basic structure shape and regulate the ‘micro’ transactions that occur within it.

  5. The remainder of this paragraph, explaining this statement, is considerably changed in the revised edition.

  6. A related objection of Nozick’s, as Pogge summarizes it, is that ‘The agreement presented by Rawls is one-sided and unfair: The untalented get the design that is best for them, while the talented must put up with this design even if they could do much better on their own (excluding the untalented)’ (P, 181–182). To simplify the exposition, I will treat these two objections together.

  7. Of our three authors, Pogge makes the least appeal to Political Liberalism in responding to Sandel on Rawls’s behalf, tending instead to suggest that a fully adequate reply was available already on the basis of A Theory of Justice.

  8. I first formed the understanding of Sandel’s book that I am here restating when presenting it to Rawls’s seminar in 1984 or 1985, a view that I retain despite the skeptical reception it received on that occasion. I suspect that Rawls was too focused on Sandel’s misunderstandings of, e.g., the status of his assumption that the parties are mutually disinterested to credit the argument I attribute to Sandel in the text, which questions the appropriateness of assuming pluralism in constructing a theory of justice.

  9. In the Preface to the Second Edition of LLJ (Sandel 1998, x), Sandel writes that ‘in the debate between Rawlsian liberalism and the view I advance in LLJ …[t]he fundamental question … is whether the right is prior to the good.’ He there goes onto specify that he takes the phrase, ‘the priority of right,’ to label two different claims in Rawls. The first is the one that Freeman glosses in the way I shall shortly quote in the text. The second is that claim that the principles of justice that specify our rights do not depend on any comprehensive moral or religious conception. To put things as Sandel there does is flatly to contradict Rawls’s central claims about his own view in Political Liberalism and hence shifts the action away from LLJ’s effort at reading TJ.

  10. See esp. PL, 191–194. See also Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, 219–226, in which Rawls characterizes Kant’s view in parallel to the way that the chapter of PL cited in the text characterizes his own.

  11. In a 1963 essay, Rawls had written that justice ‘is but one of many virtues of political and social institutions’: CP, 73.

  12. Freeman says that he takes the distinction between ‘reciprocity of advantage’ and ‘reciprocity of justification’ from David Reidy, ‘Reciprocity and Reasonable Disagreement: From Liberal to Democratic Legitimacy,’ 132 (2007): 243–291.

  13. To come clean: I have elsewhere argued that neither of these two senses of reciprocity is strongly operative in Rawls’s theory (Richardson 2006; Bohman and Richardson 2009). I go into these issues further here—as well as the others I will go onto discuss—not in an attempt to settle these difficult matters but rather to highlight the difficulties that still remain in Rawls interpretation despite the impressive and authoritative efforts of our three commentators.

  14. Freeman actually restricts the claim in the second half of the quotation to Kantian constructivism. As I will explain in the text, however, I think his language here (re ‘displacing the need’ for any heteronomous basis for moral principles) is sufficiently guarded as to be correct in application also to political constructivism. For Rawls’s use of the term ‘practical reason’ in this connection from within political liberalism, see, e.g., PL, 98.

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Richardson, H.S. Interpreting Rawls: An Essay on Audard, Freeman, and Pogge. J Ethics 15, 227–251 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9078-7

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