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Justice: Metaphysical, After All?

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Abstract

Political liberals, following Rawls, believe that justice should be ‘political’ rather than ‘metaphysical.’ In other words, a conception of justice ought to be freestanding from first-order moral and metaethical views. The reason for this is to ensure that the state’s coercion be justified to citizens in terms that meet political liberalism’s principle of legitimacy. I suggest that privileging a political conception of justice involves costs—such as forgoing the opportunity for political theory to learn from other areas of philosophy. I argue that it is not clear that it provides any benefit in return. Whether a political conception of justice more adequately satisfies the liberal principle of legitimacy than a metaphysical conception of justice is an open question. To show this, I describe three ways in which political conceptions of justice have been developed within the literature. I then argue that while each might be helpful in finding reasons that reasonable citizens can accept, all face challenges in satisfying the liberal principle of legitimacy. Political conceptions of justice confront the same set of justificatory problems as ‘metaphysical’ conceptions. The question of whether a political conception is preferable should receive greater scrutiny.

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Notes

  1. I say “might be thought of” because Political Liberalism itself does not use this language. Officially, as I will explain Rawls’s view, political liberalism displaces comprehensive philosophical views from the construction of a political conception of justice.

  2. Officially, a conception of justice is freestanding when it “offers no specific metaphysical or epistemological doctrine beyond what is implied by the political conception itself” (Rawls 1996:10). A freestanding approach is currently defended in, for example, Brettschneider (2007).

  3. My thesis echoes Hampton’s (1989) important critique of Rawls, and is indebted to it. Given the subsequent acceptance of justice as political, I hope to press a similar line against contemporary political liberals. My criticism does not apply to every way of developing a politically liberal view, though I think a successful version will be quite modest. For a good example, see Ebels-Duggan’s (2010) ‘permissive political liberalism.’

  4. My sketch here will necessarily be superficial. For a few important general statements on political liberalism, see Scheffler 1994; Klosko 1993; Wenar 1995; Larmore 1999; Krasnoff 1998.

  5. In other words, I could be criticized as instrumentally irrational.

  6. Schroeder puts the point more precisely: I would have a reason to go the department because I “bore the right kind of relation—believing—to a proposition which was the kind of thing to be an objective reason.” See p. 71.

  7. Of course, public reasons for an egalitarian health care plan could be readily forthcoming. This example is just to help illustrate the differing reason relations.

  8. I treat these questions as equivalent. Although I do not believe anything hangs on whether this is the best interpretation of Rawls, it has some textual support, (Rawls 2001: §9.1).

  9. Admittedly, my argument will be limited to these three political conceptions. Space limitations prevent a more thorough investigation of other possible views, but these three are well known, have prominent defenders, and nicely cover the prominent ways in which a political conception might be developed.

  10. I am indebted to Jonathan Quong for on this point, “The Role of an Overlapping Consensus,” Ch. 6 in his Liberalism without Perfection [ms.]. On demarcating the population whose acceptance is required for legitimacy, see Estlund 2008: Ch. 3.

  11. Perhaps a novel possibility for elaborating has gone unnoticed, or perhaps the question about health care policy had not gained sufficient salience before to be actively considered by any member of my religion. I am grateful to a reviewer for pressing me to be clearer on this point.

  12. Of course, the interpretive account could not set aside the actual beliefs of all citizens past and present, lest there be nothing left to interpret. Instead, the idea is that we are to interpret our society’s founding documents and the traditions of their interpretation. These documents and traditions will contain the beliefs of earlier citizens, which may well have been informed by their comprehensive views. But the appeal of the interpretive account, as I will explain below, is that we set aside our own comprehensive views in an effort to cooperate with other citizens in a spirit of good faith.

  13. This approach has lately been developed by James 2005:301; and Sangiovanni 2008:148–49. It was originally presented in Dworkin 1986: Ch. 2.

  14. I believe a worry of this sort motivates Waldron’s (2007) rejection of public reason as a norm on public deliberation in the first place.

  15. For a helpful discussion of the benefits to understanding public reason a common stock of shared reasons, see Stephen Macedo, “A Republic of Reasons: Public Reason and the Constitution of the Public Sphere” (ms).

  16. Here my understanding of the connections between identity and reasons borrows from Korsgaard 1996a, Korsgaard 1996b; Laden 2005.

  17. On the uncertainty about what reasons abstract ‘citizens’ will have, cf. Mouffe (1993):55–56. According to Mouffe, “the problem is that even the way he [Rawls] addresses our nature qua citizens is inadequate and does not recognize that a certain type of citizenship of given practices, discourses, and institutions” (55).

  18. James (2005:309–16) presents reasons why a politically liberal view could avoid a conception of justice that is biased too much in favor of the status quo. But even morally ambitious versions of the view will still involve compromise, if they are to be called politically liberal at all (cf. Lister 2007).

  19. For an explanation, see Korsgaard’s famous rejoinder to Williams, “Skepticism about Practical Reason,” in Korsgaard (1996a), Korsgaard (1996b).

  20. Some contemporary Kantians are more modest how many people could be expected to share Kantian reasons. See, for example, David Velleman, “Willing the Law,” in Velleman (2004).

  21. It is this consideration, I believe, that motivates Onora O’neill’s (1997) important crititicisms of political liberalism. O’neill understand the categorical imperative as limiting out considerations that could not be held as reasons for anyone in a common deliberative setting, thereby making Kantian moral theory more political.

  22. Cf. Parfit (1984).

  23. See for example, Railton (1986). Railton notes this perspective is compatible with many moral theories.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Charles Beitz, Jessica Flanigan, Javier Hidalgo, Stephen Macedo, Alan Patten, Philip Pettit, Anna Stilz, Jim Wilson and two anonymous reviewers.

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Correspondence to Ryan W. Davis.

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Davis, R.W. Justice: Metaphysical, After All?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 207–222 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9234-y

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