Abstract
In the past decade, scholars such as Samuel Freeman, Martin O’Neill, Alan Thomas and others have argued that no matter how widely Rawls’s theory of justice (TJ) was understood as a defence of the welfare state (WS), the socio-economic system Rawls defends and always defended is property-owing democracy (POD). In this article I present the argument that Rawls did not defend POD in TJ. However, while the claim that it was POD the socio-economic system implied by the principle of difference generated heated reactions by defenders of the WS, the argument I raise differs from most of them. In the article I maintain that, for Rawls, principles of justice underdetermine the choice of social systems, and that although this is true of both principles, it is especially true of the difference principle, whose ability to arbitrate between different social and economic policies is limited. I show how the attempt to uniquely determine the set of social and economic policies authorized by the difference principle clashes with what Rawls explicitly states in TJ and contrasts with central aspects of his sociological and political conception of socio-economic decision-making. Although my aim is to show that the difference principle itself does not discriminate among socio-economic systems, this does not preclude that additional reasons can help in narrowing the range of socio-economic systems allowed. With reference to the ideal of social union that Rawls expounds in the third part of TJ, I argue that TJ does, in fact, offer additional reasons to appraise the WS as preferable to POD. I maintain that the centrality Rawls attributes to the social unity of a just society provides the basis for an understanding of Rawls’s position towards POD after TJ.
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Notes
Even when the reference is to the original edition, the page directions refer to the '99 edition.
In this article I deal only with the comparison between POD and the WS without examining the liberal-socialist hypothesis, which is also explicitly contemplated by TJ. The reasons for preferring liberal socialism over any other system may differ from those that come into play in the choice between POD and WS, going beyond the issues I discuss here (Edmundson 2017).
It has some relevance to the thesis I argue that JF pre-dates its publication by far and accompanied Rawls throughout the rethinking that led him to PL (JF, pp. xv, xvi),
Rawls, indeed, extends this indifference to primary education (TJ, p. 63). On the university, however, I agree with Sandel (2020). There are reasons of justice for preferring one over the other.
Indeed, Ingrid Robeyns (2012), pointing out the similarity between POD and universal income forms, believes that, like the latter, POD could reinforce the exclusion of women and their domestic role.
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Salvatore, I. The Indeterminacy of the Principles of Justice: The Debate on Property-Owing Democracy Versus the Welfare State and the Ideal of Social Union. Res Publica (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09650-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09650-y