Abstract
One of the central elements of John Rawls’ argument in support of his two principles of justice is the intuitive normative ideal of citizens as free and equal. But taken in isolation, the claim that citizens are to be treated as free and equal is extremely indeterminate, and has virtually no clear implications for policy. In order to remedy this, the two principles of justice, together with the stipulation that citizens have basic interests in developing their moral capacities and pursuing their conceptions of the good life, are meant to provide a more precise interpretation of what is involved in treating citizens as free and equal. Rawls’ critics, however, have argued that satisfying the two principles of justice is not the most appropriate or plausible way to respect the status of citizens as free and equal. In relation to this debate, the present paper has two aims. The first is to examine Rawls’ account of the type of freedom that a just society must guarantee equally to its citizens. I will argue that those who think of Rawls as a theorist of freedom as non-interference are mistaken, because his notion of liberty resembles in important respects the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. Second, I will consider the extent to which Rawls’ principles of justice successfully protect the freedom as non-domination of all citizens so as to effectively treat them as free and equal.
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Notes
H. L. A. Hart has pointed out that there was a tension in A Theory of Justice between some passages that refer to liberty in general terms and some that refer to the basic liberties of citizens. Rawls acknowledged this criticism and revised his theory accordingly, focusing only on the distribution of basic liberties. See Hart (1989); Rawls (1996, pp. 289–371).
The only place where Rawls talks about the freedom of collective agents is in his theory of international justice, where there are principles that require respect for the freedom of “peoples”. In this case, freedom amounts to self-government. See Rawls (1999b).
In his earlier work, Rawls makes use of a broadly Kantian notion of autonomy to justify the selection of the principles of justice. See Rawls (1999c). However, after the “political turn” he avoids appealing to this notion of moral autonomy because it is a comprehensive ideal that not all reasonable citizens share. But he continues to endorse the value of political autonomy understood as “the legal independence and assured integrity of citizens and their sharing equally with others in the exercise of political power.” See Rawls (1999b, p. 146).
For further considerations against the feasibility of equalizing the worth of the basic liberties see Krouse and McPherson (1988, p. 85).
Because the principle of equal liberty has priority over the second principle, Daniels thinks that if institutional design did not suffice to protect equal opportunities for political influence, the new version of the theory would support limiting economic inequalities to prevent them from generating a highly unequal distribution of political power. See Daniels (Daniels 1989), p. xxiv. Rawls’ endorsement of the economic system of a property-owning democracy seems to acknowledge that the equalization of political power among citizens requires a dispersion of property: that is, that it requires a reduction of economic inequality.
One problem with appealing to autonomy in a political theory of justice is that there are too many accounts of what counts as being or acting autonomously. Some of these accounts are quite demanding and would label many people as lacking autonomy. Depending on the account of autonomy, domination may either impede its development, or seriously restrict its exercise, or block its exercise completely.
In my view, Pettit’s notion of arbitrary interference by private parties is clearer than his notion of arbitrary interference by the state. One reason for this is that we have a fairly clear pre-theoretical sense of what the central interests of individuals are. But the notion of arbitrary interference by the state is more problematic because of difficulties in giving a precise sense to what the common interests of citizens are, particularly when it comes to deciding policies about which there is reasonable disagreement. For discussions of the problem of determining what counts as state domination see McMahon (2005); Pettit (2006); Richardson (2006); Costa (2007).
The following two paragraphs are based largely on my Costa (2009).
But see Rawls (2001, pp. 130–132).
For a detailed examination of the democratic elements of Rawls’ theory see Cohen (2003).
The requirement that laws dealing with constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice be justified in terms of public reasons is another element in the theory that provides some assurance against state domination of citizens. But it is worth noting that this requirement only applies to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Moreover, the requirement that citizens use public reasons in political debates is a moral duty of citizens, according to Rawls. As such, it cannot be enforced. And for this reason it cannot alter structural relationships of domination. See Rawls (1999b, pp. 136).
It is a controversial question, what kinds of policies of affirmative action the fair equality of opportunity principle would support in non-ideal contexts. See Taylor (2009).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Joshua Gert and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful for funding from a grant issued by the Argentine Agency for the Promotion of Scientific Research and supervised by Maria Julia Bertomeu.
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Victoria Costa, M. Rawls on Liberty and Domination. Res Publica 15, 397–413 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-009-9102-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-009-9102-6