Abstract

John Rawls has articulated a comprehensive and sophisticated theory concerning the issues of justification and objectivity in ethics. The core of his view is found in his monumental book A Theory of Justice published in 1971. This book serves as the focus of my dissertation, although relevant portions of his other published works are referred to as is needed for a fuller understanding of his position. ;The first chapter of my dissertation introduces in a general way the outlines of Rawls' overall methodology, that is, the way in which he approaches reasoning about, arguing for, and presenting justifying grounds to support his normative conclusions. Rawls basically has a two-pronged approach to justifying his normative conclusions. The first approach aims at getting one's considered moral judgments into a state of what Rawls calls "reflective equilibrium" with a set of moral principles. The second approach attempts to demonstrate that certain moral principles would be chosen by persons in a situation that Rawls refers to as the "original position". Rawls conceives this to be a hypothetical meeting of persons under carefully specified conditions to choose the principles of justice that are to govern their society, much in the same spirit of traditional social contract theories. In this first chapter it is questioned whether the defining features of the original position outlined by Rawls are legitimate, and whether Rawls' reasons are adequate to support his claim that the participants in the original position so defined could rationally choose only one particular conception of justice. ;In the second chapter reflective equilibrium and the original position are subjected to extensive critical analysis, especially with reference to Ronald Dworkin's distinction between the natural and the constructive models of moral theorizing. Towards the end of the second chapter it is argued that Rawls has two quite incompatible conceptions of the original position working, one more in the contractarian tradition, the other more in the ideal observer tradition. It is further argued that the former is actually unnecessary to achieve the goal for which it was designed, and that the latter is in fact the crucial conception to focus upon. ;In the third chapter the original position and the ideal observer theory as presented by Roderick Firth are compared and contrasted, and even though their close similarities in many respects are indeed striking, important dissimilarities are found to exist as well. No attempt is made to defend the ideal observer theory per se but instead an attempt is made to show that it provides a powerful alternative to the original position as a method for justifying moral principles within an overall constructivist framework.