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Does Liberalism Rest on a Mistake?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard A. Rodewald
Richard A. Rodewald*
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge, Northridge, CA91130
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Extract

It is becoming popular among contemporary philosophers to view liberalism as a political morality which rests on a fundamental moral requirement that persons are to be treated equally according to a certain conception of equal respect and concern. On this view, the liberal conception of equal respect and concern requires that conflicts of interests must be decided by appeal to principles which are rationally justifiable on grounds that are neutral or impartial between persons and their competing conceptions of the good life. Ronald Dworkin has expressed this view by contrasting liberalism with political moralities that are founded on conceptions of what constitutes treating persons equally which are ‘at least partly determined by some conception of the good life.‘

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 231 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1985

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Footnotes

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I presented an earlier version of this paper at a philosophy department colloquy at The University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful to the participants for their helpful questions and criticisms. I also wish to thank the editors of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Ed Allaire, AI Martinich and Jill Rodewald for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am indebted as well to Michael Nill whose editorial suggestions greatly helped me to improve the readability of the present draft. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Richard Wasserstrom for his encouragement during the early stage of my thinking about this project.

References

1 Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism,’ in Hampshire, Stuart ed., Public and Private Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press 1978) 113–43,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 128.

2 Ibid., 127. For another recent expression of this theory of liberalism, see Ackerman's, Bruce Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1980).Google Scholar

3 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar

4 Rawls provides a good summary statement of the structure of his theory of justice in ‘A Kantian Theory of Equality,’ Cambridge Review 96 (1975) 94-9.

5 For purposes of the argument of this paper I shall follow Rawls in using ‘conception of the good’ to mean the rational ordering of a person's wants and ends, given his/her choice of a rational plan of life. I also assume that a particular kind of conception of the good implies a particular kind of conception of the good life and vice versa. I will frequently use ‘conception of the good’ and ‘conception of the good life’ interchangeably, hopefully without affecting my argument.

6 See Nielsen, Kai ‘Class and Justice,’ in Arther, John and Shaw, William H. eds., Justice and Economic Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1978) 225–45,Google Scholar for the first kind of criticism, and Nagel, Thomas ‘Rawls on Justice,’ The Philosophical Review 82 (1973) 220–34,CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the second kind of criticism.

7 See Dworkin's, ‘Justice and Rights,’ in Dworkin, Ronald Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1976) 150–83,Google Scholar esp. 182.

8 See the Citizens Party's 1980 platform for a mixture of the new left socialist and reform liberal programs which advocate this. See also Camoy, Martin and Shearer, Derek Economic Democracy (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 1980).Google Scholar

9 This conception of socialism has its roots in a socialist and anarchist tradition which emphasizes decentralized power and authority, participatory democracy and workers’ self-management. See, for example, the writings of Peter Kropotkin on anarchist communism and G.D.H. Cole on guild socialism. See also Dolgoff, Sam (ed.), The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution (New York: Free Life Editions 1974)Google Scholar and Guerin, Daniel Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review 1970).Google Scholar

10 I assume the reader's familiarity with the principles of justice Rawls argues are rational to adopt from the point of his original position.

11 Some of Rawls’ critics have raised questions about the neutrality of his basing the choice of principles in the original position on the assumption that rational persons prefer more rather than less of what he calls primary goods. They have pointed out that the primary goods he identifies are not all necessary means to satisfying every conception of the good. Moreover, they have argued that his primary goods are more useful in the pursuit of some conceptions of the good than others. And they conclude that basing the choice of principles of social justice on this assumption arbitrarily biases them in favor of persons who have conceptions of the good which depend upon the primary goods at the expense of those for whom these goods are less useful. (This line of criticism is pursued by Nagel, Thomas in ‘Rawls on Justice,’ The Philosophical Review 82 (April 1973) 220–34;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Schwartz, Adina in ‘Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods,’ Ethics 83 (1973) 294–307;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Teitelman, Michael in ‘The Limits of Individualism,’ The Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972) 545–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

In a response to these charges Rawls has claimed that his motivational assumption is not meant to hold for all actual persons but ‘only for the parties in the original position: they are to deliberate as if they prefer more rather than less primary goods.’ (‘Fairness to Goodness,’ Philosophical Review 84 (1975) 536-554, esp. 543.) He argues that his critics failed to show that basing the choice of principles on his motivational assumption is unfair to anyone because they have failed to provide any evidence to show that social arrangements which are just according to his principles of justice will in practice favor particular conceptions of the good and arbitrarily exclude others. Rawls is right, I think. His critics have not made an adequate case against his theory. While it is false that all rational persons prefer more rather than less of Rawls’ primary goods, his motivational assumption does not by itself unfairly bias his principles of justice. Instead, what I argue below is that it makes his principles indeterminate in situations where the interests of persons who have individualistic and relations-centered conceptions of the good conflict.

12 Rawls calls this an index problem (A Theory of Justice, 93-4).

13 Ibid., 94.

14 It should be noted that there is no obvious reason for thinking that a participatory self-managing socialist society is less feasible than Rawls’ ideally just capitalist state. In any case, my argument does not hang on its being fully realizable. The problem I raise for Rawls’ theory exists where there are choices between alternative institutions or policies which bring society closer to one or the other of these ideals.

15 See Pateman's, Carole argument for this conclusion in her Participation and Democratic Theory (London: Cambridge University Press 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 My description of relations-centered persons has certain affinities with the account Leonard Boonin gives of what he calls the ‘persons-in-relation’ theory of man and society in his ‘Man and Society: An Examination of Three Models,’ in Pennock, J. Roland and Chapman, John W. eds., Voluntary Associations (New York: Lieber-Atherton 1969).Google Scholar It is also compatible with Marx's conception of man as a ‘social being.’ See the third of his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. by Bottomore, T.B. (New York: McGraw-Hill 1964).Google Scholar

17 Rawls, ‘A Kantian Theory of Equality’

18 Rawls, ‘Fairness to Goodness,’ 541Google Scholar

19 It seems that not only do rational individualists desire to be wealthy in a relative sense, but that the operation of wealth as an incentive for capitalist accumulation in a capitalist society depends upon this being the case. See Robert, Heilbroner's ‘The False Promise of Growth,’ New York Review of Books 24 (March 3, 1977).Google Scholar

20 It also would not be rational for relations-centered persons to prefer to trade off an equal share of economic and political power for more consumer goods and services. It is surprising that Rawls has little or nothing to say about the problem of distributing political and economic power in a just society. ‘Power’ does not even rate an entry in his unusually thorough index. And he emphatically and inexplicably refuses to adopt the view ‘that political and economic power is a primary good.’ (Rawls, ‘Fairness to Goodness,’ 542, note 8)

21 It might be suggested that the difference principle should be interpreted as implying that those social arrangements are just which are preferred by the majority of persons in the least advantaged class. However, this represents a decision to allow the justice of social arrangements to be determined by contingent factors Rawls himself considers arbitrary from the moral point of view. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 260-3, 72ff, and 102ff)

22 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 204Google Scholar

23 See his response to his critics in ‘Fairness to Goodness.’

24 At one point Rawls acknowledges that: … an economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of creating and fashioning wants in the future. How men work together now to satisfy their present desires affects the desires they will have later on, the kind of persons they will be. (A Theory of Justice, 259)

25 For example, I have not considered the possibility of defending a standard of interpersonal comparisons of utility which is neutral between these competing conceptions of the good. However, even if such a standard were possible, it still may be impossible to rationally defend it as a standard of economic justice on grounds which are impartial between individualists and relations-centered persons.

26 I argue against Dworkin's conception of a liberal theory of social justice in my unpublished paper, ‘Dworkin on Liberalism.’

27 Brian Barry came to a similar conclusion in an earlier critique of A Theory of Justice: ‘ a liberal must take his stand on the proposition that some ways of life, some types of character are more admirable than others.’ (‘Liberalism and WantSatisfaction,’ Political Theory (1973) 134-53, esp. 152.) For a more recent argument for the conclusion that liberalism presupposes a conception of the good, see Haksar, Vinit Equality, Liberty and Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press 1979).Google Scholar