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Liberal Reasonability a Critical Tool? Reflections After Rawls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Kai Nielsen
Kai Nielsen
Affiliation:
University of Calgary Concordia University
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , Fall 1998 , pp. 739 - 760
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1998

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References

Notes

1 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, “The Law of Peoples,” in On Human Rights, edited by Shute, Stephen and Hardy, Susan (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 42–82Google Scholar; and Rawls, John, “Reply to Habermas,” The Journal of Philosophy, 92, 3 (March 1995): 132–80Google Scholar. Since this article was first drafted, a rereading of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar and of his 1989 manuscript Justice as Fairness: A Briefer Statement reveals the same thing. The texts are peppered with occurrences of “reasonable” and the like.

2 About the path such reasonable disagreement takes, and, as well, more generally about Rawls's liberal vision of society and its tensions, John Burt's insightful essay, “John Rawls and the Moral Vocation of Liberalism,” Raritan (1995): 133–53Google Scholar, is very helpful. He gives, free from Rawls's sometimes formidable vocabulary, a revealing interpretation of his liberalism.

3 Stuart Hampshire, “Liberalism: The New Twist,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1993, p. 45.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 McCarthy, Thomas, “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstruction: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue,” Ethics, 105, 1 (October 1994): 62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 On thick contextuality, see Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)Google Scholar. See also his Intrepretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

8 There is, no doubt, some redundancy in the lists. Rather than make them as short as possible—all the while seeking canonical statements in as short a list as possible-I sought, by tolerating different phrasings, though with differing nuances of what may come in some instances to much the same thing, to capture in its thickness what liberal reasonability comes to.

9 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 50.

10 Ibid., pp. 49–50. Rawls follows Thomas Scanlon here.

11 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 53.

12 Ibid., pp. 53–54.

13 Ibid., pp. 123, 157, 163.

14 Ibid., p. 217.

15 Ibid., p. 58.

16 Cohen, Joshua, “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus,” in The Idea of Democracy, edited by Copp, David et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 282.Google Scholar

17 Ibid, p. 284.

18 Plantinga, Alvin, “Belief in God,” in Perspectives in Philosophy, edited by Boylan, Michael (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), p. 405Google Scholar. Plantinga, Alvin quotes with approval John Calvin's remark, “‘There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.’ This we take to be beyond controversy”Google Scholar (emphasis added). See Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, chap. 3, translated by Battles, Ford Lewis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), pp. 43–44.Google Scholar

19 Nielsen, Kai, Why Be Moral? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. 143–206Google Scholar. See also DeBruin, Debra A., “Can One Justify Morality to Fooles?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 25, 1 (March 1995): 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 It is vital here to go on to the next two paragraphs, for, left like that, it might be thought that I contradict myself in making both the bootstrapping argument and in saying that we cannot get morality out of reasonableness (either the general or the liberal conception). But, trivially, we cannot in any interesting sense derive morality from either, because both are already moral conceptions. We are not going from non-moral considerations to moral ones, but only, within morality, from some moral considerations to others. If the bootstrapping argument is sound, it is true that, in the context of our social life, the general conception of reasonability yields the liberal one. Thus, a conservative, where he is aware of what reasonability requires in the context in which he is and is aware, as well, of the relevant non-moral facts, will have to accept the liberal conception, and, thereby, to be consistent, shift to some form of liberalism, including accepting some form of liberal justice. We can see here how reasonability, embedded in wide reflective equilibrium, does critical normal work. It is not that we just have here an ideological weapon for liberalism, and, as such, something that conservatives can justifiably brush aside. Indeed, where they see the force of what reasonability requires in the context of modern life, as well as being aware of some rather non-controversial, non-moral facts, they will be led out of their conservatism. We are not just stuck with the truism that liberals can make critical use of a specifically liberal conception of the reasonable.

21 See Couture, Jocelyne and Nielsen, Kai, “Whither Moral Philosophy?” in On the Relevance of Metaethics, edited by Couture, Jocelyne and Nielsen, Kai (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995), pp. 296–329.Google Scholar

22 Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” p. 141.

23 Hampshire, Stuart, “A New Philosophy of the Just Society,” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 1972, p. 39.Google Scholar

24 During the symposium on Rawls at the 1995 SPQ conference where a truncated version of this article was read, Michel Seymour asked if the holism, of which the method of wide reflective equilibrium is an expression, is a semantical holism, an epistemological holism, or a methodological holism. As it is a method for fixing belief, I replied that it is a methodological holism. But, as a matter of fact, people who articulate and use the method of wide reflective equilibrium (myself included) do not employ those distinctions. I think the reason for not doing so is that to fasten on any one of them, or even on all of them together, properly distinguished, does more harm than good. We could just as well say that our holism is all three of these types, or is none of them. It could, if you want to talk that way, be said to be semantical, in that it concerns itself with conceptions and concepts of justice, goodness, reasonability, warrant, justification, explanation, the person, the moral, the political, and the like. Taking it that we have a concept of justice, goodness, and reasonability (we know how to operate with, if not upon, such concepts), it seeks, as Rawls, Normal Daniels, and I employ it, both in explaining and justifying a certain political conception of justice with its allied moral and political beliefs, to get all these elements into a consistent and coherent pattern, always seeking to maximize coherence, with the other relevant things we know or believe, with our other convictions, with their allied sympathies and antipathies and the like. This, if you will, involves semantics and epistemology, though, again, someone using that method might eschew such a way of describing things. It is a method of fixing belief, and so it could be called a methodological holism, or an epistemological holism. I think the best thing to do, in saying it is a holism, is to eschew such categories altogether. The drawing of such distinctions fits badly with the idea of what a holism is. In articulating a conception of justice, we should not try to be atomistic or molecularist. Gaining a proper understanding requires, instead, that we seek to set out broad patterns of belief, conviction, and conception which we seek to coherently relate in a whole in which all elements are interrelated and clearly displayed in their relations to each other. See my “How to Proceed in Social Philosophy: Contextualist Justice and Wide Reflective Equilibrium,” Queen's Law Journal, 20, 1 (Fall 1994): 89–138Google Scholar; After the Demise of the Tradition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 195–248Google Scholar; and “Relativism and Wide Reflective Equilibrium,” The Monist, 76, 3 (July 1993): 316–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a perceptive critique of my views here, see Nevo, Isaac, “Is There a Widest Equilibrium?”Iyyun, 45 (1996): 3–21Google Scholar, followed by my response, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium Without Uniqueness,” Iyyun, 45 (1996): 23–35Google Scholar, which is also a further development of my views. See as well my Naturalism Without Foundations (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996).Google Scholar