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John Rawls and Oxford Philosophy

Part of: The Historical Rawls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Nikhil Krishnan
Nikhil Krishnan*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Scholarship historicizing John Rawls has put paid to the view that his work was without precedent. This article sets out to find out why, then, A Theory of Justice stirred such philosophical excitement, even among British philosophers in a position to recognize its antecedents. I advance the view that his work is helpfully understood as fulfilling the promise of the “naturalist” revival in ethics begun at Oxford by Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. After briefly surveying the development of analytic philosophy, I argue that Rawls's contribution was to reconceive ethics so that it was an investigation neither of an independent ethical reality nor of the logic of moral language. Rather, it was concerned with a class of facts about ourselves. Rawls's practice of ethics adopts as its central focus the ongoing human practice of justification. I place Rawls's turn from religious faith to justification between persons alongside similar shifts in Plato's Euthyphro and in the biographies of Kant and Sidgwick. I try to show the distinctiveness of Rawls's focus by contrasting his search for human self-understanding with the project of R. M. Hare, his most prominent non-naturalist critic, who charged Rawls with offering an inadequate account of the authority of ethics.

Type
Forum: The Historical Rawls
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 940 - 959
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Barry, Brian, “The Strange Death of Political Philosophy,” Government and Opposition 15/3–4 (1980), 276–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 284.

2 Hart, H. L. A., “Rawls on Liberty and Its Priority,” University of Chicago Law Review 40/3 (1973), 534–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 534.

3 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), 182, emphasis in original.

4 Hampshire, Stuart, “A Special Supplement: A New Philosophy of the Just Society,” New York Review of Books 18/3 (1972), 36–9Google Scholar, available at www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/02/24/a-special-supplement-a-new-philosophy-of-the-just-.

5 Bernard Williams, “Rawls's Principles and the Demands of Justice” (1972), in Williams, Essays and Reviews (Princeton, 2014), 82–7, at 83.

6 Laden, Anthony Simon, “The House That Jack Built: Thirty Years of Reading Rawls,” Ethics 113/2 (2003), 367–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For accounts of Rawls's personal modesty see, e.g., the obituary in the New York Times: Douglas Martin, “John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82,” New York Times, 26 Nov. 2002, at www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/us/john-rawls-theorist-on-justice-is-dead-at-82.html.

8 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 11Google Scholar.

9 Teresa Bejan's paper in the present issue presents a more detailed account of Rawls's relationship with (this) tradition.

10 E.g. Matt Matravers, “Political Philosophy,” in Dermot Moran, ed., The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (New York, 2008), 883–912; P. Mackenzie Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2017), 153–85; Bok, “‘The Latest Invasion from Britain’: Young Rawls and His Community of American Ethical Theorists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 275–85.

11 Peter Laslett, “Introduction” in Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society: First Series (Cambridge, 1956), vii–xv, at vii.

12 Michael Oakeshott, “Political Education,” in Laslett, Philosophy, Politics and Society, 1–21, at 20.

13 T. D. Weldon, “Political Principles,” in Laslett, Philosophy, Politics and Society, 22–34, at 22.

14 T. D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (London, 1953), 74.

15 W. B. Gallie, “Liberal Morality and Socialist Morality,” in Laslett, Philosophy, Politics and Society, 116–33, at 133, emphasis in original.

16 Similarly, Williams's remark in a BBC interview with the broadcaster Bryan Magee: “It's significant that … political philosophy never prospered under this [i.e. “linguistic”] regime at all.” I quote from the transcript that was published as Bernard Wiliams, “The Spell of Linguistic Philosophy,” in Bryan Magee, ed., Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy (London, 1978), 134–49, at 141.

17 Bernard Williams, “The Moral View of Politics” (1976), in Williams, Essays and Reviews, 119–24, at 119. Williams is referring, no doubt among other things, to the influential essays in Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL, 1960).

18 Hampshire, in his review, identifies the same inspirations in contemporary politics: “the pressure of political events in America … has made the search for rational structure in ethics both more widespread and more urgent. Under what conditions is a war a just war? How far may the state justly require a citizen to play his part in a war which he considers unjust? What are the degrees of moral outrage by a government which justify resistance by violent, and also by illegal, means?” Hampshire, “A Special Supplement.”

19 Williams, “The Moral View,” 120. For a detailed investigation of the ways in which the final draft of A Theory of Justice was marked by the political events of the 1960s see Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019), esp. Chs. 2, 3. For some cautionary remarks about Williams's suggestion see Sophie Smith's article in this issue, esp. the first section.

20 For a succinct version of this history see, e.g., Michael Potter, “The Birth of Analytic Philosophy,” in Moran, Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, 43–76. For a longer version, by a figure partly responsible for those developments, see A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (London, 1982).

21 A useful anthology of canonical works of positivism is A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York, 1959). For a more detailed account of Rawls's borrowings and departures from logical positivism see Bevir, Mark and Gališanka, Andrius, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 33/4 (2012), 701–25Google Scholar. In my own telling, I shall be devoting more attention than they do to the milieu of postwar Oxford as a distinct context for Rawls's early work; distinct, that is, from the Continental positivism against which many Oxford philosophers were reacting.

22 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edn (New York, 1952; first published 1936). A useful work tracing this shift is J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1956).

23 For an instance of this ambivalent reception see Isaiah Berlin's remark about J. L. Austin's reactions to the publication of Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic: “Austin expressed great admiration for it, and then proceeded to criticise it, during our afternoon walks, page by page and sentence by sentence.” Isaiah Berlin, “Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy,” in G. J. Warnock, ed., Essays on J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1973), 1–16, at 6.

24 A locus classicus of this attitude is A. J. Ayer, “Critique of Ethics and Theology,” in Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 103–25.

25 For an influential account that locates the essence of analytic philosophy in something like these terms see the remarks of Michael Dummett: “What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language.” Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London, 1993), 5. Dummett's account has been widely discussed and disputed; for a skeptical discussion see Hans-Johann Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge, 2008), 5 and passim.

26 I am here following the indispensable discussions of the background to Rawls's turn to questions of justification in Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again”; and Bok, “The Latest Invasion from Britain.” Bok rightly emphasizes the twin inspirations for Rawls's turn in features of Protestant theological ethics on the one hand and in his Wittgensteinian influences on the other. I am here urging in addition that the turn had implications for his overall metaphilosophical orientation as well. Rawls was, wittingly or not, adopting a position on what counted as “first philosophy” that placed him at odds with a prominent feature of the analytic philosophy of his contemporaries. See also my discussion of Christine Korsgaard's remarks in this connection, at n. 79 below.

27 Hampshire, “A Special Supplement.”

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 G. J. Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London, 1967).

32 For a classic discussion of its putative confusions see Frankena, W. K., “The Naturalistic Fallacy,” Mind 48/192 (1939), 464–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, 62–3.

34 Ibid., 2.

35 Ibid.

36 For a more detailed discussion of “emotivism” see J. O. Urmson, The Emotive Theory of Ethics (London, 1968).

37 For brief remarks from Carnap see Rudolf Carnap, “Replies and Systematic Expositions,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, 1963), 859–1012, at 1000.

38 R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952), 82.

39 Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, 2, original emphasis. For discussions of Austin and his influence by his younger colleagues see K. T. Fann, ed., Symposium on J. L. Austin (London, 1969); G. J. Warnock, “Saturday Mornings,” in Warnock, Essays on J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1973), 31–45.

40 Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, 74.

41 Ibid., 62–72; he cites Foot at 67 n. 32.

42 Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958), 83–104, at 83. See also Foot, “Moral Arguments,” Mind 67/268 (1958), 502–13.

43 The biographical details are from Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, trans. Michelle Kosch (New York, 2007), 16. A sprightly, illuminating, and often polemical intellectual history of these years at Oxford may be found in Jonathan Rée, “English Philosophy in the Fifties,” Radical Philosophy 65 (1993), 3–21.

44 Urmson, Philosophical Analysis.

45 H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961).

46 Pogge, Rawls, 10–11. As Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again,” 156 and passim, shows, Rawls knew a good deal about the late Wittgenstein before his year at Oxford.

47 See the succinct account of these formative graduate school experiences in Bok, “The Latest Invasion from Britain,” 279 and passim.

48 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), §217.

49 There is, for instance, no index entry for Wittgenstein in A Theory of Justice. I have, in this section, been following the general account of Rawls's reception of Wittgenstein in a number of recent works, whose details I have avoided replicating. For more detailed discussion of these influences see, e.g., Bok, “The Latest Invasion from Britain”; Bevir and Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context”; Daniele Botti, “John Rawls, Peirce's Notion of Truth, and White's Holistic Pragmatism,” History of Political Thought 35/2 (2014), 345–77; David Reidy, “Rawls's Religion and Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought 31/2 (2010), 309–44.

50 For a discussion of affinities between Austin and Wittgenstein and possible lines of influence see Daniel W. Harris and Elmar Unnsteinsson, “Wittgenstein's Influence on Austin's Philosophy of Language,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26/2 (2018), 371–95.

51 For a discussion of these aspects of Austin's philosophy see David Pears, “An Original Philosopher,” in Fann, Symposium on J. L. Austin, 45–58.

52 See, e.g., Bernard Williams's remarks in his BBC interview with Bryan Magee on the legacy of linguistic philosophy: “the Oxfordian style … was often deliberately and ironically dry, and at the same time made a virtue out of pursuing distinctions for the fun of it.” Williams, “The Spell of Linguistic Philosophy,” 140.

53 In other words, Rawls's interest in the formal principles underlying moral reasoning—what Bevir and Gališanka helpfully term his “modernism”—was where his work was closest to the older set of Oxford philosophers.

54 This was, roughly, the burden of Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago, 1949).

55 As Bevir and Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” 724, put it, Rawls “continued to seek formal principles that explained, and so were justified by, intuitive judgments.”

56 Quoted in Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again,” 162, Rawls's emphasis.

57 John Rawls, “On My Religion,” in Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: With “On My Religion”, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge MA, 2009), 261–9, at 262.

58 Ibid., 263.

59 Ibid.

60 For a discussion of how Rawls's account simplifies a more complex history of graduation evolution see Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again,” 160–6 and passim.

61 Plato, “Euthyphro,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, 1997), 1–16.

62 I echo the useful phrase with which Bernard Williams summarizes the structure of Euthyphro's dilemma in Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge, 1972), 65.

63 For a classic scholarly work on these themes in Kant see Allen W. Wood, Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, 1970).

64 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 257.

65 For further discussion of these themes, especially of Rawls's postwar Protestant context, see Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again,” 155 and passim.

66 For further discussion of Sidgwick's religion see Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2004); J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1977).

67 Another, though a little while later, was Brian Barry, Political Argument (London, 1965). This book was based on an Oxford doctoral thesis titled “The Language of Moral Argument”; the omission of the first three words foreshadows, and was perhaps part of, the loosening of the orthodoxy that I shall discuss below.

68 Biographical accounts may be found in R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Utilitas 14/3 (2002), 269–305; Anthony Price, “Richard Mervyn Hare,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016, at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/hare.

69 Hare, The Language of Morals, iii.

70 Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with Contemporary British Intellectuals (London, 1963), 59.

71 A clear instance of a case where the “modernist” predilection for formalism yields a distinctive ethical outlook marked by impartiality and, relatedly, impersonality.

72 This view has its fullest articulation in R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford, 1981).

73 See also R. M. Hare, Applications of Moral Philosophy (London, 1972). I am here echoing the useful critical discussion of Hare's corpus in Bernard Williams, “The Structure of Hare's Theory,” in Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, eds., Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking (Oxford, 1988), 185–96.

74 Hare, R. M., “Review: Rawls’ Theory of Justice—II,” Philosophical Quarterly 23/92 (1973), 241–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 252. The old articles to which he refers are presumably Rawls, John, “Outline for a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” Philosophical Review 60/2 (1951), 177–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review 64/1 (1955), 3–32

75 R. M. Hare, “Review: Rawls’ Theory of Justice—I,” Philosophical Quarterly 23/91 (1973), 144–55, at 145.

76 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 579.

77 Hare, “Review I,” 147.

78 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 51. This quotation can be usefully read in light of the remarks in Teresa Bejan's paper in this issue on Rawls's appeals to the concept of “tradition.”

79 This point is succinctly made in Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (With a Commentary on the Text by A. W. Moore), reissue (Abingdon, 2006), 102. I echo his language above: “The intuitions are supposed to represent our ethical beliefs, because the theory being sought is one of ethical life for us, and the point is not that the intuitions should be in some ultimate sense correct, but that they should be ours.” The point is made slightly differently, but no less illuminatingly, in Christine M. Korsgaard, “Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy,” in Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency (New York, 2008), 302–26, at 322. “A conception of justice is a principle that is proposed as a solution to the distribution problem, arrived at by reflecting on the nature of the problem itself … The normative force of the conception is established in this way: if you recognize the problem to be real, to be yours, to be one you have to solve, and the solution to be the only or the best one, then the solution is binding upon you.”

80 Rawls addressed these themes, most prominently, in Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14/3 (1985), 223–51Google Scholar. Also, and more generally, in Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993).

81 Sophie Smith's paper in this issue helpfully points towards the possibility of a less generous characterization. A reader skeptical, on independent grounds, about the value and promise of analytic approaches may well find that this description of Rawls's achievement—in making analytic philosophy slightly more accommodating of political questions—only deepens that skepticism. If Rawlsian theory is the most that political philosophy in the analytic tradition can do, then it is at least understandable that some readers will despair of philosophy, the analytic tradition, or both. More hopefully, one might think Rawlsian theory only one of many possible ways of rescuing philosophy from its retreat into formalism.