Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:50:20.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RELATIONAL EQUALITY, INHERENT STABILITY, AND THE REACH OF CONTRACTUALISM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

Paul Weithman
Paul Weithman*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 92 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Anderson, Peter de Marneffe, Gerald Gaus, Alasdair MacIntyre and an anonymous referee for Social Philosophy and Policy for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

References

1 Anderson, Elizabeth, “The Fundamental Difference between Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary vol. 36 (2012): 1–23.Google Scholar

2 The quotes in this paragraph are from Anderson, “Fundamental Difference,” 1–3.

3 This is a possibility Anderson herself seems to acknowledge when she says that “most relational egalitarians follow a second-personal or interpersonal conception of justification” (Anderson, “Fundamental Difference,” 3).

4 Anderson, “Fundamental Difference,” 4.

5 The interpretation is narrow because these could be views about how any moral claims, and not just claims of distributive justice, are to be justified; see Darwall, Stephen, “Precis: The Second-Person Standpoint,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXXI (2010): 218–19.Google Scholar

6 Thus I understand them as views about what justifies inequalities, not about what inequalities are justified. Those who disagree about whether distributive principles are to be justified second- or third-personally could agree on which principles of distributive justice are correct.

7 Anderson, “Fundamental Difference,” 2.

8 Thus far, the commitment to second-personal justification seems to be compatible with different views about how wide the scope of justice is. One could hold that all normally functioning adult persons, just as such, stand in the kind of mutually authoritative relationship that creates obligations of distributive justice between them. Or one could hold that only those subject to the same basic structure stand in that relationship. I shall suggest below that further commitments of contractualism serve to limit the scope of justice.

9 See Darwall, Stephen, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 300Google Scholar, whose work on second-personal justification Anderson describes as “definitive”; see Anderson, “Fundamental Disagreement,” 4.

10 Scanlon, T. M., “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard, ed., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 276Google Scholar and note 11. Darwall argues that Scanlon’s contractualism is rooted in a commitment to second-personal justification at “Contractualism, Root and Branch: A Review Essay,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (2006): 193–214.

11 See Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 301.

12 See Korsgaard, Christene, “Autonomy and the Second Person Within: A Commentary on Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint,” Ethics 118 (2007): 8–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 After observing that “most relational egalitarians follow a second person or interpersonal conception of justification,” Anderson says “[t]his follows from their contractualism.” (“Fundamental Disagreement,” 3, emphasis added). The argument in the text supports the converse: that contractualism follows from a commitment to a second-personal conception of justification. Elsewhere, Anderson seems to agree with this way of putting the point, saying of second-personal justification: “This idea underlies contractualist formulas for principles of justice” (“Fundamental Disagreement,” 5, emphasis added).

14 How that role is described, how the role played by principles of justice is related to the concept of justice, and what help conceptual analysis gives us in understanding the demands of justice, are all very important questions. Unfortunately I cannot explore them here. I take them up in “What Legitimacy Cannot Be,” (forthcoming).

15 I therefore believe that relational egalitarians quite sensibly reject what Gerald Gaus describes as the “more orthodox view” that “morality is, at its most basic level pointless”; see his “The Egalitarian Species” in the present volume, emphasis original.

16 Contractualists therefore accept a version of what Gaus calls the “Functional Desideratum” in “The Egalitarian Species.”

17 On this point, and the point of the previous paragraph, see Nagel, Thomas, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 3 (1987): 221–22.Google Scholar

18 See, for example, Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 129–30.

19 Anderson is careful to avoid committing herself to any such claims for she allows, capaciously, that third-person justifications have “normative and factual premises” (“Fundamental Disagreement,” 2).

20 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 104–5.Google Scholar

21 Anderson, “Fundamental Disagreement,” 1.

22 The phrase “democratic equality” is introduced at Rawls, Theory of Justice, 57. Those who read Rawls as individualist might doubt that he shares the relational egalitarian’s concern with the rectification of relationships. But this reading is a mistake. I cannot lay out the full argument against it here, but briefly: Rawls argues that when we act from principles chosen in the original position, we express our nature as free and equal rational beings; see Rawls, Theory of Justice, 501. I believe that expressing our nature is adverbial: it is something we do or fail to do by the ways we act, including the ways we relate to others. If that is right, one of the roles of Rawls’s principles is to say how we can relate to others in ways that befit our nature. For a different but complementary argument, see Scanlon, T. M., Being Realistic About Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 103.

24 Ibid., 132–33.

25 Ibid., 103, emphasis added.

26 Ibid., 497, emphasis added.

27 Rawls may seem to have repudiated that aim in his later work, where justification seems to be described as second-personal; see his “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” in John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed., Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 394. But I do not think the contrast Rawls means to draw in “Political not Metaphysical” is between third-personal justification and second-personal justification as Anderson and Darwall understand it. Moreover, I think it at least possible that instead of repudiating an ideal of third-personal justification, the passage reflects Rawls’s view that open avowal of that ideal would be misleading; see “Political not Metaphysical,” 401 n. 20.

28 For this contrast, see Rawls, Theory of Justice, 435–36.

29 Anderson, “Fundamental Disagreement,” 3.

30 At “Fundamental Disagreement,” 20, she says “For contractualists, the inability of principles to inspire a sense of justice is a sign that they are unreasonable.”

31 See Peter Vanderschraaf, “A Governing Convention,” Rationality, Markets and Morals (forthcoming).

32 See Telser, L. G., “A Theory of Self-Enforcing Agreements,” Journal of Business 53 (1980): 28.Google Scholar

33 For example, Farrell, Joseph, “Communication, Coordination and Nash Equilibrium,” Economic Letters 27 (1988): 209, 212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 103.

35 Ibid., 103–4.

36 Harsanyi, John and Selten, Reinhard, A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 81.Google Scholar Payoff-dominance is a stronger solution concept than what we might call a “Rawls equilibrium,” which in turn is stronger than a Nash equilibrium. A Rawls equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium arrived at by what might be called “repeated maximin selection.” We begin with the set of Nash equilibria and select the ones in which the payout to the least well-off player is maximized. We then select the equilibria from that set in which the payout to the next least well-off player is maximized, and so on.

37 Aumann, Robert, “Nash Equilibria are not Self-Enforcing,” in Aumann, Robert, Collected Papers: Volume I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 615–20.Google Scholar As Aumann explicitly notes at p. 556, his result concerns noncooperative games. The difference between cooperative and noncooperative games is that in the former, agreements can be enforced; see Aumann, Collected Papers: Volume I, 21. Can Aumann’s argument be exploited to show that agreements on terms which define a Rawls equilibrium are not ipso facto self-enforcing? Presumably so, but I have not tried.

38 I defend the following interpretation of Rawls in my Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

39 Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” in Collected Papers, 106.

40 Rawls, Theory of Justice, section 86. In later work “either congruent with, or supportive of, or else not in conflict with”; see Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 169.Google Scholar

41 Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” in Collected Papers, 487, n. 30.

42 Indeed the vast literature on Rawls’s treatment of public reason generally overlooks the fact that part of Rawls’s motivation in introducing the notion of public reason was to solve assurance problems; for a brief defense of this reading of Rawls on public reason, see my “Religion, Citizenship and Obligation,” in Tom Bailey, ed., Rawls and Religion, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

43 Rawls, Collected Papers, 106.

44 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 154.

45 Anderson suggests as much when she says at “Fundamental Disagreement,” 20:

Contractualists seek stable principles, in the sense that common knowledge of general compliance with them will inspire people to comply out of their sense of justice. They will see everyone’s good affirmed and promoted by general compliance, and this congruence between the good and the right will reinforce their sense that the principles express reasonable demands and hence deserve their allegiance. This is the basis of contractualists’ concern with stability.

46 I am grateful to Peter de Marneffe for helpful correspondence about this point.

47 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 156–57.

48 This is precisely what Rawls does in section 29 of Theory of Justice. There he argues, in effect, that his principles do not impose unreasonable demands by arguing that they would not engender strains of commitment. He then argues that those principles can generate their own support. See Rawls, Theory of Justice, 153–55.

49 Hare, John, The Moral Gap (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 It is, we might say, an article of contractualist faith that what Gaus calls the “Moral Sentiments Desideratum” can be satisfied by egalitarian principles; see his “The Egalitarian Species.”

51 Here I draw on the discussion of moral faith in Adams, Robert M., “Moral Faith,” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 2 (1995): 75–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 409–13.

53 See Cohen, G. A., Rescuing Justice and Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 178–79, n. 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 For the view of human goodness that the objector rejects, see Rawls, John, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 206.Google Scholar

55 Nagel, Thomas, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 113–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar