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Rawls' Methodological Blueprint Rawls’ Methodological Blueprint This is a pre-proofs, pre-copy-edited version. Please only cite the finished version, which is now published in the European Journal of Political Theory, and available at: http://ept.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/23/1474885115605260.abstract?rss=1 Abstract Rawls’ primary legacy is not that he standardised a particular view of justice, but rather that he standardised a particular method of arguing about it: justification via reflective equilibrium. Yet this method, despite such standardisation, is often misunderstood in at least four ways. First, we miss its continuity across his various works. Second, we miss the way in which it unifies other justificatory ideas, such as the ‘original position’ and an ‘overlapping consensus’. Third, we miss its fundamentally empirical character, given that it turns facts about the thoughts in our head into principles for the regulation of our political existence. Fourth, we miss some of the implications of that empiricism, including its tension with moral realism, relativism, and conservatism. Catherine Audard John Rawls, Stocksfield:Acumen, 2007. Samuel Freeman Rawls, London:Routledge, 2007. Paul Graham Rawls, Oxford:Oneworld, 2007. Percy B. Lehning John Rawls:An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy (eds) A Companion to Rawls, Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2014. Sebastiano Maffetone Rawls:An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Thomas Pogge John Rawls:His Life and Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Introduction Rawls’ primary legacy is not his theory of justice, or even the debate he started about that concept, but rather the way in which that debate is carried out. In other words, his primary legacy is methodological, in the sense that he standardised a particular way of doing political philosophy, or, more precisely, a particular method for the justification of political principles. This is why it makes sense to say that he created a ‘common disciplinary discourse’ (Lehning, 2009, 14), that he gave us ‘new ways to argue’ (Freeman, 2007, 459), that he inaugurated a ‘formidably productive paradigm in moral, social, and political philosophy’ (Maffetone, 2010, 14), and that, even if his conception of justice was not particularly original, the way he argued about it was (Audard, 2007, 7; Freeman, 2007, x; Graham, 2007, 167; Maffetone, 2010, 10). Yet there is still confusion about that method, despite such standardisation. What, for example, is the precise relationship between ‘wide reflective equilibrium’, the ‘original position’, and the idea of an ‘overlapping consensus’? How, if at all, does the method change between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism? Which, if any, of the following c-words accurately summarises its character: contractarian, contractualist, constructivist, contextualist, or coherentist? Given such confusion, we can be grateful for the gradual emergence of a range of books on Rawls’ works when taken as a whole, and in particular the light this approach sheds on the continuous method underpinning those works: justification via reflective equilibrium. This, in short, is the idea that runs from the first of Rawls’ works to the last, that explains, more than anything else, their fundamental character, and that became standard for a subject that was revitalised as a direct result of the promise it held. In what follows, I use these books to paint a distinctive and four-part picture of this method. First, I explain its context, core, and continuity. Second, I discuss its surprising empiricism. Third, I explore the problems it encounters, partly in virtue of such empiricism. Fourth, I comment on its future. The context, core, and continuity of Rawls’ method We start then with the context of this method, about which one needs to understand at least two things: First, the argument of A Theory of Justice was developed over the 1950s and 1960s, as captured by a series of articles leading up to that book; second, this was a time when people were asking whether political philosophy still existed (Berlin, 1962), or, more bluntly, whether it was dead (Laslett, 1956). Laslett’s account is especially important, given his third reason for the problem: ‘The Logical Positivists did it. It was Russell and Wittgenstein, Ayer and Ryle who convinced the philosophers [to] withdraw […] and re-examine their logical and linguistic apparatus. [This] called into question the logical status of all ethical statements, and […] threatened to reduce the traditional ethical systems to […] nonsense. Since political philosophy is, or was, an extension of ethics, the question has been raised whether [it] is possible at all’ (Laslett, 1956, ix)1 So, when understanding Rawls’ achievement, the point is that this was a context in which it would have seemed futile, to many, to compare the relative merits of utilitarianism and a re- worked social-contract theory, given that their differences, once logical inconsistencies are removed, must amount to either disagreements of fact (and thus the preserve of science) or boo/hurrah opinion (and thus irrelevant to philosophy). On this view, there is no proper argument to be had regarding what one should think about the matter, or, if this is a separate idea, what a reasonable person would think about it. Instead, all that is left to moral philosophy are meta-ethical questions about the meaning of moral utterances – as illustrated by Ayer’s emotivism - whilst all that is left to political philosophy – as illustrated by Berlin, Ayer’s friend and colleague - is a choice between historical interpretations or a modest form of conceptual analysis, in which one can draw out the implications of different concepts, as well as the range of possible trade-offs between them, without ever making principled recommendations for how such things ought to be done2. This context of apparently restricted normativity can be described in various ways (cf. Barry, 1990; Wolff, 2011; and Floyd, forthcoming-a). One might talk of the heyday of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ or ‘linguistic philosophy’, or of ‘analytic’, as opposed to ‘analytical’ philosophy, or of course of ‘logical positivism’, as Laslett does. One might talk more generally of the influence of ‘positivism’, or more narrowly of doctrines such as ‘expressivism’ or ‘emotivism’. Or one might talk of the dominance of normative theory by ‘meta-ethics’, and not just because the meta-ethical thinking of the day, as described, seemed to render meaningful argument about political principles impossible, but also because Rawls himself strove to show how the latter could be made ‘independent’ of the former, regardless of the positions that subject ends up adopting (Rawls, 1999, 286-302). The key thing though is this: what Rawls was doing in Theory was providing us with a method for meaningfully comparing the merits of different moral and political principles at a time when such comparison seemed impossible (Audard, 2007, 5; Freeman, 2007, 12; Graham, 2007, 4-5; Lehning, 2009, 12-15). How could he do that? Clearly not by developing ‘a substantive theory of justice founded solely on truths of logic and definition’, for he accepted that this was ‘obviously impossible’ (Rawls, 1971, 51). Instead, he believed roughly the following: (1) even if our moral judgements, e.g. ‘murdering Paul would be wrong’, boil down to brute feelings, those feelings can still be systematised into principles, e.g. ‘do not murder’; (2) even if those principles, in virtue of such feelings, look like nothing more than opinions, the opinions of different individuals can still be aligned with each other on political fundamentals – we might, after all, come to agree on ‘not murdering’; and (3) even if these feelings are just ‘facts’ about us, this process of systematisation and alignment still counts as justification of the principles they lead to, much as laws of nature are grounded by empirical observations – though it is not an identical process, given the revisability of these facts, and the lack of any commitment to the ‘truth’ of such principles, as we will see below. Nevertheless, this is why it makes sense for him to call his project a ‘theory’ of justice, and even on occasion a ‘theory of the moral sentiments’ (Rawls, 1971, 51, 120). What though, precisely, is the ‘method’ to which these claims lead? Is it contractarianism? (Graham, 2007, 9) Contractualism? (Pogge, 2007, 131) Contextualism? (Audard, 2007, 18) Constructivism? (Laden, 2014, 60) A better answer, on balance, is coherentism, given that this term highlights in Rawls’ work the fundamental importance of our existing thoughts to justification, in the sense that a principle is more or less justified (than another principle) according to the extent to which it coheres with our current normative convictions. Alternative justificatory ideas are thus subordinate to this fundamental one, given that, for example, the construction of any contract-like situation is itself dependent on the described coherence, whilst the many positions taken on contextualism are simply a set of positions on whose thoughts (and what kind of thoughts) count3. Coherentism, however, is not the label Rawls ran with in his own work (or even one of his index entries). Instead, he articulated this general idea via the more precise notion of justification via reflective equilibrium which, as we will see, is essentially a particular method for turning a certain class of our thoughts (considered judgements) into a certain class of principles (political principles - though of course Rawls focuses on principles of justice)4. It was with this method that Rawls ushered in a new ‘thoughts-to-oughts’ era of justification for political philosophy, in which various thinkers (Nozick, Dworkin, Cohen, etc.) would put various thoughts together (intuitions, hypothetical choices, considered judgements, etc.) in order to elicit principles of varying subject matter (legitimacy, justice, rights, etc.)5. And it was on this method that his own work was centred, just as contemporary scholarship is centred upon it.
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