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Social Justice in the Natural Law Tradition: a Critique of Antimoralist Marxism from a Finnisian Point of View

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Social Justice in the Natural Law Tradition: a Critique of Antimoralist Marxism from a Finnisian Point of View University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2018 Social Justice In the Natural Law Tradition: A Critique of Antimoralist Marxism from a Finnisian Point of View Qianlu Ying University of Tennessee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Ying, Qianlu, "Social Justice In the Natural Law Tradition: A Critique of Antimoralist Marxism from a Finnisian Point of View. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2018. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5063 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Qianlu Ying entitled "Social Justice In the Natural Law Tradition: A Critique of Antimoralist Marxism from a Finnisian Point of View." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. Jon F. Garthoff, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Adam S. Cureton, Allen R. Dunn, David A. Reidy Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Social Justice In the Natural Law Tradition: A Critique of Antimoralist Marxism from a Finnisian Point of View A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Qianlu Ying August 2018 Acknowledgements I did not expect to have such a fulfilling journey six years ago when I got my offer, but now when I am standing at the end of it, I feel like I am just arriving at “the end of the beginning” rather than “the beginning of the end”. I must thank David Reidy for his illuminating teaching of natural law theory. John Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights has become my favorite philosophy book and continues to shape my understanding of both myself and the social world. I had my best graduate school time in his office hours talking about the excitement and the puzzles of reading Finnis. I had never enjoyed doing philosophy like that before his course of philosophy of law, and I am realizing how much more I still need to learn to better “participate” in the basic good of knowledge. I want to thank Jon Garthoff for his useful lessons on Rawls. When I read Restatement for the first time, I did not quite understand the book. But through several years of communications, and thanks to his recommendation of other books on moral philosophy, I have gradually gained a much better grasp of Rawls and moral philosophy in general. Besides being a great teacher, Jon is also a great friend who warmly welcomes international students like me when I have other problems and requests outside the school. During my thesis writing, he offered many valuable suggestions and criticisms, and yet showed great sympathetic and encouraging understandings of my project. Although my work still needs to be improved, nearly all improvements that have been made since the first draft could not have been made without his insights and patience. ii I also want to thank Adam Cureton and Allen Dunn for their great help. Adam’s disability research is a great inspiration to me, and his fascinating teaching style has always been a great model to emulate among us many students. In the first stage of my thesis he offered many suggestions on my draft and carefully corrected the mistakes in the writing for me. But I am also fortunate to have a great committee member from English department: professor Allen Dunn kindly set up a biweekly discussion with me, and I got to read the greatest book on Marx so far I have read, Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx, under his careful instruction. In fact, this book was heavily underlined and occupied so much of my time during the writing of my thesis. I want to thank him for broadening my vision on Marx and helping me keep a further interest in reading Marx from not merely the perspective of political philosophy but also social science. Last but not least, I want to thank my parents, parents-in-law, and my husband. Without my parents and parents-in-law, I might have been quitted from school. It is their unconditional support for my academic studies and families, both financially and spiritually, that makes this work possible. I also thank my husband, Wei Huang, for his thought-provoking daily philosophical conversations with me. His loving understanding and encouragement are my great comfort and satisfaction. With all the supports and love from my families, like I said, I wish the completion of the thesis the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. iii “So the virtues arise in us neither by nature nor against nature. Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them, and we are completed through habit.” (Aristotle, NE) “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” (Marx: Communist Manifesto) “What is just draws the limits, the good makes the point.” (Rawls: Restatement) iv Abstract My thesis defends a natural law understanding of Marx against the view that Marxist social science theory is a value-free project incompatible with justice and morality. This defense has two aspects. The first aspect regards the substantive contents of Marx’s notion of justice. The second aspect regards the methodology of social science. My arguments of both of the above two aspects are grounded in the natural law tradition, especially in the light of John Finnis’s natural law theory of law. In terms of the methodology of social science, Finnis endorses a the method of first person ideal- type description in descripting legal phenomenon. Such a method distinguishes the focal cases of law from the marginal cases of law according to whether they embody or deviate from the ideal- type of law. The ideal-type of law, on the one hand, is defined by a set of first principles of natural law, which refer to a list of seven basic goods and nine requirements of the practical reasonableness. On the other hand, the description of legal phenomenon presumes that the human beings are practical agents who not only aim at the good, but have a self-understanding of themselves as practical agents as such. In terms of the substantive aspect, Finnis identifies the rational foundation of law with the nature of human beings as persons in community. As persons in community, all individuals’ well-being is inherently dependent on the thriving of the community; yet the thriving of the community is also dependent on free development of personality of all individuals. Persons and the community are two essential and integrated parts of the common good, which itself is a constituent part of the v well-being of an individual. Law and justice are understood by Finnis as the requirements of the common good in specific social and historical conditions. My work aims to show that both the Finnisian methodology of social science and his natural law understanding of justice is shared by Marx. Eventually, a liberal egalitarian theory of justice can be plausibly established. vi Table of Contents Part I. Introduction………………………………………...…………………………………….1 Part II. Natural Law Theory of Justice………………………………………….…………....17 Chapter 1. The First Principles of Natural Law…………………………………………………...18 Chapter 2. Threat to Individuality Argument and the Principle of Subsidiarity……………….…29 Chapter 3. Three Beyond Justice Arguments …………………………………………………….41 Chapter 4. The Problem of Ideology and the Formal Features of Law………………………..….58 Part III. A Marxian Conception of Justice and Natural Law………………..…….…………69 Chapter 5. The Problem of the Moral Dimension of Marxism …………………………………..70 Chapter 6. Reevaluation of the Antimoralist Arguments…………………………………………73 Chapter 7. A Rawlsian Interpretation of Marx …………...…………………………………..…104 Part IV. A Marxian Social Science and Natural Law……….…………..……………………122 Chapter 8. Legal Positivism and Natural Law Jurisprudence…………………………………...123 Chapter 9. The Finnisian First Person Methodology………………………………….....…..….138 Bibliography…….……………………………………………………………………………..156 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………..161 vii Part I Introduction 1 1 There have been a number of works arguing for a Marxian conception of justice based on the comparative studies on Marx and Rawls. For example, it is claimed that Marx’s ideas of alienation and exploitation can be construed as various forms of social injustice in the light of the two principles of justice argued by Rawls. It is also claimed that Marx’s needs principle proposed in the Critique of Gotha Programme is an egalitarian distributive principle compatible with Rawls’s difference principle1. Moreover, when Rawls discusses Marx’s criticisms of capitalism, he contends that his two principles of justice, and especially his distinction between liberty and the worth of liberty, meet socialist criticisms satisfactorily2. As some have pointed out, “the lines drawn between contemporary analytical Marxism and contemporary left-liberal political philosophy are fuzzy”, and there is a common core there yet to be elucidated3. To a great extent, my present work is to facilitate an understanding of such a common core. Yet two types of objections have been raised to question the legitimacy of having such a comparative study of Rawls and Marx.
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