Rawls in 60 Minutes - Walther Ziegler - E-Book

Rawls in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

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Beschreibung

John Rawls's masterpiece A Theory of Justice was discussed all over the world already during the author's lifetime. Its very title is provocative since it is generally believed that there can be no general theory of justice: what is just for one man is unjust for another. But Rawls succeeds nonetheless in giving a definition of a just society. To do this he develops a brilliant procedure: choice from behind a "veil of ignorance". If we are to choose, absolutely fairly and objectively, how property, income and education are to be justly distributed, then the people choosing must not know in advance whether, in the society they choose, they will be rich or poor, male or female, worker or employer, educated or uneducated, talented or untalented. Because a rich man is likely to find great differences in wealth just, a poor man unjust. Only a "veil of ignorance", says Rawls, "forces each to take the welfare of others into account". Such a choice "behind a veil" could, of course, never actually take place. But if it did, says Rawls, then it would produce the only two perfectly just principles of justice that can be applied to a society: the equality principle and the "difference principle". By these the quality of every modern society can be measured. What do these principles mean in detail? And can the same thought-experiment work in other contexts? If, for example, we did not know whether, in a future society, we would be humans or animals, would we then choose a vegetarian society? Rawls surely sets off, with his Theory of Justice, a whole firework display of ground-breaking new ideas. This introduction to Rawls appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

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My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine

graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their

excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first

inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most

professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the

English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great

care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear

understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the

needs of English-language readers.

Inhalt

Rawls’s Great Discovery

Rawls’s Central Idea

Why We Pose the Question of Justice: The Three Basic Facts of the Human Condition

The Original Position – Zero Hour for the Choice of an Ideal Society

The Veil of Ignorance and the Maximin Rule

The Two Principles of Justice: The Principle of Equality and the “Difference Principle”

Robinson Crusoe, His Man Friday, Scrooge McDuck and John Rawls Stranded on a Desert Island

Of What Use Is Rawls’s Discovery For Us Today?

Improving the Lot of the Least Advantaged – Rawls’s Critique of Capitalism

Fair Distribution of Goods and Resources: Realizable in Practice or Pure Theory?

The Veil of Ignorance: A Principle of Decision That Can Also Be Applied in Other Fields?

Rawls’s Legacy: The Undying Demand for Justice

Bibliographical References

Rawls’s Great Discovery

The Harvard professor John Rawls (1921-2002) may well be the most significant of all recent American thinkers. He published his main philosophical work, A Theory of Justice, at the age of fifty. Already the book’s title has stayed, from its first appearance in 1971 right up to the present day, a provocation for many. This inasmuch as, in the view of most people, justice cannot be the object of a “theory” at all but is rather always a matter of one’s personal point of view. Each of us, so it is widely thought, considers, from his or her own perspective, very different things to be “just” or “unjust”. And now here comes an American philosophy professor and claims that he has found a definition of justice that is valid for everyone at every time.

Possibly despite, or possibly because of this provocative quality the book quickly came to enjoy enormous success and before the end of the century was known and read all over the world. Today, fifty years later, it belongs among the philosophical classics and counts as one of the most important works of political ethics. There can be no doubt, then, but that A Theory of Justice is a groundbreaking work which does not just fascinate politicians and political scientists but has already, in many countries, gained a well-earned place in the education of young people still of school age.

In this important work Rawls poses the great question of the “just society”: according to what principles must a modern democracy be organized? Much depends on the answer to this question – including our judgment of the conditions in which we currently live. Because the fact is that we must never be content with anything less than what Rawls calls “a perfectly just society”:

Already in the very first pages of this his main philosophical work Rawls formulates the ambitious aim of his project and its vast dimensions:

But what is this “perfectly just society” to look like? The question “what is the best possible form of human co-existence?” is one with a long tradition in philosophy. Already in Ancient Greece Plato had sketched out, in his Republic, the model of an ideal state that would be governed, absolutely justly, by philosopher-kings thoroughly trained in all the branches of knowledge. Later, during the Renaissance, Thomas More continued this tradition, describing in his novel Utopia a thoroughly harmonious society of people living happily together on an island without private property of any kind. This term “utopia” – which More, an enthusiastic scholar of the classical languages, assembled from the Ancient Greek words for “no” and “place” to evoke a “place existing nowhere” – has since become a term for a whole genre of literature and type of political aspiration: visions of an ideal future. And finally, on the eve of the French Revolution, Rousseau, in his Social Contract, painted the portrait of a society of absolutely free citizens who governed themselves through popular assemblies.

Rawls, then, was by no means the first to pose this question as to the nature of an ideal, perfectly just society. In the end, however, he provides significantly more than do all his predecessors. In his theory of justice he not only sketches out a utopia – that is to say, a notion of the ideal society as we would wish to see it – but offers, above and beyond this, a procedure which any of us can use to test whether the distribution of goods and opportunities within a specific society is in fact just or not.

Because, as Rawls argues, it is, in the end, not enough to paint, however boldly and imaginatively, the image of an ideal society; one must also be able to make a reasoned argument for why the society in question really is the best possible one for human beings. And here Rawls does something that is very modern: in contrast to Plato and to More he looks, for the proof and guarantee of the notion of justice he develops, to the democratic assent and consensus of all citizens. Only if the principles of justice defined for a society are accepted by all those who have a part in this society, argues Rawls, are these principles truly just.

Basically, what would be needed would be that all the individuals coming together to form a society should agree with one another beforehand, through a contract or “foundation charter” of some sort, about the sorts of principles that should underlie, thenceforth, the social existence they would share. They would need to agree, for example, on whether they preferred a society characterized by class inequalities, such as those between patricians and their slaves or those between capitalist employers and workers, or a classless society without private property, or indeed some other form of social organization altogether:

This means that Rawls is an advocate of that tradition in political philosophy that is called “contract theory”: a theory whereby a society is legitimate only where all its members have themselves agreed to its laws and basic principles in a contract or founding charter, or where these members can be taken to assent in theory and retrospectively, though born long after their society’s foundation, to these laws and principles. In the first of these two cases one speaks of an “historical” contract; in the second one speaks of a “hypothetical” one. According to this “contract theory” of society, then, a society’s citizens conclude a contract with one another in which they regulate the fair distribution of all goods and life-opportunities and in which each citizen declares that he or she agrees to abide, in future, by the principles thereby agreed to:

There really have been at various points in history such “historical contracts” in which a group of people have decided once and for all what was going to count as just and unjust in the society that they were going thenceforth to share with one another. For example, in 1620 the “Pilgrim Fathers”, a group of Puritan emigrants from England, made such a contract with one another during the long crossing to America on the ship called the Mayflower. This document, which has become famous as the Mayflower Compact, became the regulating charter for all aspects, both religious and secular, of the life shared by these emigrants in the region in which they later settled as free and equal citizens of a self-governing community.

Being a convinced supporter of the “contract theory” of society, Rawls would surely have wished it to be possible that today’s American citizens should once again confer together upon which principles of justice ought to underlie their shared social existence and that these citizens should once again contractually commit themselves to whichever principles they chose. However, even though Rawls was, at the height of his influence as a philosopher, invited to dinner many times by the US President of the day, Bill Clinton, and consequently could boast of having good relations with the most powerful man in the world, he knew, of course, that no such conferring and contracting together was really feasible. It also seemed to him illusory to think that it would somehow be possible to put to the population of the USA today, when their society has long since taken the form it has, the question of whether, given the choice, they would give their assent to, and freely opt to participate in, the institutions and practices forming this society: namely, the US constitution but also the capitalist mode of production and the unequal distribution of goods that comes along with it:

Unlike the Pilgrim Fathers, Rawls points out, we modern men and women find ourselves born into a specific already-existing society and are quite simply never consulted as to whether we find its political form, its economic organization, or the distribution of wealth within it to be fair or unfair. And even if it were to prove possible to consult all those people who happen to have been born in the USA at some particular fixed point in their lives – say, on their eighteenth birthday – and ask them whether they wish to continue to live within that specific political and social order which was contracted into by their country’s Founding Fathers or whether they prefer rather to live in some new form of polity or society, this too may not turn out well at all. Because, Rawls goes on, there would always be a temptation for each individual to opt preferentially for whatever ordering of society he thinks will secure him the greatest personal advantage: