The Legacy of John Rawls

From Chicago Public Radio, this is Odyssey.

I'm Gretchen Helfrich.

Political philosopher John Rawls died last month at the age of 81.

Rawls' name may not be a familiar one, but he was widely regarded as the most important

political philosopher of the 20th century.

His 1971 work, A Theory of Justice, recast the terms of the debate within political

philosophy about questions of social justice, fairness, and the good society.

Today, on Odyssey, we're going to explore the ideas of John Rawls and his lasting influence

on political, philosophical thinking.

We're joined for the conversation by Michael Sandell, who joins us from WBUR in Boston.

He's a political philosopher at Harvard University.

Steve Maseedo joins us from Harvard University.

He's a political philosopher at Princeton.

And here in Chicago, we're joined by Tony Layden, who is a political philosopher at the University

of Illinois at Chicago.

Tony Layden, what was Rawls' theory of justice?

Well, the book of theory of justice was aimed at providing a systematic alternative to utilitarianism,

which was at the time the dominant view that most political philosophers held and defended.

And the core of it was a view that he called justice as fairness that included two principles

of justice.

And those principles said, first, that a good society should provide adequate basic liberties

for all and equally so.

And then second, upon doing that, should make sure that all offices and positions of privilege

and power are open to everyone, according to a principle of what he called fair equality

of opportunity.

And then finally, that any resulting leftover inequality is in income and wealth and

other what he called primary goods, should be distributed so that the worst off people in

that distribution did as well as possible.

And the part of the argument he made for those principles being the appropriate principles

of justice for a democratic society was that if you took up what he called the original

position and imagined a bunch of purely rational beings who didn't know anything about their

particular identities and place in the society, and you asked them what principles of justice

would you choose for the society?

They would choose these principles over utilitarian or other principles.

So given the possibility that you might be the worst off in society, what would you want

that society to look like?

Exactly.

Steve Masido, what else?

What other important ideas do you think John Rawls contributed to political philosophy?

Well, he has a robust defense of civil disobedience, for instance, in that book theory of justice,

and which was quite important, and has remained quite important, really the idea it stands

for is that citizens themselves should be directly engaged with thinking about and interpreting

these fundamental principles of justice and that people in the government might get them

wrong and citizens themselves should be empowered to stand up for them.

And they play a crucial role in keeping society in touch with these fundamental principles.

In later works, he developed the idea that we can share principles of justice, that we

can share ways of thinking about justice together as citizens in spite of the deep diversity

of religious and philosophical convictions that exist in society.

So it was a kind of defense of a shared public point of view, which could be sustained

on the basis of public shared reasons and principles in spite of the deep diversity,

which is so evident in religion and culture.

How do you think we could do that?

I mean, how did he get from all this diversity to the idea that we could share principles?

Well, he thought that the moral categories and principles of politics, the idea that we

are free and equal persons, that everyone counts as an equal, were principles that we

could share together in spite of the differences of religion and certain philosophical arguments

that have gone on for centuries about free will and determinism and the relationship between

mind and body and so on.

I mean, in effect, these ideas are part of a public moral culture that informs our public

tradition and that the arguments say between free market libertarians and more egalitarian

liberals as an argument that couldn't should take place without attempting to solve these

longer-standing, more foundational philosophical debates.

And likewise, a debate that could take place between different egalitarian and more libertarian

or right-wing people could take place without solving our religious differences, that there's

a certain kind of shared public discourse and public debate that could be separated off

from some of those long-standing arguments which weren't going to be settled, which are

not going to be settled anytime soon.

Michael Sandell, what did John Rawls have to say about the concept of the good life?

Well, he was one of the great liberal political philosophers in the tradition of political

thought, and he gave the most powerful expression to liberal political principles since John

Stuart Mill wrote in the 19th century.

And in a way, the liberal political project has always wrestled with the question of whether

it's possible to design a society that is fair to citizens and that doesn't impose

on some the values and convictions and visions of the good life of others.

And John Rawls's theory offers a powerful attempt to find principles of justice in ways of

defining our rights, that enable people to choose their own conceptions of the good life

for themselves without having them imposed by the government.

And he saw this as very important to honor the fact that people disagree about the best

way to live.

And in this respect, his whole project is in line with the liberal aspiration to enable

people to choose their own life plans, their own visions of the good life for themselves

without the political community imposing a preferred vision upon them.

Is it reasonable to translate this into late terms by saying something like he thought

that we could come to a common agreement about what constituted a good society without

answering the question of what constituted a good life?

Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

He talked mainly about a just society, a society that respected each citizen as a person worthy

of respect.

So I think really the language of justice rather than the good would describe what he was

up to.

But yes, a good society, a just society is what he was trying to fashion without necessarily

saying or taking a position on what a good person was.

We're talking today about the legacy of John Rawls.

John Rawls was a political philosopher who died last month.

Many people regard him as the most important political philosopher of the 20th century.

Tony Leiden, let's dig a little more into Rawls' two principles.

The notion of basic liberties.

That doesn't seem all that controversial actually that people would be allowed to enjoy

certain basic liberties.

Seems like something we've been talking about for a long time.

Can you contextualize that a little bit?

What did it mean to talk like that, to think like that in this context of the dominance

of utilitarianism?

Well, I think you're right that if we just look at the content of the two principles of

justice, you don't get the essence of Rawls' thought or its importance.

It would be like saying that Kant's great contribution to moral philosophy was he showed

as that making lying promises was wrong.

The author's like male and others defended liberty, defended rights, but Rawls argued that

they defended them in the wrong way, in a way that wasn't accessible to other democratic

citizens.

I think this is part of the key insight in Rawls' work.

So that utilitarianism would say something like having liberties is efficient because it

maximizes total happiness.

Rawls said that's the wrong way to think about liberties.

The point of liberties is that they're a way of showing respect to each other as citizens

and to valuing each other as free and equal co-authors of our political principles and society.

I think this connects to another deep way in which his view departed from utilitarianism,

which is that utilitarianism takes up the perspective outside the moral fray.

You imagine looking down as a government administrator or as God and saying what would be the

best society and then imagining that you have these little chits to give out so as to produce

that.

What you get is what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls government-housier utilitarianism.

You can see why 19th century Englishmen were attracted to this view when you have an

empire to run and colonies to demonstrate this makes a certain amount of sense.

Rawls thought if we want to come up with principles of justice for a democratic society, we

need principles that we can address to each other as citizens.

And we can not only say these are the principles we ought to adopt but this is why and give

reasons that are good reasons for our fellow citizens.

And that requires a different way of thinking about the justification of principles.

So we're now not trying to show that our theory is true or grounded in some appropriate

metaphysical view but that it's reasonable that it's something that we can in good faith

offer to our fellow citizens in all their diversity, in all their given all their passions and

interest and concerns and so forth and come to some sort of shared agreement that this

is how we should live together.

You're listening to Odyssey from Chicago Public Radio.

Let's talk some more about the idea of justification, a reason giving.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of what Rawls was trying to do.

He had this particular notion about how citizens ought to talk to each other and ought

to be able to work together.

Let's talk a little bit more about why utilitarianism doesn't work that way.

Stephen Cena, can you jump in here?

Why not just say, well, this will bring more good to more people or the most good to the

most people?

Why doesn't that work?

Or why do Rawls think it didn't work?

Rawls thought it didn't work because the distribution of welfare was vitally important

in order for equality to be just in order for a political power, a coercive political power

or the horrible, sometimes power, the state over us to be legitimate.

We have to be able to justify our political arrangements to each and every citizen individually,

not just to them in the aggregate.

Of course, the most difficult group to justify economic arrangements to are to those who

do worst in these economic arrangements.

His insistence in this part of the social contract view was that we had to be especially

concerned about the well-being of the least well-off in society.

We couldn't trade off, in general, the interests of particular groups and individuals in society,

simply for the sake of maximizing the greater good overall.

That justification of political power had to be made to each group in society as individuals,

as each person in society matters morally as a free and equal person and not simply as

components and an overall sum of collective well-being.

So that was the basic idea.

This is somewhat related, Michael Sandell, to Rawls' effort to integrate or somehow bring

together what people thought of as inherently contradicting ideas of liberty and equality.

Yes.

And if I could just say a little bit about his principle of equality, we've talked about

how it derives from a special kind of social contract behind the veil of ignorance where

people don't know what position they'll occupy in society.

But it also reflects a deep moral impulse, which I think runs through Rawls' entire theory,

which says the reason that people who make a lot of money, because their talents are in great

demand in a market economy, the reason they don't have a privileged claim to all of that

money.

It's all right to have a redistributive tax system that takes some of it away to help the poor,

is that they don't really deserve credit for having those talents in the first place.

I think that's a very important part of the underlying moral impulse of the theory.

So for example, it's all right.

You don't have to have a leveling equality.

It's all right if Sammy Soso or if Michael Jordan make millions and millions of dollars.

But in a just society, we only allow big differentials of income and wealth provided we have a tax

system and an educational system that makes those differences work for those who are at

the bottom as well as for those who are lucky enough to be at the top.

Tony Layden, let's return to this question of why Rawls' work is influential.

Let's return to a question we were addressing before.

Is his work important?

Is his work on justice?

Is theory of justice important because it's right?

Well, I'd like to think it's right.

So I've made a great, totally better question for Michael Sandel.

But I think the reason it's had the kind of impact it has is because it sort of opened up the game

again in some sense.

That is, when he started writing, utilitarianism, I think was such a dominant view that

people didn't think there was much more to say substantively about political matters.

And philosophy had taken a turn towards linguistic analysis and conceptual analysis that made it seem

like there wasn't anything to be said purely conceptually about substantive moral and political issues.

And I think he showed us a way to do that, to be both conceptually rigorous and at the same time to say

substantive things.

And to lay out a view that was as systematic and as wide ranging and as rigorous as utilitarianism

had been developed, that was different and drew on an old tradition.

The other thing I think that made it important and has had a huge impact on the field of political philosophy

is that he turned back to the history of moral and political philosophy and revived the social contract tradition

of John Locke and Jacques Rousseau and Kant.

And I think since his work has come out and in the last 30 years,

there's been a big flowering of I return to the history of moral and political philosophy

in large part because of his work and because of his teaching.

So I don't know if that gets to your question.

That gets us certainly in the direction.

I'd like to hear from our other guest, Steve Mosito and Michael Sondel,

on their assessment of why roles is so important.

Steve Mosito, let me ask you, is it because his theory of justice is right?

Well, I think it's in the range of the most powerful and justifiable accounts of the basic principles of our political order without question.

I think many people wonder whether the very egalitarian difference principle, perhaps,

goes a bit too far and has been subject to ongoing debate.

But intellectually at least, everything that Rawls wrote, all of his two major books and then the shorter one,

riveted and changed the intellectual debates.

Now it also has to be said that so far as the United States is concerned,

rather strikingly over the last 22 years, we have moved further and further away from that very critical

emphasis on equality and on thinking about major public policies and the design of our political order

from the point of view of the least well-off.

The current direction of the American public policy is strikingly, I think, contrary to the spirit of

Rawls' liberalism, he perhaps has been more influential and I think even with respect to obituaries

in public places, there's been greater notice in European papers and abroad.

But unfortunately, the intellectual influence of Rawls, the extent to which he's

riveted debate has not been reflected in our public policy lately.

Michael Sando, what do you think is accounts for Rawls' influence or the importance of his work?

Well, to go back to your question about was he right, I think he was right about three very important things.

First, he was right that it's possible to argue rationally and systematically about justice and rights

and political obligations and big normative questions and that was a huge part of his legacy.

He transformed political philosophy by making that possible again.

Second, he was right, I think, in rejecting utilitarianism and showing that it didn't really

take seriously the moral distinctions between and among persons and that it wrongly thought that

justice is simply a matter of adding up people's preferences or interests. I think he was right about

that. And third, I think he was right in his, in the thrust of his egalitarianism, that certain

inequalities of income and wealth are fundamentally inconsistent with justice and that libertarian or

free market principles that say the person who makes a lot of money morally deserves it,

that those can't be sustained. So I think he was right about those three big questions.

The area where I don't agree with Rawls' view has to do with a very important contribution

that he made to the liberal tradition, which has to do with the idea of separating questions

as you put it before of the just society from questions of the good life. The effect that had was

to say that when we reason in public, in public debate, we should try to cast our arguments

and our reasons and our justifications in ways that don't grow upon the moral and religious

convictions that citizens may espouse. And the question I raised in response to Rawls'

was whether it's possible and whether it's desirable altogether to try to separate principles

of justice and rights from questions of morality and religion and the nature of the good life.

Well, why wouldn't it be? Why do you think it wouldn't be?

Well, the reason to question that is, first of all, a lot of the political questions that are

most hotly contested today, whether the distinction between free speech and hate speech or the issue

of same-sex marriage or the question of abortion, a lot of those issues can't be decided one way or

the other without entering into substantive moral debate about which of the underlying positions

is correct and very often that will involve religious convictions or substantive moral convictions.

So it's not possible in many debates about justice and rights to separate the two.

And I also think it's not desirable because a flourishing democratic society should enable

citizens to bring to bear in public debate the moral and religious convictions that matter most to them.

Steve McSeed, are you're much closer to Rawls on this view of what sorts of

justifications, what sorts of reason-giving ought to be permissible in the public sphere?

Very much so. I disagree with Michael a bit very respectfully on the implications of Rawls' view.

Rawls' view was a moral view through and through. And I don't think anything in his theory is designed to

exclude the moral convictions that are relevant to the discussion and decision of public policy

questions, including abortion. I would agree that there's no way to exclude those things.

And I don't think he ever had any intention of doing so. However, there's a difference between

moral considerations that we can in principle share as fellow citizens, as members of a political

community. And more sectarian religious convictions about which we have not only agreed to disagree,

but which are in many important respects, not appropriate to the decision of public policy

questions. As a political society, we've come together for certain purposes, broad and important

purposes, including the general welfare, the blessings of liberty and so on, as in the pre-able

to the U.S. Constitution. But we respect our religious diversity in important ways by recognizing

that questions of salvation and questions involving the good of the soul are not directly

irrelevant to public policy considerations, at least in the following way that the convictions

that lie behind many of these religious convictions are not subject to the same sort of public inspection,

public scrutiny, and public decision, as are more public questions of the general welfare and

the nature of persons in a moral sense. And so I think that it is indeed a basic virtue of political

civility for citizens to try to discuss one another with one another, political questions in terms

that in principle, at least they can share and they can share together as a political community.

And I think American politics tends to reflect that. There's no reason to shy away from moral

considerations that are publicly discussable and publicly decidable and that we can share together.

But specifically religious convictions, which aren't offered all that frequently in politics in any case

are different matter. We're talking today about the legacy of John Rawls. Rawls was a political

philosopher he died last month. That was Steve Macido, a political philosopher from Princeton University,

the author of liberal virtues, citizenship, virtue, and community in liberal constitutionalism.

We are also talking today with Michael Sandel, who's a political philosopher at Harvard University.

He's the author of democracy's discontent America in search of a public philosophy. And here in Chicago

we're talking with Tony Layden, the author of reasonably radical, deliberative liberalism and the

politics of identity. Tony Layden is a political philosopher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Tony Layden, we've just been hearing some discussion of Rawls's ideas, ideas that have been taken up

thought about worked over obviously opposed and critiqued within political philosophy.

Do you think that within the field at least there is more to mine within Rawls? In other words,

have people, is there still more for people to take up and consider and really look at such that his

influence might be more expansive than we're even able to see now? I do. I think one way to sort of

think about that is to go back to the discussion that was just taking place between Steve Macido and

Michael Sandel and say one way to think about what Rawls did was in giving an account of

a just society. He doesn't tell us what a good human life is, but he does tell us what a good citizen

is and what it is to be a good citizen. And that's where the moral stuff that Steve Macido was just

talking about comes in without treading on the liberal restraint about insisting on what a good

human life is. And I think if we think about what Rawls has to say about citizenship and about

the role of philosophy to citizens, there's material there that hasn't been I think fully

appreciated by a lot of people who've read Rawls, both friends and critics. And one way to think

about this is the following. You might ask yourself why as a democratic citizen, should you care

what political philosophers have to say? Right, if you've got some pressing political question

burning issue that you're trying to figure out how to respond to, why would you go talk to a

bunch of people whose job it is to analyze concepts, right? And think about the meanings of words

and how they logically fit together. That seems like the wrong place to go. You want to talk to

people who know that economic theory and having pure cultural data and how to get bills through

Congress and that sort of stuff. And Rawls had an approach to thinking about philosophy that was

meant to answer that very question. He described his philosophy following Kant as philosophy is

defense and that thought was that philosophy could help us defend our faith in the possibility of

certain kinds of institutions and in particular democratic constitutional ones. And the thought is that

as a democratic citizen, I may know that I have certain obligations and I may agree that I have

those obligations to go vote to get politically engaged to talk to my fellow citizens about issues

of the day. But I may get cynical and I may think there's no point in it because well the systems corrupt

or money really wins out in the end. Or I might think and this was the problem that he was concerned

with, that given the diversity of opinions and the fundamental differences we all have about

deep moral issues, we're never going to be to agreement and it's just going to be a question of

who's on top today. And so there's no point in being respectful to my fellow citizens who

like disagree with I should just try and win at all costs. And if I do that I'm going to lose the

interest in and the motivation for following out the obligations I take myself to have the

citizen. I'm not going to speak civilly to my fellow citizens. I'm not going to try and hear

what they have to say. I'm not going to try and reach agreement with them. I'm just going to try and win.

Where philosophy helps in this is that it gives us a way of seeing that it's in fact possible

to have a robust democratic society that's characterized by deep philosophical difference.

And that's a conceptual question, right? Are these ideas reasonable pluralism as he called it,

this sort of deep diversity of opinion and constitutional democracy consistent with one another.

And he argued that they were and once you saw that they were, that can help us as citizens,

not just philosophers, you know gear ourselves up for the hard work of being democratic citizens.

And I don't think we've fully attended to that in political philosophy. And there's a lot

there to be attended to. Yeah, it's Michael Sandal. I was wondering if I could come in by just

offering a particular example to perhaps focus this different difference of view.

I don't quite agree with Steve Maseeto that religious arguments are not often brought to bear

in the public arena. Take, for example, the debate about abortion or the debate about stem cell

research. In both of those cases, there are some people who say those practices should be banned

because the embryo is a person, a moral person that is, and therefore it's sacred.

And therefore abortion is wrong and stem cell research are wrong because of the moral status of

the embryo. Now they may hold that view for religious reasons. Maseeto the religious tradition that

informs that position or for other reasons. And while I don't agree with their, the position

of those who take that view, I do think that we should admit to public discourse the

morally and religiously informed view they may have about the embryo and and argue it out in

public discourse. How else can we decide as we have to decide as a political community whether

or their stem cell research or abortion should be permitted or not? We can go back historically to

the abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison argued against labor and the grounds that it was a sin. He

argued from the perspective of a certain evangelical Protestantism. Do we want to say that that kind

of religious argument has no place in politics? I would rather join that argument than ban it.

Michael Sandell, let me just quickly remind listeners that this is obviously from Chicago Public Radio.

And we're going to be taking phone calls a little later in the program. I want to give our number one

more time. It's 1-888-859-1800. Steve Maseeto, well all three of you actually, it seems like

John Rawls is very much a political philosopher for a pluralist society. This seemed to be the biggest

problem he was trying to get at was that we have all these different people who are bringing all these

different ideas to the table and we have such a difficult time trying to say what's right and what's

wrong and what's good and what's bad because we know everybody comes at these questions from a

different way from a different viewpoint. Do you think that since his writings, since the publication

of his work and given the influence that he's had, that we are any better at coping with pluralism,

at coming up with a public philosophy, with a vigorous and reasonable public sphere for integrating these views?

Well, I think in some ways we are. We have a, you know, I think our main problem at the moment actually is

not so much diversity of various sorts, cultural sorts, multiculturalism, but a certain kind of lack of

concern the less well off on the part of people in power. I would say to Michael Sandell because his

point is directly related to this question of thinking about and arguing about justice and conditions of pluralism,

that the point is not to exclude the many moral claims that come to us through religious traditions and indeed

it's often difficult to separate, there's no point in separating the moral claims, the very sorts of

public claims that can be advanced and discussed that come to people through their religious traditions.

But if it were to be said for instance that homosexuality is a sin and therefore it should be

criminalized and if a law were to be passed based simply on that conviction and if there were no

other good grounds that could be understood for singling out homosexuality and treating it differently

from various forms of heterosexual activity that are permitted in society, then I would say that a court

that judged that such a law were passed or maintained based on religious convictions and or the

more important thing would be to say based on no public considerations that could be comprehended

but perhaps in conditions in which one could understand these convictions based on religious

grounds such a law should be struck down, it's not a legitimate basis for making law, I think it's

rather rare in our public discourse that people offer purely sectarian religious reasons when

Catholics come in and argue about just war, they cite a tradition of thinking in natural law

terms that is perfectly public in its orientation. We're talking about roles today with three political

philosophers Michael Sandell from Harvard University, Steve Macido who is at Princeton University and

Tony Laden who is from here in Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago. Our phone number one more time

is 1-888-859-1800. Give us a call if you'd like to join in our conversation. Let us talk with Mike. Hello, Mike, you are on Odyssey.

Hi. Hi. Thank you for this program, it's really good. I have two questions actually. The first is this,

what would roles make of the apparent discord between the 18th century's emphasis on the

equality of individuals and our own emphasis on their differences and my second question,

I think which follows, is does our enlightenment vocabulary need to change in order to accommodate

this so-called postmodern discourse or postmodern emphasis? And I'll take your answer off the air. Thanks.

Very interesting question. Who'd like to answer it? I'll take a crack at it. Tony Laden.

I think one of the things Ralls was trying to argue for was that it was possible to both

respect our differences and respect each other as equals and in fact that one of the ways we in fact

respect each other as equal citizens is precisely in respecting our differences, respecting that we have

deep foundational beliefs and passions and interests and concerns that aren't the same.

So does that need an updating of enlightenment views? I tend to think not in the sense that the

basic structure of a social contract view like Ralls' can be used and deployed in thinking about

questions of race and gender and cultural difference and national difference and the kinds of

issues that get labeled under postmodernism often that you can take these conceptual tools and

then use them to think about issues that are more present to us today. Before we take another

call Steve Miseeto or Michael Sandel, do either of you think that we do need to be changing or

refocusing enlightenment ideas in order to get a Rallsian position? Well, I think that there is a

declining concern with the public realm and public things in the United States. I'm not sure

rooted in philosophy so much as various sorts of political developments and political leadership which

and indeed the drawing a part of interest of people and suburbs for people in inner cities. I think

there are practical political reasons that help to explain the decline of the public realm and

the decline of concern with common things. I would also say that I think sometimes this language of

difference that gets deployed has a stronger common egalitarian element in it. It's about including

people that have been unfurled excluded in the past. It's not really an indiscriminate emphasis on

our differences often. Michael Sandel, anything on you want to comment on in this regard?

Well, I would agree with that. I think that Ralls grew upon an enlightenment ideals and tried to apply

them to contemporary the contemporary conditions of pluralism that we confront.

Okay, Mike, thanks for your call. Let's take a call from Ken. Hello, Ken, you're on Odyssey.

Thank you for taking my call. I very much appreciate this topic today and I'm

learning that the panel might possibly talk about connecting roles with some of the

immediately previous thinkers in this area, especially Reinhold Nieber to claim roles as the

preeminent political philosopher of the 20th century may overlook the contribution to some of

his predecessors, especially Reinhold Nieber and some of the liberationist themes of religious

traditions like liberation theology and not just the protocols for the powerful interacting with one

in other society, but rather the claims of the powerless and the disenfranchised within the

political conversation. I'll take my answer off the air as well. Thank you.

Okay, Michael Sandell, can I give that question to you?

I think the main difference is that Ralls did not go about the project of

justice or of equality from the standpoint of theological perspective. To the contrary, he wanted

to find a way of enabling citizens of a democratic society to talk about justice and to talk about the

requirements of equality that didn't depend on any particular theological position. So while the

actual consequences of Ralls' egalitarianism might have much in common with versions of equality

derived from religious traditions, he himself didn't rest the justification for his principles of

equality or of justice on a theological view. Okay, Ken, thanks for your call. Our number

again is 1-888-859-1800. Let's talk with Dane. Hello, Dane, you're on Odyssey.

I was just wondering if you could comment on the influence or lack thereof and importance of John

Walsh's thoughts in such international institutions like the UN and international policy.

Okay, interesting question. We hadn't talked really at all about Ralls' writings on international

politics. Tony Layden? Well, at the end of his life and career, he turned to trying to extend his

view to what he called the law of peoples, which was supposed to deal with international relations.

And that work's been, I think, less well received by political philosophers. People haven't really

known what to make of it. And I think part of what he was trying to do in one of the reasons

it maybe hasn't caught fire the way his other work has is he was less interested, I think, in the

questions of what sorts of international institutions should we have. Then the question of how should

a liberal society treat other societies to be consistent with its liberalism, which means two

things. One, that you have to respect the citizens of those states, and that means not dealing with

governments that are tyrannizing them. But at the same time, it means respecting those citizens

choice of the kind of society they live in. And so if this society is not a tyranny, but just

not liberal in certain circumstances, in broad ways, we should be liberal towards them in the sense

of not trying to impose our liberalism on them. So I think his work in international theory has been

less about international theory, as it were, than thinking through some of the implications of his

domestic theory. If I'm not mistaken, he actually got a bit of criticism for,

for that very thing for being tolerant, shall we say, of societies that we might think of as more

in tolerant or two in tolerant, applying in a sense of double standard in the international arena,

accepting less liberalism in other societies than he might accept in hours.

Well, he did take for granted, this is Michael Sandell. I think he took as given the national

societies as the basis for a distribute of justice. Certainly that was the assumption in a theory of

justice. There were others who tried to apply his ideas of equality on a global level and try to

ask, would you, would you apply the difference principle, maximizing the situation of the

least well off on a global scale, but he himself didn't follow that approach or that suggestion. He

thought universal human rights should apply on a global scale, but since there isn't a global

form of governance to enact redistributive policies, I think he didn't feel that the egalitarianism

of the difference principle could be applied globally, though others working in Raul's tradition

have tried to work out a conception of that kind. All right, let's take another call. Let's talk

with Mark. Hi, Mark, you're on Odyssey. Hi, thanks for taking my call and thanks for yet another great show.

The question I have is about the idea. I don't know if it's been mentioned yet to avail a

vignorent that underlies a lot of his thoughts about justice, that we should try to make our decisions

about justice as if we didn't know whether we were privileged in the privileged gender, the privilege

race, the rich, or the less privileged. That's been criticized as being hopelessly unrealistic

or wildly utopian, but I think it's really illuminating in the sense that it shows that a lot of

people making these decisions have a conflict of interest. They are among the wealthier or the

more privileged people. I wonder if instead of using the term veil of ignorance, if we talk about it

in terms of a conflict of interest. That's a really interesting idea. Steve, let me ask you to comment

on that. I think that's very well put, unless we put ourselves in the position of the less well

off in society, we're unlikely to be able to see the extent to which the status quo is problematic,

and the caller is quite right. People exercising political power, and indeed, as opposed to the

readers of that book, are liable to be people that are of better education, more privileged,

more powerful, and of course are able to exercise more political power on a kind of their economic

resources and so on. The book issues a moral demand, as he put it to share one another's fate

in that first volume, to recognize that all of our fellow citizens are moral equals, and that the

most basic principles of justice require us to regard their interests as equal to our own. And indeed,

to believe that our constitution and our basic principles of our political order are only

justifiable. Insofar as they could be accepted by those disadvantaged people freely and affirmed by

those disadvantaged people as just for themselves, and not only just for those who are made better

off by the society. You're listening to Odyssey from Chicago Public Radio. Our conversation today

is about the legacy of John Rawls. So in a sense, I found it's down what you're saying. It's

fundamentally a call to sympathy. It's a call to say, look at the worst people in your society,

and would you be willing to live that way? I think that's right. I think that's right. I think

what it does, though, as well, is to bring the discipline of philosophy to bear on that sympathy,

to not simply suggest that we sympathize, but then we think in principled, reasonable terms about

how we would go about arranging things and then justifying a political order so that it could

in principle, articulately rationally, critically, be affirmed by those in the least positions. So

sympathy is maybe a sort of motive that would be useful in getting people to think this way, and

I did, I think it is an essential motive in getting people to think this way, but the point is then to

offer reasonable principles, which could be articulated and affirmed in order to specify how things

should be organized. Well, we're getting near the end of our time. I'd like to ask each of you.

If you had to not sum up, but if you wanted to say, we've talked a bit about how Rawls has had

an influence on political philosophy, but most of us are not political philosophers. However, many of us

are citizens. What sort of trickle-through, if I may use that in elegant phrase, do you think there

has been, or can you see, from Rawls into the wider political arena, the real world, so to speak?

Are we conducting Rawlsian politics, Michael Senda?

I think that if anything, we've strayed from Rawls' vision of a just society, even in the time

since he wrote a theory of justice in 1971. I think that his most powerful legacy

is a corrective to the American market-driven society is his principle of equality, and

in the veil of ignorance that we were just discussing. I don't think it's utopian to say we should

think about justice from the standpoint of not knowing where we'll wind up. A very concrete way

of thinking of it is simply this, and of the moral impulse behind it. Whether your bill gates

with billions, or whether you're a person on welfare with very little, the winding up there

is largely due to contingencies, accidents of nature and of social circumstance

that are not our doing, this is Rawls's point, and so we should design society in a way

that those who wind up winning the most have an obligation, an obligation of justice to contribute

through the tax system and the educational system to those who are left out. That's the way in which

we can be said to share one another's fate, and I think this is one of the fundamental impulses

of Rawls' theory of justice. Michael Sandal is a political philosopher at Harvard University. He's

the author of Democracy's Discontent, America in Search of a Public Philosophy. He joins us today

from Boston, Massachusetts. Steve Mucido, your thoughts.

Yeah, I think that the liberalism of the 1960s and early 70s in a way which Rawls does exemplify. He

isn't simply a thinker of his time, but nevertheless his version of liberalism does represent in a way

the most profound, I think, intellectual expression of the principles of that era. It has been more

successful with respect to principles of freedom and wide diversity of ways of life and so on,

but it really has been strikingly less influential than one might hope in getting people in our politics

to take seriously, as Michael has said, the moral obligations that we have to those who are left

behind. I don't know how we go about reviving that since aside from citizens themselves taking seriously

the moral demands that come that they are imposed on them and asking themselves the question whether

they could look poorer citizens in the eye and say this is a just order for both of us, not just

for the privilege, but for the poor as well. I don't see how we can do that at the moment, and I think

Rawls requires that we do that. Steve Mucido is a political philosopher at Princeton University. He's

the author of Liberal Virtues, Citizenship Virtue and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism. He joined

us today from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tony Leiden. Yeah, let me try to end on a personal and maybe

more hopeful note, which is one of the things that characterized Rawls the man that was obvious to

everybody who knew him was a deep sense of humility combined with great passion and intellectual and

political passion. And to the extent that one can see those as virtues of a citizen to respect

others humbly, to think about what they have to say as if it might be right, and yet to engage in

politics and democratic life and living together passionately, we can see that as something to be

emulated to be valued, and we sometimes do that in public discourse. Maybe he has had an effect

since his writings, I think, convey that kind of admiration for that position.

Tony Leiden is the author of Reasonably Radical, Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity.

Tony Leiden is a political philosopher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Tony Leiden, Steve Macido and Michael Sandell, thank you all very much for joining me today.

Thank you. Thank you.

And thanks to everyone for listening and for calling.

Odyssey's theme music was composed and performed by OkGo.

Thanks to our research assistant Jim Leris and our interns Kate Toddrick and Paul Vannelly.

Our technical producer is Steve Warren Auskis. Our program is produced by Alison Cutty and

Delia Lloyd. The senior producer of Odyssey is Joshua Andrews. We want to let listeners know that we

have a new web address, so if you'd like to learn more about our show, head to our website at www.auticyradio.org.

Odyssey is a production of Chicago Public Radio and your general manager Tori Malatia.

I'm Gretchen Helfrich. Join us again next time for Odyssey.

Odyssey is a production of Chicago Public Radio and your general manager Tori Malatia.