|
John Rawls,
political philosopher and American moral conscience, died on
November 24th 2002. I write in the week following that death,
as a minor and distanced act of homage.
Based on
lectures given at Harvard in the 1980s, Justice as Fairness
was reworked as a "restatement" of Rawls' main political
theory. As such, it constantly refers back to Rawls' major book
A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, offering numerous
clarifications, additions, modifications, and occasional corrections.
Edited and re-edited by various hands over a number of years,
finally produced despite the author's declining health, the
result must now stand as a definitive statement, a life's work.
Yet much
of the prose has to be cleared away if one is to get at that
thought. In aiming for maximum clarity, the theorist has sacrificed
the virtues of rhetoric. True, Rawls has his moments of laconic
elegance, such as when opera singers are allowed to earn a lot
of money "because they work hard and bring joy". However,
the philosopher's social pessimism is more often a background
rage against the frivolity of easy text consumption. Readers
without a knowledge of the previous work will thus be somewhat
put off by the cross-references involved; readers with a knowledge
of the major book will still possibly be lost by more than one
of the labyrinthine arguments; specialists in the field may
be occasionally enthralled, but they might also have heard it
before, in the specialized publications or in oral debate. In
all, this "restatement" magnifies a conviction that
the theory is right and worth suffering for, and consequently
does little to spare the reader's suffering. The book invites
consultation rather than reading, thanks in part to a model
subject index.
Rawls' politics
is based on an ethics of how value is to be distributed among
social actors. It works on the classical cooperation model but
builds in an imperative to privilege the least advantaged. It
contains great thought in a great neo-classical tradition, including
use of geometric analogies (as in Aristotle).
Read from
a more generalist perspective (I am looking for an ethics of
intercultural relations), Rawls leaves at least two related
strategies that repay attention. The first might be called a
"wilful regionalism". Rawls' theory is presented as
a political ethics only, not as a general morality. It is a
technical ethics, designed to solve a technical problem, to
be evaluated among technicians. This may indeed be the logical
cause of the stylistic problems and the theory's lack of social
effect. Yet it also seems a laudable modesty, worth adapting
in many other fields increasingly succumbing to facile theorization.
The appeal to technicians allows other modes of discourse (elections,
marketing, religion) to spare with the general; it requires
only a narrow band of readers.
The second
great idea is related but more commonly noted: Rawls recognized
profound pluralism in society, yet claimed there is or can be
an "overlapping consensus" whereby social groups agree
on certain common principles. Political ethics should then refine
and elaborate those principles. This makes his politics very
American, even in its critique of the United States; it implies
a humanist rationalism that is increasingly hard to defend in
an age of sociological relativism. And yet, as conflictive pluralism
becomes the political reality of virtually all post-industrial
societies, this mode of thought surely concerns more than American
idealists. Many more of us can join in the search for overlapping
consensus, learning to think through the consequences of the
model, sacrificing an ounce of relativism for the ethical imperatives
of overlap.
As we do
so, hopefully some of Rawls' arguments will stand firm, thanks
to the same wilful regionalism that requires only overlaps,
without moving any masses. If only the ideas were actually in
power, in some technical intersection somewhere, and not entirely
locked up in academic argument.
|
