If you appreciate Rawls, you should read this brief essay by Joseph Heath. If you don’t appreciate Rawls, you should read this brief essay by Joseph Heath.

If you’re in the first group, you’ll enjoy how Heath captures Rawls’s importance. If you’re in the second group, reading Heath’s essay may help you become a member of the first group.

One thing Heath does is draw attention to Rawls’s innovative reconceptualization of the social contract approach as something oriented not just towards the legitimation of state authority, but to the creation of the basic structure of society, including its major economic institutions.

If this does not strike you as interesting, let alone innovative, it’s only because, as Heath puts it, “the intellectual dominance of Rawls has been so complete, for so long, that we have all become desperately bored of talking about him.”

“Rather than making a move in the familiar game of philosophical argumentation, Rawls was overturning the board, recommending that we play a very different game.”

Heath’s remarks on Rawls’s second book are worth quoting at length:

A Theory of Justice attracted a great deal of attention, and a great deal of criticism, when it was published in 1971. At the time, Rawls was still treating questions of political philosophy (such as “what is justice?”) the same way that Plato did—as a set of intellectual puzzles that needed to be solved (such that, once we figure out what justice is, we can proceed to build a society that will embody the ideal). The problem that he immediately encountered was also as old as Plato. Having put forward his most clever argument in support of his favored conception of justice, he found that most people still disagreed, and insisted on defending their own quite different views.

This led to the second big move in Rawls’ work, which took the form of a curve ball that he threw everyone in his second book, Political Liberalism. Most philosophers, when they encounter objections to their arguments, double down on the original method, trying to come up with better arguments, with the hope that this will silence the critics and end all disagreement. Rawls, however, took a different tack. If one were to imagine his response to critics stated conversationally, it would go something like this:

“I have given you my preferred conception of justice. You have given me yours. Evidently we disagree. Furthermore, there are people out there who disagree with us both, even more strenuously—consider, for example, orthodox followers of various religious traditions. Perhaps someday, someone will come up with an argument so persuasive that consensus on these questions will be reached. But in the meantime, and despite our disagreements, we are still in a position to engage in mutually beneficial cooperation. In order to establish such a system of cooperation, though, we will require some principles. We might choose to think of these as principles of justice. Naturally, because we are trying to organize a system of cooperation among individuals who disagree about fundamental questions of justice, those principles cannot presuppose the correctness of any one particular view. They must instead be freestanding with respect to all those positions.”

Again, with his gift for understatement, Rawls suggested that we refer to a theory that is freestanding in this way as a “political” conception of justice (hence the title of the book). He then suggested that the theory of justice presented in his previous work be considered, not the correct answer to the age-old question “what is justice?”, but rather as a candidate for adoption as a political conception of justice. We can think of it as the theory we should use for now, while we debate the question of what the best theory (in some stronger sense of the term) might be.

Many philosophers found this argument disorienting. Rather than making a move in the familiar game of philosophical argumentation, Rawls was overturning the board, recommending that we play a very different game. Instead of trying to answer the traditional first-order questions about the best form of society, the nature of the good, or the meaning of life, he suggested instead that we focus on a second-order task, of finding principles that would be acceptable to people who disagree with one another about the correct answers to these first-order questions.

You can read the rest here. Discussion welcome.

Related: “The Collapse of Academic Marxism“