The antipolitical philosophy of John Rawls

Public Interest, Spring, 2003 by Brian C. Anderson

This flight from the real is very different from what one finds in political thinkers such as Aristotle or Alexis de Tocqueville or, closer to us in time, Raymond Aron. These theorists do not avoid making moral and political judgments. Yet they show an abiding interest in what history and social theory can tell us about how the world actually works. Rawls detaches moral and political argument from questions of feasibility. The widespread influence of the Rawlsian method has made too much of contemporary political philosophy idle dreaming.

Is it just?

These are methodological problems in Rawls's thought, but what about justice as fairness itself? Is a conception of justice that "prevents the use of accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstances as counters in a quest for political and economic advantage," as Rawls puts it in A Theory of Justice, defensible?

The answer must surely be no. To show why, let me borrow a real-world example where something like Rawls's idea of justice is at work. South suburban Chicago, urban expert Howard Husock notes in the pages of City Journal, is home to a number of middle-class black families, many of which have, through hard work and striving, managed to escape the blighted inner city and build better lives in a decent neighborhood. Lately, though, the federal government has used Section-8 housing vouchers to subsidize ghetto residents to move to south suburban Chicago, in the belief that this nicer, suburban neighborhood will have a positive effect on their life chances. But the new residents have unfortunately brought with them the disorder and crime of the inner city that the hard-working families hoped they had forever left behind. The families that made it to the suburbs through their own efforts, Husock reports, now see those efforts going for naught, and are outraged at what they perceive to be the injustice of the reloca tion policy.

If Rawls is right, however, these families have no cause to complain. There is nothing in justice as fairness that allows us morally to distinguish the strivers from their dysfunctional Section-8 neighbors, since the economic advantage the strivers have gained is in fact a mere "accident of natural endowment" or a contingency of social circumstance (such as having involved parents). The inequality that resulted from their ambitions would only be acceptable from a Rawlsian view if it somehow benefited the "worst off." And given that the flight of the strivers has likely made the condition of the inner city worse--their human capital and good example are now lost to their old neighborhood--how has it helped the worst off? The strivers have no right to a nice neighborhood unless everyone else wins too.

There is something profoundly counter-intuitive about such a notion of justice. Indeed, it is fundamentally at odds with how most people think about the subject. As one of Rawls's critics, the philosopher John Kekes, explains, "Bawls repudiates the conception--accepted from the Old Testament to recent times--that justice consists in giving people what they deserve: reward for good conduct and punishment for bad." Bawls's idea of justice offers us instead a rather dispiriting world, where individual responsibility and striving have no moral worth. In it, the state ceaselessly shepherds us, redistributing until the end of time, in the hope of diminishing the sting of tragedy and misfortune and bad choices.