Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy

National Review, May 27, 1991 by Loren E. Lomasky

THE FIRST PART of Jeffrey Reiman's Justice & Modern Moral Philosophy traces the evolution of social-contract theory from Hobbes and Locke through Rousseau and Kant and on to Marx and beyond. This may seem like dry stuff, and in the hands of most expositors it is. But in this rendition it akes on a riveting lif of its own as high drama of the mind. Because Reiman has thought originally and deeply about some of the most important issues of political life, has book will receive considerable attention from academics--though not academics exlusively.

It all began, according to Reiman's arresting telling, with Descarte's Evil Demon. No escapee from the shadows of the occult, this hypothetical being was constructed to be a sophisticated detection device for beliefs contaminated by superstition, prejudice, haste, or any other defect that would render them untrustworthy. The history of human aspirations to truth had been a sorry series of subjugations to an endless variety of errors; in order to make a decisive right turn in the direction of indubitable knowledge, one had to cast off all that might blinker a clear gaze.

The Evil Demon was the personification of all those external bars to right understanding, and if Descartes could arrive at a belief so basic, so undeniable that not even this malignant opponent could elicit error from him, he would have arrived at an Archimedean point on which a firm foundation for science could be constructed. In "I think, therefore I am," he found his quarry. It was the fact of thought itself, and not some putative authority outside of his mind, that would ensure release from error.

Although Descartes, revolutionized theoretical philosophy, he had little to say about practical concerns of morals and politics, and that little was largely supportive of conventional mores. His basic insight, however, was soon exported to those arenas, and with profound effect. If we are susceptible to the tyranny of error in matters scientific, all the more are we vulnerable to moral phantasms that would chain us to putative duties that advantage the powerful and the persuasive at our expense. Human subjugation is less often brought about by bonds of iron than by those of creed and code. If we have been successfully indoctrinated into believing that it is our duty above all else to serve the Master, then we will contentedly do so. Our own convictions will bind us more effectively than will any cohort of overseers. How might we free our thought from these shackles? The remedy proffered by Hobbes and Locke was the device of the social contract.

A misreading of these philosophers' works would have them speculating about the existence of some primordial constitutional convention at which the articles of civil society were duly signed, sealed, and delivered. This is wrong for at least two reasons. First, no such event ever occurred. Wherever our moral principles come from, it is not there. But second, even if there had been such a convocation, its deliverances would have no bearing on what we, today, are obligated to do. To think that I am somehow required to comply with terms I had no part in making and that are detached from my interests is to fall victim to yet another variety of subjugation.

The social contract is better conceived in a hypothetical mode analogous to Descartes's demon. It confronts us with the question: What can justify our accepting any restraints at all on doing whatever is in our power to furthe the prospects of the one life we have to live? How, that is, are we to distinguish right from might?

Although different thinkers in the social-contract tradition provide somewhat different answers, their common theme is some reciprocity among persons such that each has good reason to acknowledge and respect the entitlement of others to live the life that is theirs, subject to receipet of like respect from them. That will ensure to all the conditions in which they can satisfactorily pursue what Reiman gracefully labels their "sovereign interest."

Such conceptions undergird contemporary Wester (and, given the events of the past two years, not Western alone) political life, and they are made remarkably accessible here. But Reiman does not merely expound the liberal tradition; he works to advance it. The history is prologue to a derivation of the principles of a theory of justice as nonsubjugation.

It comes in two parts. The first is a theory of natural justice: of what is owed to all other human beings simply in virtue of their humanity. It is not much; predominantly non-interference. To those with whom we share a social structure, however, more is due. That is why, Reiman claims, classical liberalism and its present-day avatar, libertarianism, are deficient. They fail to do justice to the circumstances of equitable cooperation.

The author endorses much of Marx's critique of bourgeois morality, but finally it is with the neo-bourgeois John Rawls, author of the enormously influential A Theory of Justice, that he expresses greatest solidarity. Rawls's difference principle, holding that inequalities are unjustified except as they work to the advantage of the least well-off members of a political order, is taken to be regulative for transactions within society. Rawls's own attempted justification of the difference principle is held to be inadequate, but the theory of justice as nonsubjugation, Reiman asserts, affords it firmer underpinning.