Revision 1.1.25 Rawls and Racial Justice

PINISI Discretion Review, 2020

John Rawls's theory of Justice is one of the most influential conceptions of justice. Scholars have continued to study it to understand the principles in the formation and to further frame it in the context of contemporary situations. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion by presenting Rawls’ concept of “justice as fairness” as it evolved from the traditional conception of justice to the modern-shift in the concept. The paper also examines Rawls’s concept of justice as fairness, and it focuses on analyzing or studying the concept of justice as fairness in terms of the principles used in its formulations. Several criticisms developed by political philosophers to critique the idea were examined. In conclusion, it was argued that Rawls's invention of the veil-of-ignorance for the original position has affected the theory negatively.

Philosophy Today , 2023

In this article, I argue that Rawls is not actually an ideal theorist (as it is commonly understood), that his political theory remains unconvincing nevertheless, and that we should understand justice as failure in order to unlearn our adherence to dysfunctional ideals. I demonstrate that Rawlsian ideals are not removed from actuality, as both ideal theorists and their critics seems to think. Instead, they are already actualized as something to aspire to in a given culture. They are actual ideals. Non-ideal theorists, such as Charles Mills, who claim that instead of starting from ideals we should start from actual conditions thus miss the target. I then present an argument against theories of actual ideals: the original position requires optimal epistemological conditions in order to source actual ideals from public discourse. I offer Aamer Rahman's "Reverse Racism" joke as a test for whether these conditions apply. I argue that in our world, they do not. Finally, I suggest justice as failure as a critical practice that may help us to unlearn our inherited dysfunctional actual ideals.

Lux Veritatis, 2017

In a society defined by such fact of reasonable pluralism, a reasonable comprehensive doctrine cannot secure the basis of social unity nor can it provide the content of public reason on fundamental political questions such as questions on constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Rawls must go one step further and show that reasonable persons would prefer his political conception to any other political conception. Rawls argues this point by introducing the idea of reasonable consensus together with the idea of political conception of justice where the reasonable doctrines endorse the political conception. It is where social unity is based on political conception. It raises the question of political stability; that is, whether political stability through social unity is possible when the doctrines making up the consensus are affirmed by society’s politically active citizens and the requirements of justice are not too much in conflict with citizens’ essential interests as formed and encouraged by their social arrangements. Overlapping consensus as a process mechanism of justice as fairness must be seen in its operationalization in actual practice in a constitutional democracy. Political groups having political agenda promoting their common and specific interests must engage themselves in public political fora projecting, presenting, and substantiating their claims and arguments that concern matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials affecting and influencing political culture to come up with better thinking, better reasons, better process, and better arguments. Relying on the capacity of the human persons to posit the idea of objectivity in their political actions and behavior in the sense of the motivation and goal of such actions is common welfare. The idea of objectivity is expressed, recognized, and validated when better ideas are articulated in public debates and open argumentations in a democratic society are seen as part of the community of inquiry. The notion of objectivity is where the role of public reason can be seen. The citizens follow the public principles and communal laws because all subscribe and endorse to these laws and principles regardless of their social backgrounds and comprehensive doctrines they hold. No one can be exempted from these laws and principles because these are the things that all citizens render to be objective principles of justice. Everyone also knows and feels that once he violates any or all of these principles, he must be accountable to the whole community who subscribes to these principles of justice. The comprehensive doctrines will not find the exercise of public objective principles of justice offensive because they know and feel that they are the results of public reason. The identified and expressed forms of objectivity out of public reason would serve as the groundwork of policymaking and legislative agenda. When such kind of public reason is addressed and shown that critical examination and evaluation of ideas are made and therefore there is affirmation and revision of comprehensive doctrines conforming to the idea of the political posed by justice as fairness as a political conception of justice. The idea of public reason takes central point in order to realize overlapping consensus in particular and justice as fairness in general. Without the idea of public reason, the moral conceptions and moral grounds of justice as fairness become useless. Given the conceptions and principles in justice as fairness specifically and especially the idea of public reason, the paper intends to present what Rawls meant by his idea of public reason as found in his major texts (I); survey the various serious criticisms taken against Rawls’ idea of public reason and provide critiques against those criticisms (II); critique and at the same time clarify Rawls’ idea of public reason (III); and create a conceptual model for public reason based on Rawls’ idea of public reason vis-à-vis all relevant literatures and studies on the matter (IV).

Within this paper, I argue that only an upper class, white male would be able to speak as Rawls does of abstract individualism through his conceptions of the original position, the veil of ignorance, the liberty principle, and the difference principle.

Because of the original position and the veil of ignorance, the theory of justice as fairness permits justice to be indeed fair. It shows why people want a fair and equal spread of rights and duties, and also an equal distribution of benefits, to value a place in society. Any variation in the distribution of benefits will only be acceptable because they are within acceptable limits of tolerance, or because some inequality of distribution benefits everyone, especially those whose abilities and assets are below average. So, some members of society can be privileged as long as all others benefit—usually because they undertake onerous duties on behalf of society—but the reverse is not just—that some people can be exploited to the benefit of others. Any such exploitation must lead to social discontent and offer the potential for revolution.

Theory and Decision, 1983

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. Second Principle Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, arid (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. 1 The conception of justice they express is enormously interesting. Before we can evaluate that conception, however, we need to know more precisely what the principles mean. In this paper, I explore the formal structure of these principles, so as to separate some of the alternative ways to formulate them. My primary concern is not to criticize, but to clarify. I thus refrain, on many occasions, from drawing philosophical conclusions. To clarify Rawls's principles of justice, we begin by considering what they are expected to do. Near the beginning of A Theory of Justice we read: I shall begin by considering the role of the principles of justice .... A set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine [the division of social] advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares. These principles are the principles of social justice: they provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (4) The purpose of the principles is to 'choose' among various social arrangements. That is, they are supposed to comprise necessary and sufficient conditions

John Rawls is one of the most prominent American political and ethical philosophers of the 20th century. His major work is ‘’A Theory of Justice’’ where he set the foundations of Rawls’s construction of the original position considers that the people or hypothetical contractors of the social contract are placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, which makes them unaware of their particular circumstances. Justice as fairness is a sophisticated version of the well- known idea of social contract, presented by Rawls. His ideas were considered highly ambitious and progressive. They won enormous praise and inspired many authors to generate literature based on his texts. Besides that, critics have followed Rawls’ works, detecting weaknesses on certain aspects of his theory of justice.

John Rawls' famous work is based on a definition of justice as fairness that is neither necessary (justice may want to be fair but doesn't have to be) nor sufficient (justice also involves e.g. punishment, control, and retribution). Where Rawls is a rationalist, I propose an alternative " four quadrants " view based on the classical notions of the cardinal virtues and the four causes, arguing that each quadrant is an essential moment of the truth, while Rawls' and most modern philosophers' arguments rest on the notion that only the quadrant of reason/temperance/formal cause matters and the other three (final, material and efficient causes, or the virtues of justice, wisdom and courage) do not exist in their own right, but can be derived from reason alone, or ignored. This is wrong and leads to damaging consequence that I investigate.

Fordham Law Review, 2004

Would it be desirable to reform the global institutional order in conformity with the principles Rawls defends in A Theory of Justice? Rawls himself denies this and proposes a different moral theory (The Law of Peoples) for the relations among self-governing peoples. While sharing a questionable, purely recipient-oriented approach, his two theories differ importantly in substance and structure. The former gives weight only to the interests of individual persons, yet the latter gives no weight to these interests at all. The former theory is three-tiered and institutional, centering on a public criterion of justice that is justified through a contractualist thought experiment and in turn justifies particular institutional arrangements and reforms under variable empirical circumstances. Yet, the latter theory is two-tiered and interactional, deploying a contractualist thought experiment to justify rigid rules of good conduct for peoples. Poorly motivated, these asymmetries help Rawls's anticosmopolitan case. But they fail to vindicate his claim that global economic justice demands only a modest "duty of assistance." * Columbia University, Department of Philosophy. Professor Pogge is the author of Realizing Rawls (1989) and has written numerous important papers in ethics and moral and political philosophy, especially on global justice and on the work of Rawls and Kant.

2020

In this article, in order to demonstrate the pragmatic elements of Rawls's viewpoint, the developmental path of his A Theory of Justice shall first be investigated. This development has two phases: In the first phase, justice has an ethical-philosophical basis. In A Theory of Justice, this phase is specifically shown under the title of theory of justice. In the second phase, justice has no philosophical basis, but, as Rawls says, political justice is included. The main purpose of this article is to show the path of Rawls's theory of justice from an ethical viewpoint to a political one. Rawls, himself, points out this transition, but the main problem is how Rawls arrives at a pragmatic viewpoint. In Rawls's time, this viewpoint was brought to life by Richard Rorty in a particular way. Rawls is not interested in this viewpoint, but these elements indicate the above-mentioned transition. These elements are pluralism, society as a fair system of cooperation, public reason...

The Jahangirnagar Review Part C, 2021

John Rawls’ theory of justice has shown that the world is unjust and we have the responsibility to minimize the injustice that prevails. He has designed a model of justice in which ensuring the neutral choice of justice principle is required and liberty and equality of all should be preserved. His justice model bases on a hypothetical position named as original position and two basic principles. Apparently, it seems that Rawls’ model is a noble one to address the injustice issues in the existing world. But this theory has received several criticisms from many philosophers. This paper has analyzed the concept of liberty and equality in Rawls’ theory of justice and has shown that Rawls failed to uphold the promised equal liberty for all. This research has also considered the views of Robert Nozick and Amartya Sen regarding Rawls’ theory and has suggested that a proper theory of justice needs to include rectification principles along with the consideration of various contexts and alternatives.

Philosophy of Education

By embracing the rough, nuanced, and irregular, yet abiding, features of the world in which we live, non-ideal theory appears to rather accurately describe our circumstances and may therefore seem to offer considerable benefits to normative studies of justice related to, inter alia, education. But what ought scholars do with the ideal theory that has preceded this current upsurge in acknowledging the non-ideal? 1 Though widely invoked as a prime example of the rival perspective to non-ideal theorizing, John Rawls's work on "justice as fairness" offers fertile ground for digging into the definitions and demarcations suggested by the language of both ideal and non-ideal theory in the service of suggesting some porosity within these rigid distinctions.

The Difference Principle Beyond Rawls, 2008

This article explain and justify "Theory of Justice as fairness" Which is originally the work of John Rawls, as described in his work "The Theory of Justice" (1971). To what exactly John Rawls is looking for a theory of Justice. He gave some arguments in order to criticize utilitarianism. Rawls' theory of justice builds on the social contract tradition to offer an alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls singles out justice not maximum welfare for well-ordered society as "the first virtue of social institutions". Current research in normative economics comes closer to Rawls' original proposal of a nonconsequentialist theory of justice and then address some of the debates his principles, arguments and evaluates whether his position regarding establishing justice is strong or plausible. This paper is in three sections, in first section explain utilitarianism, in second section Rawls Theory of justice and his argument against utilitarianism and how he established his theory of justice as fairness and in third section give findings and conclusion.

Philosophy <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Public Affairs, 2005

Even the most sympathetic reader of John Rawls's work can feel surprised and puzzled by one of his last published works, The Law of Peoples. 1 One might have thought the powerful lesson of Rawls's career, and the very point of asking what would be accepted from his original position, is the essential importance of what is owed or justifiable to individual "free and equal" persons. 2 Yet, in finally turning to justice outside the domestic context, Rawls poses the central question as one of what societies, or "peoples," owe to other societies. He could have offered reasons why, in the global context, we owe to individuals only what we owe to the societies of which they are members. But Rawls provides no such argumentation. There would be little difficulty in assuming a social order roughly like that which presently exists merely for the sake of "non-ideal theory." But Rawls is clear that ideal theory requires starting from "the international political world as we see it." 3 One is tempted to conclude that Rawls misunderstood his own conception of

I presented this paper in August 2008 at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, South Korea. It is forthcoming (2010) in the Proceedings of that conference. John Rawls (1921-2002) and Jurgen Habermas (born 1929) are widely considered the most important and influential moral, social, and political philosophers to have written since 1950. In this paper I propose a modified Rawlsian theory of social justice (that I call "Justice as Fair Rights") which is an elaborated version of earlier versions of this theory that I put forward in "Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice" (Princeton University Press, 1990) and "Towards a More Adequate Rawlsian Theory of Social Justice" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Special Issue on John Rawls' Political Liberalism, 75, nos. 3 & 4, Sept. Dec. 1994). It is, in part, a response to John Rawls's acceptance of three modifications I proposed to his theory in my 1990 "Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice" -- and his rejection of one other -- as indicated by him in his "Political Liberalism" (Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 7) and his "Justice as Fairness: A Restatement" (Harvard University Press, 2001, pp.44-45).