More than a decade without John Rawls

In November of 2013, the BBC aired the 50th Anniversary Dr. Who episode in 94 countries, the largest ever simulcast of a television drama. Right there –amid the intersecting wills of the Doctors, Clara, multiple races, and a civilization lurching toward oblivion– was John Rawls’ signature idea. By grasping it in the nick of time, all concerned found their creativity and their better selves. They pulled back from destruction: a grotesque, mass, and certain destruction.

We, here and now, continue to face dire intersections of will and vicious lurches toward rage. The refreshingly honest Pope Francis, bucking cultures of greed with his magnanimous goodwill, has called out … the world. In America, deep partisan dysfunction, money in politics, and policy gridlock are tarnishing our governing ethos in a manner reminiscent of the Gilded Age. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, a crush of hatred, disproportionality, and apartheid perpetuates an everlasting violence that eats children and doesn’t care. It’s a prescient moment to contemplate Rawls.

What he contributed to humanity’s philosophical endeavors is difficult to overstate. To understand his work, the best approach is to sit down and read for yourself his own words. Read the first fifty pages of A Theory of Justice. Read when you are wide-eyed. Read in a place where you can concentrate. He is not John Grisham and some of us, like me, have to read a page twice. But, this is time well spent for anyone, of any political stripe.

John Rawls knew human history with depth and scope. He had powerful, shattering life experiences. He built his thought around the concrete facts of a plural society, around intense recognition of every type of social diversity among humans. His profound empathy and his honest confrontation with human self-interest will put your heart in your throat as you find yourself shouting aloud in an empty room, “Exactly!” Rawls bound together, with unique clarity, respect for the particular histories and realities of social identity characteristics and the will of the luminous being inside each of us to seek what is free and fair. There is no blindness to identity and no vacuum of history here. Nor is there selective or revisionist interpretation of current events. There is, however, a deep sense of what capacities we share with our fellow humans and what realities we do not share. A compelling advocacy for individual choices resonates in every corner of his opus alongside an equally compelling “duty of civility.” Each part of his work demonstrates meticulous logic, watershed vision, and ever serious, painstaking response to critics.

Maybe it is not surprising that a person widely considered by his peers, here and abroad, to be the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century and our present day witnessed firsthand a defining event of our era. Rawls was a young, American WWII soldier there on the ground in the aftermath of Hiroshima. He saw the death and destruction that a nuclear bomb wreaks upon real people and their civilization. Though a consistently and remarkably humble person in his lifetime, he now has the standing of Plato, of Locke, of Kant. He is the answer to Mill and Utilitarianism, but also to Marxism and to Libertarianism. He is the answer to the perversion of our campaign finance system. He is the answer to those who make collateral damage a routine corruption of military action. He is the instrument by which we can reach the proverbial better tomorrow that must begin now. With good reason, the students of Tiananmen Square waved Rawls’ A Theory of Justice at the tanks poised to destroy their bodies.

The book is more than 500 pages long. And, it is one vital tome of many works in his canon. Thus, to reduce him to one famous conception contained therein gives a single taste of an appetizer in a ten-course meal. Nevertheless, Rawls’ thought experiment presenting the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the liberty and difference principles is one of the most accessible ideas in modern philosophy and one of the most important for democratic peoples. Like the pebble, whose ripple travels the lake, its potential constructive impact moves far and wide.

To the heart of the matter:

Rawls imagined a gathering of individuals whose concern is to draw up a social contract and found a just society. They are in the original position. The individuals are aware of detailed human history as well as generic human qualities like our propensity to categorize, to use hierarchy, to exercise bias, and mostly to be self-interested or engage in self-preservation. But, the individuals also have the capacity to use reason (even if they often discard it) and they may have a basic sense of fair play. There in the original position, Rawls cloaks them with a veil of ignorance. These individuals are tasked with creating fundamental governing principles, but they are veiled from knowing what their own identity characteristics will be. That is, they do not know what their own gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status or wealth, family origin, ability and disability status, natural assets, levels of intelligence, strength, health, and talent will be. They do not know what their place in society will be. But, again, they do know the realities of society with respect to race, gender, wealth and all of those characteristics, in the past and now. They know about the structures associated with various identity characteristics and about the interactions of human groups.

Recognizing the overriding instinct of self-interest, Rawls demonstrated that no individual in the original position under the veil of ignorance would ever agree to a society that might sacrifice the weakest members to ensure the viability of the greater number (Utilitarianism or Libertarianism) or engage in any other system where the least advantaged die sooner or fall below a basic standard of dignity. Nor would they agree to a system that discounted individual choice and individual natural rights (Communism or Fundamentalism). He reasoned, through careful and detailed logic, that those in the original position under the veil would know that they themselves might be born into poverty, or with injury or disease, or as a member of a group that was enslaved or raped, or they might be born to advantage. The veil of ignorance compels the luminous being in each of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror, to resist lying about history or rationalizing current events, to stop crassly discarding or devaluing the basic needs of fellow beings. At the same time, it champions individual freedom, to consider one’s own being and dignity, and to live one’s life as one sees fit. The individuals in the original position would agree to justice as fairness.

As such, they would embrace two fundamentals at least: the liberty principle and the difference principle, said Rawls. The former means that all members of society have equal, basic liberties, such as those outlined in the U.S. Bill of Rights and that those liberties cannot be used to quash the liberties of others, i.e., I cannot use my religious liberty to stamp out your religious liberty and vice-versa. We have equal liberty. We have due process rights; if one of us commits a crime, we will be guaranteed a fair substantive and procedural due process before our rights are justly taken away. The liberty principle will sound familiar; it is embedded in Amendments 1 — 14, among others. The difference principle requires more consideration. Rawls reasoned that those in the original position under the veil would allow social and economic inequalities to exist, i.e., difference, so long as fair equality of opportunity exists in society and so long as the least advantaged members of society receive the greatest benefit from an inequality.

What does the latter mean? What does that look like? When Jonas Salk, funded by the March of Dimes and others, invented the first successful polio vaccine in 1955, it was not withheld from populations. Countries were not bankrupted trying to buy it to save their people. Parents were not bankrupted trying to save their children. Quite the opposite. Salk was rewarded with immense prestige and considerable income for his work, his talent, his intelligence, his contribution. But, the poorest across the planet also benefited immensely. Institutions and Salk himself exercised morality by the difference principle in the course of eradicating that dreaded disease, well before Rawls articulated the concept with his compelling logic and language. Maintaining a system of compulsory licensing in medicine is quite Rawlsian. Even when it is invoked by governments, Pharma has already generally made enormous profits in the developed world. Compulsory licensing benefits the least advantaged among us. The attacks on compulsory licensing and failure to check and balance the excessive, middle-class-crushing profits of any particular industry: not Rawlsian, not just, and not moral.

The difference principle can also mean a progressive tax structure, not one where the middle class or poor are unduly burdened or pitted against each other. Not one where labor, one’s sweat and time, is taxed at a more regressive rate than capital. Both are taxed, but not in a regressive fashion. The rich can get richer in Rawls’ vision —but, not at the expense of the poor or even the middle. That is the crux of it. And, that is what demands creativity from the most talented among us. It is possible to create great wealth from invention, but Rawls shakes us into moral awakening saying, okay, do that, but not at the expense of your burdened fellow beings. Rawls would never agree to a life-saving procedure that only the rich could afford. But, he would agree that not everyone will be able to buy a Mercedes and that’s certainly okay too. No policy that embraced the rich getting rich at the expense of the poor would past muster under the veil of ignorance, in that state where our luminous beings undertake genuine honesty, instinctive self-interest, and ensuing fairness. The rich get rich and all benefit from it: that is the challenge to the genuinely talented out there. It is easy to benefit from oppression or callousness; but can you structure your creativity to benefit yourself and your fellow beings? to genuinely benefit your fellow beings? not in rationalized benefit, not in menial benefit, but in concrete, measurable goodness? Can you make your capital investment work in that mold?

John Rawls died almost twelve years ago on November 24, 2002. Ben Rogers, who penned a biographical article in 1999, included thoughts from Rawls’ friends. Ben wrote:

For all his shyness, Rawls has exercised a great influence on those who come into personal contact with him. Recently I spent ten days in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, talking to people who know him. The experience was heartening. I telephoned Rogers Albritton, an old friend from the 1940s: “My principal sense of Jack is of a man who has an incredibly fine moral sense in his dealings with other human beings. He is not just the author of a great book, he is a very admirable man… he is the best of us, the best of America.” Albritton’s testimony was repeated again and again. One eminent philosopher (he did not want to be named) said: “I find it hard to express what I feel about Jack. He has a much more refined sensibility than I even aspire to. He is a rare creature. He has a much more developed moral and social instinct than most people.” Joshua Cohen, a former student and now a friend, says: “Not since Rousseau has anyone had such a profound sense of the harm done by inequality.”

Ronald Dworkin remembers a midnight conversation in the deserted bar of the Santa Lucia hotel in Naples in June 1988. He, Rawls and one or two others found themselves in the middle of a very fruitful discussion about Rawls’s later work. In the middle of the exchange Rawls halted the conversation, asked no one to talk while he was gone, retrieved from his room a yellow pad and sat down among the wine-stained tablecloths to take notes.

–Ben Rogers, June 20, 1999. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/who-was-john-rawls-political-philosopher-justice/#.UpJhrmR4YkI

In 2003, at a Harvard University memorial service, where Rawls taught for almost forty years, Ronald Dworkin (noted above), one of America’s pre-eminent scholars of constitutional law, who himself died on Valentine’s Day this year, said:

Rawls is everywhere in this story: in the foundations of economics, in constitutional and international law, and in the normative theories of society and sociology. It is early days, but the transformation he started may one day seem, in retrospect, a crucial stage in a slow progress toward real justice.

–Ronald Dworkin, February 27, 2003. http://www.harvardphilosophy.com/issues/2003/Dworkin.pdf

A former student, now the eighth President of The University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Amy Gutmann, gave this:

As a mentor, Rawls was unsurpassed in combining generosity of spirit with rigorous standards. He welcomed all students, even if they were not philosophy majors (as I was not), as long as they took seriously the idea of justice as both an intellectual and a practical problem. He made it as clear as could be that both careful and imaginative thinking are necessary, neither sufficient. Similarly, he encouraged interpretations of great texts that are critical and charitable.

Rawls’s intellectual genius was matched by his modesty, which made him, for me and many other students, a model teacher-scholar. Even after he was recognized as the leading political philosopher of our times, he did his utmost to respond to criticism, revising his work many times until he had demonstrated a due regard for his critics. He held himself to exacting standards in this regard. After presenting an early draft of his book on international justice at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values in 1995, he wrote me that “I felt I didn’t manage very well the critical questions the third day. Yet it was profitable to me and I hope to do better next time.”

Rawls proved to the world the possibility of carrying on the grand tradition of political philosophy after it had been declared dead in the 1950s. He also demonstrated to his students how much a true generosity of spirit complements genius. Studying with John Rawls and becoming his friend and colleague have been the privileges of a lifetime.

–Amy Gutmann, 8th and Current President of the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.princetonindependent.com/issue01.03/item10a.html

A friend, who is CEO of an emerging company and himself exploring the intersections of capital and democracy, encouraged me to write some thoughts about Rawls succinctly. This is it. We have been without John Rawls in the flesh for over a decade. But, the time has come for Washington, D.C. and our States to reckon our tarnished governing ethos and our partisan dysfunction with America’s most elegant and most just thinker. We need the morality of John Rawls and the strength of his intellect to reignite dimming fires within the luminous beings who are our senior civil servants, our K Street “government relations professionals,” our corporate heads, our Generals, our Representatives and Senators, and our President. It is time for everyone to sit down and read the first fifty pages of A Theory of Justice. Then, read on.