John Rawls and America
In November of 2013, the BBC aired the 50th Anniversary Dr. Who episode in 94 countries, the largest ever simulcast of a television drama. At the pivotal moment, sharply clashing leaders pulled back from mass and certain destruction. They paused ferocity just long enough to consume John Rawls’ signature idea — justice as fairness — and his imaginative method to achieve it.
Here and now, we face dire intersections of will and vicious lurches toward rage. 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 and fear perpetuates an everlasting violence that eats children and doesn’t care. Autocratic “strong men” have risen to power around the globe. Policy commitments to human rights are fading and mistrust fills the void. It’s a prescient moment to contemplate Rawls.
With unique clarity, Rawls bound together respect for the particular histories and realities of social identity characteristics and the will of the luminous being inside each of us to freely seek what is fulfilling. There is no blindness to identity markers and no vacuum of history. There is, however, a deep sense of what capacities we share with our fellow humans and what external realities we do not share. A compelling advocacy for individual choice resonates in every corner of his opus alongside an equally compelling “duty of civility.”
Rawls witnessed a defining event of our era. He was a young, American WWII soldier on the ground in the aftermath of Hiroshima. He saw the death and annihilation that a nuclear bomb wreaks upon real people and their civilization. Though a consistently humble person in his lifetime, he now has the standing of Plato, of Locke, of Kant. He is the answer to cynicism and despotism. He is the instrument by which we can reach an authentically better tomorrow. With good reason, the students of Tiananmen Square waved Rawls’ A Theory of Justice at the tanks poised to destroy their bodies.
Among a mountain of philosophical achievements, Rawls developed a thought experiment that requires honesty, but offers bulletproof justice. He asks you to imagine a gathering of beings whose concern is to draw up a social contract and found a just society. They are in the original position. They understand generic human qualities like our propensity to categorize, to use hierarchy, to see difference, to exercise bias, but mostly to be self-interested or engage in self-preservation. The individuals have the capacity to reason and are moved by the basic urge to survive. There in the original position, Rawls cloaks them with a veil of ignorance and tasks them with creating fundamental governing principles. They are veiled not from understanding different identities, but from knowing what their own identities 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 feel the selfish propensities of the human personality because it is their prime motivator. They can contemplate structural inequities inflicted on those with various identity characteristics and the competitive interactions of human groups. This is the opposite of ill-conceived notions of “color-blindness”— Rawls forces the survival instinct to serve empathy.
Recognizing the overriding instinct of self-interest, of survival, Rawls demonstrated that no being in the original position under the veil of ignorance would ever agree to terms in 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, Fascism, or Fundamentalism). None of those systems push human resourcefulness and intelligence far enough. For Rawls, those in the original position under the veil would confront that they themselves might dwell in oppression or they might find advantage. Commanded by the survival instinct and not knowing their own ultimate state, each luminous being under the veil would choose to make fair laws.
Maintaining an honest system of compulsory licensing in medicine illustrates the point. The pharmaceutical industry may exist, earn, and thrive in a market, greatly enriching its proponents through capitalism’s tools. The unyielding caveat from Rawls is that the least advantaged people anywhere must receive the greatest benefit from this inequality. Compulsory licensing requires, through governance, that the most effective medicine is distributed to all who need it. Period. Creative people find a way.
The realities of our world are proof that we do not govern enough out of notions of decency. If we confront our selfishness and govern with it only from the veil, we necessarily protect everyone in the act of protecting ourselves. Rawls doesn’t argue that there aren’t good people who value human rights and behave with altruism—only that those are frequently not the people who seek and hold power in business and politics.
Rawls’ method requires honesty … and there’s the rub. The 45th holder of America’s Presidency is a profoundly dishonest person of criminal disposition, incapable of conducting the experiment with fidelity—or even of reading widely, beyond tweet content. Too many in the partisan group that supports him in government and in the electorate appear to follow suit, with a dubious end in power justifying corrupt means. The Senate Majority Leader? He regularly refuses to allow Senators of both parties to simply have a straight up or down vote on legislation, severely eroding the deliberative and Constitutional mandate of the Senate with excessive, autocratic gamesmanship.
Trump’s supporters stand willing to accept and/or unwilling to acknowledge: (1) the daily dishonesty (20K+ lies in a searchable database), (2) documented money-laundering from Russian oligarchs whom Trump owes (the Deutsche Bank case, the oligarchs beholden to Putin), (3) documented Trump Jr. (he’s speaking at the convention!) et al meetings with Putin’s agents with the aim of sowing discord in America and using America’s adversary to gain election advantage over a fellow American (Article III, Section 3, “adhering” “Aid” “Comfort”), (4) two dozen credible claims of sexual assault, (5) disturbingly cruel human rights violations (fenced cages) and repeated racist retweets, (6) reality-tv-based-anti-science incompetent management of a pandemic, (7) monstrously regressive tax policy benefiting only the 1%, (8) constant doublespeak, and (9) clear, ongoing attacks against the rule of law itself, a free press, and election integrity (our core democratic institution). Why the willing blindspots? In some cases it’s for opportunistic career advancement. Basic stock-fin-oriented greed, fear of immigrants despite white America’s direct descent from immigrants, and standard propaganda-based brainwashing (“radical x agenda!” no matter how false, has impact with repetition) appear to play a major role. Perhaps a desire to control women’s bodies and wield assault weapons anywhere-no-matter-what-screw-you, regardless of the chaotic, student-killing cost? … Does it boil down to psychology—people engaging in extreme rationalization about Trump in the face of obvious malfeasance and bizarre, documented lies in order to feel power and avoid ego pain?
The hypocrisy that support of Trump engenders is staggering. How does a supporter ever talk about character, honor, and integrity again with a straight face? With Trump, there’s no need to listen to pundits or analysts. The sickness comes out in every speech, response, and tweet. So, no diverting. Please answer the question.
Many principled, lifelong conservatives have left the Republican Party, unable to find any genuine integrity or a basic stewardship of our institutions in this administration and cognizant of the tremendous power of the Presidency. The Democratic Party is big, diverse, and has its problems. But, at this moment, our political parties are not “the same.” The problem with Trump is not platform differences; it’s wholesale kleptocracy while reality-tv divisiveness distracts Americans.
America is not on the brink. It’s spiraling in the abyss, a dimming beacon to free people in the world, international trust fading, dictators across the planet emboldened—especially Vladimir Putin, former KGB-turned-dictator with his eight palaces and, for anyone who has studied The Cold War and its aftermath, a well known desire to push America into decline (punishment for Gorbachev and so much else). The spin won’t stop by embracing someone thoroughly corrupt in America’s highest office, no matter the professed reason. The Republican and Democratic platforms don’t matter an iota as much as stopping the demagoguery and ignorance that is shredding our Constitution’s social contract. Dear John Rawls, the transformation away from legitimate representative democracy is in progress. Can it can be reversed by the American people in this election? If all Americans participate, if this election is free and fair, if it’s not already hopelessly hacked.
John Rawls’s work has been celebrated by Republicans and Democrats, and by liberal, moderate, and conservative Supreme Court Justices. All have understood that political and economic systems are entwined, but not the same thing. Rawls died 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
