The Law of Peoples With The Idea of Public Reason Revisited - John Rawls

Like most of John Rawls' work, The Law of Peoples is an adaptation of Kant's work to the 20th century. In this book, Rawls, tries to adapt Kant's Perpetual Peace by trying to add non-democratic regimes to the equation of the democratic peace. The thought experiment is quite interesting.

The Idea of Public Reason Revisited is one more of Rawls' attempts to please his critics. We all know that he was never able to do it.

A Theory of Justice - John Rawls

A Theory of Justice is John Rawls' most famous and important book. As I said in my previous post on Rawls, the book quickly became a target for philosophers of all ideologies and principles, which made Rawls reconsider his argument several times. At the end of his life,  Rawls' ideas about morals and politics were but a shadow of what they used to be in A Theory of Justice, and he was regarded with a strange mix of admiration and pity by most people who know his story.

A Theory of Justice is an extremely ambitious book. In Rawls' own words, its aim "is to present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant (p. 11)." Though Rawls would make efforts to distinguish his theories from Immanuel Kant's, the reality is that his theory is an application of Kant's moral principles to public policy. The original position, which is the cornerstone of Rawls' entire argument, is, in his own words, "a procedural interpretation of Kant's conception of autonomy and the categorical imperative. The principles regulative of the kingdom of ends are those that would be chosen in this position, and the description of this situation enables us to explain the sense in which acting from these principles expresses our nature as free and equal rational persons."

Reading A Theory of Justice is actually kind of sad because it shows how far we are from the ideal of a Kantian society, where all human beings are treated as ends in themselves, and where public deliberation and the common good are the guiding principles. In short, a Rawlsian society is one where public life is based on morals, and morality is based on rationality. To give a practical example, a Kantian/Rawlsian society should look a little bit like this:

"Representatives are not, to be sure, mere agents of their constituents, since they have a certain discretion and they are expected to exercise their judgment in enacting legislation. In a well-ordered society they must, nevertheless, represent their constituents in the substantive sense: they must seek first to pass just and effective  legislation, since this is a citizen's first interest in government, and secondly, they must further their constituents' other interests insofar as these are consistent with justice."

Compare this with the petty debates of real life politics and cry.

A Theory of Justice is nothing more than a complicated thought experiment. We will never be able to enter a veil of ignorance with members of past and previous generations to determine what is the best way to organize society. Instead, Rawlsian theory should be seen as an ideal to emulate, which has actually taken place in some Western democracies: maternity leave, fair labor regulations, and other measures adopted in the social arena in the last 40 years were inspired by Rawls.

The operational assumption underlying Rawls' theory is that rational human beings under a veil of ignorance can agree on an idea of justice. By bringing this assumption down, you tear down Rawls' argument with his own weapons (other critiques, like Nozick's, are but a remake of the utilitarian argument, which Rawls addresses throughout his book). The idea that there are competing versions of justice that can be defended rationally is called intuitionism. Rawls' defense against it is actually very shaky.

To give you an example of how intuitionism works, imagine you are in the original position (i.e., you are a perfectly rational human being without vested interest or pre-conceived conceptions of the good), you have a flute and you have to give it to one of three children. The first child says she deserves the flute because she is the only one who can play it. The second one counters that she is the poorest and has no toys, so the flute would give her something to play. Last, the third children says she deserves the flute because she built it. Rawlsian theory assumes that society can reach an unanimous agreement on which children should get the flute. That assumption is wrong.

The example of the flute is presented by Amartya Sen (himself a personal friend of Rawls) in The Idea of Justice (yes, the title is a conscious appeal to Rawls), probably the most powerful and best articulated critique to Rawls. If I can recommend you to read one book about justice, it would be Sen's: it summarizes Rawls' theory and presents it in in intelligible English, and provides an alternative to it.

Political Liberalism - John Rawls

I read John Rawls for the first time 7 or 8 years ago. At the beginning, I didn't understand a lot, but my professor did a great job bringing Rawls' ideas down to Earth. As time went by, I became familiar with Rawls' philosophy, and I still think that politics would be ideal if the original position and the veil of ignorance were more than thought experiments.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls designed one of the greatest social contract theories in History and he deserves full credit for that. He was attacked by left and right, and he eventually acommodated his argument to his critics, notably to Nozick's. And that's when things started going downhill for Rawls. Rawls spent the last 20 years of his life trying to address all the critiques to his argument (Nozick, on the contrary, moved to other things).  Rawls' arguments eventually became less powerful and more compromising. His physical appearance changed in the same direction of his argument: a naturally tall person, Rawls developed a haunch and his face became a permanent grimace. Every person who knows Rawls that I've met since I read him for the first time closes his remarks by saying "poor Rawls".


A Theory of Justice is sold in two different editions: the original one, for those who are more Rawlsian than Rawls himself, and the revised edition, which is Rawls' final thoughts. My understanding is that the revised edition is no longer published, while the original one is number 15,000 in Amazon, which is not bad for a political philosophy book...

This post opens a cycle on John Rawls, poor Rawls.

Political Liberalism is one attempt to satisfy people who criticized Rawls for being unable to separate his philosophy into a private and a public spheres -which is like criticizing a fish for being unable to fly: social contract theories like the one deployed in A Theory of Justice, by definition, have to be encompassing. The book tries to identify a political theory that enables people with different political and religious background to find a common ground for political discussions. Rawls suggests that, barring fundamentalists, it is possible to reach some compromise between different believers.

That is what Rawls thought before dying. If you want to know what the original Rawls would have thought about religion, refer to France's laïcité.

Arguing About War - Michael Walzer

There is no epigraph for this post. All the chapters of Arguing about War follow a logic that requires that any quotation be put into context. Extracting a sentence out of the blue would demerit this book.

One of the consequences of postmodernism is that the pretension of objectivity is gone. In this cynical age, pretending to be objective is considered a sign of pretentiousness or folly. The corollary is that intellectuals now struggle to be perceived as “engaged” enough. Engaged intellectuals play a role in society, I guess, but they are not useful educating the public; they tell us what to think, but not how to think. Nietzsche is good to be convinced that god is dead, but Spinoza is better to know what the implications of god’s life and death are.

One could argue that it is not possible to argue in favor of a cause and show an equilibrated perspective of all the sides involved in a debate at the same time. In Arguing about War, however, Michael Walzer makes clear that, as long as the author is clear and honest about the caveats and the limitations of his point of view, he can help his reader to develop his own thinking.

In 1977, Michael Walzer wrote a book called Just and Unjust Wars, which became the cornerstone of humanitarian interventions. Just and Unjust Wars used to be the second text that the students of the democratic peace theory read –the first was obviously Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Barack Obama’s speech when receiving the Nobel Prize (probably his best public intervention since he is President) is basically a condensed version of Walzer arguments.

Arguing about War is not only an update of Walzer’s first book on war, but also an introduction to the philosophy of war. The book is divided in three parts. The first one introduces the theory of just war, in particular as far as terrorism and humanitarian intervention are concerned. The second one presents five case studies (oh, Anglo-Saxon academy!) analyzed under the prism of the just war theory: the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, the First Intifada, the War on Terror after 9/11, Kosovo, and a general perspective of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The final part deals with the issue of global governance.

I would like to conclude this post by picking up Walzer’s remarks on Kant’s theory that liberal democracies do not go to war. (This used to be Kant’s original proposal, and modern political theorists have amended the dictum saying that democracies do not go to war against each other). Walzer argues that technology offers the possibility of fighting wars without sacrificing human powers. Therefore, the linkage that Kant viewed so clearly between citizens refusing to go to war is lost. Walzer is right, but he did not include the fact that democracies now hire mercenaries to fight their wars, partly because mercenaries have become common only recently. Obviously, Kant was thinking of societies with a compulsory military service, which was the norm until the Vietnam War. I guess that the twist to Kant’s theory is: “democracies do not go to war if they are willing to commit their soldiers’ lives and if they have a compulsory military service”.

Here is a video of Walzer presenting his theories about war in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan.