Rawls’ Problem of Stability
I’ve published around 70 academic articles as of now. Most of them contain ideas that I like. But, as everyone knows, academic articles tend to be long and boring. Even mine are longer and boringer than a blog post (though not as boring as other people’s articles). So I thought I would start producing blog versions of some of these articles. (Is this a good idea? Weigh in in the comments.)
I’ll start with my first published journal article (https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1996_0022_0003_0375_0396). (Note: I’m not going to reread the paper, so the below is my current statement of the ideas. I think they’re very close to what I thought in 1996.)
1. Rawls’ View of Justice
The short version:
1. Everyone should have the most extensive personal liberties compatible with giving everyone the same liberties.
2. Wealth should be distributed in the way that most benefits the poorest segment of society. (See A Theory of Justice.)
2. The Stability Problem
How can a political system keep the loyalty of a diverse range of citizens, many of whom have drastically conflicting moral, religious, & philosophical views?
Some bad solutions:
a) Convince everyone of the correct overall philosophy. This isn’t feasible.
b) Suppress dissent. This happens in totalitarian societies, but it sucks.
c) Have a mere modus vivendi, i.e., we put up with benighted other people simply because we recognize that we can’t defeat them.
Rawls rejects (a)-(c) (see his Political Liberalism). He thinks (c) is unsatisfactory because he wants to give a moral justification for being loyal to a political system, and especially for loyalty to his own (Rawls’) conception of justice. (c), I guess, sounds too much like a mere appeal to self-interest.
So this is the problem: How could we give everyone a reason to support a general political system, esp. one that adopts Rawls’ conception of justice, without either convincing everyone of the correct philosophy, or suppressing dissent, or appealing to a mere modus vivendi?
3. Rawls’ Solution
Here’s his solution: Maybe there could be an “overlapping consensus”. I.e., maybe there could be a single political view that diverse people could endorse based on a diverse range of different overall philosophies.
This is conceptually possible: people starting from different premises often arrive at the same conclusions about some particular matter. Ex.: Kantians, utilitarians, and Christians can all agree that slavery is bad, though they give different reasons for this.
4. Problem
John Rawls is, in general, an awful reasoner (see https://fakenous.net/?p=1824, https://fakenous.net/?p=1828). This case is no exception. In this case, he wrote a 500-page book about the conceptual possibility mentioned above, but he makes no serious attempt to provide any evidence that that theoretical possibility is in fact realized.
He mentions a few examples of how some people might agree with some element of his theory of justice. E.g., John Locke, despite holding that Christianity is the one true religion, endorses religious toleration rather than theocracy (see his Letter Concerning Toleration). Or, maybe utilitarians could regard Rawls’ principles of justice as an acceptable approximation to expected-utility-maximization in our world.
But he doesn’t cite any serious empirical evidence concerning people’s actual beliefs, nor does he seriously attempt to argue, in detail, that a partisan of any particular comprehensive philosophy ought to endorse his theory of justice. He doesn’t do this for any philosophy, let alone for all reasonable philosophies.
The fundamentalist Christian
Take one example. Say there is a fundamentalist Christian. And note: this is a prominent, influential view in the actual, contemporary world, so you can hardly have a decent “overlapping consensus” if you can’t include fundamentalist Christians. So, this person thinks that the Bible is God’s word, that all who do not accept Jesus are doomed to eternal hellfire, while those who accept the correct religion will (or at least may) enjoy eternal paradise after this life.
How could this person possibly rationally endorse Rawls’ theory, given their overall philosophy? As I say, Rawls really makes no serious attempt to show that they could. He cites John Locke, but that hardly shows that all rational Christians would have to agree with Locke. And by the way, even Locke is a pretty poor example for Rawls’ purposes, since Locke rejected toleration for atheists.
If you’re a Christian fundamentalist (as described above), you think that the cost of people holding the wrong beliefs is literally infinite, and the benefit of the correct beliefs likewise infinite. So no earthly goods can compare. Given this, it would seem that state support for religion would be imperative (which of course is contrary to Rawls’ conception of justice). If even a single soul is converted to Christianity because of the active religious indoctrination by the state, then this would outweigh the sum total of all earthly values.
Rights
So you can’t plausibly appeal to things like the value of peaceful social cooperation to justify separation of church and state. What about appealing to rights – maybe everyone has the right to choose their own religion without undue influence by the state, or the right to not have to support (through their tax dollars) a religion that they don’t agree with?
Well, if you believe in rights, you still should not be an absolutist. It’s permissible to violate some right (especially one that is not super-important), if doing so prevents a vastly worse catastrophe. E.g., you could steal someone’s car if doing so would stop 1,000 people from dying horribly.
In this case, it’s not obvious that a Christian should believe in the right to choose false religions in the first place, but if they do, it seems that that would obviously be outweighed by the infinite benefit to be obtained by any increase in the number of people with the correct religious beliefs.
Obviously, I am not myself endorsing this argument, since I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I’m saying it’s false that a fundamentalist Christian ought to support religious toleration based on their general philosophical worldview.
Efficient conversion
Here’s something to be said for religious toleration: if we have religious toleration & separation of church & state, then Christians will be free to proselytize for Jesus. True! This is a real benefit from their point of view.
But the fundamentalist, if rational, will still want to know if this maximizes the expected number of souls that they can save. It’s really not plausible that it does, and Rawls, of course, makes no effort whatever to argue that it does. It seems that an even better approach would be to have the state actively support Christianity.
Objection: if the state gets into religion, they might support incorrect religious views, and thereby doom more people to hell.
True. But the fundamentalist takes his own views to be the correct views. He couldn’t rationally think of his own views as being incorrect, unless he’s going to give up his general worldview. Which we’ve already rejected above (solution (a) from sec. 2).
So the concern would have to be that other factions, with different religious views, might take over the government. But at this point, we’re just appealing to the fact that, as a practical matter, the fundamentalist might not actually be able to defeat all other factions. This is the modus vivendi solution that we already rejected in sec. 2 (solution (c)).
Other cases
I didn’t go into any other general philosophies, but I think it’s pretty clear that there are similar problems. There just simply is no reason to think that people could reach an overlapping consensus, starting from the views held by actual people in the actual world.
5. What’s the Real Solution?
Liberal societies are in fact reasonably stable. Why?
The actual reason, I believe, is the sort of modus vivendi that Rawls rejects. We put up with each other because we physically cannot defeat each other.
So am I saying Rawls was wrong to reject this? Yes and no. He’s correct to think that this leaves us with no strong moral justification for being loyal to the state. But he’s incorrect to think that we need to articulate such a justification. There just simply isn’t any such justification. We should accept that. We each have to put up with the often-unjust political system because we can’t defeat all the competing factions.
That’s not a bad reason, by the way. I mean, given that you in fact can’t defeat all your opponents, it’s wise to work out a modus vivendi, and to stick to it so long as the other parties do likewise. But don't trick yourself into thinking that the system you have represents some transcendent kind of justice.