Reconstructing Rawls: the Kantian foundations of justice as fairness

362 Pages·2011·3.328 MB·English

by  Kant, Immanuel;Rawls, John;Taylor, Robert S

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RECONSTRUCTING RAWLS
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R E C O N S T R U C T I N G R AW L S
THE KANTIAN FOUNDATIONS OF JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS
R O B E R T S . TAY L O R
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taylor, Robert S., 1968–
Reconstructing Rawls : the Kantian foundations of justice as fairness / Robert S. Taylor.
p. cm.
Summary: “Compares the theories of John Rawls and Emmanuel Kant, and offers
an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a
comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-271-03771-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Justice.
2. Rawls, John, 1921–2002.
3. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804—Political and social views.
I. Title.
JC578.T39 2011
320.01’1—dc22
2010031598
Copyright ©2011 The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the
Association of American University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use
acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
This book is printed on Natures Natural,
which contains 50% post-consumer waste.
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
List of Acronyms xv
Introduction xvii
Part 1: Kantian Affinities
1
Rawls’s Kantianism 3
Part 2: Reconstructing Rawls
2
The Kantian Conception of the Person 59
3
The Priorities of Right and Political Liberty 115
4
The Priority of Civil Liberty 152
5
The Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity 173
6
The Difference Principle 192
Part 3: Kantian Foundations
7
Justifying the Kantian Conception of the Person 231
8
The Poverty of Political Liberalism 249
Conclusion:
Justice as Fairness as a Universalistic
Kantian Liberalism 301
References 318
Index 326
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Illustrations
Figures
1
Parallel autonomy and priority hierarchies xxi
2
Finite rational agency 14
3
Justice as fairness as Kantian constructivism 23
4
Partial taxonomy of duties in Kant’s late moral philosophy 77
5
Model of agency 106
6
Hierarchy of communities 113
7
The self-respect argument 157
8
Decision rules under uncertainty 195
9
Depicting Conditions 2 and 3 196
10
Depicting Conditions 1–4 216
11
Model overlapping consensus 247
12
Utilitarian civil libertarianism 282
Tables
1
A lexical ordering 151
2
Payoff matrix 195
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Preface and Acknowledgments
This book has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—
more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. His so-called political turn in
the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommo-
dation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and
has led liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise
of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice
theories. I believe it is time to redeem Theory’s implicit promise of a universal-
istic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism, a promise that went unredeemed in
Rawls’s lifetime but on which this book attempts to deliver. Reconstructing
Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about jus-
tice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading
of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair
equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the
difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recog-
nizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road
very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.
Traveling this road has, without exaggeration, taken me nearly two decades.
While I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in
the early 1990s, I completed a senior thesis on Michael Sandel’s communitar-
ian critique of Rawls, thus initiating a long, almost continuous engagement
with contemporary analytic political philosophy. My myriad discussions there
with Tom Ungs, Alex Smith, Larry Hall, and Bob Gorman—who showed near-
superhuman patience with me as an annoyingly earnest and rigidly libertarian
undergrad—further sparked my interest in liberal egalitarianism, classical lib-
eralism, and political theory more broadly. A fateful decision to pursue a doc-
torate in economics at Duke University led to a profitable seven-year detour,
during which I continued to examine Rawls and even taught an interdiscipli-
nary class on contemporary analytic political philosophy.
After four years of teaching economics, I decided in 1998 to return to grad-
uate school at the University of California at Berkeley to pursue my first in-
tellectual love on a full-time basis. I recall and appreciate the warm—if
slightly puzzled—support of Tom Ungs, Alex Smith, and Kip Viscusi (my former