Modern Intellectual History, 14, 1 (2017), pp. 153–185
doi:10.1017/S1479244315000268
C Cambridge University Press 2015
to the mountaintop again: the
early rawls and post-protestant
ethics in postwar america∗
p. mackenzie bok
St John’s College, Cambridge
E-mail: p.mackenzie.bok@gmail.com
This article draws on archival sources to offer the first thoroughgoing account of how
John Rawls moved from his undergraduate Christian ethics to the mature moral
theory that undergirded A Theory of Justice. Identifying the liberal Protestant (rather
than neo-orthodox) convictions at the heart of Rawls’s senior thesis, it shows how he
found an alternative postwar grounding for these views by applying Wittgenstein’s
later arguments about concepts, criteria, and inductive reasoning to ethics. The article
places Rawls in the context of a whole community of mid-century American ethical
theorists drawing upon Wittgenstein and trumpeting forms of moral “naturalism,”
many of whom shared Rawls’s Protestant heritage. It suggests that we can only make
sense of the reliance of Rawls’s moral theory on personal recognition, emotion, and a
universal vision if we sideline the traditional dichotomies of the secularization debate
and regard the postwar ethics of Rawls and his cohort as “post-Protestant.”
introduction
In September 1948, Princeton philosophy professor Walter Stace published a
controversial article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Man against Darkness.”
Describing the task ahead for mid-century moral philosophy, Stace wrote,
What philosophers can do is to show that neither the relativity of morals nor the denial of
free will really follows from the grounds which have been supposed to support them. They
can also try to discover a genuine basis for morals to replace the religious basis which has
∗
Thanks to Joel Isaac, Duncan Kelly, David Hollinger, Paul Weithman, Arjun Ramamurti,
and the anonymous reviewers and editorial team at Modern Intellectual History for advice
on prior drafts, and to archivists at Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and Michigan for unfailing
help. My project was first launched under the guidance of Jim Kloppenberg, David
Armitage, Peter Gordon, and Tim Scanlon, and benefited from comments by Michael
O’Brien and Mark Kishlansky, both lately lost and much missed. Quotations from the
Rawls Papers appear courtesy of the Harvard University Archives and Margaret Rawls.
153
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154 p. mackenzie bok
disappeared . . . Our ideals and moral ideas have in the past been rooted in religion. But
the religious basis of our ideals has been undermined, and the superstructure of ideals is
plainly tottering.1
A rash of alumni letters to Princeton condemned Stace’s article for its implication
that traditional theistic arguments for morality no long held up to scrutiny.2 One
campus chaplain even accused Stace of being in alliance with the Communists.3
But Stace saw his own position as motivated by a firm commitment to traditional
Western moral values; as people lost faith in God, morality could not be allowed
to perish with belief. He repeated his call in 1951: “The task of thought in our
time is to replace the lost religious and metaphysical foundation of morals by a
secular and naturalistic foundation.”4
This call acknowledged the lack of grounding for a set of moral concepts while
nonetheless affirming them as worth keeping. To understand why, one might
imagine a philosopher supernaturally transported to a seemingly inaccessible
mountaintop, then left alone. Awed by the clarity of view from this perspective,
he resolves to work backwards, constructing a reliable staircase to enable
independent return. His efforts seem reasonable in such a situation, and the
narrative’s imagery intentionally alludes to the “moral-point-of-view theories”
that would blossom in the 1950s.
Indeed, this “staircase story” best illuminates the phenomenon of
“secularization” in mid-twentieth-century ethics in the United States. But it sits
uncomfortably with two dominant strands of writing about secularization. This
is not what Charles Taylor derides as a “subtraction story,” one in which modern
thinking is steadily liberated from the extraneous distraction of religion; a history
of religious belief is responsible for many of the moral concepts still defended.5
Nor is it a story of inadequate substitution, one in which the effort to establish a
secular grounding for ethics is regarded as delusional precisely because the initial
source of certain moral concepts was religious.6 Instead, the embrace of inductive
logic in moral reasoning at mid-century enabled a group of American ethicists
1
2
3
4
5
6
Walter T. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1948), 53–8, at 56.
Harold W. Dodds, copy of letter from President Dodds to an alumnus, in Walter T.
Stace file, primary run, Faculty Files, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library (henceforth “Princeton Archives”).
Henry B. Cannon, “The Church, the College and Propaganda,” Perspective, 1/2 (1949),
Folder 10, Box 28, AC135, Princeton Archives, 1.
Walter T. Stace, “On the Need for a Secular Ethic,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 5/6–7
(1949), 197–8.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge MA, 2007), 22. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of
Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley, 1951) is a classic “subtraction story.”
Proponents of such “sorry substitution” arguments include Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt,
Alastair MacIntyre, and Taylor himself.
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to the mountaintop again
to flesh out ideas about natural morality that drew upon Protestant Christian
traditions for inspiration but did not rely on metaphysical assumptions. Among
these men, the one whose ideas would leave the longest legacy was a young John
Rawls. Rawls was Walter Stace’s doctoral student from 1946 to 1950, and his work
in the 1950s and early 1960s can be seen as an answer to Stace’s call to construct a
replacement foundation for morality. To understand how his thinking developed
requires an abandonment of the usual secular and religious entrenchments. David
Hollinger has traced how the inclusive, universal vision embraced by American
ecumenical Protestantism propelled it even to dissolve itself, in certain respects,
in order to reach out to the un-churched and the unbelieving. Hollinger writes,
“Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches,
and hence we have been slow to see it.”7 We might add to that list Rawls’s legacy of
a universalized moral and political philosophy, grounded in a robust conception
of human nature.
Rawls wrote his 1942 undergraduate thesis at Princeton on Christian ethics and
considered a career in the Episcopal ministry before leaving for war.8 Reception
of his thesis has tended either to make direct connections between its arguments
and the arguments in A Theory of Justice (1971), or else to conclude from Rawls’s
1997 essay “On My Religion” that he lost his faith definitively at the end of World
War II.9 The first approach elides thirty crucial years, while the second gives too
much weight to a distant recollection. The archives tell a subtler story. At least
until the mid-1950s, Rawls continued to engage seriously with Christian ethics
and to indicate that he remained a religious believer of some sort. But far more
interesting than the parlor game of guessing when Rawls retained or discarded
various theological propositions is how his writings on Christian ethics and
on philosophical metaethics intertwine in one continuous moral project. That
project centered on seeing persons as embedded in a community of universal
mutual recognition. Concern not to exclude anyone from that vision prompted
Rawls to translate it from his youthful Protestant ethics into a secular mode.
7
8
9
David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the
Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History, 98/1 (2011),
21–48, at 48. Hollinger is the source of the term “post-Protestant.”
First discussed in: Eric Gregory, “Before the Original Position: The Neo-orthodox
Theology of the Young John Rawls,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 35/2 (2007), 179–206;
published as John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith (Cambridge
MA, 2009) (hereafter SF).
For the former see Thomas Nagel and Joshua Cohen, “Introduction,” in Rawls, SF, 1–23;
and Jürgen Habermas, “The ‘Good Life’—A ‘Detestable Phrase’: The Significance of the
Young Rawls’s Religious Ethics for His Political Theory,” European Journal of Philosophy,
18/3 (2010), 443–54. For the latter see Mark Bevir and Andrius Gališanka, “John Rawls in
Historical Context,” History of Political Thought, 33/4 (2012), 701–25, at 704.
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During the 1950s and early 1960s, Rawls and a group of fellow American
philosophers working in the tradition of British analysis developed a
“naturalistic” view of ethics, in the sense of one grounded in human nature.10
Often the beneficiaries of year-long fellowships at Oxford or Cambridge and
deeply engaged in British ethical debates,11 they emerged convinced that to
successfully refute the emotivist or noncognitivist theories of A. J. Ayer, R. M.
Hare, and C. L. Stevenson—roughly that morality boiled down to emotion or
personal preference—one had to rebel against G. E. Moore’s rejection of “the
naturalistic fallacy” and assert that some kind of natural basis, ideally grounded
neither on scientific nor on theological claims, could justify morality as a common
code. For Rawls and others, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later arguments offered a key
resource for normative naturalism that skirted metaphysics. Wittgenstein had
argued that concepts could only be understood inductively, through their use in
a given frame. His successors on both sides of the Atlantic now employed his
methods to argue that a shared concept of morality was embedded in human
“forms of life.” The neo-Aristotelian naturalism of the Oxford philosophers
Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, and the Wittgenstein-influenced ethics
of British philosopher Stephen Toulmin and his Austrian student Kurt Baier,
are well known, but far less notice has been taken of the American side of
the movement.12 This is a significant lacuna in the history of ethics; Rawls’s
community of American ethical theorists identified themselves as engaged in a
common project and shaped the direction of the field in America.13 Furthermore,
10
11
12
13
Not in the sense of materialist “scientific naturalism.” Instead, Rawls fits well into the
narrative of “liberal naturalism” sketched in Mario De Caro and David Macarthur,
eds., Naturalism and Normativity (New York, 2010). The editors describe it as
“occupying the typically overlooked conceptual space between Scientific Naturalism
and Supernaturalism” in Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, “Introduction: Science,
Naturalism, and the Problem of Normativity,” in ibid., 1–19, at 9. The particular version
of liberal naturalism shared by Rawls’s group of 1950s analytic ethical theorists has been
overlooked.
The adoption of British concerns and methods differentiated them from the Columbia
Naturalists, who prided themselves on cultivating a distinctively American philosophy.
On the latter see Andrew Jewett, “Canonizing Dewey: Naturalism, Logical Empiricism,
and the Idea of American Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History, 8/1 (2011), 91–125.
One important survey does remark on a “great expansion” in American ethics at midcentury; see Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, “Toward Fin de siècle
Ethics: Some Trends” Philosophical Review, 101/1 (1992), 115–89, at 121–2.
For insider descriptions see Richard B. Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, 1959);
Henry D. Aiken, “Preface,” in Aiken, Reason and Conduct (New York, 1962); and William
K. Frankena, “Ethical Theory in America since 1930,” in Roderick M. Chisholm, Herbert
Feigl, William K. Frankena, John Passmore, and Manley Thompson, Philosophy: The
Princeton Studies of Humanistic Scholarship in America (Englewood Cliffs, 1964), 347–463.
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to the mountaintop again
close study of their work shows how a subset of them—most notably Rawls,
Roderick Firth, and William Frankena—believed that these new arguments could
provide an alternative, non-metaphysical yet universal basis for certain insights
from Protestant Christian morality, particularly the irreducibility of persons and
the crucial role of love.
Rawls anchored his case for universal morality in arguments about recognition
of persons. Not acknowledging the existence of other persons indicated delusion,
Rawls thought, and the basic recognition of persons entailed certain ways of
responding, such as with sympathy and compassion, that encoded the seeds for
morality into human life. The emotional aspect of Rawls’s views on morality
has often been overlooked in favor of construing his theory as grounded on
a particularly thin species of Kantian rationality.14 But Kant did not become
especially important to Rawls’s conception of his project until around 1962—by
which point his views had already mostly taken shape.15 Rawls’s papers reveal
that he spent much of the 1950s and early 1960s in a detailed investigation of
how “natural attitudes” were inextricably linked with “moral feelings,” work
that crucially underpinned his writings on justice from 1958 onwards and his
arguments in A Theory of Justice.16 This effort to render morality as encoded in
human nature rather than as an emulation of God aimed to defend morality’s
universal claim on human beings even despite nonbelief.17 Such an effort must be
understood as an extension of the ethical motivations that drove Rawls’s youthful
Protestantism, not as a repudiation.
rawls’s early christian ethics
To consider Rawls as a case for a different secularization story first requires
attention to his early religion. Raised Episcopalian, he recalls being “only
conventionally religious until my last two years at Princeton.”18 He often skipped
mandatory chapel services as a college freshman.19 The stirring description of
inward conversion at the end of his senior thesis suggests that he may have had
14
15
16
17
18
19
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, 1982), 85.
Furthermore, much of the strong Kantian gloss on A Theory of Justice was added
retrospectively, as in the 1980 Dewey Lectures.
Compare Erin I. Kelly and Lionel K. McPherson, “The Naturalist Gap in Ethics,” in
De Caro and Macarthur Naturalism and Normativity, 193–203, at 203: “Having certain
sentiments or attitudes is a condition for having moral concern at all.”
See Paul Weithman, “Does Justice as Fairness Have a Religious Aspect?”, in Jon Mandel
and David Reidy, eds., A Companion to Rawls (New York, 2013), 31–56.
John Rawls, “On My Religion,” in Rawls, SF, 261–9.
Minot C. Morgan Jr to Robert R. Wicks, 29 Nov. 1940, in “Chapel Delinquencies” (1940–
41), Box 3, AC 144, Princeton Archives.
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such an experience in his junior year.20 Perhaps it was sparked by George F.
Thomas’s class on “Christian Thought to the Reformation.” The combination
of that course and one on nineteenth-century philosophy certainly prompted
an academic conversion for Rawls in fall 1941: by December, he had belatedly
switched his major from Art and Archaeology to Philosophy.21
Philosophy and theology were intertwined at Princeton in the early 1940s;
a separate Religion Department would not be founded until 1945.22 So when
Rawls took “Social Philosophy” with Norman Malcolm in spring 1942, Malcolm
could focus on the problem of evil and assign texts—including Plato, Augustine,
Reinhold Niebuhr, and Philip Leon—chiefly in Christian theology.23 This reading
list was central to the senior honors thesis that Rawls submitted six months later
in December 1942, later published as A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin
and Faith.24 What is most striking is not that Rawls wrote a Protestant Christian
thesis but rather that he used the opportunity to formulate distinctive ethical
convictions that would drive his work on morality for decades to come. His key
contentions were (1) that taking an ethical attitude meant recognizing persons
and the human community within which they were embedded, and (2) that the
ultimate aim of such an ethical vision was a redeemed community from which
no one was excluded.
In Sin and Faith, Rawls proposed that the central tenet of Christian ethics ought
to be the distinction between people and things. “The realm or the character of
the personal and the communal is qualitatively distinct from the realm of nature,”
he wrote. “By nature we mean what is usually meant by that term, i.e., the expanse
of space filled by bodies, all that we see, feel, touch and so forth. As a result of this
distinction between the natural and the personal, there are two types of relations,
natural and personal.”25 Proper Christian ethical relations with other persons—
and with God—had to be of the latter type. Otherwise one was committing a
category error and treating persons as objects. And what defined a person was
the capacity for participation in community.
By “community” Rawls did not mean “society” in the sense of the social
contract.26 He meant a group knit together by love, what the Swiss theologian Emil
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Rawls, SF, 233.
David F. Bowers to Robert G. Albion, 8 Jan. 1942, and Rawls’s college transcript, both in
John Rawls’s undergraduate file, Box 63, AC198, Princeton Archives.
Merrimon Cuninggim, The College Seeks Religion (New Haven, 1947), 188–92. Princeton
was part of a wave of American universities establishing religion departments after World
War II.
Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford, 2007), 11.
Rawls graduated a term early to answer a draft notice.
Rawls, SF, 112.
Ibid., 126–7.
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to the mountaintop again
Brunner had called “true community.”27 Rawls credited Brunner as the theologian
to whom he owed the most, praising his “clear and unflinching recognition that
the universe is a community of Creator and created.”28 Although he used writings
by Reinhold Niebuhr and Søren Kierkegaard to elucidate the nature of sin and
human alienation from God, Rawls worried that their focus on the individual
could obscure the fact that proper relations with God entailed the restoration of
community with one’s fellow human beings as well. In Rawls’s words,
[Election] changes relations both vertically and horizontally, both to God and to men.
The man who is elected and restored to sonship before God is not thereby lifted out of the
earthly community; he is not abstracted from his fellow men and assumed into heaven.
Rather, he is planted more firmly into that earthly community. He has been elected not
for his own sake but for the sake of others.29
Rather than an individual escape from the world, Rawls argued, “election is
a communal process moving towards a communal end” of inclusive, universal
salvation for all human persons.
While Rawls’s account of conversion ultimately depended upon God, he seems
to have believed that humans could hasten the restoration of community.30 This
assertion is his most marked point of divergence from Brunner. Offering a classic
neo-orthodox critique of liberal theology, Brunner stressed that one of the great
mistakes of the modern West was to trust in deliverance through human progress
when God alone can save.31 Rawls, by contrast, believed that human beings could
be God’s saving agents for one another, as the Elect “help bring the totality of the
creation before [God].”32
Although he drew upon neo-orthodox thinkers like Niebuhr and Brunner,
Rawls’s theological outlook was therefore ultimately a liberal Protestant one.33
He thought a converted person could contribute to building the Kingdom of
God by bringing others into the nexus of loving personal relations between
all human beings and God.34 Yet his emphasis was on adopting the correct
attitude towards other persons, rather than on performing certain righteous
acts. As Robert Adams notes, this treatment of Christian ethics as primarily
concerned with “a state of mind, a complex of attitudes and motives, rather than
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt, trans. Olive Wyon (London, 1939), 74.
Rawls, SF, 108.
Ibid., 244.
Ibid., 244–5.
Emil Brunner, Theology of Crisis(New York, 1935), 85–6.
Rawls, SF, 252.
Cf. Gregory, “Before the Original Position”; and David A. Reidy, “Rawls’s Religion and
Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought, 31/2 (2010), 309–43, at 315–16.
Rawls, SF, 112–13.
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a straightforwardly voluntary act or a pattern of action” is a “classically Protestant
feature of Rawls’s senior thesis,” drawing on a tradition stretching back to Martin
Luther.35 Nevertheless, the possibility for redemptive human activity hopefully
imagined in Rawls’s thesis went beyond the Reformation emphasis on “grace
alone” to which the neo-orthodox theologians had returned.
rawls’s graduate-school work in ethics
Rawls’s experiences in the war made him question many common
interpretations of Christian doctrine, but he did not suddenly abandon
Christianity, nor did he shed his Protestant ethical perspective.36 Over his
graduate-school years back at Princeton, however, Rawls began to identify two
problems for views of ethics like those he had expounded in Sin and Faith: the
appeal to divine authority and the lack of clear criteria for resolving ethical
conflicts. In “The Nature of Ethical Thought” (1946) Rawls argued for a “rational
foundation of ethical principles” whereby moral authority could “finally be
located only in the collective sense of right of free and intelligent men and
women.”37 Such authority was never truly final, as moral questions remain open
for debate. But no other authority could supersede it. Rawls added,
Nor, from a Christian point of view, is allegiance to such an authority impious. It is obvious
that every claimant to the divine truth must show its credentials, and to what is it to show
them if not to the collective opinion of men judging by the best of their lights? . . . The
Revelation and Grace of God is not a private thing which works along humanly defined
channels. From its very nature it spreads abroad into every man who will receive it.38
Rawls’s mention of the Christian perspective was not incidental. He referenced C.
H. Dodd and other Protestant writers throughout the paper, and cited at length
Lord Acton’s argument against papal infallibility. Rawls understood himself to
be dissenting from the Roman Catholic understanding of Christian authority.
These were the “humanly defined channels” that he rejected. Rawls was making
his case against concentrated authority as a Protestant; his argument for allowing
the free working of the Holy Spirit through many people was the same one that
had led to calls for printing the Bible in the vernacular five hundred years before.
But whereas many Protestants had come to invest final authority in the
scriptural text itself, Rawls argued that Christian ethics—like any ethics—would
35
36
37
38
Robert M. Adams, “The Theological Ethics of the Young Rawls and Its Background,” in
Rawls, SF, 24–101, at 32.
I will complicate readings of Rawls, “On My Religion,” 261.
John Rawls, “The Nature of Ethical Thought,” Folder 11, Box 9, Rawls Papers (HUM 48),
Harvard University Archives (henceforth “Rawls Papers”), 7.
Ibid., 8–9.
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to the mountaintop again
eventually come down to human reasoning. In 1950, Rawls had just submitted
his doctoral thesis on a decision procedure for ethics when Paul Ramsey, a
major Protestant Christian ethicist also at Princeton, published his textbook
Basic Christian Ethics. In his May 1951 review of Ramsey’s book in Perspective, “A
Princeton Journal of Christian Opinion,” Rawls commented that, for Ramsey,
“the principles of Christian ethics stand above that authority which it seems to
me is our best authority on matters of right and wrong in daily affairs: namely,
the free and uncorked agreement of competent persons whenever it exists.” If this
were so, then Rawls expressed his puzzlement as to “how we determine, on the
basis of Christian Theology, what the criterion of right action is; and secondly,
what can be done to make this criterion more precise and clear once we have
established it.”39
The standard to which Rawls sought to hold Christian ethics was the same one
he had been working to establish for ethics more generally over the late 1940s. His
insistence on precision was aimed at defending the legitimacy of cognitivist ethics
against proponents of emotivism. As William Frankena remarked in his 1950
survey of “Moral Philosophy at Mid-century,” noncognitive or emotive theory
had come to be viewed as the ascendant position in anglophone metaethics,
displacing the naturalistic and intuitionist perspectives that had previously held
sway.40 The emotivist view, most famously propounded by Stevenson, held that
moral statements were ultimately expressions of emotion.41 Rawls was one among
a number of philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic anxious to counter that
position. As he insisted in 1951, “the language of moral discussion is the language
of argument.” But Rawls knew that emotivists thought this was just how moral
language appeared, while in fact such words were mere instruments of emotional
persuasion, “things said to get a man into a certain frame of mind.” The heart
of the matter was “whether there are ethical principles which are accepted in the
way that principles of deductive and inductive, and other types of argument are
accepted.”42
If there were no such principles then one could no longer argue sincerely about
ethics, Rawls thought, not even to show that certain dehumanizing attitudes were
beyond the pale. This upshot seemed unacceptable in a postwar, post-Holocaust,
post-Hiroshima world. Rawls wanted to defend the idea of morality as a universal
39
40
41
42
John Rawls, typescript review of Basic Christian Ethics by Paul Ramsey, Perspective, 3/7
(1951), Folder 17, Box 7, Rawls Papers, 1–2.
William K. Frankena, “Moral Philosophy at Mid-century,” Philosophical Review, 60/1
(1951), 44–55, at 45.
C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, 1944).
John Rawls, “The Concept of Moral Discussion in the Emotive Theory,” Folder 8, Box 8,
Rawls Papers (folder henceforth “ET/Rawls”).
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standard of conduct applicable to all persons. But as he wrote in a fall 1951
lecture to Princeton undergraduates, “The only way to refute the emotive theory,
if it is stated carefully, is to show that there are invariantly acceptable ethical
criteria: hence reasoning is possible.”43 It was in light of this imperative that
Rawls demanded that Ramsey define “the criterion of right action” in Christian
ethics.
Rawls’s use of the term “criteria” is important. He spent a crucial year as a guest
graduate student at Cornell in 1947–8, immersed in the first American philosophy
department to champion the later ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein.44 His emphasis
on “criteria” was borrowed from Wittgenstein, as was his proposed mode of
investigation: “We shall look at ourselves. We shall ask what are the criteria
which we use.”45 Rawls’s thinking about ethics had been profoundly shaped by
a seminar he took at Cornell with the logician Max Black, a former student
of Wittgenstein’s who defended inductive reasoning as a legitimate method of
inquiry. To lionize deduction and discredit inductive logic because its chain of
justification ended somewhere, Black argued, was to adopt an unwarranted bias
against an essential approach for everyday thinking.46 Black’s assigned reading
included the kindred arguments in Wittgenstein’s unpublished Blue Book. Rawls
applied this approach to ethics, which he subsequently described as “more
analogous to the study of inductive logic than to any other established inquiry.”47
The criteria for correct use of moral concepts could best be enumerated by careful
observation of human moral life. Such concepts, Rawls thought, could neither be
derived directly from self-evident truths (intuitionism) nor reduced to personal
proclivities (noncognitivism).
This understanding of ethics made Rawls both interested in and exasperated
by Ramsey’s book. Some arguments for Christian ethics operate deductively from
the premise of divine revelation. As Rawls would point out, however, if one reaches
into a box of all holy texts to select an authoritative scripture, one has actually
43
44
45
46
47
John Rawls, “On the Emotive Theory of Ethics (Fall 1951),” 1, ET/Rawls, original emphasis.
Pogge, John Rawls, 14.
Rawls, “On the Emotive Theory of Ethics,” 17, original emphasis.
“Induction” folder, Box 1, Max Black Papers (14–21–2466), Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Archives. The seminar minutes (taken each
week by a different graduate student) show that Rawls had already acquired much of
his knowledge of the late Wittgenstein before his year at Oxford (1952–3). Contrast with
Bevir and Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” 710; Reidy, “Rawls’s Religion
and Justice as Fairness,” 310; and Daniele Botti, “John Rawls, Peirce’s Notion of Truth and
White’s Holistic Pragmatism,” History of Political Thought, 35/2 (2014), 345–77, at 376.
John Rawls, “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” Philosophical Review, 60/2
(1951), 177–97, at 178.
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anointed oneself the final authority in ethics.48 Such a procedure played into
the noncognitivist assertion that ethics is just a persuasive cover for individual
preference. But Rawls saw that Ramsey was in fact using general criteria of moral
reasoning. Ramsey seemed to think he needed to assert that a religious principle
stood above any such reasoning in order to make his ethics legitimately Christian,
but Rawls believed the opposite: if Christians wanted to argue that one moral
outlook ought to hold sway over all humankind, then they needed to defend
cognitive ethics and insist on substantive criteria for moral concepts. Only after
demonstrating that the meaning of moral language was fixed to some degree did
it make sense to contend that the proper interpretation of moral concepts was
the Christian one.
rawls’s christian ethics at cornell
Rawls taught his own advanced seminar on Christian ethics in spring 1954,
as a new assistant professor at Cornell. Sounding a firm Protestant note, he
declared, “It seems to me utterly impossible to have anything but a superficial
acquaintance with Christian ethics without reading the Bible.”49 He devoted five
lectures to the Hebrew Scriptures, then the rest to the New Testament. Practically
every sentence was buttressed by a scriptural citation, and he appended lists of
hundreds of parables sorted into categories. But whereas in his undergraduate
thesis he had referenced the Bible naively, during the war Rawls had read the
“higher criticism” of the German theologian Adolf von Harnack and his British
successor C. H. Dodd.50 Rawls now employed their methods, using historical and
contextual arguments to assess what might actually have been said, meant, and
believed in biblical times. He then defended the interpretative possibilities that
he thought best stood up to ethical scrutiny.
For example, he offered an alternative interpretation to the apparent meaning
of the “election” or “chosen-ness” of the Jews. In Rawls’s view, if this description
were simply “a case of national vanity, and a manifestation of pride of race,” then
it did not merit ethical attention. “If we can’t reconcile ourselves to the doctrine
of election we can’t reconcile ourselves to the Old Testament and we shall have to
reject it as religiously false,” he wrote. But he argued that the Old Testament in fact
48
49
50
John Rawls, “Tolerance & Its Justifications,” Folder 1, Box 35, Rawls Papers, 9.
John Rawls, “Christian Ethics: Preliminary Remarks,” Folder 5, Box 8, Rawls Papers (folder
henceforth “CE/Rawls”), 2.
Rawls recalled reading biblical scholarship while at war in the Pacific in John Rawls,
personal interview conducted by Thomas Pogge (Cambridge MA, summer 1993), track 2.
Pogge has generously shared his four hours of recorded interviews with me. Rawls’s 1954
course notes include references to Harnack and especially Dodd.
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stood on a “higher doctrine,” according to which “Israel’s election is service for
all peoples: it is to show Yahweh, & so bring salvation to, all peoples.” Rawls read
the Hebrew Scriptures as chronicling the discovery of this purpose; over time,
Hebrew beliefs had developed from a view of God as their particular champion
into a firmly monotheistic religion, and to Rawls monotheism necessarily implied
universal community.51
Like many Christian scholars, Rawls presented this story of the widening
perspective of Hebrew religion as a providential, teleological one, leading
eventually to the cracking open of God’s covenant with the Israelites to apply
to all people through Christ. And Rawls clearly intended his interpretation of
“election” to apply to Christian theology too; as he had insisted since his 1942
senior thesis, “the Elect” were chosen for service to all.52 To Rawls, the language of
Scripture revealed a vision for right relationships in the context of a whole ethical
community, not a recipe for righteous individual success. In his New Testament
lectures, the parallel example to “election” was “reward.” Rawls pointed out that
Jesus’ use of the word “reward” in his preaching was quite unusual. An ordinary
reward could be legitimately claimed. But the heavenly reward described by Jesus
was “surely the Visio Dei,” Rawls wrote, and “what sense does it make to claim one
is entitled to that?”53 According to Rawls’s reading of the Gospel, it is not that God
distributes some reward in exchange for righteousness; rather, it is “that being
‘righteous’ are [sic] the conditions of sight; that—to follow our picture—even if
a man were ‘let’ in the Kingdom (per impossibile) when he wasn’t righteous, he
wouldn’t know it, or he wouldn’t find it what he wanted: it wouldn’t be reward for
him.”54 Receiving the “reward” required, in Rawls’s view, internal reorientation.
Only if one adopted the right ethical stance towards God and other persons could
one see and live into the Kingdom of God.
So Rawls’s chief contentions about Christian ethics in 1954—that salvation
was ultimately a universal communal end, and that righteousness entailed a
certain mental attitude towards other persons—had not changed much since
1942. And in November 1956 he restated these core positions in an even more
radically inclusive vein. Addressing a Methodist student fellowship on the subject
of toleration, Rawls listed some “religious propositions” he held to be “as certain
as I am that I am standing here.” Namely
1.
51
52
53
54
that if there be a judgment, then it must take the form of exclusion from the
destined fruition of the religious life . . .
John Rawls, “Lecture 5: Day of Yahweh & the Doctrine of Election,” CE/Rawls, 2, 4b, 5.
Rawls, SF, 252.
John Rawls, “On Rewards & Punishments,” CE/Rawls, 3b, original emphasis.
Ibid., 3a, original emphasis.
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2. that if there be a judgment, and if there be a fruition of the religious life, then
no man will be allowed to remain in everlasting alienation from it.
3. that if there be a judgment, then it cannot be a principle of it that any man
would suffer exclusion from the fruition of the religious life solely because of
any belief or practices held in conscience . . .
4. that if there be a destined fruition of the religious life then one’s participating
in it as beatitude depends upon one’s understanding of, and capacity and
desire for it; and that not one second in time can separate one’s coming to
understand and desire it from at least a partial participation in the fruition
of it . . . 55
Rawls’s vision of the Kingdom of God ultimately embraced everyone, yet was
accessed through internal transformation.
Such a view constituted “a religious argument for tolerance,” Rawls thought,
because the truth of such propositions “renders pointless the use of force
in achieving religious conformity.”56 Rawls ended with an argument for the
separation of religious associations from the state. His conclusions foreshadow
his famous later arguments that religion should remain aloof from the public
sphere.57 But here he offered justifications from the Church’s perspective. The
Church harms its own aims by attempting to spread the truth through coercion
when “it can only be known and sifted in the common sense of right, in the private
life of her own association, and in the still small voice of each of her members.”
This, Rawls argued, was where the Holy Spirit did its work. To employ the
mechanisms of state power on behalf of a church was “to make the primitive
mistake of forgetting that, like a person, the Church can gain the world but
lose her soul.”58 So Rawls’s endorsement of separation of Church and state had
an explicitly Protestant Christian rationale in 1956, one which can help explain
why he later thought that the “proviso” on religious reasons as public reasons
in Political Liberalism ought to be acceptable even to a religious believer. His
Protestant skepticism about appeals to authority prompted him to argue for
holding Christian ethics to the same standard as any ethical argument offered
within a human community.
Yet the lectures Rawls wrote from within the Protestant Christian tradition
in the mid-1950s did not explicitly tackle general criteria for ethics. Despite
55
56
57
58
Rawls, “Tolerance & Its Justifications,” 14. I have identified the previously unknown
occasion for this paper (Reidy, “Rawls’s Religion and Justice as Fairness,” 334–5) as a talk
on “Religious Liberty and Toleration” to a group of Methodist students; announcement
in Cornell Daily Sun, 73/45 (16 Nov. 1956), 5, online at http://cdsun.library.cornell.edu.
Rawls, “Tolerance & Its Justifications,” 14–15.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), 62.
Rawls, “Tolerance & Its Justifications,” 15.
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his prior chiding of Ramsey, by 1954 Rawls had acknowledged that Christian
ethicists largely ignored metaethics because their preoccupations were practical.
Contemporary academic philosophical ethics, conversely, was concerned with
the logic of moral argument but had little to say to the “ordinary intelligent
layman” about how to live. Rawls regretted this division and mused, “I would
expect that philosophical ethics and Christian ethics would in the end fit together
somehow.” Unfortunately, he left further investigation of their compatibility to
“another time” for which no lecture notes appear.59 But an examination of his
other writings about moral philosophy in the mid-1950s shows how the two
inquiries were intertwined, and how Rawls sought alternative groundings for the
person-centered ethics he had first developed as a devout young Christian.
what basis for morality?
What was to justify ethics in the place of divine example and command?
The anglophone ethical scene in the 1950s offered Rawls a series of alternatives.
Elizabeth Anscombe, herself a devout Catholic, argued that if modern moral
philosophy wished to do without divine warrant, it would have to do without
words of categorical moral judgment and obligation such as “right,” “wrong,”
“duty,” and “ought.”60 Such words implied a judge and lawgiver—the JudeoChristian God—who lent moral terms their air of requirement. Anscombe
suggested that secular moral philosophy return to its pre-Christian roots in
Aristotle’s Ethics and use words that described perfection or defect in specific
virtues.61 Such an approach would render moral language more a tool of
psychological description than an idiom with normative force, but this approach
seemed to her more honest in a secular era.
Other of Anscombe’s Oxford colleagues—such as Stephen Toulmin and
Philippa Foot—thought that normativity could be derived from the social
dimension of morality.62 Both Toulmin and Foot saw themselves as building
on Wittgenstein’s later insights into ordinary-language philosophy, according to
which the meanings of words were defined by their uses in an ongoing “form
of life,” and the possibility of a “private language” was therefore nonsense. Such
arguments could now be marshaled against the emotivists to insist that society
set the parameters of what could count as morality. Rawls sympathized with
59
60
61
62
Rawls, “Some General Remarks on Christian Ethics,” 5.
G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, 33/124 (1958), 1–19, at 1.
Ibid., 5–6.
Stephen E. Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge, 1950),
223; and Philippa Foot, “Moral Arguments,” Mind, new series, 67/268 (1958), 502–13, at
510–11.
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to the mountaintop again
this move and found much to like in Toulmin’s exposition of moral argument
as rational discourse and in Foot’s careful neo-Aristotelian description of the
criteria for using moral terms correctly. He worried, however, that they only
bumped the contingency of morality back a level, to whatever a society—rather
than an individual—decided. If morality were merely social indoctrination, as
the Swedish legal philosopher Axel Hägerström argued, why should anyone aware
of this fact go on being moral when it proved inconvenient?63 Rawls thought that
an adequate account of morality should allow the philosopher to retain moral
principles in earnest. “An explanation of morality should be compatible with
having a morality,” he wrote.64
In a pair of unpublished essays on “the concept of morality” written between
1954 and 1958, Rawls made his case for why moral commitments imposed a real
sense of bindingness.65 In his view, morality was a facet of human beings’ natural
perceptive faculties. He wrote, “Morality is part of the forms of reacting to things
which shows that we recognize these things as persons and not simply as physical
bodies. One could not be systematically amoral and at the same time recognize
and act towards persons in ways which are required in view of what they are.”
His answer to the questions “Why any morality at all? Why not act as a systematic
rational egoist?” was that to eschew morality would be to live in delusion.66
“There are persons!” he exclaimed. “To fail to have a morality would run against
recognition of this fact.”67 And if morality depends upon recognition of a fact,
Rawls concluded, “We do not choose our morality, we find that we have it, that
it springs from our recognition of others.” Someone who did not feel the tug
of moral obligation when confronted with another person had to be considered
blind to the other’s personhood. “Morality is based on the fact that other persons
exist.”
A person, as Rawls defined it, was a complex entity, “one who has wants and
interests, who experiences emotions like fear, grief, etc.; and who normally has the
natural attitudes we have been discussing; a person is rational, is able to deliberate
and decide; is able to state intentions and memories.”68 One acknowledged this
sort of entity through one’s reactions; in Rawls’s view, the reaction and the
63
64
65
66
67
68
See Axel Hägerström, Inquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals, trans. C. D. Broad
(Uppsala, 1953). Rawls regularly framed his arguments against Hägerström in the mid1950s.
John Rawls, “The Concept of Morality and the Person,” Folder 18, Box 34, Rawls Papers
(folder henceforth “MF/Rawls”), 7.
The two essays can be roughly dated by their references.
John Rawls, “Talk on the Concept of Morality,” MF/Rawls, 3.
Rawls, “Morality and the Person,” 12, original emphasis. Compare Rawls, SF, 111: “Persons
as such exist.”
Rawls, “Morality and the Person,” 12.
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acknowledgment were inseparable. He wrote that he wished to reject one possible
interpretation of Wittgenstein: that we might first see the people with whom we
interact in a form of life and then choose our attitude towards them, deciding
to respond in accordance with “morality” out of prudence. Foot and Toulmin’s
arguments could be given this gloss. Rawls disagreed. As he wrote, “We do not
choose the ultimate principles of our morality. Not to have some natural variant
on morality would make one, in a natural use of the word, insane. And this is,
in some sense, a justification of morality.”69 So morality is discovered rather
than chosen. Society may provide the soil that nurtures moral growth, but the
potential to respond to other people with appropriate “natural attitudes” was
already contained within the seed of each person’s nature. Indeed, the capacity
for recognition of others was key to one’s own personhood; not only did one
need to accommodate others in order to live within society, but one was only
fully a person in a community of mutual recognition.
So when adults truly teach morality to children—rather than merely
compelling obedience—they teach perception. “We lead them to perceive the
connection with the thoughts and feelings of other persons,” Rawls wrote. “We
teach them perception; and in affection we give them perception.”70 The child’s
natural capacity for compassion, he argued, must be extended and systematized
to become a coherent “morality.” While this progression is not automatic, it
is normal. Freud, Rawls claimed, had tried and failed to find a rationalistic,
egoistic, or hedonistic explanation for compassion. But genuinely other-directed
compassion evaded such explanations.71 It was instead a fundamental human
impulse, constitutive of being a person and perceiving other persons.
taking the moral point of view
In describing morality as a matter of accurately perceiving the world of
persons, Rawls echoed what he had said in his 1954 class on Christian ethics
about seeking an orientation that allowed one to “see” the Kingdom of God
and live appropriately in light of that vision. Rawls was one among a number
of contemporaries in the 1950s and early 1960s pursuing “moral-point-of-view”
(MPV) theories.72 Not all of these thinkers were interested in Christian ethics.
But whereas some identified the MPV with society’s perspective on morality, or
else thought that taking the MPV entailed grounding one’s ethical arguments
69
70
71
72
John Rawls, “Notes on Concept of Morality & Compassion,” ET/Rawls, original emphasis.
Rawls, “Morality and the Person,” 12.
John Rawls, “Topic IX: Compassion,” Folder 19, Box 34, Rawls Papers, 2.
For a critical retrospective account of this movement see Kai Nielsen, “Moral Point of
View Theories,” CRITICA, 31/93 (1999), 105–16.
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on good reasons of certain kinds, Rawls and several other philosophers believed
that considering something from the MPV ultimately meant seeing the moral
state of affairs as it actually is. The Americans who asserted this—most notably
Rawls, Roderick Firth, and William Frankena—shared a background and ongoing
interest in Protestant Christian ethics.
Roderick Firth had encountered the Society of Friends during college at
Haverford; like the undergraduate Rawls, he plunged into serious religion
and serious philosophy simultaneously, and his Quaker philosophy professors
encouraged him in both. Having served time in a conscientious-objector work
camp, Firth finished his doctorate at Harvard under C. I. Lewis in 1943, then taught
at the College of William and Mary and Swarthmore before eventually returning
to Harvard.73 Firth’s published work was chiefly in epistemology, defending a
radical empiricist position indebted to the philosophy of Lewis and George
Berkeley. Throughout his career, however, Firth taught almost as much in ethics
as in epistemology.74 And his 1952 article “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal
Observer” became an important touchstone for Rawls and his fellow ethical
theorists.
Firth described his “ideal-observer” theory of ethics as an “absolutist” and
“dispositional” theory, meaning that it held true regardless of the identity of the
moral agent yet was concerned with how that agent would be disposed to react
in a given set of conditions. In other words, Firth’s view of objective morality was
not a set of rules to abide by but rather a perspective to inhabit. This approach
to ethics required a picture of an “ideal observer,” whose characteristics Firth
specified on the basis of common objections as to why certain dispositions fail
to meet the moral standard. Thus the ideal observer had to be omniscient with
respect to nonethical facts, powerfully imaginative, disinterested, dispassionate,
consistent across time, and otherwise normal. The hypothetical reactions of this
imagined agent constituted the standard of truth or falsity of ethical statements.75
Firth’s contemporary Henry Aiken characterized the ideal observer “as an
attempt to clarify the doctrine of a disinterested or impartial spectator which,
in one form or another, is to be found in the writings of Hutcheson, Hume,
73
74
75
See John Rawls, “Roderick Firth: His Life and Work,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 51/1 (1991), 109–18. As department chair, Firth brought Rawls to Harvard, where
they were colleagues for twenty-five years. When Firth died in 1987, it was Rawls who
gathered his papers together. Rawls left extensive comments and most of his own annotated
reprints of Firth’s articles in the Firth collection at the Harvard archives.
John Troyer, ed. In Defense of Radical Empiricism: Essays and Lectures by Roderick Firth
(Lanham, MD, 1998), 1–11.
Roderick Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 12/3 (1952), 317–45.
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Adam Smith, and Kant.”76 But he contended that Firth’s theory constructed too
deep a gulf between real moral agents and the God-like perspective of morality.77
Firth agreed that “any plausible description of an ideal observer will be a partial
description of God, if God is conceived to be an infallible moral judge,” but did
not see this as a problem.78 “If, for example, the Christian conception of God has
influenced our conception of an ideal observer, then, if an absolutist dispositional
analysis is correct, it has influenced the very meaning of ethical statements,” Firth
wrote.79 Where Anscombe believed that the historical link between ideas of God
and moral terminology discredited the use of such terminology by the nontheist,
Firth thought this connection just meant that one needed a God’s-eye view to
speak about morals.
Richard Brandt, Firth’s Swarthmore colleague, considered the “ideal observer”
one of the best new developments in ethics, able to explain why “moral experience
is distinctively a union of cognition and emotion.” But in a published debate he
tried to convince Firth to replace his absolutist interpretation with a relativist
one.80 Having conducted his own research into the ethics of the Hopi, a native
tribe in the American Southwest, Brandt had become convinced that two ideal
observers of different cultural backgrounds could come to different but equally
legitimate ethical conclusions even in light of all Firth’s constraints.81 Firth,
however, would not yield on this point; he insisted that the ideal observer
constituted a solution to the problem of ethics precisely because any set of
ideal observers would have the same ethically significant reactions to the same
case.82
In an important exchange of letters in November 1955, Rawls told Brandt that
he agreed with Firth in this respect. Like Firth, Rawls believed that ethics had
to presume the possibility of universal agreement, even though such agreement
might never be realized in practice.83 As Rawls wrote to Brandt,
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
Henry D. Aiken, “The Concept of Moral Objectivity,” in Aiken, Reason and Conduct,
134–70, at 152.
Aiken, “Moral Philosophy and Education,” in Aiken, Reason and Conduct, 3–32, at 23.
Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” 333.
Ibid., 341.
Richard B. Brandt, “The Definition of an ‘Ideal Observer’ Theory in Ethics,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 15/3 (1955), 407–13, at 407–8.
Richard Brandt, Hopi Ethics (Chicago, 1954).
Roderick Firth, “Reply to Professor Brandt,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
15/3 (1955), 414–21, at 414.
So both Firth and Rawls were committed to what Amartya Sen has called “open
impartiality,” even though Sen coined that term in contrast to the “closed impartiality”
of the older Rawls’s seemingly more narrow vision. See Amartya Sen, “Open and Closed
Impartiality,” Journal of Philosophy, 99/9 (2002), 445–69.
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to the mountaintop again
What I have always felt about this question is the following: that if we once became
convinced that it is the case that different peoples (cultures) have different ethical
principles, and that there is no possibility of rational argument for different peoples
to convince one another that at least one of them should give up their principles, then I
think we would say that in a sense there is no such thing as right & wrong. Or to use a
rather special expression, if the explications of different peoples’ moral judgments were
incompatible, and if this incompatibility were “final”, so to speak, then we would say there
is no such thing as right & wrong. That is, as these concepts are, they are incompatible
with this situation’s obtaining; so that if we believed it did obtain, our use of moral words
would radically change.84
Like Firth, Rawls thought that moral terms had to exert the same claims on all
people.
This view was consistent with his belief that the very concept of morality
was grounded in human nature, specifically the natural capacity to perceive and
respond to persons as persons. If a shared human nature was the wellspring of
morality, then any project in ethical theory had to aim to include all human
beings or else fail at the outset. This deep commitment to universalism runs
through all of Rawls’s writing in the 1950s; for the same reason, in his talk to
the Methodists a year later, he declared his continuing allegiance to universal
salvation as the necessary fruition of any morally defensible religious vision. The
parallel is hardly surprising, since Rawls’s Christian ethics had been grounded
since the early 1940s in the imperative to treat every person as a person and
establish universal community.
Importantly, however, Rawls did not use his postulation of a universally correct
“moral point of view” to argue for enforced moral conformity. Instead, since the
blueprint for right treatment of others was embedded in human nature, an
approximation of moral truth could only be “known and sifted in the common
sense of right,” by appealing to good reasons and general ethical criteria within
the human community. Likewise, Firth did not think that the ideal observer,
who could only be an imagined and thus contestable figure, served to end moral
debate. Instead, Firth was using the ideal observer to express his conviction—
shared with Rawls—that morality aimed at an objectively better, higher viewpoint
that really did reveal the moral state of affairs more clearly. As their ally Frankena
put it, “even ‘ultimate’ moral judgments (principles, etc.) can be justified by the
‘facts’ when they are reviewed from the moral point of view.”85 Brandt and Aiken
84
85
“John Rawls to Richard Brandt, 7 November 1955,” in “Meaning and Justification in Ethics,”
Box 6, Richard B. Brandt Papers (9837 Aa 2), at Bentley Historical Library, University of
Michigan.
William Frankena to John Rawls, 12 Feb. 1958, Folder 1, Box 19, Rawls Papers, 2.
Frankena was summarizing the view he had expounded in “Yale Lectures, 1957,” Box 10,
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thought that a variety of moral lenses could be valid, while Toulmin and Foot
implied that morality served to equip everyone in a society with the same tint
of lens in order to minimize conflict. But for Firth, Rawls, and Frankena, what
made morality worth studying was that one could truly be more or less correct
in one’s perception of and reaction to fellow human beings. The aim of moral
thinking was to move from blindness to sight.
Of course, since human beings “see through a glass, darkly,” actual agreement
on moral questions would be variable and provisional.86 But the promise
of hypothetical agreement was nonetheless deeply important to these ethical
theorists, as important as the promise of the Kingdom of God was to living as a
Christian in the imperfect present. Both the “ideal observer” and the “Kingdom
of God” offered a perspective that one could attempt to inhabit while making
ethical decisions. Neither was ever fully realized, yet “not one second in time
can separate one’s coming to understand and desire it from at least a partial
participation in the fruition of it,” to use Rawls’s words about the Kingdom. To
adopt these vantage points was to catch a glimpse of the moral, interpersonal
world as it truly was, suffused with value. Frankena made the connection between
these visions explicit. In his 1966 presidential address to the Western Division of
the American Philosophical Association, entitled “On Saying the Ethical Thing,”
he declared,
As for me and my house, therefore, we will continue to serve the Lord—or, as others
may prefer to say, the Ideal Observer. For Tennyson seems to me to be right in a sense
(not his own) when he says, “The good, the true, the pure, the just—/ Take the charm
‘Forever’ from them / and they crumble into dust.” Take from them the claim to an
eventual agreement of all rational beings and they collapse into mere expressions and
tools of feeling, desire, and will.87
In other words, absent the promise of a universal ethical vision, one was back in
the clutches of the emotive theorists.
christian and philosophical ethics still entangled
Chairman of the University of Michigan’s philosophy department from 1947
to 1961, William Frankena was widely respected for his work on ethics and its
86
87
William K. Frankena Papers (9538 Aa 2), Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
(henceforth “Frankena Papers”).
1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV. The full verse captures the longing for interpersonal recognition:
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but
then shall I know even as also I am known.”
William K. Frankena, “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association, 39 (1965–6), 21–42, at 41.
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to the mountaintop again
history.88 Raised in the Dutch Reform tradition, he had shifted to the Presbyterian
Church after attending Calvin College. But like Firth, who served as clerk of the
Cambridge Friends Meeting, he remained a churchgoer. For both philosophers,
an interest in the interrelationship between religion and ethics extended into
administrative activities. Frankena launched Michigan’s Program for the Study
of Religion,89 while Firth was involved in setting up Harvard’s Committee on
Degrees in Religion.90 Their correspondence often touched on these parallel
efforts; when Firth engineered Rawls’s coming to Harvard in 1962, for example,
he asked Frankena to send a supporting letter on Rawls’s behalf and commented
that Rawls might “help out in our Philosophy of Religion program. (Jack once
planned a career in the ministry).”91
Though not a Christian ethicist, Frankena kept abreast of the field. In
“Ethical Theory in America since 1930,” the magisterial hundred-page survey he
contributed to the 1964 volume Philosophy, he devoted a full chapter to “Religious
Ethics and the Existentialists.” Frankena pointed out that theologians were
leading the way in applying normative ethics to public affairs and were offering
“some of our most serious analyses of moral experience and moral psychology.”
Moral philosophers could learn from them on these scores. Furthermore, since so
many academic philosophers celebrated the ideal of ethical consensus between
thoughtful people, they should not ignore the fact that “there is one ethical
theory which has been and still is widely accepted, especially in Judaic-Christian
circles, namely, the ethics of love.” Frankena suggested that philosophers
attend to “agapism”; perhaps “love” rather than “utility” best complemented
considerations of “justice.” Certainly, Frankena commented, “Judeo-Christian
conceptions have become a part of our ordinary moral consciousness,” entangled
with the Western concept of morality, so “any philosophical attempt to elucidate
or reform our moral ways of thinking must take them seriously.”92 This was
roughly the same point that Firth had made in 1952: the moral point of view was
tied up with a religious ethical perspective.
88
89
90
91
92
David A. Hollinger, “Academic Culture at the University of Michigan, 1938–1988,” in
Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, 1996), 121–54.
“Report of the Committee on Religion,” in “Activities—Committee on Religion,” Box 14,
Frankena Papers.
Roderick Firth to Rogers Albritton, 1 Nov. 1966, “RF Corr: Albritton,” Papers of Roderick
Firth, collection of John Troyer, Storrs, CT (henceforth “Firth/Troyer”). The vast majority
of Firth’s papers are privately held by his former student, John Troyer, to whom I am
grateful for access and gracious hospitality.
Roderick Firth to William Frankena, 31 May 1961, in “Letters of Recommendation, ’51–’69,”
Box 14, Frankena Papers.
Frankena, “Ethical Theory,” 433.
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But Frankena thought that Christian ethics also had much to learn from
analytic philosophy, as he argued in “Love and Principle in Christian Ethics,”
his contribution to Alvin Plantinga’s 1964 volume Faith and Philosophy. The
thrust of Frankena’s argument was similar to Rawls’s comment on Ramsey in
1951: Christian ethics had to abide by the same rules as philosophical ethics and
should therefore match its rigor. So Frankena sorted contemporary Christian
thinkers into a taxonomy of metaethical varieties of “agapism.”93 The leading
Christian ethicists Frankena cited were all well known to Rawls; he had taken
his first undergraduate religion classes with George Thomas; drawn on Emil
Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings in his senior honors thesis; reviewed
Paul Ramsey’s book; and watched Paul Tillich jump to the defense of Rawls’s
doctoral adviser, Walter Stace, in 1949. Frankena’s essay therefore underscores
how thoroughly exposed Rawls had been to contemporary currents in midcentury Christian ethics, even though by 1964 Rawls was no longer still writing
in the field.
Furthermore, Frankena’s contemporaneous writings in Christian and
philosophical ethics help to make explicit some of the connections implicit in
Rawls’s work. For example, Frankena wrote in 1961, “There is a different kind
of ‘revelation’ which is sometimes said to be necessary as a basis for morality,
namely, the ‘realization’ of other people as persons whose lives have the same
‘inner significance’ that ours have.”94 Speaking of the same thing in 1958, he had
asserted,
This moral imagination of the lives of others is the one thing needful above all else;
perhaps it cannot be taught in any literal sense, but any endeavor of moral education is
sadly wanting if it fails to do what can be done to develop it or bring it about. If religion has
any direct bearing on moral education, it must be here; James, in fact, calls this “widening
of vision” an “increase of religious insight.”95
Firth agreed that imagination was a crucial component of correct moral
judgment. As he wrote in 1952, “our failure to treat strangers like brothers is
in large part a result of our inability to imagine the joys and sorrows of strangers
as vividly as those of our siblings. These facts seem to indicate that the ideal
observer must be characterized by extraordinary powers of imagination.”96 Rawls
93
94
95
96
William K. Frankena, “Love and Principle in Christian Ethics,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed.,
Faith and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI, 1964), 203–25, at 204.
William K. Frankena, “Public Education and the Good Life,” Harvard Educational Review,
31/4 (1961), 413–26, at 425.
William K. Frankena, “Towards a Philosophy of Moral Education” (originally published
in Harvard Educational Review, 28/4 (1958), 300–13), in Israel Scheffler, ed., Philosophy
and Education: Modern Readings, 2nd edn (Boston, 1966), 225–44, at 243.
Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” 335.
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concurred; in his 1951 article “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” he
argued that a competent judge needed the capacity to assess the interests of
others by means of “imaginative appreciation,” thereby achieving “sympathetic
knowledge” beyond the judge’s own experience.97
Rawls’s standards for a “competent judge” were meant to be attainable, whereas
Firth’s “ideal observer” was clearly superhuman. But neither picture was actually
intended to provoke a yearning for an authoritative moral sage, human or divine.
Instead, Rawls and Firth were seeking to goad the ordinary moral agent into
considering what she might be blind to in her own judgments. In Rawls’s later
writings, the thought experiment of the “original position” behind the “veil of
ignorance” became this mental spur. By imagining what it would be like to be
imaginative—even if in the interest of optimizing one’s own lot—one’s actual
imaginative capabilities might be exercised and expanded.
But why should imagination be regarded as so key to moral thinking? One
hint is given by Firth’s use of “omnipercipient” as shorthand for an enhanced
imaginative capacity. Firth, like Rawls, thought that correct moral judgment was
linked to accurate perception—imagination afforded the ability to perceive the
reality of other persons’ inner lives. From the “moral point of view” one saw
the world of persons as it is, aided by sympathetic imagination as by a faculty of
sight. And Firth, Rawls, and Frankena all thought that the possession of at least an
embryonic version of this faculty was natural, which is why helping children learn
to use it was healthy development, rather than social indoctrination into arbitrary
norms. These philosophers embraced what Rawls termed the “natural basis of
morality,” and in describing that natural basis both Firth and Rawls grounded
their moral theories in the “ethics of love” that Frankena had suggested recovering
from Christian ethics. For Firth and for Rawls, it was love within the family that
first activated one’s imaginative capacity to see other people as full persons.
the role of love in moral recognition
In lectures he delivered in the 1960s, Firth explicitly borrowed Frankena’s
phrase “agapism” and extended his own idea from 1952 that to take the moral
point of view was to see distant others as siblings. The absence of such an attitude,
he thought, was the source of utilitarianism’s moral failure, as exemplified in the
Vietnam War. Agapism offered the restraint on hubris that utilitarianism lacked.
In a 1963 lecture Firth urged his philosophy students to consider it as an ethical
rather than religious stance, even though he would derive it from “the life and
words of Jesus.”98 The doctrine of love, Firth wrote, “enjoins us to settle our
97
98
John Rawls, “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” 179.
Roderick Firth, “Lecture on Agapism,” in “RF: ‘Agapism,’” Firth/Troyer, 1–2.
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moral problems by adopting a certain attitude,” that of a brother towards his
siblings:
If he is conceived as a normal flesh and blood brother, not a utilitarian calculating machine,
there will be a limit to the amount of suffering that he will be able to inflict on them for
the sake of what he considers to be their future benefit or the benefit of other brothers.
“I take this to be an obvious fact about human nature,” he added.99
In other words, there was nonequivalence between love of humanity as
an abstract ideal—such as was arguably embodied in utilitarianism—and the
natural sentiment of brotherly love. Firth made clear that agapism entailed
taking “love” seriously as an emotion, as something felt that allowed one to see
others correctly.100 In November 1969, addressing anti-Vietnam War protestors
in Harvard’s Memorial Church, Firth sharpened the point:
It is just not true, I think, as a matter of psychological fact, that a rational man who loves
his brothers would be willing to burn some of them alive in napalm because the available
evidence makes it somewhat probable that in ten or twenty or fifty years this evil would
be overweighed by a greater good for all.
Feeling the proper horror at making such a calculation was what Firth called “the
principle of humility.” “Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said that
we must have the humility of the child in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,”
he opined.101 So Firth too, like Rawls in the mid-1950s, identified entrance into
the Kingdom of Heaven with the adoption of an ethical outlook modeled in the
Gospel.
By the 1960s, Rawls was no longer engaging directly with Christian ethics,
unlike Firth and Frankena. But like these fellow “moral-point-of-view” theorists,
he too saw the process of learning to adopt a correct moral attitude as undergirded
by the model of familial love. In a paper he delivered at a May 1961 conference
on moral education and subsequently revised into his 1963 article “The Sense of
Justice,” Rawls described his theory of the connection between natural attitudes
and moral feelings.102 Each implied the other, he argued in 1961, so human nature
was inextricably tied up with being moral. Despite acknowledging an aversion
to excluding anyone, Rawls consistently held that someone devoid of the natural
99
100
101
102
Ibid., 9–10.
Ibid., 12.
Roderick Firth, “Two Kinds of Humility,” Moratorium Address, 14 Nov. 1969, in “Firth:
Papers 1960s,” Roderick Firth Papers, Unprocessed Accession 15015, Harvard University
Archives, 9–13, at 13.
The original title was “The Sense of Justice: Moral Feelings & Natural Attitudes,” Folder
7, Box 36, Rawls Papers.
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to the mountaintop again
attitudes that foster moral sensitivity would hardly be human.103 In describing
how this capacity ordinarily developed, Rawls borrowed much from the child
psychologist Jean Piaget, particularly from his 1932 book The Moral Judgment of
the Child. Piaget was the premier researcher at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute
(a “flagship of child study movements in Europe”), and both he and Rawls
were heavily influenced by Rousseau’s Emile.104 Rawls saw himself as adopting
Rousseau’s view when he asserted that “the sense of justice is no mere moral
conception formed by the understanding alone, but a true sentiment of the heart
enlightened by reason, the natural outcome of our primitive affections.”105 In
other words, justice had a twofold basis in reason and human nature; attachment
to normative principles grew out of facts about moral psychology.
Those “facts” took the form of an elaborate three-stage story of child
development, adapted from Piaget, in which a child’s widening spheres of
interaction lead him or her to first feel a sense of moral obligation to parents, then
to peers, and finally to social principles. Without such an account of the source of
felt obligation to morality, Rawls thought, there would be no basis for expecting
people to abide by morality or justice when it was counter to their own immediate
interests.106 He retained this account in Part III of A Theory of Justice,107 where its
importance as a source of stability has been appreciated but not its full significance
as the solution to the crucial problem of moral motivation in Rawls’s decade-long
construction of a theory of human nature.108 That theory of human nature was
grounded in the capacity for love as a “psychological law.”109 A young child,
Rawls thought, is first prompted to feel genuine love for a parent—rather than
just selfish recognition of aligned interests—by seeing that the parent loves him
or her without self-interested motives. This discovery that people can be otherregarding inspires the child to reciprocate—extra-rationally—with love for the
parent. Thus begins the process of responding to other people with compassion
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
John Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman
(Cambridge, MA, 2001) (hereafter CP), 96–116, at 112–13.
Yen Hsueh, “Piaget in the United States, 1925–1971,” in Ulrich Müller, Jeremy I. M.
Carpendale, and Leslie Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Piaget (Cambridge,
2009), 344–70, at 345.
Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” 96. Rawls attributed the idea to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (London, 1979), 211–53. Rather than uniting the two traditions
Michael Frazer discusses, Rawls relied on a figure—Rousseau—who fits in neither camp.
See Michael L. Frazer, “John Rawls: Between Two Enlightenments,” Political Theory, 35/6
(2007), 756–80, at 758.
Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” 100.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 405–16 (hereafter TJ).
Brian Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Ethics, 105/4 (1995), 874–915.
Rawls again attributed this insight to Rousseau, Emile, 213.
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and, eventually, with feelings of moral obligation; it is from family relationships
that people first learn the attitude of sympathy which proper morality then
extends to all persons.110 Rawls thought that the initial leap of love brings the
child into the moral world, the world of relations in which people are treated as
people rather than as instruments for, obstacles to, or objects of desire. Moral
development was about learning to see and respond to this relational reality more
fully, a reality Rawls had first affirmed in his undergraduate thesis and continued
to affirm in the moral theory on which he would build A Theory of Justice.
the natural basis of justice
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rawls began to focus his published work
on the topic of justice, but he viewed this inquiry as a direct extension of his
work on morality. His moral theory, for example, undergirded his invention
of the famous thought experiment of the “original position,” as a remarkable
unpublished paper from the mid-1950s demonstrates. In “The Two-Fold Basis of
Justice,” Rawls articulated two distinct bases for a just-decision procedure that
would subsequently intertwine into the original position. The first way to show
that certain principles of justice ought to be accepted, he argued, was to show that
they are “principles which persons whose interests are egoistic with respect to
one another can accept.” Egoistic individuals could only expect to convince one
another to accept principles of equal treatment, unless they could demonstrate
the clear benefit to all of doing otherwise. Rawls called this “the conventional
basis” of justice.
Yet Rawls also saw another possible basis for the principles of justice, and he
focused his essay on this latter option. Alternatively, he continued,
The principles of justice reflect the judgments of one whose aim it would be to care for all
interests equally, to pay due attention to them all, and to take them all into account. Any
one who feels for the interests of others, indeed any one who recognizes them as persons,
and who is at the same time impartial between them, will judge that their interests should
be treated equally and differences be allowed only where it is to the advantage of every
one’s interests alike.
This basis for justice Rawls called “the natural basis,” because he believed it
to be anchored in the recognition of other persons, the capacity for which was
embedded in human nature. While a group of egoists would still find the resulting
principles acceptable, the second basis for justice does not treat this fact as
fundamental. Instead, this second basis “simply invokes the thought that morality,
110
John Rawls, “Necessary Distinction in Regard to Sympathy,” Folder 15, Box 34, Rawls
Papers, 2.
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and in particular justice, is imbedded in the act of recognizing persons as persons:
justice is the reciprocal recognition of persons as persons,” Rawls wrote, explicitly
identifying justice as a species of morality.111
Rawls’s twofold basis of justice can aid interpretation of the “analytic
construction,” the prototype of the “original position” that Rawls presented in
“Justice as Fairness” in 1958. Since the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls’s
readers have debated whether the original position ought to be imagined as a
genuinely deliberative process or as a thought experiment for a single rational
person. The argument of “The Two-Fold Basis of Justice” suggests that this
confusion may have its root in Rawls trying to wrap both these procedures up
together. Supposed egoists get together to agree on principles, but they are placed
behind a veil of ignorance to enforce impartiality. And the basis for their equal
standing is taken by Rawls to be that they are all “moral persons,” capable of a
sense of justice—of recognizing other people as people.112 So while he couched
the original position in the language of egoistic actors, Rawls seems to have
constructed a model whereby each of the participants would be placed in the
position of the impartial, equally sympathetic judge of the second, natural basis
for justice.
In other words, justice is what would result if everyone always recognized
everyone else’s personhood. But rather than hoping for an epidemic of saintliness,
Rawls knew such a standard could only be upheld if embedded in institutions.
In any specific case, the particular people involved could not be expected to see
the situation as reflectively as justice requires. In a passage that might surprise
those who criticize Rawls for moral idealism, he mused that he used to think that
“it was a weakness of men that they couldn’t judge their own case, couldn’t be
impartial in their own case. But I now think this not only in a sense impossible,
but it would be wrong to be impartial in one’s own case, especially if it related to
our wives & children etc. Here we should be partial.”113 Believing as he did that
morality grew from the root of partial, familial affection, he could not bemoan this
natural attitude. Instead, he argued, moral persons institute impartial procedures
of justice so as to leave themselves free to be partial in their own cases without
undermining the recognition of persons.
Rawls did not, however, mean by this to accept the “conventional” view of
justice, whereby agreed procedures are merely a compromise settlement between
egoists. Instead, social institutions were valuable because they enabled people to
111
112
113
John Rawls, “The Two-Fold Basis of Justice,” Folder 1, Box 9, Rawls Papers (folder
henceforth “TF/Rawls”), 1, original emphasis.
Rawls, TJ, 17.
John Rawls, “Independent Discussion of the Sentiment of Justice,” TF/Rawls, original
emphasis.
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live coherently in light of their capacity to recognize others. Rawls described the
conditions of considered judgment not as artificial but as eliminating anything
that might inhibit or distort “free and full play for the natural reactions of
recognition.”114 As he wrote in “Justice as Reciprocity,” the extended 1958 version
of “Justice as Fairness,” justice “is the first moral concept generated when one
steps outside the bounds of rational self-interest.”115 And as his “psychological
construction” made clear, he thought that most people made their first toddling
steps beyond that bound in infancy. The capacity for a sense of justice was
identical with the capacity to recognize other persons as persons, without which
one could hardly function as a person oneself.116 Possessing a sense of justice was
Rawls’s ultimate criterion for inclusion in the original position.117 This capacity
would enable people to imagine the lives of others and reason about acceptable
principles behind the hypothetical veil of ignorance. But even more importantly,
in a world in which the veil never actually drops, that capacity to recognize
personhood prompted people to accept the idea of common principles mutually
binding on all persons. “Only if such acknowledgment is possible can there be true
community between persons in their common practices; otherwise their relations
will appear to them as founded to some extent on force and circumstance,” Rawls
wrote.118
The use of the phrase “true community” is striking. Just as in his undergraduate
thesis, Rawls was suggesting that people belonged in community with one
another, and that the condition for such community was mutual recognition
of each another’s personhood. In a passage Rawls had cited approvingly in 1942,
the theologian Emil Brunner wrote,
Man is man to the exact extent in which he lives in love. The degree of his alienation from
love is the degree of his inhumanity. The distinctively human element is not freedom,
nor intellectual creative power, nor reason. These are rather the conditions of realization
of man’s real human existence, which consists in love. They do not contain their own
meaning, but their meaning is love, true community.119
114
115
116
117
118
119
John Rawls, “Concept of Morality and Conditions of Considered Judgments,” MF/Rawls,
3.
“Justice as Reciprocity” appears in Rawls’s Collected Papers under the year it was finally
published (1971) rather than 1958, when it was written.
Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” 111: “One who lacks a sense of justice lacks certain
fundamental attitudes and capacities included under the notion of humanity.”
Rawls’s margin notes on Thomas Schelling to John Rawls, 29 Nov. 1965, Folder 2, Box 19,
Rawls Papers.
Rawls, “Justice as Reciprocity,” in Rawls, CP, 190–224, at 209. See also Rawls, “Justice as
Fairness,” in Rawls, CP, 47–72, at 59.
Brunner, Man in Revolt, 74, cited in Rawls, SF, 192–3.
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to the mountaintop again
Rawls explicitly excluded a society of saints from consideration in “Justice as
Fairness”; he no longer imagined that every individual could come to love every
other, nor did he frame his arguments in theological terms. But in some sense
he had not given up his core hope; establishing just institutions offered a way to
ensure that everyone was treated as if regarded with a sympathetic gaze without
demanding that real people achieve impartial sympathy. And Rawls’s vision of
true community, built on mutual recognition between persons, still relied on the
initial spark of love between parents and children and on the natural tendency to
compassion for others. The gradual unlocking of moral perception developed,
he thought, from this “natural basis.”
When it came to anchoring his idea that morality consisted of accurately
perceiving other persons, Rawls’s claims about human nature now served the
purpose that claims about God had served in his undergraduate thesis. The
intensely personal and all-encompassing nature of God’s love in the Christian
tradition had given Rawls warrant to speak of a universal community of
persons. Now he made a kindred argument by asserting that the attitudes
which enabled the sense of justice, the recognition of other persons as persons,
were universal aspects of human nature, and that therefore human beings were
naturally bound up in a joint moral project. As Rawls wrote in “Justice as
Reciprocity,” “The concept of justice is embedded in the thoughts, feelings
and actions of real persons; in studying the concept of justice one is studying
something abstracted from a certain form of life.”120 Despite the modifier
“certain,” he meant the human form of life, adding, “The analysis is pointed
toward a universal moral idea, for every people may be supposed to have
the concept of justice.”121 Rather than appealing to a divine, authoritative
stamp of personhood located outside the human frame, Rawls now used
Wittgenstein’s language to argue that shared concepts of personhood, morality,
and justice were embedded in the structure of human interaction and could
therefore be treated as authoritative and foundational within the human
frame.
That frame marked the end of inquiry. In Wittgenstein’s words, “Once I have
exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then
I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’.”122 Rawls had seized on inductive
logic as the best analogy for ethics after his graduate student sojourn at Cornell,
and he had never taken much interest in deeper metaphysical schemes. Nor did it
trouble Rawls if he fell afoul of Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy.” As he wrote in 1964,
120
121
122
Rawls, “Justice as Reciprocity,” 213.
Ibid., 224.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. edn, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P.
M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford, 2009), §217, 91e.
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“I accept a naturalistic ethical theory (in Moore’s sense); and therefore I hold
that, given appropriate definitions, ought-propositions can be derived from ispropositions.”123 Morality had seemed to him, since his first forays into Christian
ethics, a matter of perception rather than deduction or intuition. “There are
persons!” Rawls declared. Seeing one another as persons is simply what human
beings do.
conclusion
In his 1997 retrospective essay “On My Religion,” Rawls described his
“increasing rejection of many of the main doctrines of Christianity” soon after
the end of World War II. Many readers have interpreted the essay as sufficient
reason to regard the mature Rawls as secular. But Rawls’s chief reason for rejecting
these doctrines—their tendency towards narrow exclusivity—is consonant with
the universalist tenor of his faith from his undergraduate days. He explicitly
stated, “My difficulties were always moral ones, since my fideism remained firm
against all worries about the existence of God.”124 Read carefully, Rawls’s account
describes his becoming too moral for orthodox Christianity, not losing faith. His
testimony in his 1954 lectures on Christian ethics and his 1956 talk on toleration
demonstrate that he retained personal religious convictions after the war, and in
a 1993 interview he reported an affinity with “a religious attitude,” even though
he no longer considered himself “conventionally religious.”125
In the same interview, Rawls characterized his work as having a religious cast:
“I think on the whole I have asked . . . what the actual social institutions have to
be for society to redeem itself as a society. And this I think of as a quasi-religious
question, or indeed it is a religious question.” If there were no possibility of
such redemption, Rawls mused, then one couldn’t regard nature or society as
“good,” and his project seemed pointless.126 But Rawls clung to the idea—shared
with Rousseau, he thought—that “human nature is such that there is a way of
designing institutions so that people can be in a way decent.” Regarding such a
thing as possible, Rawls posited, transformed one’s view of the world even if it
never in fact came about.127
123
124
125
126
127
John Rawls, “The Principle of Fairness and Contractual Obligation (1964),” Folder 5, Box
35, Rawls Papers, 7.
Rawls, “On My Religion,” 263–4. Strikingly, Rawls’s faith was never threatened by science.
Rawls, Pogge interview, track 4. Rawls’s “religious temperament” is also mentioned at
Nagel and Cohen, “Introduction,” 5.
Ibid., track 3. Pogge notes Rawls’s views in this regard at Pogge, John Rawls, 26–7, but his
comments may mistakenly strike readers as his own inference.
Rawls, Pogge interview, track 4.
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So what did “religious” signify for Rawls? Having echoed William James’s
description of the necessary widening of moral vision as an increase of “religious
insight,” Frankena added the caveat that “while it may involve some kind of
regeneration on the part of one who has it, it is not clear that it presupposes any
belief of a specifically religious or theological nature, e.g., the belief that there is
a God or that human beings have immortal souls.”128 Rawls does indeed seem to
have moved away from creedal beliefs of the kind Frankena lists, yet the belief that
one’s attitude towards the world should be tinged by hope for a redeemed human
community is classically theological, and in line with what Rawls had argued since
his undergraduate thesis. This hope, paired with articulation of an ethical vision
rather than defense of theological propositions, perhaps conveys what religious
faith meant for Rawls, Firth, and Frankena. They were not keen to insist that one
must affirm Christian creeds in order to live ethically, yet their efforts in regard to
secular ethics, from the “ideal observer” to the “original position,” often read as
attempts to build secular justifications for ascending to an ethical vantage point
they had first accessed through a religious transformation of the heart.
In recent years, philosophers like Ronald Dworkin and Akeel Bilgrami have
argued for what Dworkin called “religion without God,” the capacity to perceive
that “inherent, objective value permeates everything” in a way that transcends
the natural world yet does not assume a supernatural person at the source.129
In their grounding of morality in accurate perception rather than the authority
of divine prescription, they recapitulate many of the moves that Rawls and his
fellow “moral-point-of-view” theorists made at mid-century. But the differences
are important. If value permeates everything, it is perhaps harder to carve
out a normative space peculiar to persons. For Rawls, the inductive chain of
justifications for morality ended with the deep reality of persons embedded in
community.
The grounding of Rawls’s theory of morals in interpersonal encounter is
part of its specifically Christian legacy. So too is the casting of moral obligation
in an ultimately emotional logic. Dworkin argued that God cannot validate
moral truths, and Rawls agreed that such dictates had to stand up to human
intellectual scrutiny. But Rawls thought that the moral sense had to be awakened
by emotional experience. In his original ethical vision, God was at the center of
interpersonal community, initiating the love that bound it together. In his later
story of moral development, parental love kindled the extra-rational spark of
128
129
Frankena, “Public Education,” 425.
Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 1. For similar claims see
Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment,” in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen,
and Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2010),
145–65.
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genuine regard for other persons in the child. But in both cases, morality had no
purchase except where unselfish love served as the unmoved Mover. Such appeals
to the Christian tradition persist; for example, the sense that the secular world has
no adequate substitute for God’s agape love as a force for moral transformation
is at the heart of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.130 Jürgen Habermas, meanwhile,
speaks of “those moral feelings which only religious language has as yet been able
to give a sufficiently differentiated expression,” though he holds out hope for a
successful secular translation.131
Rawls, Firth, and Frankena brought to their work in philosophical ethics a rich
inheritance from Christian ethics: the idea of persons embedded in community,
the conviction that love is an important undergirding reality, the language of
perception and sight, and the insistence on the universal applicability of the moral
perspective. But they also innovated, seeking to ground their ethics in human
nature and Wittgensteinian frameworks to make it more widely accessible to
nonbelievers. Whether their arguments ultimately succeed is an open question,
but they deserve careful scrutiny unfazed by the fact that such moral philosophy
disregards the religious/secular dichotomy. The history of ethics in America is
inextricably tied to Protestant Christianity, as Bruce Kuklick has made clear
for earlier periods. But the case of these ethical theorists shows that the link
continued after World War II.132 Rawls and his cohort continue to reflect what
Hollinger has called “the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the
Enlightenment.”133
Even if Rawls did not illuminate his era, his persisting influence would be
reason enough to reexamine the role of religious thinking in the moral theory
that underpins A Theory of Justice. For Rawls, transformation to a correct moral
outlook required the taking up of a perspective outside and above oneself in order
to perceive the whole world of beloved persons in which one was enmeshed—the
Kingdom of God. He never discarded this idea. Indeed, his account of such a shift
in perception in the 1954 lectures on Christian ethics offers a stunning resonance
with one of the most famous phrases of his magnum opus. Describing the effects
130
131
132
133
Taylor, A Secular Age, 279–80 and 312.
Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Eduardo Mendieta, ed., The Frankfurt
School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York, 2005), 327–38,
at 335–6. On Habermas’s evolving views on religion see Peter E. Gordon, “Between
Christian Democracy and Critical Theory: Habermas, Böckenförde, and the Dialectics
of Secularization in Postwar Germany,” Social Research, 80/1 (2013), 173–202.
Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000(Oxford, 2001), xii. Cf. ibid.,
199, where Kuklick is too quick to dismiss Rawls as part of a postwar period of “narrow
concerns” in American philosophy.
David Hollinger, “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the
Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” Daedalus, 141/1 (2012), 76–88.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244315000268 Published online by Cambridge University Press
to the mountaintop again
of the new moral perspective laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, Rawls wrote,
“I like to think of the New Righteousness as the conditions of sight: this sort
of a connection: if one becomes ‘pure in heart’ then one will ‘see’ God.”134 This
phrasing must have echoed in his head across a span of seventeen years, for
Rawls concluded A Theory of Justice with a remarkably similar affirmation of the
perspective afforded by the original position: “Purity of heart, if one could attain
it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this
point of view.”135 Both in the Sermon on the Mount and from the standpoint
of the original position, the individual’s own personal agenda is replaced with a
radically widened perspective on the world of persons. It seems that Rawls had
been to the mountaintop.
134
135
John Rawls, “The Sermon on the Mount,” CE/Rawls, 3.
Rawls, TJ, 514.
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185