Cohen’s Objection
A.
The Problem of inequality-generating incentives.
1.
Lax interpretation of Diff principle permits workers to be self-interested in
their market behaviour.
2.
`Strict interpretation require that workers adopt an egalitarian ethos in their
market behaviour.
Example: Career Choices
3.
The strict principle prohibits a wider range of inequalities than the lax
principle.
4.
Rawls’s arguments favour the strict principle.
5.
Rawls’s conclusions about the degree of permissible inequality rely on the lax
principle.
B.
Basic Structure Argument: Reply to Cohen
1.
2.
3.
Rawls states that the difference principle applies to the basic structure.
an egalitarian ethos is not part of the basic structure
Rawls’s arguments do not favour the strict principle.
A Dilemma for B.
Basic structure = either
a) legally enforced rule or
b) profoundly influential activities and attitudes
If a) the basic structure restriction is i. arbitrary and ii. implausible.
Example – it permits a sexist domestic ethos.
If b) one cannot claim that an egalitarian ethos is not part of the basic structure.
1
Rawls argues that teleological theories that argue that there is some end that
human beings should strive to realise pursue or even maximise gets things
the wrong way round. They are “radically misconceived” since they relate the
right and the good in the wrong way.
“We should not attempt to give form to our lives by first looking to the
good independently defined [GF e.g. the pursuit of happiness, pleasure
or philosophy]. It is not our aims that primarily reveal our nature, but
rather the principles that we would acknowledge to govern the
background conditions under which these aims are to be formed and
the manner in which they are to be pursued. For the self is prior to the
ends which are affirmed by it.” TJ 560.
Rawls maintains that individual selves, both in the original position and
in society itself, reserve the right to refine and revise their life projects
even their deepest ends and attachments.
B.
Sandel’s Objections
Rawls’s stipulation that principles of justice be chosen under a veil of
ignorance is supposed to model conditions of fairness and equality by
eliminating any individual or group-specific information by which they can
calculate their own advantage and tailor their distributive principles
accordingly.
According to Sandel, this device has three deleterious effects:

First, it deprives the choosers of any individuating features and
generic differences.

Second, it reduces all participants to one and the same abstract
rational person, and hence it cannot tell us anything interesting
about how a plurality of human beings can found a political
association.
2

Third, and worst of all, the single self behind the veil of ignorance is
“incapable of constitutive attachments” and devoid of “constitutive
ends”. Sandel (bizarrely) calls this self “unencumbered” and objects
that it is “wholly without character, without moral depth.”) Sandel
(1982: 179).”1
Sandel’s criticisms were enormously influential. One legacy of his influence is that the
phrase he uses to describe his target “the unencumbered self” is still part of the lingua
franca of political philosophy, even though it makes little sense in ordinary English. 2
N.B.
J. L. Austin’s warning: “One can’t abuse ordinary language
without paying for it.” Austin (1962: 15).
1.
The Unencumbered Self. Wrong conception of the person
2.
Priority of the Right
3.
The Unencumbered self is “wholly without character, without moral
depth”.
4.
Wrong picture of society – no “constitutive attachments” – no
conception of belonging or membership in a community.
1.
Rawl’s liberalism gives a wrong picture of the self.
This critique, as Rawls points out, assigns ontological significance to the
choosers in the original position, who are models, rather than to the real
selves and citizens in the political community whom they model, which
indicates that Sandel has mistaken the status of the original position as a
device of representation.
“The veil of ignorance…has no specific metaphysical implications concerning
the nature of the self” Rawls (2005: 27).
Does the original position contain an implicit social ontology, a picture of what
society is or is supposed to be?
1
This critique, as Rawls points out, assigns ontological significance to the choosers in the original position, who
are models, rather than to the real selves and citizens in the political community whom they model, which
indicates that Sandel has mistaken the status of the original position as a device of representation. “The veil of
ignorance…has no specific metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self” Rawls (2005: 27).
2
What is so odd about Sandel’s phrase is that, in direct contrast to normal English usage, he gives the term
‘encumbered’ an affirmative sense, and the term ‘unencumbered’ a pejorative one. In English, as normally
spoken, it is a bad thing to be ‘encumbered’, i.e. burdened, loaded down, hampered, hindered, and made to
suffer. Thus most people like to see their relations to their nearest and dearest, to their parents and children for
example and to their community and culture as more than just ‘encumbrances’ even if they are not the ones we
ideally would have chosen. Conversely, in usual parlance, it is a good thing not to be encumbered (burdened etc.)
and therefore also good to be ‘unencumbered’. This reminds me of J. L. Austin’s warning: “One can’t abuse
ordinary language without paying for it.” Austin (1962: 15).
3
If not, Rawls might still be in trouble. Rational choosers in the oirignal position
are different from the real citizens they are supposed to model.
Why should persons outside the original position agree to abide by the
principles they chose within it, behind the veil of ignorance, if choosers of the
priniciples are not the same as the agents who must live by them.
2.
The unencumbered Self implies the Priority of the Right
According to Sandel, the picture of unencumbered self’ prior, and at a
distance to, its aims or ends, “rules out the possibility of …constitutive ends”.
“For the unencumbered self, what matters above all, what is most essential to
our personhood are not the ends we choose but our capacity to choose
them.”
“Only if the self is prior to its ends can the right be prior to the good. Only if my
identity is never tied to the aims and interests I may have at any moment can I
think of myself as a free and independent agent.”
The self is a kind of radically unattached, individual chooser, with no
substance.
The Unencumbered self is thus “wholly without character, without moral
depth”.
2.1
Kymlicka’s qualified defence of Rawls.
Rawls’ claim that “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it”
Rawls (1973: 560). This can be interpreted as meaning either
a) in a liberal society no life-project or attachment or end, however deep, is
beyond re-examination and revision, or
b) as the normative claim that each person should be free to interpret and
re-interpret his or her own life as he or she sees fit compatibly with
everyone else’s similar freedom. See Rawls (1973: 560).
When push came to shove Sandel was reluctant to deny either the empirical
or the normative claim. Kymlicka, (1989: 55)
If what Sandel meant by the rejoinder that selves are, pace Rawls,
“encumbered” was only that “some relative fixity of character appears
essential to prevent the lapse into arbitrariness” See Sandel (1982: 180).
Rawls could perfectly well agree.
4
They can, for example, both agree that at any one time some of a person’s
ends are revisable and others not, whilst allowing that there is no fixity
about which ends are fixed and which revisable.
2.2
The encumbered self may be constituted by antecedent attachments and
substantive ends but these are local. They give rise to one of the problems to
which a well-ordered political community is the answer.
MacIntyre: After Virtue
‘…we all approach our own circumstances as the bearers of a particular social
identity. I am sonmeone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle.: I am a
citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this
clan, that tribe, this nation.’
Insofar as this is true, we are not shaped (constituted is just too strong!) or influenced
by our membership in a political community. It is family, locality, and the immediate
environment that shape our ends. (We do not live in Rousseau’s Geneva or his
idealised version of Sparta, or in Aristotle’s Athens.)
These local factors, will determine people’s substantive ends and values differently.
People with different ends and values may well and often do come into conflict or
disagreement with one another. A modern mass large-scale political community must
unite all kinds of different people, with different substantive ends, from different
family and local cultures.
Rawlsian liberalism accepts pluralism and diversity as a fact, and then proposes an
answer – namely that individuals abstract from their substantive ends and conceptions
the good that bring them into conflict and generate disagreement, and unite around
priniciples that are based soley on the values that they have in common.
Communitarians overestimate the shaping and socialising effect of membership in a
political community, they mistakenly assume that a political community will have a
largely homogenous set of substantive values, and have no answer to the problem of
pluralism and diversity.
Communitarian answer will either be – conflict, tyranny of the majority over the
minority, or large-scale social engineering.
3.
Wrong picture of society – no “constitutive attachments” – no
conception of belonging or membership in a community.
Sandel and MacIntyre appear to make two separate sets of objections.
A
Rawls (and liberalism) has the wrong social ontology – wrong picture of the
self and its relation to society.
5
1.
Rawls and liberals in general (including Kant!) give the wrong picture of the
self and society. The liberal self has no “constitutive attachments” it is a
‘ghost’ or a ‘cipher’.
2.
Society and membership in a political community has no pre-eminent or
inherent value. Wrong conception of belonging - Rawlsian selves have a
purely instrumental or prudential relation to the political community.
Community is evacuated of meaning – because all selves are purged of
anything specific and particular in the OP, and are thus made the same by a
device of the philosopher. Of course they agree on the principles because,
having been made the same, it is just as if there is only one of them.)
B.
Liberalism (and liberal ideas) has given rise to a wrong social ontology in a
different sense: it has produced a bad society, fragmented communities,
destroyed the shared understandings and formative attachments of
communities and emptied our lives of shared meaning.
Sandel deplores what he calls “the shift in our practices and
institutions, from a public philosophy of common purposes to one of fair
procedures, from a politics of the good to a politics of right, from the
national republic to the procedural republic.” Communitarinaism and
Liberalism p. 27 (Avinieri and de-Shalit)
He blames Rawls conception of liberalism as a kind of simple reflection of this
wretched state of man’s and women’s alienation from themselves sand their
community
A. and B. when conceived as criticisms of Rawls pull in entirely opposite directions.
If A. is true, then surely B. cannot be.
On the one hand Sandel’s claim seems to be that the picture of the “unencumbered self”
contained in the original position is false, and that the concomitant liberal picture of
society as a “procedural republic”, i.e. as an aggregate of lone, rational, unencumbered
selves who value choice above all things, is also false.3 On the other hand Sandel argues
that the Rawlsian liberal picture of both self and society is true, more is the pity. Here he
makes the normative claim that, due in part to the nefarious influence of liberal ideas and
political theories, self and society have become what liberalism says they are. Liberalism
(among other things) has led to the emergence of an atomised society of self-interested
rational choosers with no orientation to the common good, and is to this extent responsible
3
Sandel (1982) passim; and (1984). The contention here is that Rawlsian liberalism paints the wrong picture of self
and society.
6
for the atrophy of political association and for the increase in feelings of alienation and
disempowerment among citizens.4
It is as though the ‘unencumbered self’ presupposed by the liberal ethic had
begun to come true.” Sandel (1984: 90-96)
Does Rawls give an accurate picture of a ‘wrong’ ‘false’ or bad liberal society (bad
because emptied of shared social meaning and populated by beings alienated from
themselves and each other)?
Or does he give an inaccurate report of a society that has not been so damaged and
emptied of meaning and in which people are actually shaped by communities,
constitutive ends and value their membership in communities and so forth.
This problem arises because Sandel attempts to get a one-size fits all critique of
liberalism (as an historical force) and as Rawlsian theory. And its not clear that when
he is railing against liberalism he’s not actually railing against modernisation and
social forces, and a tide of history that cannot be turned back, certainly not by a
change of philosophy.
C.
What is the actual substantive difference between communitarians and
liberals. How do communitarians theorize about politics and conceive of the
political community? Almost nothing.
What are the real political and social issues between the liberal individualist and the
communitarian?
A) Rawls is making normative claims: that each person should be free to
interpret and re-interprets his or her own life as he or she sees fit;
B) Political claim that establishing the framework of a just well-ordered
society is the central task of politics and political theory.
B) Philosophical claim: that the principles of justice provides a framework
within which this freedom is best assured.
It turns out that there are almost no differences. Communitarians, we have seen, when
pushed don’t deny A).
4
“It is as though the ‘unencumbered self’ presupposed by the liberal ethic had begun to come true.” Sandel
(1984: 90-96) Of course Rawls denies this claim. He maintains that the citizens in a liberal and just society do (or
would) have an orientation to the common good, once this is reinterpreted as an orientation to political values
Rawls (2005: 201-7).
7
They do not disagree with B). (as Nozick and the libertarians do) about the idea that
the advantages of social cooperation should be fairly allocated, and hence that wealth
should be redistributed to the extent that inequalities must at least indirectly benefit
the least well off.
They deny 3. It turns out that they bring mainly philosophical objections to the
argument by which Rawls attempts to establish his principles of justice. Perhaps to the
principles themselves.
But they don’t object to the vision of liberal society he is advancing.
They don’t even disagree about substantive points – say about whether pornography is
morally abhorrent because degrading for women. They disagree about the grounds on
which it should be prohibited – see Kymlicka.
8