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Abstract
This paper proposes an interpretation of the conception of morality that remains relatively vague in John Rawls' political liberalism. It begins with Rawls' remark that the political conception of justice is also a moral conception, which is puzzling when taking into consideration Rawls' explicit avoidance of comprehensive moral doctrines in constructing the political conception of justice. In response, this paper proposes the public conception of morality that is structurally justificatory rather than substantively foundationalist. This conception is then further developed by addressing two critical questions concerning the necessity of avoiding comprehensive moral foundations and the source of objective prescriptivity in a justificatory view of morality. The former is situated in an analysis and reinterpretation of Alasdair MacIntyre's reading of Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, and the latter is demonstrated through a comparative study of two leading justificatory theories of morality by Rainer Forst and Thomas Scanlon. Finally, the public conception of morality is fully developed to show that it both defines and defends the political conception of justice.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to David Rasmussen for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. I also thank Eva Erman and the anonymous reviewers of Ethics & Global Politics for their extremely helpful comments. Finally, I also wish to thank Silvia An for reading and commenting on different versions of this article.
Notes
1 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 11.
2 John Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited', in The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174, Footnote 91; 137, Footnote 19.
3 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24, 14, 17.
4 The (narrower) moral conception in relation to the domain of the political should be distinguished from the (broader) moral conception as such. This paper is primarily concerned with the former, as Rawls' first feature of the political conception of justice suggests. This distinction, as we shall see in the end of the essay, will be developed more fully as the distinction between morality and ethics.
5 I owe this formulation to the helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer. Similar concern has been raised from different angles in recent literatures, but the puzzle regarding Rawls' conception of morality in relation to the domain of the political is never fully addressed. See for instance Marcel Becker, ‘E Pluribus Unum? Critical Comments on John Rawls' Concept of Overlapping Consensus', Religion, State and Society 41, no. 2 (2013): 188–98; Fabian Freyenhagen, ‘Taking Reasonable Pluralism Seriously: An Internal Critique of Political Liberalism', Politics, Philosophy & Economics 10, no. 3 (2011): 323–42; and Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality', Journal of Political Philosophy 16, no. 2 (June 2008): 137–64.
6 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 8.
7 J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1991).
8 Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Rainer Forst, The Rights to Justification, trans. Jeffery Flynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Rainer Forstr;cambridge and malden Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2013).
9 Rawls, Political Liberalism, xv–xvi.
10 Rawls, Political Liberalism, xviii.
11 John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical', Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 223.
12 John Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory', The Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 9, 1980): 519.
13 John Rawls, ‘The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus', in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1999), 486.
14 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 9.
15 Ibid., 8.
16 Ibid., 14.
17 Ibid., 11–13. These three features are repeated on Page 175: ‘first that it is a moral conception worked out for a specific subject, namely, the basic structure of a constitutional democratic regime; second, that accepting the political conception does not presuppose accepting any particular comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine; rather, the political conception presents itself as a reasonable conception for the basic structure alone; and third, that it is not formulated in terms of any comprehensive doctrine but in terms of certain fundamental ideas viewed as latent in the public political culture of a democratic society'.
18 Ibid., 11, Footnote 11.
19 Ibid., 175.
20 This is reasonable justification, which will be distinguished from rational justification that does not necessarily take into consideration other equally rational justifications. In his reply to Habermas, Rawls distinguishes three levels of justification. The first level constitutes merely a pro tanto justification through the representational device of the Original Position, which may be overridden by citizens' comprehensive doctrines. The second level constitutes the full justification, where citizens evaluate the pro tanto argument to see if they can endorse it given their comprehensive doctrines. If so, an overlapping consensus is produced, and the pro tanto argument can be seen as derived from, or congruent with, or at least not in conflict with citizens' diverse but reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Finally, public justification obtains when all reasonable citizens have achieved full justification of the principles of justice, which are publicly known and respected. Thus, the political conception of justice is stable for the right reason, because each citizen is able to find within their own reasonable comprehensive doctrines the support needed to establish political consensus. For a recent attempt to revise the order of priority in Rawls' theory of justification, see Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a critical review of this attempt, see Gerald Gaus, ‘Sectarianism without Perfection? Quong's Political Liberalism', Philosophy and Public Issues 2, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 7–15.
21 In this section, I will use ‘the ethical' and ‘the moral' interchangeably, primarily because both Kierkegaard and Davenport used them interchangeably. However, as we shall see in the end of the essay, morality is to be distinguished from ethics in that the former involves reasonable justification whereas the latter involves only rational justification.
22 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 40.
23 Ibid., 41.
24 Ibid., 42.
25 See John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, eds., Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: and Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue (Chicago and La salle: Open Court, 2001).
26 This is one of the three arguments Davenport developed in response to MacIntyre. For the other two arguments, see John Davenport, ‘The Meaning of Kierkegaard's Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre', in Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, eds. John Davenport and Anthony Rudd (Chicago and La salle: Open Court, 2001), 75–112. For treatment of the other two arguments, see Ian Duckles, ‘Kierkegaard's Irrationalism: A Response to Davenport and Rudd', Southwest Philosophy Review 21, no. 2 (2005): 37–51.
27 According to Frankfurt, besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, ‘men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives' according to some principles or standards that are not reducible to these desires and motives. This higher level will to go through or refrain from going through our basic desires and motives are referred to by Frankfurt as second-order desires or second-order volitions. Based on this distinction, Frankfurt introduces the idea of a wanton addict. Unlike an unwilling addict who has conflicting first-order desires but also has volition of the second order that prevents him from being neutral regarding his first-order desires, a wanton ‘does not prefer that one of this conflicting desires should be paramount over the other; he does not prefer that one first-order desire rather than the other should constitute his will'. In other words, the identity of the unwilling addict is defined by his second-order volition, whereas the identity of the wanton addict is defined by his lack thereof. For Frankfurt, a person who possesses a complete structure of the will must display both first-order desires and second-order volitions. Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person', in The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 63–76.
28 Ibid., 87.
29 Ibid., 88.
30 MacIntyre does offer another explanation. The reason why an agent wishes to remain wanton despite fulfilling conditions (a) and (b) is because the aesthetic can indeed be chosen seriously: ‘I think of those young men of my father's generation who watched their own earlier ethical principles die along with the death of their friends in the trenches in the mass murder of Ypres and the Somme, and who returned determined that nothing was ever going to matter to them again'. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 41.
31 Forst, The Rights to Justification, 33.
32 In Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 49. MacIntyre argues that perhaps the aesthetic can indeed be taken seriously by such people as ‘those young men of my father's generation who watched their own earlier ethical principles die along with the deaths of their friends in the trenches in the mass murder of Ypres and the Somme; and who returned determined that nothing was ever going to matter to them again and invented the aesthetic triviality of the nineteen-twenties'. These aesthetic people are also likely to reject Kantian morality because of its strong foundationalism.
33 This point is captured by the Prichard's dilemma that says that morality cannot be justified. On the one hand, it is circular to appeal to anything moral to justify morality, like saying ‘you ought to do this because it is moral'. On the other hand, it defeats the whole purpose of justifying morality if one appeals to anything other than morality, such as utility and other goods, because a person ceases to be moral if something other than morality actually motivates her. The same Kantian point can also be expressed by making references to Bernard Williams' article ‘Internal and External Reasons', where unless the moral standpoint is already part of the supposedly amoral agent's ‘subjective motivational set', she cannot be said to be motivated by the right reason to be moral; but if she is already subjectively and motivationally moral, it is no longer necessary to persuade her to be moral. See Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons', in Moral Luck: Philosophical Essays 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 101–13.
34 See Kierkegaard's own work, Fear and Trembling for instance.
35 See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religions (New York: Vintage, 2013); Joshua Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul', in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Books, 2014); Sharon Street, ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value', Philosophical Studies 127 (2006), 109–66; Dennis L. Krebs, The Origins of Morality: An Evolutionary Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Robert Trivers, ‘Reciprocal Altruism', in Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
36 Ian Duckles, ‘A (Partial) Defense of MacIntyre's Reading of Kierkegaard', Idealistic Studies 36, no. 2 (2006): 143.
37 A version of this criterionlessness is discussed by Charles Taylor in his account of the rise of the ‘immanent frame', through which a believer experiences her faith as one among many options, none of which can be seen as having a privileged position in society. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539–93. Also see Alessandro Ferrara, The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 69–70. Ulrich Preuβ recently argues that law works as a source of pluralism, in that it facilitates the development of moral and religious pluralism. See Ulrich Preuβ, ‘Law as a Source of Pluralism', Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 4–5 (2015): 357–65.
38 Moreover, according to Mackie, the reason why we think that there is objective value is partly because we adopt a backward causal connection. For instance, ‘it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy'. The correct causal relation will show that different ways of life determine different moral codes, which undermines the objective status of morality. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Kindle Edition (London: Penguin Books, 1990), Location 525.
39 Richard Garner, ‘On the Genuine Queerness of Moral Properties and Facts', in Arguing about Metaethics, eds. Andrew Fisher and Simon Kirchin (London and New York Routledge, 2006),98. Mackie's argument from queerness is sometimes misrepresented. For instance, David Brink's criticism of Mackie focuses on problems of motivation and internalism, and he argues that moral realism can be maintained through what he calls a ‘functionalist theory of moral values' on the basis of a kind of externalism. Motivation is important for Mackie, yet it is not what Mackie primarily means by the term ‘queerness'. See David Brink, ‘Moral Realism and Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness', in Arguing about Metaethics, ed. Andrew Fisher and Simon Kirchin (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 84.
40 Ibid., 98.
41 Ibid., 102.
42 Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Location 564–5.
43 Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, trans. Jeffery Flynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1.
44 Gründe, the German word for reason, implies that reasons establish a supportive ground (Grund), which point Forst takes to mean that the ground created by reasons ‘must therefore be a shared, common basis for justified, well-founded thought and action'. Ibid., 13.
45 Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 153.
46 Ibid., 162.
47 Ibid. It will become clear in the next section that people do not necessarily have to give the same reason for a moral principle to be reasonably justified.
48 Rainer Forst, Context of Justice, trans. John M.M. Farrell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 244.
49 One might of course have amoral reasons not to be moved by a moral demand.
50 As one of the anonymous reviewers correctly pointed out, one need not be a die-hard Kantian to reject these descriptions. Forst, The Right to Justification (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 43.
51 Ibid., 34.
52 To demonstrate this point, Forst accepts the Kantian formulation of duty and further develops it by combining cognition with recognition. According to Forst, ‘the moral person does not first see a human being and then, on the basis of further consideration, come to the conclusion that the other is a moral person. Rather, cognition and recognition are here so interwoven that an “evaluative perception” takes pace'. This ‘evaluative perception' is the knowledge and mutual recognition of a moral authority that Kant would label as respect. Ibid., 59–61.
53 Ibid., 44.
54 Ibid., 5.
55 See Forst, Justification and Critique.
56 Stephen White, ‘Does Critical Theory Need Strong Foundations?' Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 3 (2015): 208.
57 Ibid., 209–10.
58 Rainer Forst, ‘A Critical Theory of Politics: Grounds, Method and Aims. Reply to Simone Chambers, Stephen White and Lea Ypi', Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 3 (2015): 227.
59 Forst's political philosophy based on the foundationalist reliance on the principle of justification is designed to be critical in that people who disagree with existing normative or political orders should be duly counted as a voice demanding justification. In this sense, White is correct to point out that Forst's critical theory of politics departs from Habermas' consensual focus to the phenomenon of dissensus. But this does not mean that the foundation of Forst's theory is dissensus-based. To the contrary, Forst only makes room for the right reason to be moral, around which people, in virtue of being a justificatory being, necessarily forms a consensus. See White, ‘Does Critical Theory Need Strong Foundations?'
60 Alessandro Ferrara, ‘Democracies in the Plural: A Typology of Democratic Cultures', Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 4–5 (2015): 393.
61 Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 153.
62 Thomas Scanlon, ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism', in The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138, Footnote 11.
63 A skeptic might wonder if we are ever going to agree on anything moral according to the justificatory view of morality. To answer this question will point our discussion to a different direction, but I do wish to point out that moral overlapping consensus is indeed possible following this justificatory approach. In order to pass moral judgment, we must have some kind of shared moral background, which warrants, at least in theory, an agreement on certain moral values. Charles Larmore's political liberalism, based on his understanding of reasonable disagreements, also favors ‘a [thin] core morality that reasonable people can accept despite their natural tendency to disagree about comprehensive visions of the nature of value', which not only grounds political principles but also have concrete moral content. More substantially, we find in Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach a tentative list of capabilities that belong to what she calls a ‘moral core', which according to Nussbaum is shared by people in different cultures, genders, and countries with different economic statuses. The important thing to note is that such a moral overlapping consensus must not presuppose a singular and uniquely true foundation of morality. See Charles Larmore, ‘Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement', Social Philosophy and Policy 11, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 74, 78. John Kekes makes a similar point when he argues that pluralists need not be committed to denying that morality makes some claims equally binding on all moral agents, and that human nature suggests the existence of ‘the minimum content of morality'. See John Kekes, ‘Pluralism and Conflict in Morality', The Journal of Value Inquiry 26 (1992): 38.
64 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 11, Footnote 11.
65 Ibid., 175. Nussbaum, who advocates a different version of political liberalism, similarly argues that political liberalism ‘is intended as the moral core of a specifically political conception'. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 105.
66 Rawls distinguishes these three points of view in his discussions of the original position: the point of view ‘of the parties in the original position, that of the citizens in a well-ordered society, and that of you and me who are examining justice as fairness to serve as a basis for a conception that may yield a suitable understanding of freedom and equality'. Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory', 567.
67 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36.
68 Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical', 225.
69 Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory', 570.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 571.
72 For instance, see Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory', 521. For a related issue regarding the respect for persons' free and equal status in a modern democratic society, see a recent exchange between Martha Nussbaum and Steven Wall. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism', Philosophy & Public Affairs 39, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 3–45; and Steven Wall, ‘Perfectionism, Reasonableness, and Respect', Political Theory 42, no. 4 (2014): 468–89.
73 Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical', 225.
74 Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 348–9.
75 Ibid., 349.
76 Ibid.
77 Forst, The Right to Justification, 15.
78 Ibid., 17.
79 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 137.
80 Ibid., 137.
81 See for instance Joseph Chan, ‘Legitimacy, Unanimity, and Perfectionism', Philosophy & Public Affairs 29, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 5–42; and Chapter 3 in Steven Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 44–62.