Rawlsianism, Utilitarianism, and the Asymmetric Use of Extraordinary Counterexamples

In my book Unequivocal Justice, I document how Rawls repeatedly employs a form of asymmetric idealization. He compares an ideal political sector to a nonideal nonpolitical sector and, unsurprisingly, ends up endorsing a rather large regulatory and redistributive state. But Rawlsians are guilty of another kind of asymmetry which is just as bad.

First, they’ll make use of extraordinary counterexamples to object to rival views (e.g. utility monsters, rogue transplant surgeons, people getting electrocuted during the World Cup, etc). Then, they’ll be challenged with extraordinary (or even not-so-extraordinary) examples to their own view. For instance, the difference principle would oblige us to channel all of society’s resources to one severely sick person if that were required to maximize the material well-being of the worst off. Similarly, the lexical priority of Rawls's first principle implies that we may not sacrifice a trivial amount of free speech for a monumental amount of wealth and income. When confronted with these objections, Rawls and Rawlsians retreat to the “Well, my theory isn’t meant to apply to these sorts of unusual cases.” But this is an utterly inadequate response. (Imagine if a utilitarian replied, “Well, my theory isn’t meant to apply to unusual cases like utility monsters.”) You can’t make use of extraordinary counterexamples to object to competing views and then stipulate them away in your own case. (I say more about this worry here.)

Why Isn't Public Justification Trivial and Easy to Satisfy?

 The public justification principle, central to public reason liberalism:

The Public Justification Principle (PJP): A coercive law L is justified in a public P if and only if each member i of P has sufficient reason(s) Ri to endorse L.

A billion contradictory and incompatible papers have been written trying to flesh this idea out. After all, it leaves open all of these questions, which Vallier lists:

1. What makes a reason “sufficient”?
2. How fine-grained is the specification by L of the conduct which is permitted or prohibited for members of the public?
3. What types of justificatory reasons R do we recognize?
4. How are the parties to public justificatory arguments idealized?
5. What is the scope of the public?
6. What are the modalities of public justification? Or: by which process is public justification achieved?
7. Must we publicly justify anything other than coercion?

I often wonder, though, why isn't PJP easy to satisfy.

Consider this dialogue:

Utilitarian: We should do X.

PRL: Nuh-uh. Some people disagree.

U: Lots of people disagree about lots of things. For instance, I think PRL is a terrible, vacuous theory and the entire corpus of work has been a distraction.

PRL: Well, we can't force people to do X unless we can justify it to them!

U: Uh, I guess so. But I did justify it. Here you go, here is a philosophy book justifying my normative theory and here are 600 econ papers proving X works. What else could you possibly need?

PRL: But that's not accessible to everyone!

U: What do you mean? Like they don't have copies of the books and papers? I can't recall any law ever being passed where the government first sent out all the papers and books proving the law works to the people.

PRL: No, I mean they might not understand the reasons.

U: Okay, I rewrote it everything at an eighth-grade reading level. Are we good? I mean, surely you don't mean to say that a coercive law is justifiable only we can explain it at an even lower reading level. Maybe some justified laws are a bit complicated, no?

PRL: Ok, no, I mean that the people upon whom the law will be imposed have to be able to accept the reasons behind it.

U: But now you're just gain-saying me. As I said, here are the papers justifying the law. Here. Right here. Look. You can't keep invoking PRL and the mere possibility of reasonable disagreement. If you have a substantive disagreement, name it. 

PRL: You see, people might have good objections you haven't defeated.

U: Well, do they? What's are the objections? These books and papers are pretty thorough and we answer every major and minor objection we've seen in the press and elsewhere. It seems like instead of saying people might have a disagreement or objection, you should simply say that reason the law isn't justified is that there is in fact an important objection. Tell us what the objection is, and then let's see if we can overcome it.

PRL: Ok, but some people don't agree with your argument.

U: Are you saying mere disagreement renders the law illegitimate? Like if the Nazi disagrees with...

PRL: No, only reasonable disagreement.

U: What makes someone reasonable?

PRL: That they accept my theory.

U: So, if, say Robert Nozick rejects property-owning democracy because of the reasons offered in ASU, does that render it wrong? Also, why can't I say, as you do, that laws have to be justified to reasonable people, but then just say only utilitarians are reasonable people? Why can't Nazis say that a person is reasonable if and only if they Nazis? It seems like you jump back and forth between platitudes about reasonableness (accepting evidence, processing evidence in a scientific way, etc.) and substantive commitment to your parochial theory, as it suits you. Which is it? I mean, utilitarians are all about giving reasons for their actions, and we make our reasons clear. When Singer explains why eating meat is wrong, he justifies it on the basis of widely accepted premises all people other than sociopaths share, while when Rawls tries to justify his theory, he mostly cites obscure ideas and half-baked arguments which apparently no one understands. (After all, if you all have to spend 2,000 papers+ trying to decode his work, it's apparently not accessible.)

PRL: No, no, no. Nozick isn't reasonable. Utilitarians aren't reasonable. Nazis aren't reasonable. 

U: Uh, hmmm, ok. But back to X. I've given a sound argument, based on clear and almost universally accepted premises, in favor of X. I've done all the work showing that X works and that all the objections I could think of against X are bad. What more could you ask for?

PRL: You have to add "...and therefore all reasonable people could accept X" and then I guess we're good. 

U: But what work does that do? What more does that add?

PRL: It helps me keep my job. 

If You're an Egalitarian, You Shouldn't Be So Rich

Chris Freiman and I have a new paper out by this title at The Journal of Ethics, the same journal that published G. A. Cohen's "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?"

Abstract:

G.A. Cohen famously claims that egalitarians shouldn’t be so rich. If you possess excess income and there is little chance that the state will redistribute it to the poor, you are obligated to donate it yourself. We argue that this conclusion is correct, but that the case against the rich egalitarian is significantly stronger than the one Cohen offers. In particular, the standard arguments against donating one’s excess income face two critical, unrecognized problems. First, we show that these arguments imply that citizens have no duty to further egalitarian political institutions—a conclusion that Cohen’s Rawlsian opponents cannot abide. Second, these arguments yield unacceptable implications for other questions of justice. We conclude that even moderately rich egalitarians are obligated to donate their excess income.

In philosophy and elsewhere, it's funny how frequently you encounter professed egalitarians who live high while people die, who seek and flaunt high status, and yet who somehow think themselves kindly and sympathetic because they defend egalitarian redistribution in obscure journals. One New York-area egalitarian of high stature was reputed to make grad students pay for his fancy dinners for the privilege of eating with him.

This paper considers and refutes a number of reasons egalitarians have offered on behalf of the claim that they are not obligated to donate their excess income (to government, to an NGO, or directly to those worse off): 

1. Structuralism: Justice applies only to the basic structure and not to personal behavior

2. There is a division of labor; individuals are not charged with promoting justice directly.

3. Donations are a "drop in the ocean"; they do not change the overall distribution much.

4. Donations don't change the causes of inequality.

5. We have an obligation to support just institutions, not to promote equality directly.

6. Paying taxes is less burdensome than giving to charity. 

7. We don't have the assurance others will do their part, and it's unfair/etc. if I give when I can't be sure others will.

8. Proper egalitarianism allows for some inequality. For instance, no one should make less than a post-doc and more than a chaired law professor at Yale. Therefore, since all of us richer professors are within the upper limit, we are not required to give, though perhaps even richer egalitarians (such as Bernie Sanders or most leftie movie stars) are. 

We have a number of responses to each kind of argument. Sometimes we show the arguments are simply badly formed or question-begging. We frequently show that each of these arguments leads to other absurd or deeply unpalatable conclusions that the egalitarians who make such arguments would not want to endorse. None of this arguments work. They are all just rationalizations. If you are an egalitarian, you ought to donate most of your income to those significantly worse off than you, or to effective charities, or even to a government. Otherwise, you are a morally blameworthy hypocrite.

Here's an excerpt:

As more general point, the “drop in the ocean” argument looks extremely implausible when applied to virtually any issue of justice other than distributive justice. Suppose that Bess is running her business within a basic framework that permits discriminatory hiring practices. She reckons that it is morally permissible for her to discriminate against applicants based on their race because any decision of hers to not discriminate wouldn’t make a dent in the larger social problem of racial discrimination. Clearly, Bess is in the wrong. Even if her decision to act unjustly toward particular people is a “drop in the ocean,” she still ought not act unjustly

 

Indeed, Rawls himself seems to agree with us here. For instance, he says universities cannot engage in racial discrimination, churches cannot burn heretics, parents cannot deprive their children of medical care, and parents should ensure that the burdens of raising children do not fall disproportionately on women. In these and other cases, Rawls says that principles of justice directly control individual behavior in markets and civil society, not merely what the laws should say about individual behavior. Presumably, if a society had no laws forbidding such behaviors—if it allowed churches to burn heretics—Rawls would not merely say the basic structure is unjust. He would likely say that it would still be unjust for individual priests to burn heretics. Further, Rawls is not saying these cases are wrong because they violate other principles of justice beyond those constituting justice as fairness; he says these behaviors violate justice as fairness.

 

To bring the argument back to distributive justice in particular, consider a thought experiment. Imagine a party brings together a large number of people. It could be great-grandma hosting her 100 great-grandchildren, none of whom have met each other before. Or imagine a new business has an opening day party. 

 

Suppose a giant pie will be sliced and distributed to the partygoers. Imagine the person cutting and handing out slices does what he admits is a bad job—some slices are huge and others tiny. 100 uneven slices are handed out. 98 of the 100 attendees immediately eat their slices, leaving just you with your giant slice and Mary with a tiny slice. She says, “Wow, the slices are so uneven. Might you share some of yours with me?” 

 

It seems absurd for you to say, “Well, since everyone else has already eaten their slices, there’s no way for me to rectify the overall unjust distribution. Even if I share my pie and we both get equal slices, the overall distribution will remain unjust. So, I might as well eat my big slice while you nibble on your tiny slice.”

 

It’s true that sharing with Mary won't fix the overall distribution. But that doesn’t appear to justify your refusal to share with Mary. Even if we modify the thought experiment, imagining that there are 1,000, 10,000, or a million other pie eaters, and once again, everyone quickly eats their pie except you and Mary, it still seems reasonable for Mary to demand you share with her and unreasonable for you to refuse on the grounds that it won’t fix the problem.

 

Note that in this thought experiment, we are not even supposing that Mary is very hungry or needy, or that she will starve unless she gets enough pie. What’s doing the work here is the thought that the distribution of pie is unfair, not principles of beneficence or charity.

Some Additions to the Philosophical Lexicon

Reasonable (adj.): Agreeing with whatever Rawls says for whatever reason. 

E.g., "There are lots of different conceptions of the good life and of justice, but all reasonable people would agree that what Rawls happened to endorse in 1972 is legitimate."

Unreasonable (adj.): Good at political philosophy. Capable of making arguments for conclusions. 

E.g., "Robert Nozick, Gil Harman, and Peter Singer are unreasonable because they are not Rawlsians, therefore we don't have to respond to their criticisms of Rawls."

Political Anti-Liberalism and the Overlapping Consensus on Twin Earth

Oh, no, my evil twin brother Jasper discovered I'm on a new blog. Damn it. Once again, mom is forcing me to share some blog space with him. The following is a guest post from Jasper. Please don't read it.

In Political Liberalism, Rawls argues that the exact theory he came up with in 1972 would be what an overlapping consensus of reasonable people would agree to. Reasonable people are defined by....well, ask 20 political liberals what makes someone reasonable and you'll get 40 answers. But in one way or another, reasonable people are committed to the idea of public reason itself--that all principles be in some way justifiable to the reasonable (damn recursion/reflexivity!) subject to those principles on grounds they can in some way endorse or recognize given their diverse epistemic and moral standpoints--and to the idea that politics must respect us as free and equal.

But over on Twin Earth, Twin John Rawls at Twin Harvard took a decidedly more Schmittean turn. (He ended up being a more consistent, less question-begging theorist as a result, if not closer to the truth.) On Twin Earth, Twin Rawls discussed how there might be an overlapping consensus of illiberal authoritarians. He called his book Political Illiberalism.

Liberals disagree about what exactly justice requires, what the good life is, and so on. But they agree that society should treat people as free and equal. 

Well, Twin Rawls points out that in the same way, illiberal authoritarians--such as tankies, Nazis, fascists, illiberal theocrats, and others--disagree about what exactly justice requires, what the good life is, and so on. But they also agree on lots of things. They agree that societies ought to be hierarchical. They agree that society takes precedence over the individual. They agree that what makes something legitimate is that it can be justified to, and be the subject of an overlapping consensus of, people committed to the idea that people are unfree and are unequal. On Twin Earth, for instance, when collectivist authoritarians, religious fundamentalists, and so on, disagree about many specific details of their politics, they often defer to reliable umpires to determine which kind of authoritarian, totalitarian, or intrusive politics they ought to have. 

On our Earth, John Tomasi at Brown published a book called Liberalism Beyond Justice. He describes people as falling into four categories from he standpoint of public reason theory. A-people are ethical and political liberals who value openness, individuality, and so on. Think Ayn Rand and John Stuart Mill. C-people are reasonable romantics and religious people who adhere to more conventional, traditional, and hierarchical ways of life, but who are nevertheless committed to the public reason project and so keep their religiosity out of politics. Think Kevin Vallier. B-people are the typical wishy washy people in between. Think Rawls himself. But then there are D-people, who reject the public reason project altogether in favor of imposing hierarchical, illiberal political policies, regardless of whether those positions can be justified on Rawlsian grounds, whatever that means. They are considered unreasonable and the system does not need to be justified to them. 

On Twin Earth, Twin John Tomasi at Twin Brown published a book called Illiberalism Beyond Justice, which also had a helpful alphabet soup characterization of people. Twin Tomasi's A-people are committed collectivist authoritarians. Think Stalin. His C-people are fairly individualist people who advocate as much liberalism for themselves as the theory allows, but who defer overall to the illiberal public reason project. Think Sartre. (Remember, Sartre was a tankie.) B-people are the wishy washy in-between people. D-people are political liberals who reject the overlapping consensus of illiberal public reason. They are considered unreasonable and the system does not need to be justified to them.

On earth, when someone who is not a public reason liberal--e.g., a regular old liberal or libertarian--criticizes Rawls, Rawlsians are inclined to dismiss the person as unreasonable. The same thing happens on Twi Earth. For instance, if you complained that Twin Rawls's theory treats people as unfree, you'd be dismissed as unreasonable and your criticism ignored. 

I, Jasper, having read both liberal and illiberal Rawls defend exactly the opposite theories on what are almost identical grounds, can't find a particular reason to reject liberal Rawls as having a better argument than illiberal Twin Rawls. The theories are structurally identical and generate the opposite result. I guess people will just pick and chose Rawls over Twin Rawls because they like the conclusions, not because the theories are any better. Rawls starts with liberal assumptions and gets liberal conclusions. Twin Rawls starts with illiberal assumption and generates illiberal conclusions through a mirror-image but structurally identical theory.

I got bad news for you, folks. Not only is there Twin Rawls, but Triplet Rawls, Quadruplet Rawls, and more. Turns out you can recast Rawls's public reason project any way you want, with any political philosophy you want being the subject of an overlapping consensus of "reasonable" people suitably and plausibly defined. Oh well. 

Which Original Position?

Rawls argues that the correct principles of justice are whatever people would choose in the original position (OP). In the original position, parties come together to choose principles of justice which will be used to select the basic institutions of a society they will inhabit. These agents are presumed to be self-interested. They want to pick principles which will improve their own welfare. But they are also imagined to be ignorant of their own particular identities. They don't know whether their relative status or income, their race, ethnicity, and so on. They don't even know the distribution of such identities. Thus, when they choose selfishly, they choose for everyone. And that's what makes the principles good--they're what you would choose for yourself if you don't know who you are. The original position is supposed to force the parties to pick principles (which in turn select institutions) that are good for all.

Except not really.

Some big questions are: Who counts from the standpoint of justice? To whom and from whom are duties of justice owed? Who is part of justice and who is outside justice?

Rawls OP doesn't answer these questions so much as it presupposes answers. When Rawls constructs the OP, he more or less imagines capable, working adults who will live forever in a single nation state. Accordingly, when the OP doesn't generate principles of justice for foreigners, children, animals, or, unborn fetuses, that's not because the theory shows that they are outside justice, or are special cases, or are governed by different principles of justice generated through different means. Rather, it's simply because Rawls designed the OP a particular way. It's arbitrary fiat rather than an insightful or illuminating argument.

If we rewrite the OP to state that the parties could turn out to be, say, unborn fetuses, it would generate very different conclusions. (It would probably end up endorsing a much more pro-life position.) If we rewrite it to say that the parties are choosing principles to select a world order rather than a national order, or that they could turn out to be foreigners and resident aliens, they'd select different principles. If we rewrite it so that they could be animals, we get different principles. After all, the mechanism by which the OP makes the parties pick principles that improve the interests of various groups is that the parties could turn out to be members of those groups. If you make the possible range of identities narrower, the OP selects narrower principles. Make it wider, and the OP selects wider principles.

There is thus not one OP, but many possible OPs. What a Rawlsian-type theory says depends in great part on which OP we think is morally privileged or the "right" OP. Who the parties could turn out to be changes which principles the parties pick and to whom the principles apply. 

Rawls's theory ends up being nationalist not because Rawls has an argument for nationalism, but because he assumes nationalism in the design of his theory. His theory ends up endorsing a pro-choice over a pro-life position (I guess; he more or less asserts this in some footnotes but, in typical Rawlsian style, doesn't argue for it) because of what he assumes, not because of what the theory shows.

Similar remarks apply to Rawls's ideas of public reason. If you start by saying that what is legitimate is whatever could form the overlapping consensus of reasonable people in a society, you then have to specify what you mean by reasonable and what counts as a society. Rawls of course famously fudges "reasonable" to exclude brilliant critics like Robert Nozick but to include mealy-mouthed morons like your MSNBC-parroting dad, but he also assumes rather than proves that a society = the adult, human members of a nation-state.

Is Politics like a Relationship?

Philosophers in the Rawlsian tradition often like to think about political relationships on the model of personal relationships.  My own view is that we don’t share a meaningful connection to other persons just by virtue of happening to live within the same political state.  But nevermind that.  A bigger worry is that if political associations are like personal relationships, that is more disturbing than comforting.  No matter how bad things get in our personal relationships, resorting to threats of force or coercion remains totally beyond the pale.  If we really think about the relation of political rule on the model of a relationship, then it seems like a very messed up kind of relationship.

Let’s say we go ahead and think in relationship terms.  Consider what we know from political psychology about the kind of people who want to rule over us.  They are more Machiavellian.  More than most, they seek their own ends at others expense, rather than looking for shred values.  They are more narcissistic, or inclined to exaggerate their achievements and deny criticisms.  They prioritize short-term rewards to longer-term commitments.  They are less agreeable, or concerned with getting along with others.  And they may score higher in psychopathy, which would make them more willing to use force and violence than most people.  In short, “There is no doubt that some who run for elective office crave the benefits and adulation that comes from positions of power.”

People curious about the prospects for exercising rule generally want to couch their ambitions in terms of “service” for fellow citizens.  But given the list of traits just mentioned, we should know better than to take this at face value.  Those who want to get into politics often see it more as a way of realizing a goal to hold and exercise power over others more than they see it as a way of providing communal goods.  (This is especially true for men, who continue to be dramatically over-represented.)

Imagining these problems away by idealizing political rule as a healthy personal relationship can give us the wrong idea about how we should treat signals from political elites.  As Jess wrote a while back:

Charisma is not a positive feature of a leader, nor is it ‘value-free’ as Weber claimed. Rather, charisma is quite morally problematic insofar as people defer to charismatic leaders on the basis of their charisma rather than their moral or epistemic authority. A charismatic presence often inspires followers to bypass any deliberation of their own. Whether charismatic leaders are moral or not, when charisma is the reason for deference the motives followers are therefore morally worse.

There are a lot of reasons to think this is a real phenomenon.  People take their partisan leaders’ word for it all the time.

What to make of all of this for thinking about actual political activity?  Lately my sense has been that those who have opposed peaceful protests seem to think that protestors should be more grateful for the terms of political rule.  To my ear, their skepticism still has the tone of “You’ll be back!”  That rejoinder has been wrong before, and relying on political rule to guide our moral actions and beliefs – the way we might rely on people with whom we share real relationships – continues to look unpromising.  The bottom line is that if the reminder of someone’s love is found at the literal point of a fully armed battalion, it might time to start rethinking some relationship goals. 

The Society to Nation-State Slide

Most political philosophers at some point refer to something called "society". "We owe a debt to society." "The basic structure of a society must be justifiable to all people in that society on terms they can reasonable accept." "We should provide a universal basic income to all people in our society." "A society is just only if the 'distribution' of income matches this particular pattern I concocted last night.' "Our society is racist." That kind of thing.

 

Philosophers almost always uncritically assume that "society" is coextensive with some nation-state or other.

 

On its face, this seems clearly false. 

 

For instance, consider the Ralwsian-style arguments for prioritizing co-nationals in welfare payments, or for holding that principles of distributive justice hold for people inside nation-states but not between them: Rawls would say that we have special obligations to those within the same society, because we are involved in a web of cooperation from which we as individuals derive great benefit.

Here, the argument is that your own personal welfare depends in large part on your membership in and belonging to a particular society. You depend upon various background institutions, past rates of capital accumulation, and so on. In virtue of receiving such benefits, you owe more to fellow participants who helped create and sustain the social conditions that make you so well off.

 

However, there’s no clear way in which the “society” in question here just so happens to be co-extensive with the modern nation-state. Each of us is connected to billions of others in complex webs of cooperation, with some people close and others distant, with some strands thick and others thin, all organized by various overlapping formal and informal institutions, most of which regulate parts of the web but not the whole thing. Each of our webs is different and different parts of our individual webs are governed by different institutions. Your web does not match the borders of your nation-state, and indeed, you are more highly connected to, dependent on, and aided by many people outside your borders than many/most people inside. 

 

Similarly, suppose Rawls says, "We owe more to co-nationals because we have to justify the rules of the game to them. The institutions of our society won’t be legitimate unless each member has a sufficient stake in those rules, and sufficiently benefits from them, that it’s reasonable to demand they play along by those rules.” 

But, again, there’s no plausible interpretation of “society” which equates it with any modern-nation state. You are part of a web of cooperation and influence, with different institutions regulating and influencing different parts of your web. Even the institutions that directly regulate you are not co-extensive with your nation-state. They involve more both more local and more international laws, rules, customs, and norms. Your web of cooperation overlaps with but is different from mine.

 

Rawls has no response to this objection, because he explicitly imagines away this complexity. In A Theory of Justice, for the ease of constructing his theory, he asks us to imagine an isolated autarkical nation-state, which people enter only by birth and leave only by death, in which all norms, customs, and laws are more or less uniform across the entire state. In Rawls’s imaginary example, he stipulates that society is equivalent to all the members of a state and we are all indeed subject to the same basic structure. But this has little to do with the real world. In the real world, nation-states do not have a uniform basic structure and there is no “society” co-extensive with the nation-state.

 

It's not as though the real world is simply a complicated departure from Rawls's thought experiment or model. Rather, Rawls's thought experiment fails to model or capture the important aspects of real-life social interaction. The reality is--a reality which any serious political philosophy must acknowledge--that we are each in complex webs of interaction and influence, each with slightly different webs, with some strands thicker than others, and with the webs not matching the boundaries of our modern nation-states. 

 

If you're reading a book or article on political or social philosophy which makes this mistake, throw it in the trash can. It's trying to analyze or solve a fake problem while ignoring the real problem. 

Society ≠ all the people subject to a particular national government. 

 

 

  

 

Rawls and the Philosophical Imagination

When Theory of Justice was published, Hare reviewed the book for Phil Quarterly. Hare writes, 

“Since the theoretical structure is tailored at every point to fit Rawls’ intuitions, it is hardly surprising that its normative consequences fit them too – if they did not, he would alter the theory ... and the fact that Rawls is a fairly typical man of his times and society, and will therefore have many adherents, does not make this a good way of doing philosophy (147).”

 As it turns out, Hare was right about Rawls's having many adherents going forward. Susan McWilliams Barndt recently reviewed Katrina Forrester's new book about how Rawls influenced the discipline. Barndt writes, 

"Katrina Forrester’s excellent recent book, In the Shadow of Justice, tells the story of how this came to be: how Rawls’s highly intricate and deceptively simple brand of abstract liberal egalitarianism—first articulated in his A Theory of Justice in 1971—came to take over academic philosophy, particularly via “a small group of influential, affluent, white, mostly male analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain” in the late twentieth century. 

Around that time I entered graduate school at one of those institutions and, like most Americans, had never heard of John Rawls. Within days of my arrival, I learned that I must never forget him: that Rawls would be the nucleus of my graduate education, around which we were all to revolve. As I recall, the syllabus for our course in “Liberalism and Its Critics” devoted fully half of our class sessions to Rawls—and most of the other half to his late-twentieth-century interlocutors. On that liberal campus, Rawls was liberalism."

Forrester's book suggests that Rawls's influence is waning as the discipline evolves. But part of the reason Rawlsianism has been so persistent is that Rawls provides a technical vocabulary for talking about justice-- "basic structure," "moral powers," "reasonable" etc. that still dominates discussions of justice even when the views people are defending are totally separate from Rawls's views. Rawls changed the terms of political philosophy.

You might think it's a good thing for political philosophers to have a shared technical language for talking about justice. But as Hare suggests, Rawlsian language is set up in a way that favors a broadly Rawlsian framework. For example, the terms reflect the assumption that political philosophy is somehow apart from ethics so we need a new language for talking about it. The terms implicitly assume that there should be a state and that the state can be distinguished from culture/religion. The framework lends itself to analysis at an intermediate level of idealization between policy analysis and utopian theory.  

These choices about how to frame and describe questions in political philosophy are not neutral. So the fact that Rawlsianism has set the standard terms for debates about distributive justice gives means that these debates are structured in a way that favors the substantive views that Rawls supported. 

The dominance of Rawlsianism in political philosophy limits our philosophical imagination when we talk about justice. If Forrester is right and Rawlsianism is losing its influence, well, I can't wait to see what comes next.