Conflicts of Interests

John Rawls proposes a system of political liberalism as opposed to comprehensive liberalism, supposedly motivated by the "fact of reasonable pluralism" and the ensuing fact that no comprehensive doctrine can ever have the support of all the people and thus be the legitimate basis of governance. Gerry Cohen, on the other hand, alleges that a political liberalism that only concerns itself with the so-called "basic structure" and allows citizens to make inegalitarian choices in their private lives is insufficient (he's not the only one!). Corey Brettschneider responds that, well, okay, but Cohen is trying to advance a comprehensive doctrine, and as we've shown, that doesn't work. How to resolve the dispute?

(I will here try to explain some of what I'm talking about rather than using jargony terms.) Basically, Rawls' idea was that people have comprehensive doctrines, which are basically philosophies of everything, including a theory of nature, human nature, what is good, etc., but people don't all have the same comprehensive doctrine, especially in a free, democratic society: the so-called fact of reasonable pluralism. Therefore, he says, the philosophy behind a government cannot be any one of those comprehensive doctrines but rather a political doctrine, one that only relates to the so-called basic structure. I'm not saying what that is for one very good reason, namely that no one really knows. Sometimes it's only coercive institutions; sometimes it's broader than that. But in any event, Rawls says that to have a legitimate government you have to have a philosophy that focuses on the basic structure, and he then contends that his idea of Justice as Fairness is such a philosophy. Justice as Fairness is basically the idea that in a just society people ought to recognize one another as free and equal citizens, and that if they do so they would accept the following principles of justice: #1, that all citizens are to be granted a comprehensive set of basic rights, with the scheme of those rights allowing their equal distribution to all, and #2 that inequalities must both be attached to "offices open to all" and be necessary to improve the absolute well-being of the least well-off in society. Rawls claims, as I have said, that this is to be thought of as a political doctrine, i.e. a doctrine only applying to the basic structure.

G.A. Cohen's critique goes like this: the reason why inequality might be justified, according to the so-called difference principle (the second part of Principle #2), is that greater inequality provides an incentive for greater productivity. But, he argues, if that is true then the people being incentivized by their exalted position atop the socioeconomic ladder to produce more do not truly believe in the Principles of Justice that Rawls outlines, because they could choose to work just as hard without those incentives, thereby removing the need for that inequality. Therefore, in a truly just society as he and Rawls define it, i.e. one where people endorse the idea of free and equal citizenship and therefore the Principles of Justice, that kind of incentive-based inequality is not justified. Furthermore, it's no good to object to this line of argument that we are only concerned with the basic structure, for several reasons. First, several of the remarks Rawls makes about the benefits of his kind of justice, that it encourages fraternity at the top of the ladder, dignity at the bottom, and moral fulfillment all along, fall apart if you truly want to confine yourself to a narrow basic structure. Second, that if you confine yourself to a narrow basic structure you are ignoring a great deal of things that matter greatly in society, and the reason Rawls gives why he focuses on the basic structure is that it matters greatly in society. Third, that if you expand the basic structure beyond coercive institutions there's no good categorical line to draw between it and the choices individuals make within it. So therefore, Cohen says, justice needs to be concerned with the non-coerced choices that people make within the basic structure, and not just with the structure itself.

Brettschneider replies that Cohen is pursuing a comprehensive doctrine, and trying to get everyone to endorse the idea of equality rather than equal citizenship. This, according to original Rawlsian logic, cannot form the legitimate basis of a government. Perhaps. However, I wonder why one can try to get people to endorse free and equal citizenship but not equality per se. And if Cohen is right that equal citizenship all by itself, defined vis-a-vis the basic structure, is insufficient to achieve many of the things Rawls claims justice wants to achieve, then we have a potential conflict: there is, after all, no inherent reason why the set of things that make for legitimate government and the set of things that make for a just society with a just distribution of benefits and burdens have to be overlapping sets. Alternately one could just say that equality isn't a comprehensive belief, which might require drawing the line of comprehensiveness slightly differently than Rawls does. Or it might require investigating the idea of "reasonable pluralism": by the word "reasonable," Rawls means to exclude notions contrary to the idea of free and equal citizenship, which he assumes to be endorsed in his "reasonably favorable circumstances" for a democratic society. But who decides that those doctrines are unreasonable? And why couldn't one say that, if according with free and equal citizenship is required for reasonableness, and if Cohen is correct that free and equal citizenship as Rawls plays it out requires much more actual equality than Rawls thinks, then isn't equality sort of part of free and equal citizenship? And therefore aren't doctrines which object to it unreasonable?

Essentially I just think that the effort to cordon off the "basic structure" and "political doctrines" as being separate from everything else is dangerous, because while you do make issues of legitimacy become clearer and more soluble, you also make issues of efficacy more challenging, and after all the point of government is to improve people's lives (a corollary of my philosophy that the point of everything is to improve people's lives, with "people" interpreted broadly. You could disagree with me about that, but that's a separate argument.). Yes, it's also tricky to work back the other way, and try to get more comprehensive and therefore more effective but at the same time sacrificing some of the clear-cut-ness of legitimacy issues, but I think it's somewhat necessary. I also think that if political doctrines are formulated as being the only legitimate basis for coercion, but there is a certain comprehensive doctrine, maybe comprehensive liberalism we could call it, that would result in a more just society if everyone adopted it than if they didn't, the state could be justified in trying to persuade people of that comprehensive doctrine. And furthermore, if the need for political doctrines arises out of reasonable pluralism, then couldn't one say that on any matter where all the comprehensive doctrines in a society happened to agree the need disappears? That on that particular issue there would then be no pluralism? Rawls claims that this can never happen without coercion, but he also seems to think that there is some sort of overlapping consensus, which is theoretically where political notions ought to reside. At some point it all starts to seem kind of circular and self-contradictory, all at once, which is pretty impressive.

That wasn't terribly coherent, I know. It was mainly just me trying to play out some of my thoughts on this issue by writing them down.