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A Fallacy in Rawls's Theory of Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Peter J. Steinberger
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Extract

An important feature of Rawls's theory of justice is the putative separation of justice and desert. It is shown that Rawls in fact presupposes a quite strong theory of desert which provides the key justification for the original position. It is further argued that the theory of desert has implications for distributive shares which contradict those of Rawlsian justice in general and the difference principle in particular. Finally, it is claimed that this contradiction seems to resist any kind of easy resolution since the theory of justice rests upon, hence requires, the theory of desert.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , Winter 1989 , pp. 55 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1989

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References

Notes

I am especially grateful to Arthur DiQuattro for his many valuable comments and suggestions.

1. Rawls, John, A Theory of Juslice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 311.Google Scholar References in the text to this work are in parentheses by page number.

2. Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (09 1980): 551–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also, Rawls, John, “The Basic Structure as Subject,” in Values and Morals, ed. Alvin, I.Goldman, and Kim, Jaegwon (Boston: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 57–65Google Scholar, passim. As far as I can tell, Rawls's later clarifications and seeming retrenchment do not affect materially the issue at hand. See Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985), especially pp. 235–37.Google Scholar

3. Feinberg, Joel, “Justice and Personal Desert,” in Nomos VI: Justice, ed., Friedrich, Carl J. and Chapman, John W. (New York: Atherton Press, 1963), pp. 69–97.Google Scholar

4. Rawls, acknowledges this. Theory of Justice, p. 314n.Google Scholar

5. See the various arguments of Slote, Michael A., “Desert, Consent, and Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (Summer 1973)Google Scholar; Kleinig, John, Punishment and Desert (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sterba, James P., “Justice and the Concept of Desert,” The Personalist 57 (1976).Google Scholar

6. Steinberger, Peter J., “Desert and Justice in Rawls,” Journal of Politics 44 (11 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The conclusion of the present essay comports fully with that of the older one, but its argument toward that conclusion is quite different and, in my view, much improved.

7. Rawls himself mentions aristocratic and caste societies as historically widespread examples of systems that justify distributions in terms of the natural-social lottery (Theory of Justice, p. 102).

8. For the sake of the argument, I rule out the possibility that hair color can be changed.

9. I emphasize that this seems to be the only plausible reconstruction of Rawls's position. Rawls, himself writes only of the “arbitrariness” of the lottery (Theory of Justice, pp. 102 and 141).Google Scholar Presumably, if people deserved their natural-social traits, then the distribution of such traits could not be called arbitrary. But there is a further point to be made here. One might argue that to call a trait undeserved is not thereby to claim that it is contrary to desert. It might simply be not a matter of desert at all, roughly analogous to the category “nonlegal” as opposed to “illegal.” There is no doubt an enormous range of things which are neither deserved nor undeserved. But to apply this to (e.g.) Rawls's chapter 17 is to force upon it the most tortured and contrived reading imaginable. When Rawls says time and again that our traits are not deserved and that the idea is to “mitigate the effects of natural accident and social circumstance,” this cannot plausibly be interpreted to mean that the question of desert does not in any way apply.

10. See Kleinig, , Punishment and Desert, pp. 49–64.Google Scholar

11. The general issue of desert is further complicated by the fact that in the end Rawls seems to separate the question of “moral worth” from that of the distribution of natural and social assets (p. 437). Moral worth is ultimately defined in terms of having a “sense of justice” (those who have it are morally worthy), and this definition may be thought to open up the possibility of unequal deserts. However, Rawls continues to insist that justice and desert do not correlate, and that just distributions can never be based on considerations of desert. Moreover, and crucially, he says that distributive shares “do not correlate with moral worth, since the initial endowment of natural assets and the contingencies of their growth and nurture in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view” (pp. 311–12). This passage, in contradistinction to the one on p. 437 just cited, unambiguously indicates that moral worth and the lottery are bound up with one another. Rawls's claims regarding moral worth, then, appear to be inconsistent but, in either case, the argument of the present article is not affected.

12. Of course, this is not to suggest that the difference principle is the whole of the substance of Rawlsian justice.

13. It should be noted, though, that the choice is not a necessary one. As Thucydides tells us, the Melians, faced with a somewhat similar situation, chose otherwise.

14. Of course, there may be an empirical relationship (e.g., the alien force appears because it found out about George's accession). But that would have no bearing on the argument.

15. Slote, “Desert, Consent, and Justice.”

16. See Gewirth, Alan, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 11–15.Google Scholar