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203. Theory of Politics ​

Learning outcomes ​

  • When two people argue about what the state owes its citizens, what counts as a fair distribution, or whether group identity should matter to the law, you'll know how to find the underlying commitment that produces the disagreement (about self-ownership, luck, real freedom, or community) and what would have to give for either side to move.

Justice: Rawls and his critics ​

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) set the agenda. The argument runs through a thought experiment, the original position: imagine the principles rational individuals would choose for their society from behind a veil of ignorance about their own talents, race, sex, social position, and conception of the good. Rawls argued they would converge on two principles. First, equal basic liberties for all. Second, social and economic inequalities are permitted only when (a) they attach to positions open under fair equality of opportunity and (b) they work to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged member of society. The second clause is the difference principle.

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) attacked from the libertarian right. Any pattern-based theory of distribution (including Rawls's) requires continuous interference with voluntary transactions, and so violates self-ownership. Nozick's positive view is entitlement theory: a holding is just if it arose from just acquisition and just transfer, regardless of the resulting shape. To dramatise the point he posed the Wilt Chamberlain case. Start from any distribution you call just, then let a million people each pay Chamberlain twenty-five cents to watch him play. Chamberlain ends up rich, the distribution is no longer "just" by the original pattern, but no rights were violated. Patterns and liberty cannot both be preserved.

Tamar Gendler walks through Nozick's three-part scheme (acquisition, transfer, the Lockean proviso) and lands on the Chamberlain transfer in Open Yale PHIL 181 Lecture 22, "Equality II" (about 30 minutes, uploaded by Yale).

G. A. Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995) is the egalitarian counter-attack. Cohen argued that the libertarian intuition behind self-ownership does not survive scrutiny: it commits the libertarian to saying that a person born with a useful talent owes nothing to anyone, including a person born without hands or feet who would die without help. Once the reader sees this, the appeal of self-ownership weakens. Cohen also turned on Rawls. The difference principle tolerates inequalities that high earners extract by threatening to withhold their talent unless paid more, but a society whose members have internalised an egalitarian ethos would not engage in that bargaining. Justice is about the ethos people live by, not just the rules of their institutions.

The post-Rawls landscape contains several other live positions:

PositionCore principleStandard objection
Liberal egalitarianism (Rawls)Maximin distribution under fair equality of opportunityTalent-bargaining undermines the egalitarian ethos (Cohen); demands much of institutions, little of individuals
Libertarianism (Nozick)Self-ownership; just acquisition and transferSelf-ownership begs the question; historical injustice in acquisition undermines current entitlements
Luck egalitarianism (Cohen)Inequalities are acceptable only when they trace to choice, not luckHard to draw the choice/luck line; punishes "unlucky" choosers harshly (Anderson)
Capability approach (Sen, Nussbaum)Justice is about the real freedoms people have to pursue valuable livesLists of capabilities are contestable; smuggle in a thick conception of the good
Communitarianism (Sandel, MacIntyre)Justice is internal to the practices of particular communities; the unencumbered self is a fictionDefends prevailing community norms, including their prejudices; weak on women's rights, exit, minority protection

Ideal theory and its critics ​

Rawls argued that political philosophy should first describe a perfectly just society, and only then ask how to move toward it from a non-ideal start. Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (2009) and Charles Mills's The Racial Contract (1997) attacked this ideal theory approach as worse than useless. Mills's argument is concrete. The actual social contract that built modern liberal states was a racial contract among Europeans, premised on the exclusion of non-Europeans from full personhood. A philosophy that abstracts from this and asks what perfectly just institutions would look like in a clean world cannot describe the institutions we actually have, and cannot tell us what reform should aim at. Sen's complaint is methodologically lighter: comparative judgements ("this reform is more just than the status quo") do not require knowing what perfect justice would look like, and demanding that they do paralyses the philosophy.

Mills set out the non-ideal case in his own voice in the 2020 Tanner Lecture, "Theorizing Racial Justice" (about 1 hour 20 minutes, uploaded by the University of Michigan Ford School), the late statement of the argument The Racial Contract opened.

The non-ideal response has produced work on historical injustice (reparations, transitional justice), structural injustice (Iris Marion Young's Responsibility for Justice, 2011), and epistemic injustice (Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice, 2007, on how some knowers are systematically discredited as knowers). The methodological dispute is genuine. Start from perfect justice and you risk missing the political question; start from observed injustice and you may lack the normative tools to say what counts as a fix.

Multiculturalism, neutrality, and identity ​

Liberalism is officially neutral between conceptions of the good. It does not endorse one religion or one ideal of life; it provides a fair framework within which people pursue their own. Two challenges have stretched this picture.

The multicultural challenge (Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship, 1995) argues that genuine equality may require cultural and group-based rights (language rights, autonomy provisions, exemptions from generally applicable laws) that an individual-rights framework cannot supply. A French-speaking Quebecer in an officially English-only Canada is not enjoying equal cultural standing with anglophones, even if both have the same individual rights. The standard liberal worry is that group rights subordinate individual members, especially women and dissenters, to the group's traditional power-holders. Susan Moller Okin's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999) pressed this point with cases (cousin marriage exemptions, polygamy claims, mother-tongue control of girls' schooling) where the group's claim and the individual woman's interests pull apart.

The communitarian challenge (Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982; Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, 1981) attacks the liberal unencumbered self: a self choosing values from a neutral standpoint, free of constitutive attachments. The communitarian holds this picture is sociologically false (people are constituted by communities, traditions, and shared identities) and morally impoverished (the picture cannot describe the goods of belonging that people actually have). The standard liberal reply is that the alternative defends whatever the prevailing community endorses, including its bigotries.

Global justice ​

Domestic justice is not the whole field. If the worst-off persons relevant to Rawls's difference principle are the world's poorest, why does Rawls confine the principle inside the borders of a single liberal society? Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972) argued that distance does not weaken duties of rescue: if you would wade into a pond to save a drowning child at the cost of your shoes, you must also send the equivalent of those shoes to a child dying of preventable disease abroad. Thomas Pogge's World Poverty and Human Rights (2002) shifted the argument from positive duties to negative ones: rich states are not bystanders to global poverty but active participants in an international order (resource and borrowing privileges, trade rules, intellectual property regimes) that predictably harms the poor. The cosmopolitan position holds that principles of justice apply to all persons regardless of citizenship. The statist reply (David Miller's National Responsibility and Global Justice, 2007) argues that the demanding principles of distributive justice presuppose the coercive shared institutions of a state and so do not extend across borders.

Ideologies and what they actually claim ​

The vocabulary of "left" and "right" obscures the structure of competing political traditions.

Socialism, in its post-Marxist analytic form (Cohen, John Roemer's A Future for Socialism, 1994), holds that capitalism produces avoidable inequalities of power, and that some form of egalitarian ownership of productive resources is a precondition for genuine freedom rather than a luxury added to it. The harder version requires public ownership of major productive assets; the softer version requires a strong welfare state, codetermination, and capital-spreading policies.

Libertarianism, in its rights-based form (Nozick) or its consequentialist form (Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, 1960; Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, 1962), holds that voluntary exchange is generally just, that markets aggregate dispersed information better than central planning can, and that the burden of proof falls heavily on any state action beyond defence and contract enforcement.

Conservatism (Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790; Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, 1962) is less a substantive doctrine than a style of political reasoning: it values inherited institutions because they encode information that has survived selection, prefers gradual reform to comprehensive redesign, and is sceptical of plans to remake society from first principles. Modern political conservatism includes versions that have detached from this style and become reform-minded, or reactionary.

References ​