Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science

Chapter Two: The Cognition of Principles and the Role of Rawlsian Political Analysis

   29 c h a p t e r t w o The Cognition of Principles and the Role of Rawlsian Political Analysis This chapter aims to secure the place of principles as coequal with interests in the microfoundations of political analysis, and to consider how this recasts the role of political analysis. In order to do these things, it first shows how the proposed political analysis is grounded in the work of Kant and of Rawls and explains how that analysis builds on Rawls’s project. Although I noted above that Kant and Rawls are engaged in ideal theory, given the Kantian moral psychology as a foundation, a certain applied analysis becomes both necessary and possible. In order to explore our cognition of principles and the relation of the reasonable to the rational and to other forms of cognition, this chapter considers the role of principles in Kant’s and Rawls’s philosophies. While Rawls asserts that “justice as fairness” (his conception of social justice) does not rely on Kantian metaphysics,1 the Kantian moral psychology is at the core of Rawls’s constructive procedure. Showing how the reasonable and the rational are represented in the original position and their role in Rawls’s idea of political liberalism at once clarifies the concepts of principles and interests and also helps us to see what is required from what I am calling “Rawlsian analysis.” In order to move from ideal theory to political analysis we need to grasp a more prosaic conception of principles than one might normally associate with Kant or Rawls. For this purpose, and also to establish 30 Rawlsian Political Analysis principles as coequal with interests, we consider three accounts of the sources and development of principles; the first is from Rawls, the second is from Honneth, and the third is my own account of possible origins of principles in human evolution. Kant and Rawls work with ideological frameworks that include theistic worldviews, although Rawls does not adopt such a view himself and Kant generally keeps the working area of his philosophy free from deistic considerations.2 Contemporary common sense, however, is beginning to take evolution more or less for granted. While an evolutionary perspective might appear to suggest that interests are more fundamental than principles, I show how the independence of principles from interests can be consistent with such a perspective. The sparest justification for a Rawlsian political analysis can be drawn from basic features of Kant’s ontology and Rawls’s ethics. Given that (1) social relations are constructed from principles and interests and (2) we have an obligation to promote social justice, the need for such an analysis becomes apparent. We can link this spare account with Rawls’s project as follows. Rawls views the importance of justice as given.3 He builds on the contractarian tradition, drawing from John Locke, Rousseau , and Kant, to provide an alternative conception of social justice to those of the prevailing utilitarian tradition.4 His theory is loosely grounded in history, in that it appeals to what he refers to as “our” considered judgments and political traditions, and he explains a general sequence of implementation (i.e., by way of a constitutional convention),5 but he does not address how his theory might be adopted, for example, by any particular society. I would like to emphasize that achieving a society that is just in Rawlsian terms is contingent and perhaps unlikely. Social justice is, after all, the ultimate public good (to borrow from economic theory). As the obligation of all, it is the responsibility of none, and steps to building a just society offend powerful interests. Rawls offers his theory of justice as cohering with and helping to order our considered judgments, but whether it does so depends on the principles that constitute a particular person’s political identity. The analysis I propose takes the question of what principles actually constitute our political identities to be an empirical one. The Cognition of Principles and the Role of Rawlsian Political Analysis 31 Kant and the Sense of Right Kant regarded his own philosophy as having solved, once and for all, many long-standing problems in ontology, epistemology, and ethics. A central feature of his solutions in all three areas is the distinction between things in themselves and things as objects of experience, and the concepts from Kant on which Rawls bases the reasonable and the rational employ this...