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8 The Poverty of Political Liberalism I. Introduction In the preceding chapter, I in effect initiated a two-part critique of what Rawls eventually came to call “political liberalism,” which offered a new justificatory basis for justice as fairness. The first part of this critique focuses on Rawls’s proposed solution to the problem of securing a coincidence of wide reflective judgments across persons on a conception of justice, which Rawls sees as “a necessary condition for objective moral truths” (IMT 290; cf. JFPM 395, PL 112). After rejecting one means of securing such a coincidence—namely, “selfevident first principles,” like Kant’s practical postulates—Rawls opts for another: a preexisting consensus on (liberal) considered convictions of justice “implicit in the public culture of a democratic society” (IMT 289; KCMT 305). By limiting his justification in this way, however, Rawls demonstrates a profound pessimism about the potential width of reflective equilibrium: if starting points strongly influence the conclusions we reflectively reach, then dissimilar societies effectively become closed worlds with respect to one another, and justice as fairness (or any other liberal conception of justice, for that matter) can address only those fortunate enough to already have democratic public cultures and institutions. Political liberalism’s rejection of universalism and muteness vis-à-vis nondemocratic societies has been critically discussed by several scholars , including Onora O’Neill and Sam Scheffler (O’Neill 1997, 422–28; Scheffler 1994, 20–22). The second part of the critique says that even in the case of a “democratic society under modern conditions” it is unclear why justice as fairness would be more attractive than alternative conceptions of justice to adherents of nonKantian comprehensive doctrines (KCMT 305–6). I have argued over the course of this book that the conception of the person required to support the three lexically ordered principles of justice (EL, FEO, and DP) is not only radical but distinctively Kantian—so much so, in fact, that it is hard to imagine how adherents of other comprehensive doctrines could morally endorse it, as Rawls insists (IOC 432). Such an affirmation would require a “radical shift” in their belief systems of a kind that Rawls has effectively ruled out by his rejection of self-evident first principles and his consequent pessimism regarding wide reflective equilibrium (TJ 43). In this chapter, I will further develop this two-part critique, starting with the second part and then returning to the first. I reverse the order from the last chapter for the following reason: if political liberals were convinced by the second part, they might be tempted to “bite the bullet” and simply accept the fact that in a pluralistic democratic society, justice as fairness will be just one liberal conception of justice among many, with whatever political efficacy it might achieve being determined through constrained political competition. The first part shows, however, that political liberalism’s poverty runs much deeper than an inability to support justice as fairness in overlapping consensus and that it is not an independently attractive form of justification. Before continuing, I should say a bit more about the “target,” so to speak, of this critique: political liberals, that is, adherents of the mature doctrine outlined at the end of the last chapter as a method of justification in political theory, whether in its narrow form (where the focus of the OC contains only justice as fairness) or its broad form (where the focus contains justice as fairness as well as other liberal PCJs). On this definition, the later Rawls was a political liberal, though there is a hint of ambiguity even here.1 So are many 250 Kantian Foundations 1. The ambiguity arises mostly in Rawls’s very last writings. Earlier, around the time of the political turn, Rawls is reasonably clear that he views Theory as a political-liberal text, albeit one with certain flaws (notably with regard to its treatment of stability)—see, e.g., JFPM 388–89, 396n14. Given that Theory could be interpreted instead as advocating some kind of universalistic Kantian liberalism—a possibility that he does not completely exclude (JFPM 388)—Rawls can be seen here as offering an authoritative political-liberal interpretation of Theory, one intended to discount any universalistic elements. Political liberalism thus supplants any universalism that might have snuck into Theory. In one of his last published pieces, however, Rawls says that Political Liberalism simply answers a different question than Theory—viz...

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