Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness

Introduction

In his essay “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” William Galston distinguishes between two varieties of liberal theory.1 The first—Enlightenment liberalism— stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, understood as “individual self-direction” and entailing a “sustained rational examination of self, others, and social practices”; this is the liberalism of not only Kant and Mill but also a number of contemporary thinkers, including Don Herzog, Stephen Macedo, Jeremy Waldron, and the preeminent Kantians (Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgaard, Onora O’Neill, Allen Wood, etc.).2 The second— Reformation liberalism—emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it, where diversity is understood simply as “differences among individuals and groups over such matters as the nature of a good life, sources of moral authority, reason versus faith, and the like”; this is the liberalism of not only Madison and Isaiah Berlin but also contemporary thinkers such as Galston himself , Charles Larmore, and Donald Moon.3 These two varieties of liberal theory are often mutually supporting—as Galston puts it, “the exercise of autonomy yields diversity, while the fact of diversity protects and nourishes autonomy”— but in a surprising number of cases they conflict, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally.4 In fact, much of the so-called liberalism/multiculturalism debate is an intramural affair, pitting Enlightenment and Reformation liberals against one another.5 Introduction 1. Galston (1995). His distinction between “Enlightenment” and “Reformation” liberalisms was anticipated by Charles Larmore’s distinction between “Kantian” and “modus vivendi” liberalisms and Donald Moon’s distinction between “traditional” and “political” liberalisms, respectively; see Larmore (1987) and Moon (1993). 2. Galston (1995, 521, 523, 525). He identifies Herzog, Macedo, and Waldron as Enlightenment liberals. 3. Ibid., 521, 525–27. He identifies himself, Madison, and Berlin as Reformation liberals, at least implicitly. Locke is harder to categorize. The Letter Concerning Toleration has both Enlightenment and Reformation components: some of its arguments focus on the idea that only a “free faith” can have any worth in the eyes of God, while others place emphasis on the peace and security that will follow from toleration of diverse sects—see Locke (1990, 19, 65, 71). 4. Galston (1995, 521). Regarding the third case, see Mehta (1999) on Mill, Burke, and British colonialism. 5. See, e.g., Laden and Owen (2007), as well as the discussion in Kymlicka (2002, chap. 8). One might reasonably ask where John Rawls, arguably the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century, would fall in this debate. He certainly had many Enlightenment-liberal credentials: he taught several famous Kantians (e.g., Herman, Korsgaard, and O’Neill), lectured on Kant extensively, and characterized his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), as “highly Kantian in nature.”6 By the same token, though, Rawls’s later work Political Liberalism (1993) “applies the principle of toleration to philosophy itself,” thus taking a diversity-based approach that has been a major influence on such Reformation liberals as Galston, Larmore, and Moon.7 We might therefore understand Rawls’s intellectual trajectory as the opposite of the historical one: it begins with the Enlightenment and ends by circling back to the Reformation. This depiction of his trajectory is far too crude, however. Political Liberalism may be a Reformation-liberal text, but is Theory really an Enlightenmentliberal one—or, more precisely, is it a Kantian-liberal one? Many scholars have called Rawls’s Kantian credentials into question, including Kerstin Budde, Otfried Höffe, Oliver Johnson, Larry Krasnoff, and Andrew Levine (see Budde 2007, Höffe 1984, Johnson 1974, Krasnoff 1999, and Levine 1974). Other scholars (e.g., Larmore) have discerned certain justificatory ambiguities in Theory, such as the commingling of Enlightenment-liberal and Reformation-liberal elements.8 Most importantly, Rawls himself saw a strong continuity between the arguments of Theory and Political Liberalism, suggesting that the Kantianism of the former work may have been oversold, not only by himself but by others as well.9 I will therefore begin in chapter 1 by showing just how Kantian Rawls was during his most Kantian period—roughly, from Theory of Justice to his “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980) and “Social Unity and Primary xviii Introduction 6. TJ xviii. The Kant lectures take up approximately half of LHMP. A number of Rawls’s students , including those listed above, contributed to an edited volume that took its inspiration from Rawls’s approach to teaching the history of...