On Rawls & Mainstream American Political Theory : Theorizing Racial Justice PART 3 | C. Mills
a Transcribed Lecture from Charles W. Mills
So Rawls's 1971 book "A Theory of Justice" is generally seen by many people as the most important book of global political philosophy of the 20th century, and this book accomplishes several things. It revives social contract theory. Social contract theory had its heyday in the century-and-a-half from 1650 to 1800, so Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant. And then it goes into historical decline, it's displaced by a more historically oriented theories like Hegel and later Marx, and by Utilitarian theory. And you know by the mid 50s or so social contract theory is seen as dead and also Anglo-American political philosophy is seen as moribund, you know if you go back to the period you find articles written you know sort of worrying about the survival of Anglo-American political philosophy. And the subject matter was seen as so boring that it's not merely that the people reading the articles tended to fall asleep, even the people writing the articles tended to fall asleep. You know you're there, so, um, what was I writing again? Oh, right, right.
So, political philosophy had been reduced to boring stuff like linguistic analysis how should we think of obligation and so forth. And Rawls's work revitalizes the field and suddenly people are doing all kinds of exciting stuff they're talking about you know the big picture the grand theory and so forth and one of the crucial things that Rawls does is he revives social contract theory and he says the appropriate theme of social contract theory should be social justice. And here's what Rawls does he revives social contract theory in the form of a thought experiment. So here's a Rawlsian thought experiment: you're going to be choosing principles of justice for a society, and you're choosing them not on principled moral grounds, but on selfish grounds, prudential grounds, what's in it for me? And you might think that's a really bad basis for choosing principles of justice but you haven't heard the whole story, because Rawls specifies you're choosing behind a veil of ignorance. So you don't know crucial facts about yourself, you don't know crucial facts about the society, so it means that the combination of self-interest and this stipulated ignorance is going to result in the equivalent of a moral choice. And Rawls also allows for a sort of move out from behind the veil and check what these principles whether or not they comport with our sort of deepest moral principles so the sort of check of that kind.
So you're not going to choose a sexist society because for all you know you may turn out to be female. You're not going to choose a racist society because for all you know you may [not] turn out to be white not of course that there can't be other kinds of racist societies. You're not going to choose a plutocratic society because you don't know whether you're going to be in the privileged socio-economic class. So Rawls says these are a good way for generating principles of justice because the crucial point about Rawls is that he said our focus should be devising principles of justice for an ideal that's a perfect society, a well-ordered society.
So there are two principles of justice, the first principle BL, those are the basic rights and liberties people should have, for example to vote, to run for office, freedom of speech, liberty of conscience, rights over personal property, all that good stuff. Second principle has two components FEO, fair equality of opportunity that's a combination of formal equality of opportunity, so you know people are not discriminated against when they apply for jobs and so forth, but in addition, resources sort of equalized for class disadvantage. So the idea would be, if you are a working class kid that's against an upper class kid you should not be disadvantaged by that class background. We want you to have an equal shot at it with people who are you know sort of equally able. And then finally Difference Principle, that's for people who are disadvantaged by other things, for example: you have a thin bundle of natural talents. Rawls is a guy who believes there's a sort of definite sort of distribution curve of talents.
Okay, so Rawls's book would generate a huge body of secondary literature, but here's the problem: he had very little to say about corrective justice. These are principles of distributive justice for an ideal society, a perfect society. And racial Justice, my theme for this evening, is largely a matter of corrective justice in societies that are unjust. So in my work in the previous years I have spent a fair amount of time criticizing Rawls and Rawlsians and saying look; you guys claim to be concerned about justice, and yet you're not talking about racial justice. We need to sort of ask the question about how can we make the transition from Rawls's principles of ideal justice for a well-ordered society to societies that are not well ordered, we need to talk about corrective justice. And then about two years ago, I had a theoretical epiphany and I came to believe that actually I had been misinterpreting Rawls all along, and what that implied is that a significant amount of my previous criticisms of Rawls had been unjustified. But you'll be glad to hear, lest you think it's going to turn into some sort of Rawls love-fest, that it meant that a whole new wave of criticisms could now be unleashed.
So I'm going to give you the background sort of explain this, and I have a claim that I've put in bold, I don't really known if you can see it in this room, but here's my dramatic claim put in bold. Rawls's theory of justice does not apply to the United States. Let me say that again because it's so bizarre. Rawls's theory of justice does not apply to the United States. So obviously you're going to ask why on earth would Rawls, as a citizen of the United States, have devised a theory of justice that was not applicable to his own country. But I'm not saying he intended it not to apply, rather what I'm claiming is that as a matter of fact it doesn't apply. So my original interpretation and I'm suggesting that the first three premises of this are widely shared in the profession. It is important to Φ. We should be trying to Φ. Rawls is trying to Φ. Rawls is doing a bad job of Φing. Bad Rawls, bad. So, Rawls should be criticized for doing a bad job of Φing, and in fact that's what I've been doing for several years. How wrong I was.
My recent, revised interpretation: Rawls is not trying to Φ in the first place, so Rawls cannot be criticized for Φing badly. But it's important to Φ. We should be trying to Φ. So Rawls should be criticized for not even trying to Φ in the first place. So the obvious question, the burning question that I know you all have on your lips is: "Well gee, what is Φing?" And not to keep you in suspense, the answer is Φing is developing a theory of justice for modern Western societies of all kinds both racist and non-racist. And why is Rawls not trying to Φ? Because in his own mind he doesn't have to. The class of "racist modern Western societies" is empty. No modern Western Society is racist, therefore the United States is not racist.
Now that's a pretty strange set of claims, so let me now try to make them plausible for you. And first of all where's the evidence for this crucial claim I made which is obviously quite crazy? My suggestion is that it's in his final book "Justice as Fairness". So this is the last book Rawls wrote, not quite finished because of his illness, edited by philosopher Aaron Kelly. And in this book you can find the following two sentences, admittedly separated by some pages, but nonetheless I think the link should be clear. Page 14, so this is John Rawls: "Justice as fairness is a political conception of justice for this special case of the basic structure of a modern democratic society." Then a few pages later page 21, he expands on this "From the start then, we view a democratic society as a political society that excludes a confessional or an aristocratic state, not to mention a caste, slave, or racist one."
So this was my Epiphany. It's not like I was reading this book for the first time the book has been out since like you know 2001. But for some reason the passages had never struck me before. So my inference is that Rawls is saying: "Look, my theory has a very limited scope, it doesn't apply to these other theories you know I mean we wouldn't think of them, um, confessional—that's a theocratic state—aristocratic state caste society, racist society included on that list.”