John Rawls — reading pack

Page: https://gautsch.org/research/john-rawls/

How to use this pack

Help the reader explore this rabbit hole. Start by asking what caught their attention, then discuss one question at a time. Explore the strongest counterargument and what remains uncertain. Distinguish the original speakers’ claims, Adam’s question, the site’s research commentary, and your own interpretation. Do not treat the commentary as a transcript or assume Adam endorses every claim. Preserve corrections and uncertainty; do not invent sources or pretend to have opened links.

This pack contains the page’s current research text, references and figure text. Related rabbit holes are linked, not included. It is a reading companion, not an independently verified source.

The short version

The most influential political philosopher of the 20th century (1921–2002), and the man who revived social contract theory almost single-handedly. His A Theory of Justice (1971) asks: what principles would you choose for a society if you did not know who you would be in it? Acemoglu’s complaint, in Chapter 3 of What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, is not about the ordering of Rawls’s principles at all. It is about the veil: nobody is ever actually asked, so a philosopher’s account of what you would have agreed to is being used in place of your consent.

Relevant transcript excerpt

Source: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daron-acemoglu-2/

Annotated transcript: https://gautsch.org/research/#a07

ACEMOGLU: Let me start with what’s wrong with a general-will type answer—I’m simplifying it—but I would say in a general-will type of approach is that we have a book in our hand which says when values clash and when there’s something, here is a higher value and we’re going to follow that. Ultimately, even though he’s a true liberal, John Rawls also goes into that direction. Now, you might think utilitarianism avoids that because it says, “No, we don’t have a book. All we do is we turn everything to utils and then we compare those utils.”

Research commentary

Adam asked: “Who is John Rawls.”

The famous machinery. Rawls’s original position, behind a veil of ignorance, asks what principles people would choose without knowing their place in society. His two principles give basic liberties priority over the second principle’s requirements for opportunity and economic distribution:

  1. The liberty principle — the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same for everyone.
  2. Fair equality of opportunity — positions genuinely open to all.
  3. The difference principle — inequalities are permitted only if they benefit the least advantaged.

The priority rules exclude trading basic liberties for greater income and put fair opportunity ahead of the difference principle. This is background to Rawls, not the target of Acemoglu’s objection. See the account of the two principles.

Why Acemoglu objects. In the transcript:

“Ultimately, even though he’s a true liberal, John Rawls also goes into that direction.”

Chapter 3 explains the objection: a philosopher’s account of what people would agree to cannot stand in for their actual participation and consent. The earlier draft guessed that Acemoglu meant Rawls’s ordering of principles. The book review corrected that guess; the hypothetical agreement is what is at issue.

Rawls vs. Nozick, if you want the other half: Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) accepts the contractarian starting point and derives a minimal state, arguing that redistribution violates rights that people hold prior to any distribution. The two books are usually taught together.

From the book

Chapter 3, Liberalism Without Social Contract, is where Rawls is argued with rather than named in passing, and it settles what “goes into that direction” means. It is not lexical priority. The objection is to the hypothetical agreement itself:

“John Rawls, whose 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is foundational to twentieth-century liberalism, was much more committed to liberal ideas than Rousseau was, but I will argue that the same sort of presumed-to-have-agreed reasoning creates tensions for Rawls’s philosophy too.”

The tension is the same one he presses on Rousseau, transposed:

“In practice, nobody is ever asked their views about justice when a social contract is being designed or behind a veil of ignorance… For those living in a real society, not behind a curtain, it would be little comfort to hear that their condition has been justified by a philosopher or statesperson claiming they would have assented to such a social contract behind the veil. Given the chance, they would readily tear up that social contract and the veil.”

And then the general form of the complaint, which is about who does the deciding, not about what got ranked first:

“The root problem is that social contract theories, interpreted as the basis for general ethical rules, go against self-government. They don’t seek the actual consent of individuals and communities to public choices by a process of deliberation, communication, and debate. Rather, they attempt to circumvent any opposition by invoking high-level precepts without broad buy-in from the population.”

Three things this changes.

1. The ordering is not his target. Chapter 3 discusses the difference principle and describes basic liberties as a guardrail on it. Presenting them in that order does not reverse their priority: a guardrail on redistribution is compatible with liberty taking precedence. The objection developed in the chapter is instead to presumed agreement replacing self-government.

2. He does mention the later Rawls. In the same passage: “In later work, Rawls also grapples with the issue of shared moral principles, or public reason, which I discuss below.” So Political Liberalism is not the unnoticed refutation it looks like from the interview — it is acknowledged, and folded into his own account of deliberation later in the chapter.

3. He grants Rawls a legitimate role, which the interview never gets to. The chapter names an “alternative interpretation that Rawls himself offers for his contractarian philosophy, as an input into a debate on shared moral principles” — and accepts it, with a limit:

“However, in this case, such reasoning should be used mainly in the context of deliberation and cannot justify actual policies or impositions of values on people, for example, becoming the basis of laws and how policymakers judge different options.”

By the end of the chapter this has become his positive proposal: political philosophy, “especially those based on liberal principles like John Rawls’s,” as input into deliberation, never as its conclusion. The quarrel is not with what Rawls concluded. It is with anyone treating a philosopher’s conclusion as consent already given.

Reading

Working notes

Resolved against the book, and my reading was wrong. Draft 1 guessed that “goes into that direction” meant Rawls’s lexical priority rule, and called checking it the single highest-value verification on the whole rabbit-hole list. It was — and it came back negative. The words lexical and lexicographic do not occur anywhere in the book, the priority ordering is never discussed as an ordering, and the objection Chapter 3 actually makes is the looser one I listed as the alternative: that contractarian reasoning derives principles philosophically instead of democratically, so nobody is ever actually asked. The From the book section above replaces the guess.

That resolution propagates. Social Contract Theory and Its Critics and The Book Problem were both waiting on this answer, and both were leaning on the same wrong reading.

Source and its limits. Checked against the audiobook edition (Penguin Random House Audio, narrated by John Lee), machine-transcribed, so references are by chapter rather than page. Quotations are transcribed speech and may differ from the printed text in punctuation; they should be re-checked against print before being quoted as exact. A negative result — “the book never says lexical” — is weaker evidence from a transcript than from a printed index, though a rule that is never discussed in twelve hours of text is not a rule he is arguing against.

Related: Social Contract Theory and Its Critics · The Book Problem · Henry Sidgwick

Research page built in conversation with Claude.