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| protean |
Posted
on 05-Dec-02 02:43 PM
John Rawls, one of the most prominent political thinkers of the 20th century, on equality, justice,and rights, has passed away.
May his soul rest in peace and may his teachings guide and enlighten
generations to come!
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http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1477322
John Rawls, political philosopher, died on November 24th, aged 81
WHEN young, John Rawls was a talented athlete. Instead of becoming one of America's most distinguished political thinkers, he could have been a baseball player. Thin, quick and gangly, he would have made a perfect third baseman, a position requiring lightning reflexes and no time to think.
In the line he chose, however—close argument—Mr Rawls was a slow mover. He noted queries in pencil, responded to every objection and often begged for time with, “I'll have to think about that.” Many philosophers treat their theories as extensions of themselves; his seemed more like a common enterprise. He was modest, claiming that he took up philosophy because he was not clever enough for music or mathematics. Others at his level were quicker. Few were as thorough.
The germ of “A Theory of Justice”, the book that to his surprise made him famous, began to circulate in draft soon after he reached Harvard from Princeton and MIT in 1962. By the time of its publication in 1971, Mr Rawls had done his best to work in answers to every possible objection. His assiduity made the book hard-going. It also meant that it met a test proposed by Hilary Putnam, a logician and colleague, for a philosophical classic: the smarter you get, the smarter it gets. The book has sold getting on for 400,000 copies, and exists in dozens of languages, most recently Arabic.
In “A Theory of Justice”, Mr Rawls attempted to lay out a defendable basis for an equality-minded liberalism. Its pillars were two principles of justice: the inviolability of individual rights and the idea that when justifying social inequality—some degree of which was inevitable in a flourishing and prosperous society—absolute priority should be given to the needs of the worst off. By putting rights back at the centre of the enterprise and by re-invoking the old idea of a notional social contract among putative equals, Mr Rawls did much to free political theory in America and Britain from apparent cul-de-sacs. It also encouraged philosophers to think more practically about moral issues in the public arena.
Problems of redistribution
Challenges were not long in coming. Much fire was concentrated on Mr Rawls's famous “veil of ignorance”: what principles of justice would we choose, he asked, if we did not know our talents, wealth or opinions? Would we be as risk-averse as he seemed to think? This eye-catching device actually mattered less to the whole than it looked. A more notable attack came from Robert Nozick (who died in January). In “Anarchy, State and Utopia” (1974), Nozick argued that Mr Rawls's two principles of justice were in irreconcilable conflict. Attempts at redistribution to correct for inequality were bound, Nozick believed, to infringe on personal freedoms.
Conservatives took up Nozick's charge with alacrity. Though socialists were lukewarm to Mr Rawls, the two men were soon represented outside the academy as prizefighters for right and left: in the blue corner, Nozick, in the red corner, Rawls.
For all its importance, the issue of redistribution arose for Mr Rawls from a deeper concern. How can people with conflicting ideas about morals, religion and the good life agree to principles that will allow them to live together in a decent society? Though the need for toleration is perfectly general, because of America's divided history and his own family background, Mr Rawls felt its demands with unusual acuity.
He was born to a wealthy, professional family from Maryland, a slave-owning border state that stayed in the Union during the civil war. The father was a Baltimore lawyer who, to the son's chagrin, shared the racial bigotry of his class and time. His mother campaigned for women's rights.
Mr Rawls grew up with a powerful conscience. Though not conventionally religious, there was something deeply moral about him. At one time, he thought of becoming a minister of religion. Colleagues remember his kindness and wry humour. He was almost universally admired, even loved. Not all of us can be so good, of course. Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford political thinker, referred to him teasingly as Christ. Political opponents chided Mr Rawls for overplaying human decency and underestimating our selfishness. A conservative writer called him an innocent.
Holier than some might wish, perhaps. But innocent, never. In 1943, Mr Rawls signed up as an infantry private and fought on the Pacific beaches. A rare example of direct political action was his protest in 1945 against the Hiroshima bomb. Like his reconciling hero, Abraham Lincoln—whose memorial he visited on trips to Washington—Mr Rawls appealed to our better natures. But he knew from experience what people and states were capable of. Not to see this darker, more pessimistic side is to mistake what he was about.
In his later work, Mr Rawls paid more attention to “how” questions of fair process and tried to extend his principles from what struck some as their unduly western, not to say American, context. He lived behind a veil of privacy with his wife and four children, accepting few honours, giving few interviews and devoting spare time to hiking and sailing.
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| protean |
Posted
on 05-Dec-02 02:46 PM
More on Rawls.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021223&s=alterman
Rawls and Us
The late John Rawls was, by all accounts, a remarkably modest and generous person, much beloved by his friends and students, and profoundly uninterested in the kinds of fame and celebrity perks his prominence naturally invited. But his genius, not his goodness, is what makes him important to those of us who never knew him.
Thomas Nagel calls Rawls "the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century." Many consider him to be the most important thinker on justice, rights and equality since Kant. Indeed, his demanding 1971 masterpiece, A Theory of Justice, has sold more than 200,000 copies in the United States alone, launched an estimated 5,000 retorts and critiques, and been translated into roughly two dozen languages. Even political philosophers who disagree with its emphasis, including the liberal communitarians Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, and the conservative Robert Nozick, do so in a Rawlsian context. Liberal legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin admits, "My present view is opposed to his in some ways, but only from within a field defined by him."
Isaiah Berlin often observed that beneath most great philosophical systems lie some pretty ideas. Nowhere is this truer than of Rawls. I'll leave the summary to Alan Ryan, who memorialized Rawls in the London Independent. Rawls, Ryan wrote, "had two deep insights. The first was that utilitarianism was fundamentally flawed; utilitarianism, that is, trying to maximise the welfare of a whole society, failed to recognise what Rawls called 'the separateness of persons.'... The second deep insight is thus that we need an account of justice as fairness. What is the crucial question that we must be able to answer if we are to say that social arrangements meet the test of fairness?... Rawls's stroke of genius was to invent the idea of a 'veil of ignorance,' shrouding the folk who make this social contract so that they do not know who they will be, what abilities they will possess, what faith they will adopt, and so on. If they do not know whether they will be winners or losers, smart or dumb, Christians, Jews, Muslims or atheists, they will sign up only for arrangements that protect them whatever happens."
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| protean |
Posted
on 05-Dec-02 02:46 PM
These two insights remain the starting point for most students of political philosophy, but they remain all but invisible in politics itself. Dworkin once told a reporter that he could think of no Supreme Court arguments relying on Rawls. His ideas are entirely invisible in the political programs of either US major political party and have been explicitly rejected by "New Labour" in Britain. The relative obscurity of his ideas in American life today--compared with, say, those of Milton Friedman or, God help us, Charles Murray--is evident in just how little notice was taken of his death in this country. The Washington Post, the political community's hometown paper, ran a buried wire-service report. The New York Times and LA Times both ran rather perfunctory obituaries with none of the "great man" trappings that accompanied the death of Milton Berle (no disrespect to Uncle Miltie intended). While he was properly lauded by his peers in Britain and in Le Monde, ironically, if you wanted to read an American appreciation of Rawls, you had to go to National Review Online, where the conservative philosopher Richard Epstein published a provocative engagement with his work (though the Times and Boston Globe did later run thoughtful reflections on his legacy in other sections).
Part of the reason for this is that Rawls refused almost all honors offered him and explicitly abjured involvement with contemporary politics. His only known written contribution to a political debate was a 1995 Dissent article in which he criticized the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Rawls was a soldier in the Pacific in August 1945.) He also participated in an antiwar conference during the Vietnam War, though he argued against the "2S" deferment, which allowed his Harvard students to avoid service by virtue of their privileged position as students "in good standing." But that's it.
Thomas Nagel argues that "political philosophy, when it has an impact on the world, affects the world only indirectly, through the gradual penetration, usually over generations, of questions and arguments from abstruse theoretical writings into the consciousness and the habits of thought of educated persons, and from there into political and legal argument, and eventually into the structure of alternatives among which political and practical choices are actually made." Even so, there exists a yawning gap between Rawls's totemic standing in the life of the mind and his near obscurity in the life of society. His basic notions are not terribly complex. And while he may have lacked the gene for self-promotion, it is not as if no one else in public life had the opportunity to explicate his ideas for a larger public.
I think the problem with Rawls is not philosophical but political. Like Peter Singer--who in his most recent work is critical of Rawls for concerning himself only with a single society and community without addressing the issue of our responsibilities to those beyond our borders--Rawls's simple standard of justice just asks too much of us. In particular, he asks too much of those born with sufficient natural advantages--in birth, wealth and education--to participate in national political debate. The idea of the people who clean the classrooms of the 92nd Street Y preschool having the same rights and privileges as the Jack Grubmans who organize million-dollar contributions in order to get their kids into it would require so many radical changes in the structure of our society and political system that we would hardly recognize it. Indeed, a few days before Rawls died, the Wall Street Journal was advocating higher taxes--for the first time in its history, perhaps--but only for the "lucky duckies" who make only $12,000 a year. The right's successful campaign against the so-called death tax, coupled with its assault on public education, could destroy forever the possibility of an even remotely equal-opportunity society.
That we cannot live up to the best, however, is no reason not to strive for the better. It is surely no excuse for complacency in the face of a war against children born poor.
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| protean |
Posted
on 05-Dec-02 05:30 PM
Rawls,one of the most distinguihsed philosophers of the 20th century,remembered.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/opinion/02NUSS.html
Making Philosophy Matter to Politics
By MARTHA NUSSBAUM
CHICAGO
John Rawls, who died last week at the age of 82, was the most distinguished political philosopher of the 20th century. His is not a household name, in part because he disliked publicity. Yet, to a great degree, it is thanks to John Rawls that philosophy has continued to animate politics. He enters philosophy's history alongside Locke, Mill, Henry Sidgwick and Kant. One of his characteristically generous contributions was to insist on the enduring significance of the writings of these historical figures: he constantly taught them in preference to his own.
When Mr. Rawls began his career, these figures and their themes — social justice, free speech, respect for human equality, religious pluralism — were neglected in philosophy. "Logical positivism" had convinced people that there were only two things that it made sense to do: empirical research and conceptual analysis. Science did the first, philosophy the second. So moral and political philosophy became the analysis of moral and political concepts and how language conveyed them.
Mr. Rawls, however, insisted on the importance of asking the big normative questions like, What makes a society just? He used a method of justification that he associated with Socrates, Aristotle and Sidgwick. He argued that, as we set out our ethical convictions, we try to identify those that are deepest and most reliable. (His example is the belief that slavery is wrong.) We then examine these convictions using the ethical theories known to us, seeking consistency and fit in our judgments taken as a whole. Judgments sometimes yield to a convincing theory; and theories often undergo revision or rejection in the light of judgments that they fail to fit.
Mr. Rawls believed that his own writings supplied only one of the theories we should consider in such a process. But he also believed he could show that his theory was superior to some other theories that had held sway: for example, utilitarianism, understood as the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. This theory, he argued, does too little to respond to our conviction that each person's life is in certain ways inviolable. (Utilitarianism cannot rule out slavery as being unjust, only for being inefficient.)
Beginning from this idea about each person's inviolability, Mr. Rawls invented the famous thought experiment called the "original position," which represents people choosing principles of justice for the society in which they will live. In the experiment, these people know that they have interests and plans, but they are behind a "veil of ignorance," not permitted to know their class, race, sex, religion or the precise content of their plans of life.
Mr. Rawls argues that, under these conditions, they will give priority to a group of traditional religious and political liberties on a basis of equality for all citizens. In the economic sphere they will permit inequalities, but only when those raise the position of the least well off. "Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view," says the last sentence of "A Theory of Justice," published in 1971.
These famous arguments underwent some revision over time. Mr. Rawls focused increasingly on the issue of religious pluralism, redesigning the theory to show that it could offer principles that all the major religions, and nonreligious people, could accept as a basis for life together in a pluralistic society. Although he seemed to lose interest in defending his economic principles against the criticism they increasingly received — as the Great Society yielded to a new era in which these principles seemed increasingly radical — he did insist that the American system of campaign financing was distorting the right to vote.
Another change was Mr. Rawls's growing interest in justice for women. Unlike some of his younger colleagues — Robert Nozick, for example, who also died this year, a man of constantly surprising perceptions — Mr. Rawls had, at first, little sense of the goals for which feminists were striving. But he understood that many of the proposed changes were just, and he worked constantly to integrate a concern for women's equality into his work.
Although he never questioned the naturalness, in some sense, of the traditional nuclear family, he did much to respond to feminist criticisms, acknowledging that families as we know them are often unjust to women. In his writings on international justice, he repeatedly underlined the importance of women's equal opportunity as a key to global justice.
John Rawls has sometimes been portrayed as a kind of natural saint, who effortlessly put others first. I believe the reality was more complicated and more admirable than that: he had a keen sense of the emotions that make for injustice, yet waged a constant struggle for justice. I recall a conversation with him about Wagner's "Tristan," when I was a young faculty member. I made some Nietzschean jibes about the otherworldliness of Wagnerian passion and how silly it all was. Mr. Rawls, with sudden intensity, said to me that I must not make a joke about this. Wagner was absolutely wonderful and therefore extremely dangerous. You had to see the danger, he said, to comprehend how bad it would be to be seduced by that picture of life, with no vision of the general good.
America has increasingly moved away from John Rawls. Inequalities have grown, and the electorate seems largely indifferent to them. But our own greed and partiality can hardly diminish the virtues of his distinguished work. Perhaps we can regard the occasion of his death as a challenge to look into ourselves and identify the roots of those selfish passions that eclipse, so much of the time, the vision of the general good. Purity of heart would be to see clearly what has blocked that vision and to act with grace and self-command toward the general good.
Martha Nussbaum is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
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| himalaya |
Posted
on 06-Dec-02 03:55 PM
politician and justice? politician and rights? GIVE ME A BREAK. But i would still like to know what made him earn so much respect from you.
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| protean |
Posted
on 10-Dec-02 11:35 AM
He was one who never came to politcal cricle for his vested interest. Became an academic all along. Believed in eqaulity --the concept which is evasive and also conceived as not being possible nowadays. He could be one of the philosophers that would be termed a genius all along, and he was always modest of his ability.
That's why I respect him, and will continually do.
He'll go in the history as a philosopher in the same stature as Locke, Mills, and others before him.
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