Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (16 page)

Rawls’s philosophical laboratory

The leading and most influential theorist of philosophical liberalism in the 20th century was John Rawls (1921–2002). Rawls’s famous phrase, ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’ has had significant resonance in recalibrating liberal values. In other liberal variants that first virtue might be liberty, or privacy, or well-being, or progress, or individuality. For Rawls the essence of liberalism lies in two components, the one libertarian and the other egalitarian. The libertarian component aspires to make individuals more capable of making choices about their lives that are not only free, but reflective and sensible. That component is the autonomy conception of liberty mentioned in
Chapter 4
. The egalitarian component is Rawls’s most creative contribution to liberal theory. It insists on satisfying basic conditions for social justice; that is to say, endowing individuals with the requisite resources without which they will not have the effective possibility of pursuing autonomous ends and living a good life of their choosing. That entails not only ensuring the equal liberty of all members of a society, but a redistribution of goods designed to benefit the least advantaged, who have prior claim on wealth and services before others can benefit from them. To the extent that individual circumstances are the consequence of brute luck, the argument goes, the less fortunate should be compensated in a just society. That luck might be genetic, or reflect the fertility of a geographical region, or relate to the means possessed by the family into which one is born. However, the ‘least advantaged’ remains an elusive category as a policy guide as it is consummately difficult to identify an individual who would occupy that hapless position simultaneously on the different scales of wealth, health, intelligence, and good looks, to mention some of the more prominent criteria that determine human life-chances. Because we may be advantaged on one scale and deprived on another, this requires a comparison that can never be conclusive.

It is no accident that in his version of liberalism Rawls makes a move from justice to fairness. Replacing the grandiloquent connotations of justice for a society as a whole, Rawls approaches justice more modestly as building up from a personal, small-scale reflection on how any individual would want to be treated fairly and applying that reflection to all. He employs a thought-experiment that relies on methodological individualism, that is to say, on positing the individual alone as the unit of analysis, abstracted from his or her social environment. In what Rawls terms the ‘original position’, each individual is placed under a veil of ignorance about most of their characteristics, about their position in society, about the groups to which they belong, and about their life-chances. However, even under that veil individuals are still endowed with two features: they are rational and they are risk-averse. In addition, individuals possess two pre-social moral powers: a sense of justice and a conception of the good. Equipped with those attributes they are expected to determine what each of them would want both for themselves and for others. For Rawls, that is the optimal approach to exploring what a fair political system should look like.

The second moral power involves the capacity of individuals to form, revise, and pursue a conception of one’s rational advantage or good, though it bypasses the fact that alternative liberal viewpoints increasingly accept that people are also motivated by emotional and irrational factors. As will be illustrated in
Chapter 7
, emotion is part and parcel of thought and conduct, even within the liberal family. Philosophical liberals are keen to see individuals working intellectually, and especially morally, at full strength. They pay little heed to the human frailty that welfare state liberals incorporated into their thinking or to the passions that motivate people, passions that sometimes reinforce but at other times undercut their moral sensibilities. Arguably, few individuals are inclined to shoulder the burden of repeatedly re-assessing their life plans, a point brilliantly made in 1907 by Herbert Asquith, about to become the British Liberal prime minister, who had attended T.H. Green’s lectures but reacted sceptically to that philosopher’s message by commenting: ‘I believe in the right of every man face to face with the State to make the best of himself and subject to the limitation that he does not become a nuisance or a danger to the community to make less than the best of himself.’ For Rawls, nonetheless, the impact of the two moral powers under the veil of ignorance is to create a fair order of free and equal persons acting as fully cooperating members of a society. The endemic presence of conflict and dissent is minimized because rational collaboration is elevated to the default position of social life—it is the norm of human conduct.

The egalitarian component of liberalism—rarely, and if so implicitly, at the core of the older liberal layers—has been moved to centre-stage in many recent philosophical arguments because a liberal society is now held to be one that guarantees each and every member generous access to important social goods. That liberal egalitarianism usually falls short of the radical equalization of socialist schemes. It rests content with ensuring minima for a humane life, and with reducing the gap between the fortunate and the disadvantaged through a mix of public and private redistributive measures—the state, employers’ codes of conduct, and voluntary associations such as charities. But it is prepared to permit discrepancies in wealth that will nonetheless influence life-chances. Undoubtedly, there is plausibility in the Rawlsian precepts as a characterization of liberalism’s actual and historical preconditions and ends, given the many possible meanings of liberty, equality, and justice in the liberal family. But this, more than most other liberal schemes, is primarily a stipulative vision (or what Rawls occasionally termed a ‘realistic utopia’) of the arrangements that any fair and decent society should seek to implement. Notably current philosophers, unlike many of their political theory counterparts, are prone to referring to liberalism in the singular, not the plural. They see no need for argument about its interpretation and priorities. It is conceived of as the distillation of the agreed normative requirements of a free and well-ordered community, and one that will ensure its long-term stability.

Left-liberalism and ideal-type liberalism

Rawlsian philosophical liberalism shares certain similarities with fourth layer liberalism. Both subscribe to a strong idea of internal harmony and consensus on which all right-thinking people will converge. And both place considerable emphasis on social policies that will work in favour of the marginalized and underprivileged members of a society. But there the similarities end. Philosophical liberalism in its Rawlsian version is based on hypothetical assumptions that model human thought and conduct, and are therefore immediately attainable in a specific, imagined, and context-free thought exercise. Fourth layer liberalism was the outcome of actual and hard-won radical policies, however imperfect, that saw the slow rise of a welfare society in a piecemeal and gradual process. Notably, Rawls’s analysis is based on an individual artificially insulated from the social groups that fourth layer liberals regarded as contributing significantly to individual ability and character, due to his belief that the veil of ignorance can usefully model human conduct and form the basis for social arrangements.

The strong individualism of much contemporary philosophical liberalism has also been put at the service of dichotomizing liberalism and communitarianism. It involves a sharp distinction between the emphasis on rational individuals capable of realizing themselves independently and a focus on the social anchoring of individuals—be that in a small group, a neighbourhood, or society as a whole. That dichotomy ignores the extent to which the liberal tradition, particularly in its social liberal mode—a mode of which many philosophical liberals seem to be unaware—reconciled the two tendencies. The decontextualized timelessness of philosophical liberalism, and its indifference to history, play down the importance of mutating social relationships in constituting the individual. Philosophical liberalism also treats as largely irrelevant the evidence that liberalism is an ideology that has had to struggle with other ideologies for supremacy and impact, and that liberalism undergoes continuous modifications when it emerges in different cultures. Seen historically and politically, liberalism has pursued an elusive universalism (or in more recent language, a globalism) intended to spread gradually—but far from completely—through example and expansion. On the contrary, the neatness of philosophical liberalism lies in its logical immediacy and robust persuasiveness for those who subscribe to its ethical vision. Once you accept its impeccable moral reasoning it simply becomes the correct viewpoint. Space and time offer no boundaries for ideal-type thinking. That is not offered as a critique of the enterprise of philosophical liberalism but as a comment on its different disciplinary allegiances.

What has to obtain for such a conception of liberalism to be workable? First, justice must be a universalizable idea that can be shared by all—there can be no multiple, ideologically competing, theories of justice possessing moral respectability. Second, human beings are unquestionably both moral and rational entities. For a Rawlsian philosophical liberal, there is an inevitability about human rationality that is morally compelling: being irrational is not an ethical option. Third, the sense of justice is based on an assumed overlapping consensus on universal ground rules, otherwise described as a theory of the right rather than of the good, because it over-rides procedurally the substantive religious, philosophical, and moral differences that invariably exist among people. That overlapping consensus is also ‘free-standing’; in other words, it is not dependent on a more comprehensive liberal ideology of the kind this book has investigated—or any other ideology for that matter. However, Rawls does concede that it has an affinity with particular practices that are embedded in current democracies. Put differently, it just happens to be the case that each rational individual on his or her own will arrive at the same justifiable ethical ground rules. And it just happens to be the case that the resulting overlapping consensus is remarkably similar to some Western democratic assumptions. That consensus becomes the vital sustainer of social and constitutional stability, which, for Rawlsians, are also central political ends of liberalism.

The kind of pared-down ‘political liberalism’ advanced by Rawls has been criticized as far too minimal and out of step with other liberalisms purporting to contain radical messages. Two of its features have been singled out as inadequate. First, it does not include individuality, and possibly not even progress, at the centre of its vision. Second, its emphasis on what is uniquely human—a range of mental and moral capabilities—seriously understates the emotional and physical attributes of human beings, which are not necessarily captured on an ethically normative register. It is only when we take all four of those capabilities together as having robust claims on social policy that we can realize the welfare state liberalism that marked the policies of many 20th century European societies. Conversely, it is doubtful whether Rawls’s ‘thin’ political liberalism can be universalized and made compatible with other ideologies or with all major religious belief systems.

Liberal neutrality

Other philosophical liberals have brought their own brands of liberal argumentation to the table. Their insistence on liberal neutrality is incompatible with a view of ideologies as a particular assemblage of decontested concepts, values, and preferences. It perpetuates the possibility of a clear divide between the private and the public, with the state abstaining from declaring a position on private matters. Liberal critics have found that divide increasingly controversial, not least because what one perspective finds private—hate speech or family relationships—another may find of public concern. Moreover, state silence effectively condones whatever the prevailing practice is, whether desirable or not. Unquestionably, liberals believe that many areas of human activity should be exempt from state control or regulation, but to make that a rigid rule would permit serious abuses to be disregarded.

For a while in the late 20th century a doctrine of liberal neutrality was a firm favourite among liberal philosophers, exemplified by Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) with the American constitutional model in mind. The argument for state neutrality could only hold if certain choices, rules, and rights were regarded as supra-political, beyond human contention. That would seemingly limit liberalism’s role not only to protecting all privately held values, however distasteful, but to the active facilitation of their expression, reminiscent of the old adage ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. That approach is redolent of an older liberal view of harm as physical and legal rather than psychological and emotional.

Characteristically, Dworkin maintained that the great merit of the American Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments addition to the original American Constitution—was its decisive removal of certain fundamental principles from the control of democratic majorities. That was elaborated in Rawls’s insistence on the urgent political requirement ‘to fix, once and for all, the content of certain basic political rights and liberties’, thus taking them off the political agenda. While understandable as an attempt to safeguard some liberal principles, that insistence is as elitist and political as many other expressions of liberal ideology. On that view, majorities tend to impose preferences on others and potentially violate individual rights, and those crucial rights need to be isolated from the vicissitudes that rule the political sphere by enshrining them in a constitution that is very hard to modify. The American Constitution and its Bill of Rights unquestionably include important liberal political practices, in particular establishing the principles of representation and the equal treatment of all citizens. But the immunity bestowed on the Bill of Rights has fostered the illusion that the Supreme Court possesses a neutral perspective impervious to political vicissitudes.