However attractive a conception of justice might be on other grounds, it is seriously defective if the principles of moral psychology are such that it fails to engender in human beings the requisite desire to act upon it.
–John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Abstract
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to John Rawls’s concern with stability—a concern that, as Rawls himself notes, motivated Part III of A Theory of Justice and some of the more important changes of his political turn. For Rawls, the possibility of achieving ‘stability for the right reasons’ depends on citizens possessing sufficient moral motivation. I argue, however, that the moral psychology Rawls develops to show how such motivation would be cultivated and sustained does not cohere with his specific descriptions of ‘pluralist (partially comprehensive)’ doctrines. Considering Rawls’s claims that ‘most’ citizens—both in contemporary liberal democracies and in the well-ordered society—possess such doctrines, this incompatibility threatens to undermine his stability arguments. Despite the enormous importance of pluralist doctrines and the potential difficulties they pose for Rawls’s project, remarkably little attention has been paid to them. By critically examining these difficulties, the article begins to address this oversight.
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Notes
The following abbreviations are used throughout and are generally cited parenthetically in the text: A Theory of Justice = TJ (page references are given to both the 1971 and 1999 editions in the form [1971]/[1999]); Political Liberalism = PL; Collected Papers = CP; Justice as Fairness: A Restatement = JFR.
Rawls’s distinction between ‘acting from’ and ‘acting in accordance with’ the political conception is conceptually relevant to my argument here, as only the former is sufficient for stability for the right reasons (see PL, pp. 142–143, 302). Both acting in accordance with and acting from the political conception involve structuring one's actions so that they conform with the principles of justice, whenever appropriate. Yet, truly acting from the political conception requires having a sense of justice, which means regarding the principles of justice themselves as reasons for acting; in other words, acting from entails having the ‘right’ kind of motivation. Merely living in accordance with the political conception, on the other hand, implies a lack of that kind of motivation. Indeed, one might act in accordance with the political conception simply by being ‘prompted by penalties enforced by state power’ (PL, p. 142).
Alternatively, Rawls refers to the same doctrine as ‘the comprehensive pluralist view’, ‘the pluralist view’, and the ‘partially comprehensive view’ (see, e.g., PL, pp. 145, 155, 160, 170). Note also that Weithman (2010) refers to the view as ‘value pluralism’.
A pluralistic society is one comprised of citizens of various comprehensive doctrines.
This slightly amends George Klosko’s formulation of the ‘basic question’ (which he attributes to Rawls): ‘how is just moral and political union possible in pluralistic, contemporary societies?’ (Klosko (2000), p. vii).
The term ‘partially comprehensive doctrine’ encompasses the PPC view, though is ostensibly not limited to it (Rawls also identifies various ‘null’ views as examples of non-pluralist, partially comprehensive doctrines) (PL, p. 386 n. 18). However, once a citizen with an only partially comprehensive doctrine adopts an account of values not already present or presupposed by that doctrine (e.g. the political conception), the doctrine ipso facto becomes ‘pluralist’ (PL, p. 168).
There is certainly reason to question Rawls’s psychological account of the PPC view—in particular, whether the various domains of values are as discrete as he suggests. Pursuing this question exceeds the scope of this paper, however.
An account of values is ‘freestanding’ when it is ‘not presented as derived from any comprehensive doctrine’ (PL, p. xlii).
A defense might be made, however, by appealing to the various political goods that the political conception helps citizens to realize—e.g. the fair terms of social cooperation, full political autonomy, and so on (see, e.g., PL, pp. 201 ff., 160–164; see further, Gaus 2014). This point is considered more carefully in the second part of section four, below.
On this point, see PL, pp. 147, 160–162, 168, 183–186; JFR, pp. 194–195.
I am grateful to George Klosko for helping me to articulate this point.
See PL, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii. For the sake of space, I can only suggest this as an explanation here.
See endnote 9.
At least this is what Rawls suggests where he writes: ‘To speak of our having conception-dependent desires we must be able to form the corresponding conception and to see how the principles belong to and help to articulate it’ (PL, p. 84). Note, however, that on the next page he appears to contradict this, claiming that conception-dependent desires have their source (at least ‘superficially’) in the public political culture (PL, p. 85 n. 33). I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this apparent contradiction.
NB. Although Rawls invokes TJ’s theory of moral development in PL (pp. 143 n. 9, 49 n. 2), he does not specify how it should be adapted following his political turn. Thus, here again, it is unclear how Rawls might account for PPC views.
By this I mean a PPC view lacks a notion of the good with implications for the whole of one’s life. Instead, each PPC view is a conjunction of several ‘freestanding’ conceptions of value, including that of the political (PL, pp. 155, 40; Weithman 2010, p. 305).
NB: ‘Motivational sets’ refers to specific elements of motivation (e.g. ideals, beliefs, desires, coercive force), while ‘motivational dispositions’ refer to broader modalities of motivation (i.e. ‘active’ and ‘passive’).
These types are used to help isolate distinctive features of PPC views. It is likely that some admixture of the two would characterize the actual motivational dispositions of real-life value pluralists.
Robert Taylor also notes that Rawls’s descriptions of the PPC view suggests two variants (2011, pp. 272–275). And his distinction between ‘principled’ and ‘unprincipled partially comprehensive doctrines’ parallels the one I make between PPC views with ‘active’ and ‘passive’ motivational dispositions. A key difference between our two accounts, however, is that Taylor focuses narrowly on variations in the coherence or consistency of the two types of PPC doctrine, whereas, in addition to this, I analyze the motivational differences that this variation entails. Extending the argument in this way is essential because, as Rawls himself repeatedly insists, PL’s stability argument requires successfully addressing the question of motivation. In what follows, I attempt to show how Rawls’s various descriptions of the PPC view undermine his stability argument on precisely this ground.
Their motivation may also be moral, if weakly so. Consider, for instance, where Rawls notes that even for citizens ‘who cannot fully explain’ their reasons for adopting the political conception, they may still affirm their decision on the ground that ‘when they adopt [the public political culture’s] framework of deliberation, their judgments converge sufficiently so that political cooperation on the basis of mutual respect can be maintained’ (PL, p. 156). I thank an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this possibility.
The negative desire is an implicit element of the social conditioning in Rawls’s account of moral development (TJ, §70–72).
PL, pp. xl, xxxviii, 54. For Rawls, ‘wholehearted support’ derives from citizens affirming the political conception from within their comprehensive doctrines—i.e. on the grounds of a perceived relationship between their nonpolitical values and those of the political—since these doctrines are constitutive of citizens’ most fundamental and deeply held ‘religious, philosophical, and moral’ ‘convictions’ (PL, p. 392). In this way, citizens come to view the political conception as not only ‘reasonable’ but ‘true’, thereby affording their commitment to it a greater measure of aesthetic-affective depth and meaningfulness, and, undoubtedly, motivational power (PL, pp. 386, 126–128).
In this respect, it seems that they are guided less by rational and explicit conception-dependent desires and more by ‘object-dependent desires’, which, as Rawls notes, ‘govern[] by custom and habit’ (PL, p. 84).
Indeed, insofar as coercion aims at adjusting habit and custom, this may be normally necessary, since habit comprises a chief part of the passive motivational disposition.
Perhaps by a process of ‘reverse slippage’, which I describe below in the first part of section five.
Note that I distinguish here between initial acceptance and subsequent, continued affirmation of the political conception. My basic claim is that the motivation that initially prompts acceptance may be different than that which later sustains allegiance. For the textual grounds of this view, see PL, p. 160 n. 25.
This analogy is partially adapted from Alasdair MacIntyre’s example of a chess-playing child (1984, p. 188).
Rawls notes that engaging with other citizens in a society marked by a fair political conception may at first be done only ‘reluctantly’ (PL, pp. 159, 163, 246).
As Rawls says, after ‘citizens embed their shared political conception’ into their broader comprehensive doctrine, ‘we hope that [they] will judge…that political values either outweigh or are normally (though not always) ordered prior to whatever nonpolitical values may conflict with them’ (PL, p. 392).
Rawls calls this process ‘slippage’, about which much more in the following section.
I thank both anonymous reviewers for pressing this point.
This is discussed in greater detail in the next section.
Rawls views coercive mechanisms as one element of a background condition meant to resolve the ‘assurance problem’ (TJ, pp. 267 ff./236 ff., 577/505). I challenge this view below.
The process whereby this occurs is difficult to describe concisely, and the details need not concern us here. For Rawls’s description, see PL, pp. 157–168, 208; JFR, pp. 193–198.
For my purposes here, anti-political values are simply those that conflict with Rawlsian political values (as defined by the political conception of justice).
For instance, one like Plato’s or Hobbes’s, wherein education is strictly confined to bowdlerized ideals that accord with the political conception.
This is suggested in the discussion at pp. 21–23, above.
I conceive of coercion here, broadly, as the use of state power to promote compliance with just laws.
On the assurance problem, see TJ, pp. 267 ff./236 ff., and Weithman (2010), pp. 46–47.
And thus ‘impose’ stability through enforcement; nor is state coercion meant to serve as some form of ‘retributive or denunciatory’ punishment (TJ, pp. 240–241/211–212, 267/237); rather, its ‘purpose is to underwrite citizens’ trust in one another’ (TJ, pp. 576/505).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2014 Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting. I thank my respondent, Simon Cotton, and my co-panelist, Dan Brudney, for their feedback on that occasion. I also thank Colin Bird, Tal Brewer, Harrison Frye, Stephen White, and the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments on various earlier drafts. My deepest gratitude goes to George Klosko and Jordanna Faye Brown for their generous feedback and unflagging encouragement throughout the article’s development.
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Mittiga, R.A. Pluralist Partially Comprehensive Doctrines, Moral Motivation, and the Problem of Stability. Res Publica 23, 409–429 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9335-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9335-0