Can any society be justified to all its members?

What John Rawls Missed https://t.co/Kpf6fZKoHM

— mozu (@mozumozumozu) 2019年11月6日

Although Rawls’s principles of justice were in many ways radical, they were not novel. He is often thought of as the philosopher of 1960s Great Society reformism, because his principles seemed to elaborate on the goals of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty.

What was new was Rawls’s mode of argument. He asked a question fundamental in political philosophy: Can any society be justified to all its members,

Rawls argued that, faced with this uncertainty, people would choose the world that provided the best position for the least advantaged, worst-off class of people. If you don’t know where you will fall, you will want the worst possibility to be as acceptable as possible.

Philosophy is less about achieving a new kind of knowledge, more about making clear what we already know.

Forrester argues that Rawls wanted to elucidate society itself as a “game” of this sort. Social morality, which is the topic of justice, had its own tacit rules, and drawing those out could help to make clear what people already knew when not distracted by self-interest or prejudice. Like the rule book for a well-established sport, the original position and the principles that Rawls drew from it did not dictate some new morality. They helped to spell out the terms of a social practice.

The American political myth (meaning not a simple fiction but a kind of shared master-story) is “constitutional redemption,” the idea that moral truths are woven deep into the country’s character, imperfectly expressed in the Constitution and existing institutions, but awaiting realization in “a more perfect union.”

The question today must be whether and, if so, how cooperation and solidarity can emerge from conflict that is structured and galvanized by historical wrong and continuing harms and deprivations.

Rawls was able to presuppose a state strong enough and with enough freedom of action to enforce democratic socialism, if that were what its citizens chose, or, if they preferred, to build a non-racist Jeffersonian democracy of smallholders. He took for granted a world in which capital was brought to heel and trapped within national borders, so that egalitarian redistribution would not stir capital flight

　ロールズに限らないが、どんな哲学、あるいは作品でも時代と文化の影響下にある。哲学の場合、その時代と文化を超越せんとする意志があり、あたかも超越したかのようにみせるところが、哲学の優れたところでも、また、欠点にもなる。

　ロールズの説も然り。市民権拡大、貧困対策が大きな課題だった戦後に、新しい知見よりも、日常の言語を整理してすでにある真理を明確にしていこうという、オックスフォードの日常言語派の影響をうけ、国民の誰もが同意できるようなアメリカ的な正義論を構築していった。

　ところが、差別にまみれた歴史をもつアメリカについて、人々の間の深い分断、紛争を無視してよいはずがなかった。また、ロールズのアメリカ的理想郷を実現できるほど現実は甘くなかった。

ーーーアメリカの知識人の道徳意識というのは、根深いものがあって、正義や真理があり、彼らは、それを実現すべきだ、というのは、不可侵の彼らの奥深い神聖領域にあります。
　だから、私が、米軍慰安婦問題を突きつけると、せいぜい無視するだけで、否定はできない。否定までしてしまうと、彼らの道徳律を侵犯してしまうのであります。

　しかし、あえて無視するのも実は道徳に反するものであります。彼らをそこまで、追い込みたいのですが、いかんせん、右翼のおじいさんたちにはできない仕事なのであります。