Column: John Rawls, rest in peace

John Rawls, the eminent Harvard philosopher, died last week at the age of 81. He was, perhaps, the most influential ethical apologist for liberal democracy of the last half-century and known primarily for his seminal work A Theory of Justice. His death has occasioned a number of kind reflections on his long and distinguished life-the life of a humble man and a deep thinker. While many pause to pay their respects at the passing of this great figure, it is a perfect time to write a second obituary for Rawls's theory of justice, which should have died long before he did. The most brilliant defense of the liberal state failed, and the time has come to acknowledge that liberalism is dead.

The death of his theory, Rawls's rational blueprint for justice within the liberal state, heralds the death of the institutions it justified: the welfare state, affirmative action, national healthcare, Lyndon Johnson's great society and other social engineering programs of an omnipotent centralized government. This theory of justice died both a theoretical and practical death, hastened by analytical challenges within political theory as well as the catastrophic failure of attempts at government control over human flourishing. However, most liberals, whether or not they ever really put Rawls's theory to practice in their personal endeavors, still suffer from a hangover of Rawlsian idealism and intellectual self-satisfaction. What we should learn from the fate of his theory over the last 30 years is that Rawls did not provide us with a rational litmus test by which to reduce and decide matters of justice and, as a consequence, the liberal vision lacks any coherent and rational defense of its ethics.

I first encountered the mammoth book, A Theory of Justice, on a friend's bookshelf at the beginning of my freshman year. It was on the reading list of the other FOCUS program, and we had some lively conversations over its perceived content. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was the foil to Rawls, and participants in dorm arguments tended toward siding with one or the other, along Democrat and Republican lines. Such was the depth of freshman political theory. I had the opportunity the following semester to read Rawls at length and recall both the initial plausibility and troubling consequences of his theory. Rawls is well known for suggesting that a just society is that society which any rational agent situated behind a veil of ignorance would choose, knowing that he or she could actually be located at any position within that society. Rawls argued the only rational choice would be for a society in which, "all socially primary goods--liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self respect--are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all these goods is to the advantage of the lest favored." Rawls tried to combine what we might call the "charitable option for the poor" with the coercive mechanisms of the modern liberal state in a set of universal principles that defined justice. What he created was a philosophical vision that situated equality as the indisputable highest good.

In this vision, the only mandate the state must serve in the pursuit of justice is the mandate of producing equal outcomes among citizens. Inequality becomes synonymous with injustice. Such an equation is at the heart of liberal society and has been since the French revolution. This all sounds rather innocent until one realizes that this principle provides the state with two ways to justly respond to a crippled citizen. If, for example, a man looses his leg in a car accident, the state must either (a) use the resources of the well-off to build a vast network of wheelchair ramps, elevators and equal access vehicles so as to make him equally mobile as others, or (b) amputate the one leg from every remaining citizen. Either path produces an equal-and therefore just-society. What perverse examples like this uncover are the many problems with letting a strict rubric of equality determine the coercive injunctions of the state.

One problem with such a theory is that it might always be used to force and level all individuals down to their most common and base denominator. What good is it to make all people equal if by that we mean equally miserable? No one thinks it is good that handicapped people can't walk up stairs, but justice is more complicated than the application of some equality rule. An infatuation with equality also belies our inability to accept the fact that we do not possess political mastery of everyone's destiny. Human design cannot save everyone from suffering, and some will refuse the opportunities they are given. Liberty, a good that Rawls was initially interested in maximizing, turns out to be incompatible with his equality, as Nozick so cogently argues, and within Rawls's framework "irrational" becomes a name for people who disagree with the liberal democratic view of society.

At least one problem with Rawls's fictional experiment of the "veil" is that it is indeed fictional. We do not find ourselves in a world that was perfectly constructed by an uninterested third party nor one in which some notion of what people deserve is absent from the concept of justice. That is to say, for all its grandeur and brilliance, Rawls's theory of justice did not provide a compelling account of how the liberal state can and should be just in practice. Rawls did not uncover the universal principles he sought, and the consequences of this failure are wide ranging.

Most important is the recognition that we--today's elites of the secular academy and tomorrow's policy wonks and world leaders--have not arrived at the end of history with a simple formula for the good society, nor do we even have a substantive ethics. We do, however, because of the failure of Rawls, have good reasons to doubt that the omnipotent state can be the locus of a just solution to all the world's problems. What remain before us today are different conceptions of justice within different groups, and we often lack a framework to say why one position is more just than the other. That is why dogmatic liberals in practice generally adopt some version of relativism and one reason why war with Iraq, when it comes, will be so contentious, and the questions of abortion, drugs, the death penalty and income redistribution will continue to divide our country's politics. Any belief that our society has somehow rationally resolved these issues is a chimera and hopefully an illusion that will pass away with Rawls.

Bill English is a Trinity senior. His column appears every other Monday.