Political Thought

13. What is the republican critique of

Rawls?
The Welfare State Debate: Merit and Need

Wilson Bunneghem (20201518)

9 January 2022
Introduction
If people do not differ on relevant points, equality is the measure of justice. But people do differ on
relevant points. The American John Rawls (1921-2002) defends a state with a large collective pot of
resources to be distributed as needed. Rawls is the best-known representative of the political-
philosophical tradition called social liberalism (Beitz, 1999). In A Theory of Justice, Rawls (1971) offers
an answer to the question: according to which principles should a society be organized in order for it
to be just? Rawls gives a new version of the social contract theory (Rousseau). Central to that theory
is the original position, the state of nature (1971, p.11). Rawls points out that moral pluralism is
practically ineradicable: there are many theories of the good life, and we have no means of forcing
people to choose one over the other. If we are to think about a just society, we have to do so without
being influenced by the position we occupy in our society. We have to choose principles of justice as if
we were behind “a veil of ignorance”. The veil of ignorance hides all the knowledge that makes people
individually identifiable. No one knows about themselves or anyone else, whether they are male or
female, young or old, smart, stupid, strong, weak, sick, healthy, handsome, ugly, slow or energetic.
These kinds of characteristics are not a merit: people inherit them through birth, inheritance or
destiny. In other words, they are not responsible for it themselves (1971, pp. 52-56). The veil of
ignorance makes it impossible to predict in which type of society one would be better off - after all, no
one knows who he or she will be. So any member can end in the better or in the worse position of the
society. Therefore, every reasonable being wants to maximise the position of the least advantaged
person in the society (Maximin principle).

The deliberations in the original position ultimately result in the choice of Rawls's so-called Two
Principles of Justice (1971):

1. Maximum liberty for all, insofar as it is compatible with equal liberty of all others;

We wouldn’t want to take the chance that we would wind up as members of an oppressed or despised
minority with the majority tyrannizing over us (Sandel, 2009).

2. Socio-economic inequality is only allowed if

A. unequal distribution is in favour of the least well off and
B. all social positions are open to everyone in a fair manner.

Critique on Rawls
Rawls' A Theory of Justice has had an enormous influence on political philosophy over the past thirty
years. Rawls is therefore by far the most quoted contemporary philosopher, and is quoted by
supporters and opponents of his views. And the latter are there in large numbers. When one looks at
the critiques on Rawls his Theory of Justice, we can divide them in two parts, critique on the method
(the whole concept of the veil of ignorance) and even if you would accept the situation of the veil of
ignorance, the different principles Rawls use.

Method
Firstly, in his book Justice: What's the right thing to do, Michael Sandel questions what the moral force
is of a hypothetical contract (“a contract that never happened”) (2009). He also questions that when
people are behind the veil of ignorance, why wouldn’t they be gamblers, willing to take the risk in a
highly unequal society in hopes of maybe landing on top (2009, p. 81)?

Other so-called Republicans (Hammersley, 2020) believe that Rawls has an absurd view of man. We
can ask ourselves the question what remains of a human being behind the veil of ignorance. Some
would even say that it is no longer a human. Such a person has no more dreams, no past, no family,

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no culture, no history, no body, nothing - so he lacks all those things that make us what we are: real
people. Try the veil of ignorance for yourself - there isn't even an "I" left to identify with. Why should
we accept the judgment of 'people' in the original position, if those 'people' don't even know what it
is to be a real human being? (Pettit, 1974).

Principles
In his second Principle of Justice, Rawls states that inequality is only allowed if it benefits the least well
of (and all social positions are open to everyone in a fair manner). Sandel doesn’t agree with this, he
talks about incentives. He thinks there is a reasonable chance that the talented would be less
motivated if they had to help the least well off (less resources for the talented). Rawls has a solution
for this, income inequalities aren’t there because you and I are better at something than anybody else,
no income inequalities are their to stimulate us to work hard and in the end it’s to the benefit of the
least well off. “Income inequalities are just only insofar as they call forth efforts that ultimately help
the disadvantaged” Sandel says (2009, pp. 83-84).

Sandel has another objection: what about effort? We agree that you can’t decide with what kind of
natural talents you are born, but sure you can decide how hard you are going to work (2009, p. 84)
Rawls defends himself with saying that effort can be the product of a certain kind of upbringing. One
could even argue that being able to take the effort is a talent in itself.

One can also argue that the principles are not reasonable as such. Rawls is not living up to his promise
of an impartial, universally acceptable method of justifying principles. In Rawls' original position, all
sorts of typically Western liberal (pre)judgments creep in unnoticed (1974, p. 311), for example the
view that 'autonomy' is a good thing (1971, pp. 450-455), or the view that all theories of the good life
are in principle equally valuable. Rawls suggests that we can simply choose such theories in everyday
life, or even switch from one to another: vegetarian one day, Muslim the next, and then another day
carnivore or atheist. Republicans find this implausible, and argue that we can only judge principles of
justice if we 'start from ourselves': we cannot rise above our culture and norms and values because we
are the product of them. At best, we can criticize our own society when it does not conform to our
shared norms and values, and we can criticize what happens beyond the borders of our country and
culture from within our own norms. But we cannot stand above our culture and impartially lecture
other cultures (Pettit, 1974).

Conclusion
The aim of this essay is to explain the republican critique on Rawls. Firstly, we can distinguish two kinds
of critiques: criticism directed at the method of Rawls (the veil of ignorance) and criticism directed at
the so-called Two Principles of Justice. Especially Michael Sandel and Philip Pettit seem to criticize
Rawls’ Theory of Justice from a republican point of view. Their main arguments are that it is only a
hypothetical contract, very unrealistic and very Western-centred. Sandel also argues that the
importance of incentives for hard work and the existence of the concept effort is underestimated.
However, it is important to bear in mind that Rawls not only wrote A Theory of Justice and that the
book itself has more than 500 pages. The critics I stated here are only pointed at a very specific part of
Rawls’ discourse, but that gave me also the chance to describe them in a very specific way.

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References
Beitz, C. R. (1999). Social and cosmopolitan liberalism. International affairs, 75(3), 515-529.

Hammersley, R. (2020). Republicanism: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons.

Pettit, P. A theory of justice?. Theory and Decision 4, 311–324 (1974).

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136652

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice [TJ], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Revised edition,
1999.

Sandel, M. J. (2009). Justice: What's the right thing to do. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.