I had no idea. David Brink's recent article "Liberaltarians" has sparked some interesting discussion at the CATO Institute's blog and elsewhere around the web, including the at lefty hub DailyKos (I picked this up initially at the left-libertarian blog Freedom Democrats). Will Wilkinson in particular has applauded the idea of "Rawlsekianism"; basically taking Hayek's empirical findings in economics and plugging them into a Rawlsian framework.
That post got me wondering why a libertarian such as Wilkinson would count Rawls (and not Nozick, e.g.) with Hayek as " the greatest social/political thinkers of the 20th Century." Well, in a recent post by Wilkinson I have my answer.
A few friends and colleagues have asked me why I think Rawls and not, say, Nozick, was the best political philosopher of the 20th Century. What kind of libertarian am I to think that? Well, I certainly think Nozick gets the conclusions right. But I truly think A Theory of Justice is an incredibly rich and profound book that lays out an extremely compelling method for evaluating the moral desirability of basic social and political institutions. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is in my opinion one of the most, if not the most, compelling, creative, and pyrotechnically brilliant pieces of extended reasoning in all of 20th Century philosophy. But it famously begins with an unsupported assumption of John Locke-style individual rights. If you don’t accept the assumption, the argument just doesn’t get going.
I think that the basic point there is right (although I don't agree that Nozick gets the conclusions right). In any case, I'm very glad that there's room for fruitful discussion between liberals and libertarians in a broadly Rawlsian framework. Before diving into the particulars of that discussion, I would also like to make the point that a liberal/libertarian ideological alliance strikes me as much more promising for bringing about pragmatic and effective government policies than rebuilding a religious left. We need evidence-based intitiatives, not new faith-based initiatives. (For a view contrary to my own both in regards to desirability and feasability, here is a nice post).
On to Wilkinson's recent blog. First, a technical point. Agreeing with Hayek, Wilkinson claims that Rawls makes a "kind of category error" in using the phrase "social justice." I just don't think that any such thing can be alleged once we accept Rawls' framework. Keeping in mind that Rawls' metaethics is constructivist, there's no independent concept of justice such that we may measure the appropriateness of applying that concept to society. Wilkinson at least needs to further explain what he means by alleging this category mistake if he accepts the constructivist underpinnings of Rawls' framework.
More fundamentally, I think Wilkinson's take on Rawls just misses the best opportunities for compromise between liberals and libertarians. That is, Wilkinson states that Rawls gets things wrong
by worrying too much about equitable distribution of primary goods. Rawls' Second Principle (also called the maximin principle) states that inequity is only justifiable if it results in advantage for the worst off. I might agree with Wilkinson that this is too strongly stated a principal, but he needs to say what he would put in its place. Here is precisely what Wilkinson says:
For instance, Rawls’ does not take sufficiently seriously his own claim for the moral priority of his First Principle of Justice, "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others," over his Second Principle, that inequality in the "distribution" of "primary goods" is justified only if it benefits the least well-off class of citizens. Additionally, even if one accepts Rawls’ second principle (I think it is too strong), his conclusions about how it justifies certain institutions of the modern welfare state don’t follow, given what is known, empirically and theoretically, about economics and political economy.
This leaves unanswered just what Wilkinson's proposal for compromise with liberals is. Is his proposal to compromise by agreeing to some weakened version of Rawls' Second Principal or to accept the strong version as long as liberals take a closer look at the empirical evidence for certain theories in economics?
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