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Rawls and Habermas
REASON, PLURALISM, AND THE CLAIMS OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
By Todd Hedrick
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7077-4
Chapter One
Freestanding Political Philosophy and the Descriptivist Critique of Rawls
In this chapter, I begin by outlining the basic methodological difference between Rawls and Habermas that Rawls draws our attention to in their exchange: the difference between "freestanding" and "comprehensive" theories. Rawls charges Habermas with being a comprehensive theorist, which implies that he is vulnerable to the same objection that Rawls levels against predecessors like Kant and mill. Habermas bases his theory of constitutional democracy on a "deep" account of the sources of normativity, using his theory of communicative rationality to locate it in the idealizations that he argues are presupposed and tacitly accepted by all participants in linguistically mediated communication aimed at mutual understanding. This "comprehensive" theoretical edifice, Rawls contends, puts Habermas in the company of Kant and mill, who base their accounts of liberalism on the values of autonomy and individualism, respectively. All three represent ways of justifying liberalism or constitutional democracy that are inherently controversial. It is possible that one of these accounts is true, and all three represent ways in which reasonable individuals might, for their own part, understand liberal principles to be justified. But a liberal society cannot expect a consensus on basic values, and so Habermas's theory cannot form a public basis for social cooperation and reciprocal justification-the task that Rawls insists is the central task for political philosophy-any more than Kant or mill can. After laying out this argument, I turn to explore some of the possible negative consequences of this "political turn," elaborating a broad critique of Rawls that I will be calling the descriptivist critique. The next two chapters are, then, largely concerned with trying to understand the extent to which the descriptivist critique is true.
1. FREESTANDING AND COMPREHENSIVE THEORIES
Rawls and Habermas follow the social contract tradition in western political thought in their focus on issues of justification. And a cursory glance at the content of the 1995 Rawls-Habermas exchange shows that the really pivotal differences between them circle around questions of justification. Both philosophers can be read as articulating what I will be calling frameworks of justification. Frameworks of justification are sets of principles, norms, criteria, or values that have a dual function: (a) they may be used to assess the legitimacy of the products of the lawmaking process, and (b) citizens may use the framework to offer justifications to their fellow citizens for their proposed uses of political power. There is, then, an active and a passive sense in which justification takes place through a framework of justification. On the one hand, Rawls and Habermas hold that a framework ought potentially to enable citizens to understand the laws whose coercive power they are subject to as legitimate (passive)-that is, if our laws are somehow made within the recommended normative framework, we should be able to see ourselves as having good reason to follow them. This point is clearly captured by Rawls's "principle of liberal legitimacy":
[O]ur exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason. (Pl, 137)
On the other hand, a framework of justification should be something that citizens can use (active) in order to justify themselves-their votes, policy preferences, exercises of political power, and so forth-to their fellow citizens, in terms that their fellow citizens can (or, at any rate, ought to) accept, so that their politically mediated relations to one another are transparent and mutual. This, for Rawls, is what the practice of public reason promises to do.
In this context, the most obvious difference between Rawls and Habermas is that they propose different kinds of frameworks of justification: for Rawls, a framework of justification consists in the political conception of justice. He argues that a well-ordered society would be one in which citizens understand that the basic terms of social cooperation are set by a conception of justice that they all accept. The conception of justice that Rawls proposes for this purpose is "justice as fairness," which, of course, consists in a first principle guarantying a maximal scheme of equal basic liberties for all, and a second principle securing fair equality of opportunity, and that regulates inequalities such that they are justified only to the extent that they are to the advantage of society's least advantaged (the difference principle) (JF, 42-50). Habermas's framework of justification, on the other hand, is what he calls "the system of rights," which will be discussed in later chapters. we need to examine the issue of how Rawls and Habermas conceive of a framework of justification being justified to those that are to use them (that is, us) and be subject to political power exercised through them, and this returns us to questions about the conception of reason most appropriate to political philosophy.
In his reply to Habermas, Rawls clearly delineates these two issues (which type of framework? how do we justify a framework?) and makes it clear that, in his view, the latter is of greater significance. He draws two pivotal distinctions between Habermas's theory and his own (R, 373). First, and most important, he says that Habermas's theory is a "comprehensive doctrine," whereas his is "freestanding" or merely "political." So, Habermas's theory is alleged to depend on a comprehensive doctrine, along with all of the baggage that such a thing entails, whereas Rawls claims that his theory depends only upon a conception of the reasonable, which can be embedded in a variety of comprehensive doctrines. Secondly, and derivatively, the "device of representation" that Habermas uses to identify valid norms is an "ideal speech situation" developed out of the theory of communicative action, whereas Rawls uses the original position, which can, on his account, be articulated independently of any comprehensive theory of morality and validity. So, each generates his framework of justification using a different device.
Rawls is correct that the first difference is more fundamental, because, if we accept his distinction between comprehensive and freestanding theories, along with his arguments about what each kind of theory is capable of doing, it would defuse the issues between Rawls and Habermas, making Rawls the victor by default. On Rawls's view, the validity of a conception of justice ultimately depends on its reflective acceptance by reasonable citizens-a theory of justice is valid only if, at the end of the day, it meshes with their considered moral-political intuitions. Since we currently lack such a consensus in our political culture, our job as philosophers is to characterize "the reasonable," using this concept to determine the conception of justice that would be most appropriate and mutually agreeable for persons like us. According to Rawls, whatever kind of theory Habermas's is, it cannot be authoritative, inasmuch as people need not accept the theory that supports it in order to qualify as reasonable: reasonable people with convictions different than Habermas's may reject the rather open ended and procedural conception of rationality associated with Habermas's theory of communicative action. For Rawls, philosophy ought not to take issue with the moral intuitions of persons who are prepared to abide by fair terms of social cooperation, as this unwarranted scrutiny undermines political philosophy's practical task of articulating a reasonable consensus. Thus, if one hopes to marshal any support for Habermas's position, one would have to take issue with Rawls's presentation of the first basic difference.
For as much as he found it useful to work through major thinkers of the past, Rawls's distinction between "freestanding" and "comprehensive" political theories, and his abandonment of the latter in favor of the former, is a radical one that seems to mark a break with the main enterprise of western political philosophy, if we understand that as a full account of the best, the true, or otherwise most correct principles and institutional arrangements that ought to govern our social and political lives. Although Rawls rejects this project, he does so not because he regards the task of providing a philosophical answer to the question of what "the best" society is to be impossible in principle-to decide even this metatheoretical question one way or another would not be to stay "on the surface, philosophically speaking" (CP, 395). His motive is the practical one of seeking a transparent and genuinely mutual basis for social cooperation among citizens with widely divergent comprehensive views (that is, different ethical values, life projects, religious beliefs, and so forth), and this task cannot be accomplished by a theory that takes sides on fundamental ethical questions. Even before the publication of Political Liberalism, Rawls's shift from truth to reasonable agreement as the goal of inquiry was made abundantly clear. As he puts it in "Justice as Fairness: Political not metaphysical":
[T]he aim of justice as fairness as a political conception is practical, and not metaphysical or epistemological. That is, it presents itself not as a conception of justice that is true, but one that can serve as a basis of informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons. (CP, 394)
According to Rawls, "the burdens of judgment" and "the fact of reasonable pluralism" lead reasonable persons to conclude that we can expect no eventual convergence among comprehensive views of the good life within what Rawls calls "the background culture" of democratic societies, and therefore that forging social unity based on adherence to a single comprehensive doctrine can be accomplished (if at all) only through the use of coercive state power (PL, 36). The burdens of judgment are defined as "the many obstacles to the correct (and conscientious) exercise of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life" (JF, 35). These include the following: the difficulty in evaluating evidence relevant to practical issues, as well as the weight to assign to various considerations; the indeterminacy and vagueness of our moral-political conceptions, making them "subject to hard cases"; and the difficulty in assessing the degree to which differences in total life experience are responsible for differences in judgment, as well as the complicated matter of determining the degree to which those differences are epistemically legitimate. Reasonable persons who recognize these burdens will acknowledge that agreement about moral and political issues is hardly inevitable, and that differences in judgments and comprehensive doctrines are not to be blamed on errors of reasoning.
Reasonable persons also recognize that "reasonable pluralism" among comprehensive doctrines is the natural outcome of the public exercise of reason, over time, in a free society.
A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines.... Political liberalism assumes that, for political purposes, a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime. (PL, xviii)
The fact of reasonable pluralism is, Rawls argues, a permanent feature of modern societies with "free institutions" (for example, freedom of conscience, religion, press, expression, and the like). While the development within such free institutions of what Rawls calls our "rational" moral power to articulate for ourselves and pursue over the course of our lives a conception of the good will lead different individuals in different directions, as persons also in possession of the "reasonable" moral power of an "effective sense of justice" (JF, 9; PL, 35), they are willing to propose and abide by fair terms of social cooperation-moreover, as reasonable, they "desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate on terms all can accept" (Pl, 50). They desire, in other words, a "well ordered society."
A society is well ordered if "(1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles" (TJ, 5/5). Rawls, of course, proposes his two principles of justice to fulfill that role. But the upshot of these considerations, Rawls is convinced, is that the presentation and justification of the conception of justice "should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines" (CP, 388). Unlike Kant or mill, who affirm principles of liberal justice because they see them as grounded in a comprehensive conception of value or rightness, the Rawlsian political philosopher practices "the method of avoidance" (CP, 395) and makes no such appeals, but rather presents the principles of justice as a consistent extension of reasonable moral intuitions that makes mutually beneficial and transparent social cooperation possible, leaving it ultimately to the citizens themselves, as private individuals, to determine their ultimate reasons for accepting the political conception.
A cursory glance at Rawls's and Habermas's bodies of work largely confirms Rawls's assessment of their different metatheoretical orientations. while Theory does have deep roots in the history of western political thought, claiming to complete the work of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant by developing the social contract's basic insight at a "higher level of abstraction" (TJ, 11/10), one can see that Rawls has a robust sense of the independence of political philosophy from the rest of philosophy, and while he is not shy about borrowing from disciplines as diverse as economics, rational choice theory, moral and analytic philosophy, and linguistics, he works this material up from a standpoint where the results of these rather more esoteric fields of inquiry can be made comprehensible to reasonable people with different worldviews. That is, he is mining these materials in order to illustrate justice as fairness and lend plausibility to its justification, but the theory in its essentials is supposed to depend on only general psychological and sociological knowledge, available both to the deliberators in the original position and to reasonable citizens, here and now. Rawls comes to stress the independence of political philosophy to the point of declaring that it must extend the principle of tolerance to the rest of philosophy (CP, 394-95). Thus, the justification for liberal democratic constitutionalism is not supposed to depend upon any particular views about the foundations of ethics, any particular metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophical anthropology, and it is supposed to be compatible with any number of theoretical positions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rawls and Habermas by Todd Hedrick Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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