Political Liberalism and Rawlsian Religion

Ed Feser argues that John Rawls’ political liberalism is no more neutral and no less religiously particular than a comprehensively Catholic society.

Liberalism presents itself as a neutral political framework within which citizens committed to very different religious, moral, and philosophical perspectives can live together peacefully according to shared principles of justice.  It has always defined itself by contrast with the order that prevailed in the Middle Ages, when the Church and its doctrine and ethos were deeply integrated into the political life of Western society.  This Catholic “integralist” system, says the liberal, imposed on all citizens values and beliefs that not all would freely have accepted if they had had a choice.  Liberalism, it is claimed, imposes no particular vision of the good on society, but lets a thousand flowers bloom.

John Rawls is by far the most influential proponent of this vision of liberalism.  For Rawls, all religious, moral, and philosophical “comprehensive doctrines” (as he calls them) exist on an equal footing in the impartial liberal polity, or at least all “reasonable” comprehensive doctrines do.  But it does not take much probing to see that the neutrality of Rawls’s system is entirely bogus.  Rawlsian liberalism is no different from Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism or other comprehensive doctrines in ordering society according to a tendentious vision of the good.  What sets it apart is that it alone deludes itself that it is any different.

A Theory of Justice

Consider first Rawls’s major contribution to modern political philosophy, his 1971 book A Theory of Justice.  Rawls draws inspiration from the modern social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and asks, as they do, what sort of society human beings would opt to live in if they could start from scratch.  Like these early modern thinkers – and contrary to ancient thinkers like Aristotle and medieval thinkers like Aquinas – Rawls takes society and the political authority that governs it to be artificial, the products of human conventionrather than something we are oriented to by nature.

But Rawls’s departure from the ancients and medievals goes much further than that of the early moderns.  Like Aristotle and Aquinas, social contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all attributed to human beings a nature that moves them to some end, and this end determines in turn the nature of the social order they enter into.  To be sure, these thinkers differ radically over exactly what that end is.  For example, forAquinas it is to know and love God, whereas for Hobbes it is to avoid death.  But grounding political philosophy in an account of human nature is a common theme.

Rawls, however, begins by imagining human beings in an essentially denatured state.  He asks us to consider what sort of society people would together choose to live in if they entertained this question behind a “veil of ignorance” – that is to say, if they did not know such things about themselves as whether they were male or female, their race or ethnicity, their personal talents, what religion if any they adhered to, or what their overall conception of a good life is.  The residue of a self that remains when all such characteristics are subtracted out is the self that, in Rawls’s view, we should look to for guidance about what sort of society we should construct in the actual world.  More precisely, we should look to what would be chosen by the collection of such selves that make up what Rawls calls the “original position” (his variation on what early modern social contract theorists called the “state of nature”).

What they would choose, says Rawls, is a society molded by his radically egalitarian principles of justice.  As one would expect from a liberal, this includes guaranteeing to all an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with others have the same liberty.  It also includes Rawls’s famous “difference principle,” according to which no inequalities in wealth and power can be permitted except those that benefit the least well-off members of society.  And Rawls holds that the just society must ensure, as perhaps the most important primary good, the self-esteem of its members.  This it must do regardless of the ends they set for themselves, even for those committed to some trivial life goal like counting blades of grass (to take Rawls’s notorious example).

There is much that could be said about this, but central to our purposes is the crucial assumption of A Theory of Justice that “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.”  The entire argument presupposes that there is no end to which the self is by nature oriented, an end which it must pursue on pain of irrationality and unhappiness.  Even if this conception of the self were correct, it would hardly be neutral, as it is fundamentally at odds with many religious, moral, and philosophical comprehensive doctrines.  Hence no conception of justice founded on it could be neutral between such doctrines.  A society geared toward facilitating individuals’ pursuit of whatever they simply happen to value, however trivial, is fundamentally unjust from the point of view of, say, the Aristotelian who takes us to be by nature oriented toward the common good of the polis, the Confucian who puts filial piety above individual interest, or the Catholic for whom the social order must facilitate the knowledge and love of God.