States, Markets, and Basic Liberties | The Moral Sciences Club. Ned Resnikoff picks up on my old post, via a terrific recent one by Daniel Little, on the radicalism of John Rawls' position on economic liberty: If we’ve to fairly evaluated Rawls’ decision to include all of those [political and civil] rights while excluding things like (in Wilkinson’s words) “[t]he freedom to buy and sell, to enter into contracts, to start a business, to hire and be hired, to save and invest, to trade freely across borders,” etc., then we need to consider what all of Rawls’ basic freedoms have in common that those economic freedoms do not.
I don't think this is quite right either as a matter of philosophy or Rawls exegesis. Rawls' two principles are supposed to be the output of the imaginary deliberations of imaginary characters with certain imputed interests in a context of selective uncertainty. The economic liberties get short shrift not because Rawls thinks first we have the state and then we have the market. Rawls and exploitation « UnderstandingSociety. Image: Karl Marx by David Levine It is interesting to consider whether the principles of justice that Rawls describes in A Theory of Justice would in fact permit economic exploitation in Marx’s sense of the term.
Do Rawls’s two principles of justice permit what Marx would call systemic exploitation of one group of individuals by another? A very interesting post by Will Wilkinson in BigThink suggests that Rawls was a more radical critic of capitalism than we thought, and the reasoning he puts forward is very relevant to the question of justice and exploitation.
First, the basics. Marx believed that the greatest accomplishment of his economic theory in Capital (link) was its ability to explain how exploitation could occur within a system of free and unforced exchanges among equals, including employers of labor and sellers of labor time. The exploitation of the serf by the lord within feudalism depends on forcible extraction and coercion. Like this: Like Loading... Rawls, Economic Liberty, and Lack Thereof « Ned Resnikoff. Gary Oldman as George Smiley -- I mean, John Rawls (Photo credit: Wikipedia) A recent-ish post at Understanding Society leads back to this old Will Wilkinson post suggesting that the great philosopher of liberalism John Rawls was more radical than anyone gives him credit for.
That’s because everyone treats Rawls’ difference principle — that a just society is only unequal when those inequalities benefit the worst off — as his most radical claim when, according to Wilkinson, what precedes it is actually far more radical. Here’s Wilkinson: Rawls theory of justice has two principles. According to Rawls, the requirements of the first principle absolutely must be satisfied before moving on to the second principle.
So far so good. Here are the basic liberties as Rawls lists them: Rawls seems to be assuming that the state exists prior to the market, and so we must consider what sort of rights are built into the fabric of the former before we can even talk about the latter. Like this: Occupy Wall Street and the deradicalized Rawls | The Moral Sciences Club. At the New York Times' Opinionator blog, Steven Mazie urges Occupy Wall Street to take inspiration from the late, great political philosopher John Rawls: Rawls’s boldest claim — that inequality in society is only justified if its least well-off members fare better than they would under any other scheme — could provide a lodestar for the protests. Rawls was no Marxist: this “difference principle” acknowledges that a productive, free society will be home to at least some degree of inequality.
But the principle insists that if the rich get richer while wages and social capital of the poor and middle class are stagnant or falling, there is something seriously wrong. I don't believe that this is Rawls' boldest claim. That the basic structure of a society's political economy ought to benefit its least advantaged members as much as any feasible alternative basic structure is not really so bold a claim. Rawls theory of justice has two principles. Rawls on Wall Street.
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Whether it fizzles with the first snowfall or develops into a true counterweight to the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street will go down as the first protest movement in recent memory to shine a critical light on the staggering levels of economic inequality in the United States. What today’s protesters can learn from one of our most revered political philosophers. But to move forward and make a difference, Occupy Wall Street needs specific goals backed by a more coherent, more inspiring vision for American democracy.
To their credit, protestors have recently begun debating which specific demands the movement should make, but their conversations appear to be unguided by any deeper wisdom. Rawls’s boldest claim — that inequality in society is only justified if its least well-off members fare better than they would under any other scheme — could provide a lodestar for the protests. Steven V.