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T H R E E B O O K S O N R A W L S

Since the publication in 1971 of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, three books devoted entirely to discussion of Rawls's theory have been published. Two of these - Brian Barry's The Liberal Theory of Justice, A Critical Examination of the Principal Doctrines in A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (Oxford University Press, 1973) and Robert Paul Wolff's Understanding Rawls, A reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of Justice (Princeton University

Press, 1977) - are full-length monographs. The third, Reading Rawls, Critical Studies on Rawls' A Theory of Justice (Basic Books, 1974), is a collection of papers most of which have also appeared elsewhere (including some that were originally prepared for publication in ReadingRawls). Each of these books is worth reading, and despite a certain amount of overlap among them, serious students of Rawls's work will want to read all three.

One of Barry's main themes is that Rawls's attempts to keep his premises 'weak' (independent of any particular conception of the good or ideal of the person) and to derive 'strong' substantive conclusions frequently place him in a 'Catch 22' situation: either (i) the conclusions are not what he claims (e.g., Rawls claims that his theory does not treat all desires as equally worthy of satisfaction in the way that Benthamite utilitarianism does; Barry argues

that Rawls has established no real distinction between his own theory and

Bentham's on this point (Barry pp. 20-24)); or (ii) his premises are not what he claims (e.g., an ideal of the person is smuggled into the original position with the Aristotelian Principle (Barry p. 30)); or (iii) the arguments are not valid (throughout, especially Chs. 6-11). Barry says, "The lengthiness and complexity of Rawl's [sic. ] manoeuvres are, I believe, an illustration of the slogan 'The impossible takes a little longer'" (Barry p. 22). He concludes that the only way out of this trilemma is for liberals to acknowledge that they hold some ways of life, some types of character to be more worthwhile and admirable than others, and that they believe societies ought to be organized so as to encourage the more valuable ones. Weaker ('value-free') premises

Theory and Decision 9 (1978) 369-383.All Rights Reserved. Copyright �9 1978 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.

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cannot be made validly to yield the kinds of principle to which liberals are

committed (Barry pp. 126-7). Another of Barry's themes is that Rawls's brand of liberalism is in some

respects "archaic". Some examples: (1) Rawls treats self-respect as secured by the guarantee of equal rights and opportunities, and the question of whether it is affected by one's relative share of wealth and power does not even arise

for him (Barry pp. 31-2). (2) His 'solution' to the problem of defining the worst-off group ignores the now accepted view that the chief sources of

poverty are not touched by approaches aimed at raising the average income of any broadly defined group such as unskilled workers (Barry p. 50). (3) The assumption of chain connection is "a sort of living fossil, a coelacanth among ideas, alive and flourishing in Cambridge, Mass ..... The most important single fact about European politics in this century is the general loss of faith in this doctrine..." (Barry p. 111). (Barry also points out that these last two features, combined with Rawls's psychological assumptions about the need for in- centives, effectively rob the difference principles of most of the egalitarian force it might otherwise have (Barry pp. 49,108, 156).) (4) Rawls's discussion of international relations is "in the spirit of a pure nineteenth-century liberal like Gladstone, not even making concessions to twentieth-century ideas to the

extent of catching up with Woodrow Wilson, once described as 'Gladstone in a wing collar '" (Barry p. 130).

A third theme is that Rawls is unfair to utilitarianism in a variety of ways. For example, many of Rawls's arguments to the effect that various utilitarian principles would not be adopted in' the original position are invalid or require special rigging (Barry pp. 90-96, 104-107). Rawls criticizes utilitarianism for requiring special empirical assumptions, yet his own theory requires many special assumptions, some of which are at best no less dubious (e.g., the Aristotelean Principle (Barry pp. 27-32), the assumption of chain connection (Barry pp. 111-114), and certain psychological assumptions (Barry pp. 140- 142, 154-164).) And Rawls claims an advantage over utilitarianism in that his principles do not call for interpersonal comparisons of subjective quantities such as utilities. Barry argues that insofar as such comparisons are avoided in the application of the principles, this is only because they are implicitly assumed in the choice of principles (i.e., the parties must believe that the primary social goods are of roughly equal utility for everyone in order for it to be rational for them to agree to use them as an index of well-being). (Barry does not inquire whether interpersonal comparisons really are avoided in the

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application of Rawls's principles.) In addition, comparing packages of primary

social goods among representative persons makes it impossible for Rawls's principles to take into account cases of special need (Barry pp. 55-56). It is not evident what Barry's view is on Rawls's basic objection against utilitarian- ism, i.e., that it ignores the distinction between persons.

The most technical part of Barry's book is Chapter 7, 'The Derivation of

the Priority of Liberty.' Barry develops two interpretations of Rawls's state- ments about the priority of liberty in terms of the assumptions the parties in the original position must make about their indifference curves, feasibility curves depicting possible trade-offs between liberty and the other primary social goods, and the resulting optimal paths for a society's pursuit of these

goods as it develops economically. In his first interpretation, Barry uses axes labelled 'Liberty (grapes)' and 'Wealth (potatoes)'; he draws indifference curves in the shape suggested by Rawls's text, adds feasibility curves of 'standard' shape, i.e., concave to the origin, and plots an optimal path. He notes (1) that this path never becomes parallel to the liberty axis, as Rawls's

discussion indicates it should, (2) that the 'funny' shape of the indifference curves is not crucial to the optimal path, and (3) that the kind of optimal path Rawls wants can be gotten using standard indifference curves and 'funny' feasibility curves. He offers some reasons for considering his 'funny' feasibility curves more plausible than the standard ones where the trade-offs contemplated are between liberty and wealth rather than between grapes and potatoes. Still, considering the complexity of the question what, if any, the possible forms of trade-off between wealth and liberty might be, the choice of any particular shape and position for feasibility curves seems somewhat arbitrary. (To show that these arbitrary choices have consequences for Barry's case, Michael Lessnoff uses straight feasibility curves positioned so that all of them intersect the 'maximum liberty' line, plus Barry's original 'funny' indifference curves to plot an optimal path that does become parallel to the liberty axis. See 'Barry on Rawls' Priority of Liberty' Philosophy andPublic Affairs, 4,1 (100-114).)

In his second interpretation, Barry introduces a new key variable, 'effective liberty', which he treats as the single value to be maximized by society. Effective liberty is construed as the arithmetical product of basic liberty and wealth. The optimal path constructed "follows a line gratifyingly close to that which Rawls would appear to want" (Barry p. 81). Although the notion of effective liberty has some appeal, this interpretation seems to go even

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further than the first in the direction of an inappropriate and unilluminating

treatment of liberty, requiring us to make sense of the notion of 'units of

liberty' which can be identified, counted and multiplied with units of wealth. In Chapter 11, 'The Nature of the Derivation: A Critique', Barry argues

that, above and beyond the specific problems with the various derivations of strategy and principles discussed in Chapters 6-10, the general form of reason- ing involves a fallacy. If something is an individual good for everyone, it does not follow, says Barry, .that it is a collective good. From the fact that, other things being equal, I would like to have a car rather than not have one, it does not follow that I would choose to have society arranged so that everyone has a car. Due to the disadvantages of living in a car-choked society, I might prefer a society in which no one had a car. Yet this is the only form of reasoning available to the parties in the original position. I do not recall seeing this fundamental and - in other contexts - familiar point raised anywhere else as a general critique of Rawls's theory. (It is raised by Hart in connection with the rationality of adopting the first principle (Reading Rawls pp. 248- 249).) It constitutes a powerful objection against the attempt to base choices of social values and policies on individualist premises. And it shows that the fairness among individuals resulting from the veil of ignorance does not suffice for transforming even universally shared individual preferences into social values.

In Chapters 10 and 12-15, Barry examines the implications of Rawls's principles, interpreted as Rawls proposes,for some of the actual moral-social- political problems we face in our present national and international circum- stances. And, in Chapters 13 and 15, he notes and explores the implications of a deep split in Rawls's psychological assumptions, one set applying to the

political sphere and the other to the economic sphere. (Wolff also notes a deep ambivalence in Rawls, stemming from his moral/philosophical commit- ment to an Aristotelean conception of human nature on the one hand, and his methodological commitment to the utility-maximizing conception of Classical liberal economic and political theory on the other (Wolff pp. 208-9).) Thus persons are expected to be unwaveringly committed to the realization of their sense of justice, regardless of possible conflict with their self-interest. Their sense of justice will be decisive in the' decisions they make and the policies they pursue as citizens, i.e., in the political sphere. But significant inequalities in wealth, income and power may be expected because, in the economic sphere, these will be needed to attract qualified persons to the

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jobs that need to be done, motivate people to put forth their best efforts,

etc.

There are two places where Barry's arguments seem to me to go awry.

First, in Chapter 9, 'The Derivation of the Maximin Criterion', Barry argues

that Rawls's claim that the first o f the three conditions making the choice o f

a maximin strategy appropriate in the original position rests on a "monu-

mental confusion." The condition in question is that "since the [maximin]

rule takes no account o f the likelihood of possible circumstances, there must

be some reason for sharply discounting estimates of these probabilities"

(Rawls p. 154; Barry p. 90). Rawls's claim is that this condition is satisfied

since the parties know nothing about the distribution o f population over

social position, and in such circumstances use o f the principle o f insufficient

reason for the assigning of probabilities would be rejected. The "monumental

confusion," according to Barry, is that:

The decision to be made is about the criterion to be used in judging the institutions of their society, whatever that society may turn out to be. In the situation where this criterion is to be used there is no extraordinary uncertainty: the situation is the normal one of taking decisions in an actual society. The radical uncertainty of the original position comes in the wrong place to help Rawls's argument for the maximin criterion. To have an argument he would have to say, in order to support it, that the conditions in which the chosen criterion is to be applied are such as to make knowledge of proba- bilities impossible (Barry pp. 92-3, his italics).

I f I understand Barry correctly, it seems to me that he fails to distinguish between the adoption of a strategy for choosing principles on the one hand,

and the choice o f the principles themselves on the other. His use o f the term

'maximin criterion' seems to cover both. Rawls's claims regarding the three

conditions for the rationality o f maximin apply to the adoption o f a strategy,

which must be used in the original position, under whatever conditions o f

uncertainty obtain there. The uncertainties involved in predicting the out-

comes of various policies within actual societies must be taken :into account

in the choice o f principles (and interpretations for them). (This criticism, o f

course, does not hold against Barry's "parallel objection" to a "curious subsidiary argument that Rawls advances to the effect that people in the

original position cannot choose a criterion with the object o f maximizing

expected utility because such a choice to be meaningful presupposes known

tastes, whereas those in the original position do not know their tastes" (Barry

p. 93, fn. 4; Rawls pp. 173-174).)

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The second argument that seems to me to go wrong is in Chapter 12,

'International Relations.' Barry argues that Rawls's attempt to dodge the

question o f justice between nations by treating the def'mition o f the

society as already determined fails even on Rawls's own assumptions. Barry

says:

Although they do not know whether their own society is rich or poor, they can pre- sumably know that, if they live in the twentieth century, there will be a minority of rich societies and a majority in which there is undernourishment or malnutrition or, even if these are escaped, very little over and above the bare minimum of food, clothing and shelter necessary (Barry p. 129).

He goes on to argue that a maximin strategy would not be compatible with

the parties taking a chance that they might be members of a poor society,

concluding that it would not be rational for them to accept the stipulation

that existing states will be the units within which the principles they choose

will operate. But the knowledge on which this argument relies seems clearly

to be ruled out in at least one of Rawls's statements o f what is excluded b y

the veil o f ignorance:

In the original position the only particular facts known to the parties are those that can be inferred from the circumstances of justice. While they know the first principles of social theory, the course of history is closed to them; they have no information about how often society has taken this or that form, or which kinds of societies presently exist (Rawls p. 200).

While many of Barry's arguments are 'internal', i.e., designed to show that

Rawls's arguments fail on Rawls's own terms, he attempts to connect these

failures with certain basic features o f the theory - and of liberalism in

general - and to suggest that no theory with those features could work. Thus

Barry intends his critique of Rawls's theory to be, at the same time, a critique o f liberalism in general, and perhaps especially: 1) its tendency to deny its

own value assumptions, and 2) its tendency to make grand, far-reaching egalitarian gestures with one hand (e.g., a) the insistence on the importance of equal political participation, b) the strong egalitarian thrust of the difference principle, and c) the priority demand for fair equality o f opportunity), and to take them back with the other (a') the argument that equal political partici-

pation might be sacrificed if this would result in a stronger total system of liberties, b ' ) the combination o f proposed interpretation o f "worst-off', chain

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connection, and need for significant inequalities as incentives, and c') the

proviso that unequal opportunities entailed by continuation of the family system will be tolerated).

Nevertheless, Barry is clearly sympathetic to many of the concerns and values of liberalism, and he regards it as the most significant aspect o f Rawls's

theory that the connection between liberalism and private ownership in the

means o f production is treated as contingent rather than necessary (Barry p. 166). His own view appears to be that, properly interpreted, Rawls's prin- ciples - or some very much like them - express appropriate criteria for the

assessment of social arrangements, and that they would most nearly be satis-

fied by some form of liberal democratic socialism. There is, incidentally,

some ambiguity in Barry's use of the term 'liberalism'. As he defines it, liberalism is equivalent to individualism:

The essence of liberalism as I am defining it here is the vision of society as made up of independent, autonomous units who co-operate only when the terms of co-operation are such as make it further the ends of each of the parties. Market relations are the paradigm of such co-operation (Barry p. 166).

Yet he says, two pages later, in the closing paragraph of the book, "I feel a strong at tachment to liberalism in relation to ideas..." (Barry p. 168). His

attachment, I take it, is to the liberal 'conclusions' which place a high value

on individual liberty, responsibility, autonomy, etc. - which Barry sees as the

underlying values of liberalism (Barry p. 127, and above p. 369) - and not to

the individualist 'premises' used in the just-quoted definition~ from which

liberal theorists seek to derive them (Barry p. 121, 127).

I turn now to the most recent book of the three, UnderstandingRawls, by

Robert Paul Wolff. (Considering some o f the titles Wolff has used in the past,

there can be little doubt that the present one contains a playful reference to

and suggested comparison with the book to be discussed below.) The basic idea of Wolff's book is that Rawls's theory has developed through at least

three distinct stages, as represented by 'Justice as Fairness' in 1958, 'Distri- butive Justice' in 1967, and A Theory of Justice in 1971; and ~Lhat the final form is best understood, "not as a single piece of philosophical argument to be tested and accepted or rejected whole, but as a complex, many-layered record of at least twenty years of philosophical growth and development" (Wolff p. 4). After setting forth 'The First Form of the Model', as he calls it, Wolff provides 'A Critique of the First Form' , in which questions and

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criticisms are offered, some of which were raised in published responses to 'Justice as Fairness', and some of which Wolff assumes, on the basis of changes incorporated in later forms, must have occurred to Rawls. The same procedure

is used for the second form of the model, and then the third form is presented as an attempt to avoid and/or respond to criticisms of the second form. Each form, in the effort to preserve the original key idea while avoiding objections and criticisms levelled against its predecessor, becomes immensely more com-

plicated than the last. This laying out and critiquing of the development of Rawls's theory occupies about half of Wolff's book (Parts One and Two).

Following the reconstruction of Rawls's theory, there is a short Part Three on Rawls and Kant. Part Four contains Wolff's sustained and probing critique of A Theory of Justice, including a detailed formal analysis of the bargaining game behind the veil of ignorance. In Part Five, the 'Conclusion', Wolff argues

that Rawls's theory fails ultimately because "it abstracts from the significant

factors determining the nature and development of social reality" (Wolff p. 204). "Rawls's failure," he says, "grows naturally and inevitably out of his uncritical acceptance o f the socio-political presuppositions and associated modes of analysis of classical and nee-classical liberal political economy. By focusing exclusively on distribution rather than on production, Rawls obscures the real roots of that distribution" (Wolff p. 210). In both Parts Four and

Five, Wolff attempts to spell out and clarify the ways of thinking that under- lie some of the most important Marxist/leftist criticisms of Rawls's theory and of liberalism in general.

I shall limit my comments to two issues. The first is a matter of interpre- tation. In his account of the first form of the model, Wolff interprets Rawls's statement of his original two principles in what seems to me an unnecessarily implausible way. As Wolff labels them, the principles are: I: Each person is entitled to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; IIa: Inequalities must work out to everyone's advantage to be permissible; IIb:.favored positions must be open to all (Wolff pp. 37-8).

Wolff says that Principle I is puzzling in that it refers to liberty rather than to wealth, income or rewards. He offers considerations, which he considers decisive, for interpreting Rawls as saying 'liberty' when he meant 'wealth, income or rewards', i.e., the same things that Principle II is concerned with.

This interpretation fits nicely with Wolff's claim that, in this first form, the "relationship between formal, procedural elements of the game and sub- stantive proposals for principles of distribution is a perfect model of the

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traditional liberal analysis of the relationship between the formal political and

legal guarantees of the liberal bourgois state and the economic arrangements or patterns of distribution arrived at by the workings of the free market" (Wolff p. 37).

Still, it seems highly impl'ausible to me that Rawls said 'liberty' when he meant something he considers (or even came to consider) as so radically distinct from. liberty as wealth, income or rewards. Moreover, his discussion, toward the end of 'Justice as Fairness', of the difference between his approach and utilitarianism concerning the possibility that slavery might, under some

conditions, be just, strongly suggests that it is this issue that he is primarily concerned with in Principle I. It seems more plausible to interpret the relations between the original Principles I and Ila as follows: Principle I has reference to liberty, and Principle IIa has reference to possible inequalities in the dis- tribution of any of the potential benefits and burdens of social cooperation, including liberty (as understood for Principle I) and wealth, income and other rewards.

On this interpretation, Rawls thought that he had provided a special status for liberty by singling it out in Principle I. But, by including liberty under the provisions for permissible inequality of Principle II, he effectively eradicated any special status. For Principle II, by itself, establishes the same presumption in favor of equal distribution of all of the goods it refers to that is explicitly spelled out for liberty in Principle I. The recognition of this fact and the desire to maintain a special place for liberty then led Rawls to adopt the

priority rule and limit the application of the second principle as he does in later versions.

Offhand, I do not see that this interpretation is fundamentally incom- patible with Wolff's reconstruction. It makes the change over time perhaps a little less dramatic, and the idea involved at the earliest stage perhaps a little less starkly simple than he would like. But it does not seem to alter anything more substantially than that. If Wolff's reconstruction should turn out, in

some way that is not now apparent to me, to require his interpretation on this point, I would take that to count as much against his reconstruction as for his interpretation.

The second issue I want to discuss concerns the implications of one of the major leftist objections against Rawts's theory, i.e., that it is ahistorical. In his critique of Rawls's account of the information available to the parties in the original position, Wolff raises the question whether the particular

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combination of knowledge and ignorance specified by Rawls is "in principle

epistemologically possible" (Wolff p. 121). Wolff argues that it is not. He says:

Consider first the knowledge of political affairs, the principles of economic theory, and the bases of social organization. Rawls's theory assumes that such knowledge is ahistori- cal in its epistemological foundations, that it has the same trans-temporally impersonal character possessed by the truths of the natural sciences (Wolff p. 122).

But, says Wolff:

...our knowledge of society is different in kind from our knowledge of nature because the object of our knowledge of society is different in kind from the object of our knowledge of nature .... In short, classical economic theory was not a discovery of laws timelessly operative, in the way that Newtonian mechanics was (Wolff p. 125).

Wolff spells out his view of the nature of society, and its implications for

knowledge about society. And he concludes:

...if the 'general facts of human society' include an awareness of the ideological character of classical economic theory, then a party in the original position can infer that he must live in a society that has advanced...beyond the early stages of the rationalization of industrial production, past even the early stages of the formation of a capitalist econ- omy . . . . He will know that his own society has reached this stage, and not merely that some human society in the past has acquired such knowledge, because the knowledge claims advanced by the ideological analysis of economic theory will not appear to him plausible or comprehensible claims about human society unless his own societY has progressed to a certain stage in the progressive dernystification of social relationships (Wolff pp. 127-8, italics in the original).

It seems to me that there are at least two possible objections to Rawls's

theory interwined in Wolff's discussion. One is that it is a mistake to attribute

to the parties in the original position knowledge of timeless, transhistorical

laws of social organization, economics, etc. because there are no such laws (or

at least not of the sort and in the numbers that Rawls seems to have in mind).

This, as I understand it, is the basis for the general charge of ahistoricity. No

special epistemological problem is involved here.

The second possible objection arises from the epistemological point that

what one can know depends on what one can comprehend, what one has

concepts for, etc.; and this in turn depends on what kind of society one lives

in and what stage of development it has reached. So there is a question about

the coherence of attributing knowledge to the parties in the original position

from which they could infer much about their society, and saying that they

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don ' t know anything about their society or what stage of historical develop-

ment it has reached. And this constitutes a charge o f epistemological ahistori- city. But it does not involve any special appeal to the nature o f social reality

or o f knowledge about society. Wolff seems to see these as a single objection because of his v~ew that there

are two fundamentally different kinds o f reality. Thus he takes the second

objection as holding for knowledge about society in a way in which it does

not hold for knowledge of natural science. But I do not believe his discussion

supports such a distinction.

It may be thought that endorsing the charge of ahistoricity commits one

to the view that social reality, being essentially historical, is fundamentally

different from the rest of nature. But I do not believe it does. We have recog- nized that it was a mistake to think o f the laws o f classical economics, etc. as

fixed and timeless 'like the laws of nature'. Might it not also be a mistake to

think o f the laws of nature in that way? Human beings and social reality are

integral parts o f the natural world. We differ from other natural creatures in

that, in our interactions with each other and with the rest o f nature, we

change ourselves (and our environment) more profoundly than they. And we have more choice about how we change our selves and our environment.

In the process o f creating what we need to live, we simultaneously create

our selves and (within certain - not fixed - limits) the conditions of our life.

There is a crucial difference between laws, facts, etc. that we can choose to

change and those we can have no influence on (and this is the main difference

that Wolff is, rightly, concerned to emphasize). But even this line is not com-

pletely fixed, independent of history. It may be accurate to say that we conceive of the natural world and its

laws as fixed for all time, and as the background against which social reality

develops and changes. But I suggest that, if this is so, it is not, as Wolff

claims, because the objects of our knowledge (or thought) are different in kind in the two cases, but because the differences between the relevant time

spans are so great as to 1) make them appear fundamentally different from

our perspective, and 2) make the range o f possible choice far greater within the social arena than outside it.

Reading Rawls contains fourteen papers and a substantial and useful intro-

duction by Norman Daniels. No brief summary of the contents could do

justice to the range and depth o f its many excellent essays. I shall merely

mention a few of the contributions that add substantially to the discussion of topics already raised.

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In "Justifying Justice: Problems of Psychology, Politics and Measurement in Rawls", Benjamin Barber explores the problems that arise in attempting to specify workable criteria for application of Rawls's principles. It becomes

clear that the use of objective quantities (primary goods) rather than subjec- tive ones (utilities) does not avoid the difficulties of interpersonal compari- sons, as Rawls had hoped. (A. K. Sen's paper examines in formal terms the

contrast between the interpersonal comparisons required by utilitarianism

and those required by Rawls's theory.) Barber illustrates how Rawls's approach is ahistorical, not only in his stipulations regarding the knowledge of the parties in the original position, but also in the way he conceives of the appli- cation of his principles to actual social arrangements. A major point of Barber's paper is that Rawls doesn't, and can't, get the substantive results he wants from the abstract and 'weak' premises he uses. (Variations on this theme may be found in the essays by Nagel, Fisk, G. Dworkin and Hart as well.)

H. L. A. Hart's "Rawls on Liberty and its Priority" is a most subtle and searching attempt to clarify the meaning and application of the principle of maximum equal liberty, and of the priority of this principle over Rawls's second principle. This discussion dearly shows how inadequate it is to treat liberty as a single quantifiable dimension, as Rawls's discussion suggests, and as Barry does (see above pp. 371-372). In "Equal Liberty and UnequalWorth of Liberty", Norman Daniels argues that Rawls's distinction between liberty (the concern of the first principle) and the worth of liberty (the concern of the second principle) will not hold up. On Rawls's own terms, if it is rational

for the parties to give priority to the former, then it is equally rational for them to give priority to the latter.

There are four explicitly leftist (and in some cases, explicitly Marxist) essays: those by Fisk, Miller, Daniels, and Barber. There seem to be two basic strategies employed in left critiques of Rawls. The first is to argue that, on Rawls's own terms, his theory fails in certain respects; then to suggest that, due to certain fundamental assumptions or features of the theory, no attempt to patch it up would work; and finally to point out that these assumptions or features are characteristic of liberal theories in general. This strategy may be seen, for example, in Barber and Daniels, in Wolff, and in Barry (especially Chapters 3-9 and 11).

The second strategy is: assume for the sake of argument that Rawls's derivations are valid, or could be made so; argue that Rawls's emPirical

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assumptions are false (or controversial); then argue (a) that if true (or equally

plausible) assumptions were substituted, his principles would not be chosen,

and/or (b) that the results o f following his principles would be unacceptable.

(See, e.g., Miller, Fisk, and Barber, and Barry Chapters 10 and 12-15.)

A brief illustration of the second strategy: Miller (RR) argues that if, instead of the social and economic facts and laws Rawls assumes, knowledge

of a few of the less controversial claims of Marxist social and economic

theory were attributed to the parties in the original position, they would not

be able to agree on any principles.

Both o f the strategies just described are useful - they offer specific

reasons for objecting to Rawls's theory and then attempt to display the

relations o f these reasons to more general leftist criticisms of liberal theories.

Thus they speak to an audience including both those who accept some

version of liberalism and those who reject liberalism but feel it is important

to deepen their understanding of the various forms it can take, of its impli-

cations, and of the implications of their objections to it.

But one result of adopting either o f these strategies is that a large pro-

portion of the piece is taken up with arguments concerning the rationality

of adopting various strategies and principles in some version o f the original

position. Thus discussion of the more general forms of the criticisms and their

broader implications is often very brief. The two pieces, among those under

consideration here, of which this is least true are those by Wolff and Fisk.

I quote from Daniels' summary of Fisk's paper:

Fisk ...tries to show that Rawls' biases in the original position are a general feature of contract arguments...Fisk claims that Rawls...thinks he can earnjusfificatory force for the contract position by stripping men down to their 'natural' characteristics of 'freedom' and 'equality'. These characteristics, however, reflect a particular ideological bias.... Fisk argues that abstracting man from his real condition, which always involves group inter- ests, is an unfortunate distortion...It leads to selecting ideologically biased principles... It results in a misleading description of the state... And finally, it makes genuine 'com- munity' impossible...Fisk suggests that a second major distortion of human nature is embodied in the claim that people are 'equal'. In reality, Fisk claims, people are 'equally' members of classes, not members of society as a whole. Adopting the view of society as a whole leads to principles which seem to treat all people equally, but which really have different effects on different classes.

While there are a number of points on which I would take issue with Fisk,

and others which at least need clarification, there is one question which seems to confront the left on the most general terms, i.e., to be most independent

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of the peculiarities o f Rawls's theory. The question is: once we accept the

idea that the natures of human beings are not independent o f their historical/

social circumstances, and in particular their class, are we commit ted to an

extreme form of moral relativism according to which what is right depends on

the class perspective one happens to share, and that is all there is to say? Are

the only alternatives, as Fisk maintains "Either relativism of partisanship

wrapped in absolutism!" (RR p. 76)?

If the question is whether there is a genuinely transcendent (i.e., trans-

historical, trans-class, trans-societal) conception o f human nature substantial

enough to form the basis ("sub specie aeternitat is") of a Rawtsian social

contract , I would agree with Fisk that there is not. But Fisk appears to be

making a much stronger claim than that . He says:

A revolutionary view of human nature, like Marx's, claims human nature is not being realized until human activity becomes an end rather than a means. Such a view is no less biased in its class implications than the liberal view. This view of human nature corres- ponds to the nature of humans in the special role of working people in a capitalist society (RR p. 77).

The revolutionary view of human nature is a useful conceptualization of the social role of members of the working class. But as Marx would himself insist, it would be uncritical to suppose that its validity extends beyond that role (RR p, 78).

Some form o f relativism does indeed seem inevitable, but must it be the

extreme form embraced by Fisk? Perhaps there is another alternative. Perhaps

part of the answer is that a) although persons' natures are profoundly

indluenced by class, they are not wholly determined by it; and b) class

interests or aims may be more or less in conflict or in harmony with other

human interests or aims, some at least of which may be - though still not

absolute, whatever that means - rooted in features of our existence that are

far more enduring than particular social class formations (though the partic-

ular form in which they are manifested in a particular period may be deter-

mined by its class structure). I have in mind such features as the facts that

we are conscious beings, that we are language-users, that we are social beings,

that we need air to breathe, water to drink, food and shelter to survive, that

we have opposable thumbs, etc. It seems to me that there are needs and inter-

ests arising out o f these aspects of our natures. The aims and interests o f one

class in a particular historical per iod may not be compatible with these more

enduring needs and interests while those o f another class are. Thus these

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long-term features o f human existence may provide just if icatory grounds for

partisanship. Historical relativism may be maintained without what is right

being reduced to what is right for the members o f this or that class.

Each o f these three books is an eloquent tribute to the depth and fecundity

o f Rawls's work - and much remains to be said.*

Livingston College Rutgers University

MARY GIBSON

*I wish to express my gratitude to my colleague Fred Schick for many helpful suggestions and comments.