To celebrate Bank Transfer Day, I sat down with Stanford Professor of Political Science, Philosophy and Law Joshua Cohen to discuss how political philosopher John Rawls might view the Occupy Wall Street movement. The late Rawls, a Harvard professor and the author of A Theory of Justice, is widely recognized as the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. His theory about how to set up a just society, called ‘Justice as Fairness,’ could provide a legitimate philosophical framework for the Occupy the Wall Street movement. I talked with Cohen about what Rawls’ theory says, and what it means for the 99%.
Links:
- Read the biography of Professor Joshua Cohen, Martha Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society
- Buy A Theory of Justice by John Rawls from Amazon.com
- Read about John Rawls on Wikipedia
- Read “Rawls on Wall Street” by Steven Mazie in the New York Times
- Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
- Read “Dancing to the Port: Occupy Oakland’s General Strike” by Danelle Morton of Boston Review
- Read “Libertarianism and Liberty” in Boston Review
Thank you …very interesting
Excellent interview, Seth. I can affirm Professor Cohen’s depiction of Rawls’s remarkable character. I was his student in two courses as an undergrad in the early 90s, just after Rawls had retired and was teaching as an emeritus professor. Rawls began his moral philosophy survey course in the humblest and gentlest and most sincere of ways, telling the class that he was a devoted reader of the texts (by Hume, Kant, Hegel and Leibniz) but that he had a hard time understanding many of the ideas, and looked forward to working through them with us. This was no false modesty. He embodied a generosity, civility and, more than that, a depth of humanity, that undergirds the foundation of any just society.
For more on the question of whether property rights ought to count as fundamental liberties, listeners may consider Will Wilkinson’s critique of my original Times piece:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/40809 …and my rejoinder: http://bigthink.com/ideas/40850?page=all
Steven Mazie, thanks for giving us a personal glimpse of Rawls.
At the end of Cohen’s illuminating discussion of Rawls and OWS, he turns to Rawls’s views on civil disobedience. I would have liked Cohen to speak more directly only the limits of civil disobedience in Rawls’s view. For Rawls argued that civil disobedience should be limited to protesting violations of the Liberty Principle and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle, but not the Different Principle. For example, in his paper, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience”, which was essentially incorporated into A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues that civil disobedience can only be justified for “substantial and clear violations” of justice. Because the Difference Principle “applies primarily to fundamental economic and social policies,” Rawls maintains, there is “a problem of assigning it a determinate and precise sense” and there can be a “wide variety of reasonable opinion as to whether the principle is satisfied.” Consequently, Rawls contends, “unless the laws of taxation are clearly designed to attack a basic equal liberty, they should not be protested by civil disobedience….” It seems hard (read: impossible) to dispute the fact that the Difference Principle isn’t satisfied in the United States, but its certainly not obvious that the laws of taxation “are clearly designed to attack a basic equal liberty.” But then, by my lights, it also seems unduly constraining to hold that civil disobedience can only be justified to protest violations of the basic liberties — gross and unjust economic inequality, too, seems like an acceptable basis for civil disobedience. So anyway, I would have liked to have heard Cohen address this apparent limitation in Rawls’s view more squarely.
Strongly agreed. Rawls’s had a disastrously narrow view of civil disobedience. Because he is – I’m sorry to have to say it – at root a philosopher of stability, an apologist for an improved status quo, NOT any kind of revolutionary.
Here’s my article on where Rawls on civil disobedience runs aground, via a case study:
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=rupert%20read%20rawls%20refuseniks%20practice%20philosophy&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCMQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uea.ac.uk%2F~j339%2Frefuseniksshort.rtf&ei=mp7KTp6sDsH48QOfheF2&usg=AFQjCNEBVJ91frknp06h1aaWhKP-Oh9NOg
or
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=rupert%20read%20rawls%20refuseniks%20practice%20philosophy&source=web&cd=18&ved=0CD8QFjAHOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rupertread.fastmail.co.uk%2FRawls%2520and%2520the%2520Refuseniks.doc&ei=9J7KTq-FDM2s8QOw7eVP&usg=AFQjCNGrHUNH0ha8R5-rnx1wjSbJoo_9pA
http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/05/memoir-volume-two-hapter-three-ninth.html
“On September 17, 1969 I sent a letter to eleven senior members
of the philosophy profession, asking them to serve as co-signers
with me on a motion to be presented to the annual meeting of
the Eastern Division of the APA, calling for the establishment of
a Standing Committee on the Status of Women in the
Profession. Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz [who were
husband and wife] came on board, as did Justus Buchler [whose
wife taught philosophy], and Sue Larson and Mary Mothersill,
both of Barnard. Maurice Mandelbaum, who along with Lewis
White Beck had read my Kant manuscript for Harvard, was
sympathetic, but pointed out that as the incoming APA
president, if he signed he would be in the position of petitioning
himself. A good point. The great Classicist Gregory Vlastos also
said yes, as did Ruth Marcus, whom I knew from my Chicago
days, when she was at Northwestern. Morty White was
supportive, but declined to sign for fear that if the motion
passed, he would be expected to serve on the committee,
something he said he could not do because of writing
obligations. That left Jack Rawls, who declined to sign. In
retrospect, this does not surprise me. Although Jack was on his
way to becoming the world’s leading expert on justice, he never
seemed to be there when action was needed. I was reminded of
the great story [possibly apocryphal] about Karl Marx. whose
mother is reputed to have said, “I wish Karl would write less
about capital and make some.” The motion passed, and my old
student, Margaret Wilson, was elected the first Chair of the new
Standing Committee. “
(A Theory of Justice = The Republic, Leviathan)
pompous self-promoting liberal BS, waste of time…
the Oakland civil disobedience was aimless, nothing like civil rights
I love it at 11 mins 20 seconds in, when the interviewer says, of Rawls (of fair equality of opportunity), “This sounds like the American dream” (and Cohen assents). Yep – hard to find a better condemnation of Rawls than that!
Also, at 20 minutes in etc., Cohen, all the stuff about ‘expanding the pie’ gives the game away – Rawls’s difference principle IS a veiled apologia for trickle-down economics, provided that the trickle is ‘as big as possible’.
24 mins in: Oh dear… Always sickening to hear the absurd lie that Rawls is about ”reconciling liberty and equality”. NO – he quite explicitly prioritises liberty to equality; but, also, and moreover, the second principle is in any case NOT an egalitarian principle. What it is FOR is to justify inequality! It is a ‘prioritarian’ principle.
30 mins in: “So, if the Occupy movement want things to be just a little bit more equal than they are, Rawls would agree with them?” Cohen: “Absolutely”. Again, this hits the nail on the head: Rawls would only have sympathised with the most moderate – the Obama-backing – members of the Occupy movement. NOT with any seriously radical goals for it.