Rawlsian Rationality Requires Anarchy
10 December 2024
John Rawls's famous theory of justice is taken by himself and his commentators to constitute a version of "political" or "classical" liberalism." (Political Liberalism is the title of one of Rawls's books.) This is the view, roughly, that people have equal fundamental rights, and that the legitimacy of government rests on the consent of the governed (or "the will of the people"), as tempered by "republican" institutions which filter and refine the people's will, lend it some stability and resistance to momentary fads or demagoguery. The state sector, as well, has a distributive and redistributive function, which for one thing helps make it more stable; a situation of extreme inequality of resources or opportunities threatens a political system with collapse, and a too-great degree of inequality is itself incompatible with justice as liberals understand it.
Perhaps liberalism in this sense amounts practically to representative democracy with a large state sector and substantial welfare programs. It looks a lot like the United States government in periods of stability, as delineated by the Constitution, and indeed the great classical liberals such as John Locke were extremely influential on the founders of the American republic.
Rawls's theory of justice, now undergoing its umpteenth revival (though not its umpteenth revision, since Rawls is no longer around to keep refining it), is compelling not only for its content, but for the method by which the conclusion is established. Provisionally, I agree with its definition of social justice. But Rawls's theory – both in its method and in the principles at which it arrives – is not in fact compatible with classical liberalism as thus understood, whatever Rawls's followers or the man himself might believe, because, I argue, it is not compatible with the existence of the coercive political state.
People who take Rawls seriously, I say, are obliged to assay non-state solutions to the problem of distributive or political justice. Now, if you are a casual dipper, you may well already be yawning. But if you are a liberal or an admirer of John Rawls, you ought to be surprised. I'm saying that anyone who accepts Rawls's method or his theory is rationally obliged to be an anarchist in the sense of rejecting the existence of the political state, on the grounds of the principles of justice and the nature of what Rawls terms the 'original position'. This would amount to a compelling argument for anarchism as the only political philosophy compatible with the most plausible characterization of social justice that we know.
I'll review Rawls's basic political philosophy quickly (apologies if this is overly familiar). Controversies concerning rival definitions of justice have been intractable and irresolvable since the ancient Greeks. Rather than starting with a new theory, Rawls suggests, we'd do better to start by designing people who could come up with a decent account of the concept. This is Rawls's fundamental innovation. He creates a thought experiment known as the original position, in which people have to decide what sort of political system they want to live under, and how the "goods" of their society (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, political power, and education, among others) are to be distributed.
These people are pictured as rational, in the sense that they want to maximize their own access to these goods; they operate from a tempered self-interest and knowledge of how people in general behave and what they want. The key idea, however, is that the people in the original position operate behind a "veil of ignorance," a systematic editing of what they know, to ensure a fair outcome. We might think of this as analogous to "blind reviewing," which can lead to more objective assessments.
The problem with starting by trying to generate substantive policies or institutions is that each person might, even unconsciously, favor people like themselves in the distribution of goods. So in the original position I do not know my own gender, my own race, my own class, my own educational level ,age, etc.. Then I will be unable to favor people like myself, and will be constrained to come up with solutions that are fair for everyone. It's rather an ingenious idea. Each person in the original position is pictured as rationally pursuing their own self-interest, but not able to tailor the results to favor their own social group or their own particular circumstances. Rawls argues that each would be concerned to make sure that the people in the very worst positions in the society, the people "lowest down" in the distribution of goods, would be able to survive and even thrive. After all, they might end up in the worst position.
Rawls formulated the principles that he claimed (and carefully, at great length, argued) the people in the original position would accept, in several different versions. “As a first step,” Rawls writes in one of these, “suppose that the basic structure of society distributes certain primary goods, that is, things that every rational man is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever a person's rational plan of life. For simplicity, assume that the chief primary goods at the disposition of society are rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth.” Then the principles on which these goods are to be distributed as follows: All citizens should have equal basic political rights and liberties (such as freedom of speech and assembly), and, so far as possible, equal opportunities. With regard to other goods such as shelter or wealth, such resources should be distributed equally, except where an unequal distribution would help those with least. This "difference principle" is one of Rawls's great contributions, a nice refinement of a number of basic moral intuitions. But the argument is also fairly compelling: in the original position, I might accept inequalities if these were to the benefit of everyone, including myself, even if I ended up near the bottom of the distributive scheme(1).
Rawls's practical conclusions are classically liberal indeed: an active government resting on and filtering and tempering the popular will, with "paternalistic" authority and the ability to distribute and redistribute goods in accordance with the principles of justice. That is, Rawls demands a coercive state to achieve the just distributions he describes.
It is reasonable to assume that even in a well-ordered society [wherein principles of justice are universally agreed on] the coercive powers of government are to some degree necessary for the stability of social cooperation. . . . [E]ven under reasonably ideal conditions, it is hard to imagine, for example, a successful income tax scheme on a voluntary basis. Such an arrangement is unstable. The role of an authorized public interpretation or rules supported by collective sanctions is precisely to overcome this instability. By enforcing a public system of penalties government removes the grounds for thinking others are not complying with the rules. For this reason alone, a coercive sovereignty is presumably always necessary. (211)
I think Rawls's procedure for generating a theory of justice, and his theory of justice itself, are plausible, though there are of course many possible objections. But he is wrong that the people in the original position would establish a coercive state. Indeed, they could not, compatibly with the original position as Rawls describes it. And they could not, given that they are rationally self-interested. Rawls's Theory of Justice is very compelling indeed. But it is a compelling argument not for classical liberalism, but for anarchism.
There are very good reasons, for example, why people in the original position would not countenance slavery, racial supremacism, or a caste system: they might end up a slave, a member of a despised race, an untouchable. They might end up oppressed and dispossessed of most or all goods. Well, these are exactly the reasons that they could not rationally countenance a political state.
The most traditional definition of the political state, often associated with Max Weber, is something like this: a group of people which claims and to an effective extent administers a monopoly of force and coercion over a population (enabling people in this group to tax or imprison other people in the population, for example). This monopoly of violence and coercion is never perfect, but it must be fairly effective, if the society has a government at all. This, I assert (and have argued here and there), is the only plausible definition of the political state.
So the political state represents a dramatic asymmetry of power by definition. Some people are inside it; some people are not. The people inside it as a group have the power to dispossess, incarcerate, exile, conscript, or kill the people who are not. If it's me against the government of the US: well, they've got world-annihilating weaponry, thorough systems of surveillance and incarceration, and unlimited resources to bring to bear. I have this little body, okay? Resistance is futile.
Now, surely people in the original position could not rationally decide to constitute a power like that, for the same reason that they could not countenance a racial supremacist polity: they might end up completely disempowered. All their goods will be vulnerable at every moment to the coercive state. They put all their goods at the mercy of some of their number, who effectively operate an irresistible force. They can be dispossessed and incarcerated, or for that matter executed, by due process, or because of a mistake. (Though Rawls is a fan of due process, no force can effectively constrain the power of the state once it is constituted, by definition, unless a revolution is right now in process. It can also dispossess you on a whim.) This is not an abstract problem, though I will not pause here to enumerate oppressions, wars, famines, and genocides unleashed by governments on their own people. You know about these already.
No rational person, and certainly not the people in the original position, could constitute such a force. For if they did, they would expect to be its victim.
And even more devastatingly for the classical liberal interpretation of Rawls's principles of justice, those principles cannot be consistently applied in a society that features a political state. Recall that in Rawls's enumeration of primary social goods, he includes 'powers,' by which he means political power, among other things. Political power is a good for Rawls, and it is subject to social distribution. That is, a political system or situation can give power to people or remove people from power: it can make you a prison guard or a tax collector or an ambassador or a general, and then it can take such powers away.
So the people in the original position have to decide how to distribute political power. This is a particularly fundamental distribution, because political power is the power to distribute the other goods. They are, of course, constrained to distribute political power according to the principles of justice they have previously agreed to. So, first, they operate on a presumption of equality: to begin with, everyone should have the same degree of political power. This is obviously impossible in a statist system, by definition of the state.
Rawls himself appears to hold that equal voting or free speech rights amount to equal political power. But that is bizarrely false: the contribution of my vote in the next presidential election is about one in about 200 million. But the president I vote for or against has the power to restrict my health care decisions, change my income by changing tax policies, or to deport me. The distribution of political power in a state system is radically unequal.
So then the question amounts to whether most people's being disempowered in this way and hence vulnerable to the extent entailed by the political state, is to the benefit of those people. Cases in which governments irresistibly turn on their own people, or declare wars of expansion or colonialism – possibilities inherent in the concept of the political state – demonstrate it to be grotesquely false. If it turns on you, it will take all your stuff and annihilate you. To repeat, no rational person who did not know whether she would end up as an oppressed person or an oppressor, could choose such a system, by the basic principles of Rawls himself.
So, the people in the original position could not constitute a state because of the sort of rational self-interest and risk-aversion that Rawls attributes to them. And not only would they be irrational, they could not constitute a state without massively violating the principles of justice on which they have agreed. So people in the original position – exactly as Rawls describes them – must assay non-state solutions for achieving just distributions. Having eliminated the state as a possibility for extremely obvious reasons, they must explore non-coercive modes of governance and distribution.
They would have to try to think outside the monopoly of violence and the wildly unjust distribution of power that Rawls regards as "always necessary." For if it is always necessary, then justice in Rawls's sense is always impossible.
Rawls argues that we should start our accounts of political justice with an 'ideal theory'; something that could show us where we really want eventually to head. His own theory achieves that feat of imagination in some respects, but fails miserably at it in this one. Surely if we were trying to imagine an ideal situation, we wouldn't fill it up with force, violence, coercion, incarceration, and inequality in the statist fashion.
(1) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 62.
Crispin Sartwell is a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.
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