In Our Time - Rawls' Theory of Justice

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1921 - 2002) which has been called the most influential book in twentieth century political philosophy. It was first published in 1971. Rawls (pictured above) drew on his own experience in WW2 and saw the chance in its aftermath to build a new society, one founded on personal liberty and fair equality of opportunity. While in that just society there could be inequalities, Rawls’ radical idea was that those inequalities must be to the greatest advantage not to the richest but to the worst off. WithFabienne Peter Professor of Philosophy at the University of WarwickMartin O’Neill Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of YorkAnd Jonathan Wolff The Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson CollegeProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, a theory of justice by John Rawls has been called the most influential book in 20th century political philosophy. Rawls, 1921 to 2002, drew on his own experience in World War II

and saw the chance in its aftermath to build a new society, founded on personal liberty and fair equality of opportunity. And while in that just society there could be inequalities, Rawls' radical idea was that those inequalities must be of the greatest advantage

not to the richest, but to the worst of. With me to discuss Rawls' theory of justice are Fabianne Peter, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Martin O'Neill, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York, and Jonathan Wolfe, the Alfred Lundick, Professor of Values and Public Policy

at the Blatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and fellow Wolfson College. Let's start with you, Martin. Can you give us some brief notes about his background, his youth? Sure, so Roles was born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, to quite an affluent family. His father was quite a successful lawyer.

He was one of five boys, and I suppose that, the most notable incident of his childhood was that two of his younger brothers died in childhood from infections that they'd actually contracted from rules himself. So it seems as if, with this formative experience very early in his life, he had this sense of the sheer arbitrariness of good or bad luck and the way that so many features of our lives really just come down to factors well beyond our control. He then went on to Princeton where he studied, he did an accelerated degree given the US entry into World War II, and he joined the US Army as a private,

so he didn't take the route that some of his fellow Princeton men were doing of looking for officer commissions. He joined up as an ordinary soldier and fought in the Pacific during World War 2, in the Philippines, and in New Guinea, and ended up actually at one point on a troop train going through Hiroshima just after the bombing. The war, I think, had a complete... able to continue studying while he was in the war? So he just finished his Princeton degree that had been accelerated and his plan

actually after the war was that he would enter the Episcopalian priesthood that's what he thought he was going to do but the experience of the war completely changed his life. He lost his faith over the course of the war both I think the sense that the sheer difficulty of

seeing some of his friends and comrades killed when he survived I think was very difficult for him but also learning of the full evil of the Holocaust and the evil of the Nazi regime, I think made him lose his faith that there was any divine plan in history or that divine providence was going to work its way in the world. So I think by the end of the war, rules had this very vivid sense that the church wasn't going to be for him

and instead he had to think about the project of justice as something that human beings themselves would have to make in the world. We couldn't trust in divine providence, but instead it had to be something. that people together created. Well, Rawls is working mainly in the USA. Now, here's a big one for you. Can you tell us the four or five major political and social events that were going on in his first years in the USA?

I'm sure you can do that. They go to a very straightforward question. So, well, I mean, after the war, so what Rawls does, he goes back on the, thanks to the GI Bill, he goes back to do a PhD then at Princeton. So that's one big thing that's happening. Yeah, but in society, all are the big things. Well, so you get that expansion.

So I suppose with the New Deal, you get this period where the US is heading towards a somewhat more equal society, where you get that expansion of opportunity. At the time that he's teaching then through the 60s, I guess that I don't know about four or five issues, but I suppose two things that loom very large of the Vietnam War, obviously, is going on in the background and also the civil rights movement and issues around the treatment of African-Americans. and how the US can become a more inclusive society. That's all going on in the background at the time that Rules is writing in an academic register about justice. Could it be described as a turbulent and rather confused society that was looking for a clear way through? I think there's certainly a large amount of turbulence.

I think there's also underlying that a sense of progress. There's some sense of confidence. There's a thought that in the wake of the war, in the wake of the New Deal, that this is a society that's actually facing up, to some of its domestic problems at least and might be moving towards becoming a more equal society. And I think that there's a kind of confidence at that stage

that maybe disappears later on. Thank you. Joe Wolf, let's go through aspects of his work now, starting with utilitarianism. What place did that have in the development of his ideas? First of all, tell people what it is, and then say what place it had in his views. Utilitarianism is a theory really easy.

systematized or introduced by Jeremy Bentham. And the thought from Bentham is that the juicy of governments and you as an individual is to pursue the action that will bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. So that is the utilitarian slogan. Society should bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. And the way that is cashed out in a bit more detail, is that we need to do a type of cost-benefit analysis of the good and the bad. In fact, the happiness and unhappiness or pleasure and pain that any action will bring about. And our juicy as an individual or as a society is to bring about the state of affairs that has the greatest balance of pleasure over pain or happiness over unhappiness.

So it's a maximizing view that says we should, in a sense, make society as happy as possible. And on that basis, you can see it's a very appealing theory, that you might think what else should government do other than... How do you measure this? Well, that is a question that every great utilitarian has managed to duck rather than addressed directly. Are you going to be part of the duckus?

Well, it's not my theory, so thankfully... So it is a very difficult question about how you measure, and it's very important, because if you're aggregating something and maximizing it, you have to quantify. it. And this is a problem that one has a modern economics to some degree as well. And there are technical solutions around preference satisfaction and measuring the gambols that people would take. But for Bentham and John Stuart Mill, they really didn't address that in any detail. So just because the start of this conversation about his work,

in mind his work, we've got utilitarianism as one called it a pillar or a step, whatever it is. And the other is intuitionism. Lots of isms about this morning. What ought we to know about his view of intuitionism? In the early sections of a theory of justice, Rawls sets up this type of opposition between utilitarianism and intuitionism. So as we've seen utilitarianism as a highly principled view,

it gives you really a decision procedure for public policy, and it allows different people to, try to calculate and come up with the same or different results and gives a type of principle of public accountability. The problem with utilitarianism, though, is that in Rawls's phrase, it ignores the separateness of persons. That is, if one person suffers and another benefits more than the other person suffers, if we can measure this, then we should go ahead. So it doesn't pay any attention to individual rights. And so if society will maximize happiness in a way that is detrimental to one group's

interests, that's just bad luck. So although utilitarianism is very principled, it can give us counterintuitive consequences. And intuitionism. It's a mirror image. So intuitionism is the view, roughly speaking, that you should do whatever seems right to you. That we all have moral intuition. We have judgments about states of affairs. Some of us are very vile, nasty, destructive thoughts.

Well, we do. So an intuitionist would say you've been brought up badly, if you have those thoughts. Oh, have you? And that we have to rely on the intuitions of those who know best, who turn out to be the people who have written the theory and are from the finest Oxbridge colleges on the whole. So this is a problem with intuitionism.

And what we've got here, what rules has done, whether it's something going on in his own mind or a type of historical development is replaying something that comes up time and time again in public policy because on the one hand, we want rules, we want accountability, we want something that is public and transparent. But the problem with any system of rules

is very often it will give us judgments, outcomes we don't like very much. In my reading of rules and others may differ, what I see rules is doing is trying to get the advantages of both of these theories and ignore, overcome the disadvantages. So what he wants is a principle that only ever gives us the right answers, rather than the tab utilitarian principle that will sometimes give us unjust outcomes. Fabian, Peter, there's an element of the social contract in Raw's approach.

Can you tell us what that is and what part of it he was drawing on, please? Yes, of course. Indeed, the social contract tradition, which was particularly influential in the 18th century, played a huge part, in how Rawls thought about the principles of justice. So as Joe and Martin explained, Rawls was trying to figure out what a just society would look like, and the way he thought about this was, what are the principles of justice that could govern the basic structure

or the basic social institutions of a society? So the theory of justice, the book we're discussing, starts with this wonderful sentence saying that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. And in thinking about the justice of social institutions, Rowe thought that it will help if we go back to these influential 18th century social contract thinkers, especially John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Emmanuel Kant.

Now, these are very diverse thinkers, as I'm sure you know better than most, but what united them in Roles' view and in the views of many, is that they thought about a just, social contract, a system of principles of justice that define a just society, that define a system that everyone would subscribe to, would start from a commitment to the equal freedom of all citizens. So a just society is one that all citizens, all persons understood as free and equal, could agree to. They could sign up to that sort of society. And Rolls thought that that was an important

idea and he built his justice on that idea of what principles of justice could persons understood as free and equal all agree to. Now as I mentioned, this kind of thinking about the just society so peaked in the 18th century and then with the ascent of utilitarianism that Joe mentioned, it lost influence. It lost influence in part because Jeremy Bentham, the influential utilitarian thinker ridiculed the idea, particularly he ridiculed the idea of, people are somehow naturally equal and equally free. So he ridiculed the idea of natural rights. Everyone would have equal rights.

He called that nonsense upon stilts. So when Roles set out in the 20th century to think about justice, he thought, well, utilitarianism has its advantages, but one big problem is it doesn't actually give us the right answers on justice. So to make progress on thinking about what the just society looks like, we should go back to these earlier thinkers and start again from this thought if we understand each other as equals,

what could we all agree to would a just society look like? So what did he think, if it's possible to be brief about this and if it is, it is, if it isn't, it isn't? Overall, was his view, was his theory of justice? His theory of justice, he calls his justice as fairness, is a theory that is based on two main principles of justice.

The first principle, the principle of equal liberties, holds that in a just society, all members of society, enjoy an equal set of basic rights and liberties. So that's the first principle. The second principle of justice that he thought defined the just society is the sort of principle that everyone could agree to, like the first one, is a principle of justice. It has two components. One is a principle of fair equality of opportunity, such as society would give everyone fair opportunities.

And the second part of the second principle of justice is a difference principle, which says that a just society works to the benefit of the least well-off in that society. That's the radical part, isn't it? That's the radical part. I mean, there are other radical elements because even the first part, the first principle, the principle of equal rights and liberties says that of those rights and liberties, so one aspect is the political rights and liberties. And there he thought everyone should enjoy a fair value,

which is a very demanding idea that it's not enough that everyone has a right to vote. Everyone should, in fact, have an equal say in society be in a position to be an equal contributing member to society. That's already very radical. But then the difference principle, the thought that a society should not work to the advantage of the already better off,

but benefit the worst off. That's certainly also very radical. Well, thank you for that. That's a very good starting point. Martin, so let's take this. there's three really, one and two in two parts, so let's call it three. Can you tell us, first of all, about liberty and then about fair opportunity, what his view of liberty was?

So I think... You get the easy question. Well, Fabian's done a very good job of introducing that. Now, I think one thing to say to you're absolutely right that this is three principles. Rules always says that he's got two, but actually, given that the second divides into two halves, it's much easier to think of it as three. So, Rawls says there should be, as Fabian has said, the system of equal basic liberties. And that's really the kind of familiar liberal freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, political rights.

Wow. I mean, maybe not yet freedom from fear. Just the kind of the basic constitutional rights that we'd have in the democratic society. But to that, Rawls adds this really quite radical rider to that idea. So he says it's not enough simply, if you think about the various liberties that we have as democratic citizens, it's not enough that those are merely formal protections. We need what he calls the fair value of the political liberties. So what that means for rules is that for people with a similar motivation and similar ability to intervene in the political process, there should be roughly equal prospects of getting to influence political outcomes. a political system where the interests of the rich or privileged gets much more weight than the interests of others or where certain groups get to become members of Parliament and other groups don't, that's a society that fails to realise the fair value of the political liberties,

even if in formal terms everyone has got the same rights. Now, to move to the second principle then, when Rawls talks about this idea of fair equality of opportunity, as Fabian has said, that's also a surprisingly radical idea because it's not merely the idea that all jobs in the economy should be formally open to everyone, that there shouldn't be discrimination on grounds of race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever it might be. It's the much stronger thought that those who, with similar motivation and ability,

should have the same prospects of success in the economic realm, just as the earlier principle, wants to guarantee a fair chance at success in the political realm. So those two principles together really envisage a society where none of the social facts about people's backgrounds, their social class, their race, none of that would actually have a material influence on their chances of success, whether in the political domain or whether in the economic domain.

Did he work out in any way how this could be achievable? Or does it remain a sort of idealistic view? vision. So he does talk about some of what would be involved there. I suppose the two main things that come up there. On the one hand, he talks a little bit about the education system. So what he envisages there is it's an education system that tries to act to overturn background inequalities. So the thought would be that if you've got a society where some groups have advantages that others don't, you try and design an education system that actually targeted more religiously. resources at those coming into it from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds to try to equalise life

chances. Another big part of that would then be the tax system. So rules, because he's so interested in these two different kinds of fair equality of opportunity in the political domain and the economic domain, he's very worried about the intergenerational transmission of advantage, the way that wealth in one generation turns into unfair opportunities in the next generation. And he thinks that what we need to do is design a tax system that tries to fight against that. So he endorses high levels of inheritance taxation or capital transfer taxation. He thinks what we need is a fiscal structure that stops this kind of buildup of enormous wealth across generations that turns into unfair levels of advantage from generation to generation.

Thank you. Joe Wolf, what do we know about the difference principle? Well, one thing I think we know is that it is a highly original principle. Rawls was a very modest man, and if you look through a theory of justice, virtually every idea he has, he tries to find someone who had it before. So the book is just peppered. He just wanted to be showing off. He didn't want to show off. He was a very modest man. But he can't find anyone to pin the difference principle on as far as I can see.

There are one or two shadows, foreshadowings of it. And maybe one way of introducing it is that in the British Labour Party in the 1940s, there was a debate about equality. And some people wanted complete equality of income and wealth. But that lays you open to an easy critique that equality takes away incentives. And so if we divide everything equally, who's going to go to work? where is the juice that runs society going to come from? So these simple theories of equality were not really in favour.

But the Labour Party said inequality is justifiable as long as it works to everyone's advantage. So it has to be inequality for the sake of everyone. And what I think Rawls did was just... We're still on the difference principle. We're on the difference principle. Inequalities of income and wealth are to be to the advantage of everyone.

But Rawls, I think, ratchets up a notch and says it's not just that they've got to be to the advantage of everyone, they've got to make the worst off as well off as possible. So if we're trying to judge the justice of our society, we should look to the income and wealth, not of the worst off individual, because that could give us quite arbitrary results, but identify the worst off group,

whoever they may be, the lowest paid workers, unemployed people and if we could improve their position without making anyone else fall below where those people were then our society is unjust so justice requires us to make the worst off

group as well off as possible and as far as I know no society has ever achieved anything even close to that so it's not just about redistribution it's not just about high tax but arranging a form of society where the worst

can flourish as much as is possible. What do you think of it as an idea? Well, it's a lovely idea. I'm pushing it. What do you think beyond that? Is it achievable? Well, so I would love to live in that society. There are several ways in which it might not be achievable. One is whether it may, it's not economically achievable.

And I don't see any reason to think that it couldn't be achievable. It may be not through tax and transfer, maybe we'd have to completely reorganise society in his later work, Rawls use the idea of a property-owning democracy. So the idea that we disperse wealth. So it's not about redistribution. It's allowing everyone to live their own lives

to the best of their abilities. So I think economically, it's a feasible idea for as much as I know about it. Politically, it hasn't got a chance. And I think this goes back to the points Martin was making about the fair, value of political liberties. Because for as long as we've got a system which allows wealthy people to spend a lot of money getting elected, then we're not going to have policies that redistribute

wealth in the way that rules would want. Thank you. Fabian Pitech. There's this theory rather ambiguous called the original position. Now, can you tell us about that? Indeed. So the original position is one of the many long-lasting ideas that we find in the theory of justice. The theory of justice is really a treasure trove, I would say, of novel ideas, ideas that have caught on and influenced philosophy a great deal. The original position is one of them.

It's a thought experiment that helps us to illustrate the social contract approach to thinking about a just society. So as I explained earlier, and the social contract approach that roles takes is what is the set of principles that persons understood as free and equal can agree to. Now, what's this sort of agreement that we're talking about here? The problem is if we think about the agreement starting from everyone's actual position in society, they might be biased towards their privilege. That's one problem.

Or the better off might try to buy off the worst off to an overall agreement. that ends up benefiting the better off. So we can't really take our actual starting points because there's too much inequality baked in the actual society as we know it. So the original position is a thought experiment that helps us illustrate what would an agreement look like if it was reached from a starting point of equality. And the way in which rules thought experiment works, he thinks we can imagine ourselves in a position

of equality, if we imagine that we're thinking about the just society from behind a veil of ignorance. This veil of ignorance let through information about our society in general, how it works, how the economy works, what social dynamics are, but it doesn't let through any information about who we are in that society. Hold on. So we're all behind this veil. That's right. Everybody. Everybody. Or a set of representatives charged with finding justice. So how does the thing operate? Do we take off the veil? Can you just take us that basic step forward? Okay, good. So in the first instance, it helps us illustrate a position of equality. So if you don't know whether you're rich or poor, whether what your gender identity is,

what your race is, then Mawls hoped you'd be more inclined to think about what justice requires. in a way that's not biased by your current position and that would be helpful in reaching an overall agreement. However, of course, being behind this veil of ignorance is not helpful if you're trying to make these principles of justice that we just heard about more concrete. So the way in which rules thought about it is that there's a four-stage sequence.

The first stage is what would a just society even look like? That deliberation happens behind the veil of ignorance. But when we then try to make it more concrete, and work out principles that can be implemented in society. This veil is gradually lifted, and in the end at the stage of making laws, all information is available. But the thought is still the deliberation

about what should our laws be like. It's constrained by an idea of justice reached in a deliberative process where we're less influenced by our, ideally not influenced by our biases or thinking about our advantages given our actual positions in society. Thank you.

Martin, do you want to take that on? Yeah, so I suppose one way of thinking about how the veil of ignorance functions, it's a sort of radicalisation of the social contract tradition. It's thinking not what you and I would agree to, if you've got some threat advantage over me, if I'm sort of worried about what you can do to me, if we could strip away anything that makes an agreement unfair, so the fact that we have different starting points,

if we can abstract away from all of that, and then think, well, what would we agree to in general terms about the construction of our society? That's a way of capturing through an idea of sort of choice or bargaining under conditions of ignorance. It's a way of capturing an idea of impartiality. And so if you like, it's a kind of the original position behind the veil of ignorance. It's something that we could enter any of us at any time. It's a thought experiment. It's a way of trying to give some sort of, I mean, Joe was talking earlier about,

the ambition in rules for some sort of going beyond mere intuitionism, what the original position does is it gives you a kind of imaginative mechanism for turning what might be sort of incoate moral intuitions and sort of funneling them towards a definite set of, a definite procedure for getting a set of principles for how a society ought to be governed, and that in a way that takes away all the kind of the impurities of real world agreements that often reflect, as Fabian was saying, background inequalities. Joe?

There's one thing Royal says, I think, which helps bring the idea to life. And he says, imagine how you would design society if you knew that your enemy was going to assign you your place in it. And then, if I remember correctly, he says immediately after that,

but we shouldn't reason from false premises. So, you know, this is just the type of heuristic. But the idea is, if, it's rather sweet to think you have an enemy, but assume you have an enemy and that person was assigning you a place, you would want to make the worst place in society as good as possible.

And this is Rawls's idea. If you're looking at this in a completely impartial way, not knowing where you're going to end up in society, then you would design a just society, he thinks. I mean, to put it in its simplest terms, if you're dividing a birthday cake among some children, you don't want someone to be choosing the slice that they've cut. Right?

So if you get one child to cut the cake and the other child to choose which slice they get, that's a way of it. They're going to cut them as equally as possible. And really, it's just that very simple thought about how, if you don't get to choose which place you occupy in society, but you are choosing what the distribution of those places look like, you're going to be as fair as possible. Can I come back to you, Joe?

What's the distinction between justice and fairness? Well, I'm glad you asked that question. because the Rawls described his view as justice as fairness, and it has left people scratching their heads, and particularly translators, because in many languages, there actually isn't a distinction, as far as I know, between justice and fairness. But in the English language, there is a difference between these terms,

and one way of thinking about it is think about the infant school. So children, in their infant school, have a very strong sense of fairness. Now that's, or rather unfairness, saying that's unfair. So a four-year-old might say, that's unfair. But if the same four-year-old said, that's unjust,

we'd be a bit surprised. I think there is a parent, a high court judge or a philosopher. And so justice seems to have a type of depth to us and maybe formalism that fairness doesn't. So fairness is, for rules, largely a procedural matter. So as I understand it, I think by justice of fairness,

he simply means that the way that we get to a just outcome is through fair procedures. And the original position is a way, in the veil of ignorance, is a way of having a fair procedure. And if we get the procedure right, then we will get a just outcome at the other end. You're nodding away. Yes, so the idea of procedural justice

is an essential contribution of rules and it links back to what we said earlier about his focus being on the justice of the basic structure of society, that is the set of society's basic institutions, because we could also think about justice as the justice of person, right? What is a just person? Or we could think about justice as what do we all reach to each other individually. But both thought these were all questions that we can't really resolve at the social level, but we can make progress in thinking about justice if we focus on, if we adopt a procedural idea of justice where we get the basic institutions of society right, have them been governed by a small set of principles of justice,

and then whatever outcome results is just. There have been criticisms of the theory, the theory of the bail of ignorance, sorry. There are a few. We're going to start, perhaps just mention some. So one influential set of criticisms against the original position and the veil of ignorance came from a set of social philosophers which were known as the communitarians at the time.

So the issue they had with Rawls's thought experiment was that one feature of the original position as Rose described it is he thought of people behind the veil of ignorance as mutually disinterested. And he did that because he thought well one of the circumstances of justice

is that we're not all maximally alteration So it'd be misleading to think about a theory of justice that could actually be implemented if we imagine that we're all moral saints. We're all concerned about each other and we're all trying to do the best for each other. He thought the problem of justice is one that we're not like that. But we're not enemies either, right? So he thought assuming the people behind the veil of ignorance is mutually disinterest is a good starting point. But these social philosophers, these communitarians thought that this is a misleading

characterization of persons. As persons, we are inherently social beings. We are born through our connections with others and we live good lives through our connections with others. So mutual disinterestness which they thought boils down to us just being self-interested and atomistic beings is the wrong starting point for thinking about justice. I think that's a sort of misconstrual of roles. He did not think of us as atomistic, self-interested being, and this sort of process of rational justification

he was interested in was not one where we each tried to satisfy our self-interest. It was very much one that's driven by our sense of justice. Jerry, you don't think of me. I wanted to mention a more recent criticism of the veil of ignorance, which is that it has, in a way, too much ignorance. We talked before about the political, events going on at the time Rawls was writing, and one of them is a civil rights movement.

And recently Rawls has come under a lot of criticism for not really having a discussion of racial justice in the United States. And I suppose as a undergraduate, as a graduate student, in this country, I never noticed this. But now, when it's brought to your attention, it's rather staggering that he writes as if one of the greatest transformations in his society hadn't taken place. And one way in which this criticism has been made in recent years was from the Jamaican philosopher who worked in North America, Charles Mills. And one way of putting it is that Mills thinks we need to know some facts about history in order to come up with the right theory of justice. And one way of trying to explain this,

is say suppose American society tomorrow implemented rules as principles of justice. Would it be a just society? And Mill says, well, no, it wouldn't. Because if all we're doing is making the worst off as well off as possible and racial minorities are the worst off, they will still be the worst off after the transformation. That is, the order won't be changed.

It will just be the absolute position of the people at the bottom. And so Mills thinks that it's necessary to have more knowledge in the original position so that steps can be taken to redress historical injustice. Martin Nenna Nuba.

One rejoinder to the interesting challenge from Mills comes from an African American philosopher Tommy Shelby, the same name as the character in Pecky Blinders, but a different person. And Shelby says, well look, bear in mind,

So Rules talks about the lexical priority of his principles. So first of all, equal basic liberties, then fair equality of opportunity, then the difference principle. Now, think of the work that would be done by fair equality of opportunity or fair value of the political liberties. That says try to get rid of whatever the influence of whatever background conditions it might be that's stopping people from having a fair set of opportunities within that society. Now, Rules there talks about people having the same opportunities, regardless of their social class of origin, but class there is a placeholder, really, for whatever it is in that society that's structuring people's opportunities.

So a society that was marked by racial injustice, as actually existing societies are, that look to implement Rawls's principles, would first of all look to address those existing injustices. And that's all mandated there in the theory. The reason that Rules doesn't want to build that in to the version of the theory in the book, one might, think is because this is a work of philosophy that's aspiring to a certain sort of generality. But as soon as one would then think about its application, then, of course, the relevant historical and sociological facts would come in. So I think that it's a really interesting issue, but there's certainly two different kinds of views that one might have. You wanted to make a comment. Yes. Well, there's a related set of criticisms that rules as

idea of the veil of ignorance faced from feminist philosophers. And so while I agree with Martin that class is a placeholder. It is feminist philosophers who have, like some philosophers of race, argued that the veil of ignorance obscures too much. It shields us from important experiences of injustice. For example, injustice in the family. Susan Moeller-Okin, for example, argued that one problem with the theory of justice, that it's completely unclear how justice in the family is supposed to figure, and that should be a concern for us, given that one source of injustice comes within the family, with very unequal divisions of labour, women doing the share of the maximum share of unpaid labour, caring for children, and so on. Roles then responded

to that, to some extent, along similar lines, that when it comes to problems of gender justice, for example, as they might arise in patterns of family life, they could be addressed by the theory of justice and the sort of thinking of the veil of ignorance could be helpful here because the thought is if you don't know whether you're going to end up as your children's father or mother, what would you think a just society requires? But he also saw there are limits.

Roles thought, for example, that the principles of justice are not designed to apply to family life itself, only to the background conditions in which people might then form their families and conduct their family lives. Some feminist philosophers thought that's not good enough. So I think these issues are still, I think, today, unresolved whether it comes to race or gender, the theory of justice struggles.

Thank you very. We're coming near the end now, Martin. He's been criticised heavily and constantly, and yet he survives, more than survived, he's read the most read by your students and why does he continue in a position of such importance when he attracts so much criticism? That's a great question.

I think it's because the project is so ambitious and it's so well-executive. The level of ambition is to give, you know, a general account of what it would be for human beings considered as free and equal individuals to live together under terms that they could all accept. So it's an absolutely central foundational question. and it's one that he then approaches with enormous theoretical firepower sophistication and moral seriousness.

And he gives you both a method for thinking about this problem and he gives you an account of the content of an answer, his two or three principles. Now, what that does really is to set up a huge sort of target for people thinking about those issues. So you might be convinced by rules, in which case you'd have one sort of reaction, or there might be various things in that project that you disagree with. But where you find yourself then articulating that disagreement with reference to Rules' attempts to do this. So I think it's unsurprising, given the sort of magnitude of the achievement, this really is someone who's managed to write something that will be a classic in political philosophy that's read for hundreds of years. I would confidently bear. And it creates then something to push against, something to argue with,

and even if you disagree with it, engaging with it, I think helps to make your thinking about matters of justice more richer and fuller. So I would agree with all of that. Just one additional comment. So Martin said there are two parts, the method and the theory. I was suggested as a third,

which is an argument as well, so that Rawls says, that the way to think about justice is in this new form of social contract. If you do that, you will get my theory. So that is the argument. And then you can separately assess a theory. So there are people who disagree with the method.

The people who agree with a method, but say you would get a different theory. And there are people who don't care about the method or the argument and say, let's just look at the theory. So people with completely different philosophical temperaments that are drawn to the same thing. and there's been nothing since anything like it. So it has a level of ambition

and there was nothing before it since probably John Stuart Mill or Henry Sidgewick. So we go for decades without a work of that achievement we might be waiting another 50 years, 100 years for the next one. So it really is a magnificent piece

and it is characteristic of works of philosophy that many more people disagree with them than agree with them. Well, I couldn't think of a better ending. Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you very much to Fabian and Peter, to you Joe Wolf and Martin O'Neill, and our studio engineer Michael Millam. Next week, the chance discovery that electrical resistance can disappear at very low temperatures and why this matters. Superconductivity. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So can I start by asking you, how does he say we assess moral claim? Here we have another one of rules as main innovations really, and that's the idea of reflective equilibrium. It's a hugely influential idea, but it's obviously not a household name. So even when I introduce the idea of reflective equilibrium to my students, it's usually blank faces at first. So what is this? Why is reflective equilibrium important for roles? Well, it's a method of justification.

It's a method for assessing who has a concept. claim when it comes to thinking about the principles of a just society. Philosophers often think about justification in ways connected to truth and knowledge. So, for example, when we ask whether you should believe something, we might suggest that, well, you're justified in believing this thing as long as it's true or you have enough evidence that it's true or something along the time. Also, that's not the right way of thinking about justification in the moral domain. So when it comes to thinking about moral claims. He thought that truth can divide us. He was worried about people's religious commitments. If we asked them to think about justice from within their, say, religious

understandings of moral claims, we end up fighting, we end up fighting about moral truth, we end up fighting about religious truth. And that goes back to what Martin was saying earlier about his experiences of society. So he devised a different method, one that, again, sort of captures this social contract idea that what justifies a set of principles of justice is an agreement between persons understood as equals. So what's the connection between agreement and justification? That's the key question. And Roles thought that we can think about justification, not in relation to a search for truth, but instead of achieving coherence between our moral ideas at different levels of generality. So we might think that, to use an example,

current society, the current levels of poverty are morally wrong. That would be a particular moral judgment. And we might feel quite strongly about that. That might be something we don't easily want to give up. At a more general level, we might think a society should offer equal opportunities, or we might think that a society should be meritocratic. They're sort of mid-level principles. And then there's a further level of abstractions and general theories. Rowe thought that the right way of thinking about what is this right set of principles, what moral claims should count is by trying to reach coherence across these judgments that we think are the right ones at different levels of generality. In addition, he thought, reflective equilibrium isn't just something we can

achieve individually by going back and forth without anything being a given, trying to create a consistent moral view. We can't just do that individually. We also do this interpersonally. So, the way he labelled this is a full reflective equilibrium. That's a reflective equilibrium reached by a set of people. So if we agree across people that a certain set of principles justice is the right one, that's a full reflective equilibrium. That defines which moral claims we should honour in society. I suppose one thing it might be useful to mention is the degree to which rules is or isn't a critic of capital. And I think this is something that's perhaps come to be better understood more recently, in part because Rul's view over the course of his life actually seem to harden somewhat and become a bit more disappointed about the direction of travel of the world he was in.

So we talked at the outset about the context in the 1960s and 70s of a society that in some ways was making strides towards greater equality. And where one might have seen Roles's theory as just a call for an acceleration. of tendencies that were already there. But I think in the world that we've seen in the last 40 years, in the neoliberal period, if you like, we've moved further and further away from something like a just society by Rules' lights. And I think in response to that, Rules' own view became more explicitly critical of capitalism.

So as Joe mentioned earlier, he came to emphasise more the fact that familiar kinds of redistributive capitalist welfare states, even if they do quite a good job of looking after the lease well off, aren't really getting as close enough to a just society. So he talked on the one hand about what he called a property-owning democracy, which would be a kind of market economy with a very broad distribution of holdings of wealth and capital. Or on the other hand, he also talked about the idea of a liberal socialist regime, which would be more of an economy with more public and collective ownership, but with the same kind of protections of individual liberties that he thought were needed for a just society. So when rules actually turned towards thinking about institutions

and thinking about really existing sets of economic and political regimes, he interestingly was very critical both of sort of Soviet-style command economies, but also of his own country, of the US as a kind of market society that simply wasn't doing enough to move towards the realization of his principles and actually given various of its structural features maybe couldn't do enough to move towards a just society. So I think while Rawls's ubiquitousness

in academic discussions has maybe made him like quite a familiar intellectual figure, I think it would be a mistake to think of him as a theorist of the status quo. He's actually someone with quite a radical critique of the kind of societies we're in, and he's someone who's really pointing towards a very different kind of economic settlement and a much more equal kind of society than the ones that we're in at the moment. Joe? Joe, Joe, I agree with what has been said.

But there's another question, of course, about Rawls' is influence on policy outside the academy and whether Rawlsian ideas have been taken up. and of course in some ways we've gone in the other direction so when Rawls was writing in marginal tax rates in the UK and the US at some points were in their 90s 90%, it's hard to reconstruct that particularly for the US but it was true after the war marginal tax rates were very high they've come down and down and down so in some ways it looks like

the legacy is the opposite of what one would have hoped if one was Rawls but on the other hand I think there are ways in which we can see a type of rulesian influence in public policy to some extent because many many people have read the theory of justice and have gone into public life

and gone into the civil service or similar roles around the world and I think there's a shift whether it's caused by rules or just more generally moving away from a type of utilitarian maximisation approach, the idea that what we should do is create the greatest benefit, but rather think about

how policies affect the worst off. So in this country, political parties right and left want to pay attention, special attention to the people who are the least advantaged in society. So I see this as a slight shift in a Rawlsian direction. I mean, no one is saying we should make the worst off as well off as possible, but every party wants to improve the position of the worst off, even if it's not cost-effective in utilitarian terms. So I think we have seen a small but significant movement there. Well, I suppose one idea that hasn't come up yet, but it was absolutely essential in Rawls's thinking, was the idea of democracy. We talked about the social contract tradition and the idea of natural rights, but Rawls actually in his thinking,

especially also as his thinking developed later on, thought that all we need is a commitment to democracy because of key feature of democracy is that everyone is seen as an equal. So that's all we need. We don't need more baggage here, theoretical baggage in terms of who we are as persons. It's enough that we think of our society as committed to democracy and to the idea of equality that comes with that. Now, of course, that raises a difficult question today. Are we still equally committed to democracy? And if not, how does that affect the chances of the sort of project that rules pursuit. So,

Awe is committed to democracy as rules was. Well, I think, you know, there's a lot of evidence now, particularly from the United States, that younger people are not so concerned about democracy. And given the qualities of the democracies they've been experiencing,

you can see why disillusion may come in. I mean, the rules in response would be to try to improve democracy rather than to move on. But democracy is very important for rules, but it does give a dialogue there was a type of criticism we haven't talked about that Rawls is setting out his principles of

justice for the just society. So that raises a question about what would democracy be doing if Rawls has already given us to the answers. So Rawls has told us what a just society is. So what are we voting about? Now is democracy just about the most efficient way of achieving Rawls's goals? Well if so, then that does seem rather boring. So there was a line of criticism probably from the 1970s and 80s, I think. Benjamin Barber wrote a book called The Conquest of Democracy. I think it was quite interesting to say that the goal of the major political philosophers is more or less to solve problems once and for all, whereas there's a more democratic tradition that says the world is changing,

issues are changing, nothing is a final answer to anything, and so we constantly need to refresh politics. So I think we see in some interpretations of rules, both of those ideas, yes, you have a theory and you have democracy and I don't think they sit brilliantly well together. I suppose an opposing view to Joe's worry there might be that actually

the importance of democracies, they're right at the centre of the whole Rulseon project. So it's a way of thinking about how do you have a set of institutions for free and equal people who are going to live together on terms that they can all agree to. Now, it's going to be absolutely foundational

to that that's going to be a democratic society where everyone gets to participate in the development of that society over time and to think together about how it's going to evolve. And so the kind of democratic protections that are built into the first principle are very sort of central to what rules is doing. And it's really sort of foundational to his project. And I think, I mean, in response to Joe's worry and the issue that the Euro's Melvin about, you know, are we at a point where there's a sort of decline of confidence in democracy. There's a very interesting discussion of that by the American philosopher Samuel Schaepler from New York University, where he has a paper where he talks about

the Rawlsian diagnosis of Donald Trump. And the thought there is, well, if liberal democracy looks like it's in trouble, is that in some way a kind of disproof of our best theories of what a just liberal society might look like? And Schaeffler says, well, No, it's really the opposite. What Rules gives you is an account of what a society in its main institutions, I mean Fabian was emphasising the idea of the basic structure, the main institutions of your society, what do they owe to the members of that society?

Well, what they owe, says Rules, is something quite close to his principles. And that embodies the sort of attitude of reciprocity. You look at your fellow citizens, you look at the institutions you live under. And you think, yeah, I'm being treated here, in a kind of reciprocal way, and I can affirm my allegiance to these institutions because they're realizing something really valuable among me and my fellow citizens. Now, when those institutions have broken down to the point where there's runaway levels of inequality, where there's terrible inequalities in regard to who has political influence and who doesn't, when you're

so far away from the main commitments of the theory, that idea that you're actually living with others under terms of reciprocity is gone. And it's unsurprising then in a way that that would lead to a certain kind of disillusion. So I think there's a kind of democratic ambition in rules for what's valuable about having institutions that embody that idea of people as free and equal living under fair and reciprocal terms. And really a lot of the pathologies of our current societies are ones that really start to happen when you move so far away from that. that kind of ideal of justice. Yeah, just do add to the points that Joe and Martin were making

that indeed I also think that the conundrum that Joe raised about how is this idea that justice is the result of an agreement between people, on the one hand, while based on democracy, really compatible with democracy, because after all, democracy is there to resolve some of our problems, right? And I would say, yes, the solution here is also to think about the principles of justice as applying to the basic structure, of society, but that still leaves quite a lot for democracy to decide and indeed leaves us in need of a vibrant democratic society to tackle these problems for all sorts of

reasons. So I do think that is the right answer. The level that Rawls thinks of the principles of justice applying to is as if we're about to have a constitutional consensus. So these are principles that are even deeper than the constitution. So once we've got the principles, So actually there's a lot of work to work out what our day-to-day life would be like. Do you want to come in? So one thing that hasn't come up yet, in terms of his legacy, we were just talking about how hugely influential Rawls' theory of justice was within political philosophy and how, to some extent, roles became a victim of his own success, right?

Because he's so successful, people pushed back against it. But there's a further thing. Roles was also incredibly influential through his brilliant students. and this influence wasn't just in political philosophy, even though some of his brilliant students were in political philosophy, but others were in more philosophy. And one thing that's really remarkable about roles as brilliant students that so many of them were women.

That is remarkable because philosophy is one of those fields still now where there aren't a lot of women, is still a field quite dominated by men, but roles for however he did it, managed to have, exceptionally successful students who were women. So in political philosophy, philosophers who went on to work sort of broadly in the roles in tradition, but pursuing agendas very much of their own were Elizabeth Anderson, who worked on equality,

Michel Moody Adams, who worked on political movements, social justice, including on race. And then Jean Hampton, who worked on the social contract tradition, unfortunately she died quite early. But then in moral philosophy, quite a large number of roles as a student developed his sort of Kantian ideas. I mentioned Kant earlier as one of his influences. And philosophers like Christine Korskart, Barbara Herman, and Honora Anil, who was a philosopher at Cambridge, she's still a philosopher, but is no longer active at Cambridge. They all went on to develop the Kantian aspects of Roleses' work, again put forward their own moral theory. and that had a really

sort of invigorating effect on moral philosophy and on canton ethics in particular. You spoke to rules. What happened then, Fabian? Yes. Well, I had the fortune of being supervised by him in my doctoral work when I was a visiting student at Harvard. I was in

94, 95, and he was still active then. And so one of the conversations we had concerned the impact his theory of justice had on American society. And it It was interesting to see how disappointed he was. That relates back to things both Joe and Martin said earlier.

Not disappointed in a sort of egomaniac sense. Why did people not take my theory of justice more seriously? But rather, he really dedicated his life to try and come up with the theory of justice that could be implemented. And he thought that precisely because the initial commitments are so minimal, all you need is be committed to a democracy and look what follows, right? an attractive set of principles of justice and yet society

if anything had moved further away from the tendency towards equality that we saw after the Second World War when Wall started thinking about these issues so that was a major disappointment to him which was yeah sad did you make him think about amending his theory

I think it was more hoping that society would somehow mend here's a producer to say this all straight would anyone like tea or coffee Oh, I'm good. I'm good, thank you. Two teas, Melvin.

Three teas. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. My name is Jonathan Meyerson, and two years ago we produced Nuremberg, a dramatized reconstruction of the trial of the major Nazi war criminals. Their crimes were indisputable, but one mystery remained. How did this group of unremarkable men come to rule all of Germany? Our new podcast, Nazis, The Road to Power, unravels this improbable story in 16 episodes, starring Tom Mothersdale, Derek Jacoby, Alexander Vlahos, Toby Stevens and Laura Donnelly. It remains a lesson for us all.

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