Instructions for the essay :
Books and articles to do the essay :Rawls, Fanon, Sokoloff, Sokoloff 2
Fanon, Rawls and Sokoloff: Drawing on the work of Fanon, Rawls and Sokoloff, please write an argumentative essay that answers the following question. In your view, what are the components of the ideal democratic citizen? Please provide reasons to back up your claim. Please be sure to refute counterarguments. The names of these authors should not appear in your thesis statement. Be sure to criticize the authors (e.g., say why they are wrong about something and provide reasons to back up what you say). For example, Sokoloff is easy to criticize. He defends hatred and rage. Why might this be the wrong approach?
Include as an appendix to this essay a self-evaluation statement where you state what grade you believe you deserve on this paper and why. Please address the following issues: Strengths of your paper; weaknesses of your paper; what you would like help with; why you were able to do the positive things you did; creativity and independent thought; argument; how you were able to refute counterarguments; knowledge of reading material; grade.
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical Author(s): John Rawls Source: Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Summer, 1985), pp. 223-251 Published by: Wiley Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265349 Accessed: 11-05-2020 15:09 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy & Public Affairs This content downloaded from 104.138.248.119 on Mon, 11 May 2020 15:09:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JOHN RAWLS Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical In this discussion I shall make some general remarks about how I now understand the conception of justice that I have called "justice as fair- ness" (presented in my book A Theory of Justice)., I do this because it may seem that this conception depends on philosophical claims I should like to avoid, for example, claims to universal truth, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons. My aim is to explain why it does not. I shall first discuss what I regard as the task of political philosophy at the present time and then briefly survey how the basic intuitive ideas drawn upon in justice as fairness are combined into a political conception of justice for a constitutional democracy. Doing this will bring out how and why this conception of justice avoids certain philosophical and meta- physical claims. Briefly, the idea is that in a constitutional democracy the public conception of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines. Thus, to formulate such a conception, we apply the principle of toleration to philosophy itself: the public conception of justice is to be political, not metaphysical. Hence the title. I want to put aside the question whether the text of A Theory of Justice supports different readings than the one I sketch here. Certainly on a Beginning in November of I983, different versions of this paper were presented at New York University, the Yale Law School Legal Theory Workshop, the University of Illinois, and the University of California at Davis. I am grateful to many people for clarifying numerous points and for raising instructive difficulties; the paper is much changed as a result. In particular, I am indebted to Arnold Davidson, B. J. Diggs, Catherine Elgin, Owen Fiss, Stephen Holmes, Norbert Hornstein, Thomas Nagel, George Priest, and David Sachs; and especially to Burton Dreben who has been of very great help throughout. Indebtedness to others on particular points is indicated in the footnotes. i. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, I97I. This content downloaded from 104.138.248.119 on Mon, 11 May 2020 15:09:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 224 Philosophy & Public Affairs number of points I have changed my views, and there are no doubt others on which my views have changed in ways that I am unaware of.2 J recognize further that certain faults of exposition as well as obscure and ambiguous passages in A Theory ofJustice invite misunderstanding; but I think these matters need not concern us and I shan't pursue them beyond a few footnote indications. For our purposes here, it suffices first, to show how a conception of justice with the structure and content of justice as fairness can be understood as political and not metaphysical, and second, to explain why we should look for such a conception of justice in a democratic society. I One thing I failed to say in A Theory of Justice, or failed to stress suffi- ciently, is that justice as fairness is intended as a political conception of justice. While a political conception of justice is, of course, a moral con- ception, it is a moral conception worked out for a specific kind of subject, namely, for political, social, and economic institutions. In particular, jus- tice as fairness is framed to apply to what I have called the "basic struc- ture" of a modern constitutional democracy.3 (I shall use "constitutional 2. A number of these changes, or shifts of emphasis, are evident in three lectures entitled "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Journal of Philosophy 77 (September I980). For example, the account of what I have called "primary goods" is revised so that it clearly depends on a particular conception of persons and their higher-order interests; hence this account is not a purely psychological, sociological, or historical thesis. See pp. 526f. There is also throughout those lectures a more explicit emphasis on the role of a conception of the person as well as on the idea that the justification of a conception of justice is a practical social task rather than an epistemological or metaphysical problem. See pp. 5I8f. And in this connection the idea of "Kantian constructivism" is introduced, especially in the third lecture. It must be noted, however, that this idea is not proposed as Kant's idea: the adjective "Kantian" indicates analogy not identity, that is, resemblance in enough fundamental re- spects so that the adjective is appropriate. These fundamental respects are certain structural features of justice as fairness and elements of its content, such as the distinction between what may be called the Reasonable and the Rational, the priority of right, and the role of the conception of the persons as free and equal, and capable of autonomy, and so on. Resemblances of structural features and content are not to be mistaken for resemblances with Kant's views on questions of epistemology and metaphysics. Finally, I should remark that the title of those lectures, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," was misleading; since the conception of justice discussed is a political conception, a better title would have been "Kantian Constructivism in Political Philosophy." Whether constructivism is reason- able for moral philosophy is a separate and more general question. 3. Theory, Sec. 2, and see the index; see also "The Basic Structure as Subject," in Values and Morals, eds. Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim (Dordrecht: Reidel, I978), pp. 47-7I. This content downloaded from 104.138.248.119 on Mon, 11 May 2020 15:09:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 225 Justice as Fairness democracy" and "democratic regime," and similar phrases interchange- ably.) By this structure I mean such a society's main political, social, and economic institutions, and how they fit together into one unified system of social cooperation. Whether justice as fairness can be extended to a general political conception for different kinds of societies existing under different historical and social conditions, or whether it can be extended to a general moral conception, or a significant part thereof, are altogether separate questions. I avoid prejudging these larger questions one way or the other. It should also be stressed that justice as fairness is not intended as the application of a general moral conception to the basic structure of society, as if this structure were simply another case to which that general moral conception is applied.4 In this respect justice as fairness differs from traditional moral doctrines, for these are widely regarded as such general conceptions. Utilitarianism is a familiar example, since the principle of utility, however it is formulated, is usually said to hold for all kinds of subjects ranging from the actions of individuals to the law of nations. The essential point is this: as a practical political matter no general moral conception can provide a publicly recognized basis for a conception of justice in a modern democratic state. The social and historical conditions of such a state have their origins in the Wars of Religion following the Reformation and the subsequent development of the principle of toler- ation, and in the growth of constitutional government and the institutions of large industrial market economies. These conditions profoundly affect the requirements of a workable conception of political justice: such a conception must allow for a diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting, and indeed incommensurable, conceptions of the good af- firmed by the members of existing democratic societies. Finally, to conclude these introductory remarks, since justice as fair- ness is intended as a political conception of justice for a democratic society, it tries to draw solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretation. Justice as fairness is a political conception in part because it starts from within a certain political tradi- tion. We hope that this political conception of justice may at least be supported by what we may call an "overlapping consensus," that is, by a consensus that includes all the opposing philosophical and religious 4. See "Basic Structure as Subject," ibid., pp. 48-50. This content downloaded from 104.138.248.119 on Mon, 11 May 2020 15:09:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 226 Philosophy & Public Affairs doctrines likely to persist and to gain adherents in a more or less just constitutional democratic society.5 II There are, of course, many ways in which political philosophy may be understood, and writers at different times, faced with different political and social circumstances, understand their work differently. Justice as fairness I would now understand as a reasonably systematic and prac- ticable conception of justice for a constitutional democracy, a conception that offers an alternative to the dominant utilitarianism of our tradition of political thought. Its first task is to provide a more secure and acceptable basis for constitutional principles and basic rights and liberties than util- itarianism seems to allow.6 The need for such a political conception arises in the following way. There are periods, sometimes long periods, in the history of any society during which certain fundamental questions give rise to sharp and di- visive political controversy, and it seems difficult