Modern Political Thought: John Rawls and his Critics

Paper:

The Social Contract and its contentious role for
Rawls’s “Theory of Justice”

By Jan Kercher 
(International)

Introduction  1

The Rawlsian Social Contract  1

Rawls’s theory - Not a genuinely contract theory at all?  2

The role of Rawls’s contract – crucial or dispensable?  5

Conclusion  7

Bibliography  9

Introduction

In “A Theory of Justice” (Rawls, 1971), John Rawls tries to develop a conception of justice that is based on a social contract. His approach, doubtlessly, led to a revival of the contract theory in modern political theory. However, his peculiar conception of a hypothetical contract has also evoked a wave of severe criticism. Some of his critics settle for condemning special features of Rawls’s contractual concept, while others maintain that Rawls’s theory is, in effect, no real contract theory. In this paper, I will therefore focus on two research questions: Is Rawls’s theory a genuine contract theory at all? If yes, does the contract play a crucial role in this theory or is there a preferable alternative available to Rawls?

The Rawlsian Social Contract

I first want to briefly sketch the most important features of Rawls’s social contract. Far from giving a complete explanation of this highly complex conception, I will only focus on those features that are relevant for this paper.

Rawls’s main idea is that the principles of justice are the object of an original agreement: “Thus, we are to imagine that those who engage in social co-operation choose together, in one joint act, the principles which are to assign basic rights and duties and to determine the division of social benefits” (Rawls, 1971, p. 11). However, this original agreement is not an actual historical contract, but only a hypothetical one (p. 12). The justification of the principles arising from the contract therefore depends on the notion that they would have been agreed to under the given theoretical and hypothetical conditions. In other words, the contract can be called “as-iffed” (Hall, 1957, p. 663). Rawls is convinced that true principles of justice can only be developed under fair conditions. This is why his theory is called “justice as fairness” (Rawls, 1971, p. 3). To reach this aim, i.e. to create fair conditions as a basis for the original agreement, Rawls constructs an “original position” of equality. Though the original position “corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of social contracts” (Rawls, 1971, p. 12) it is quite different in its composition. The desired equality of its inhabitants is reached through a “kind of complicated amnesia” (Sandel, 1998, p. 105) called the “veil of ignorance” (Rawls, 1971, p. 12). For our purposes, it is only important to know that this veil of ignorance leads to the fact that “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like” (Rawls, 1971, p. 12). Under the veil of ignorance, the parties of the original position are now facing a joint task: to agree on a contract that permanently fixes certain principles of justice which will be the basis for society once the veil of ignorance fades away. This procedure, in the end, leads to the two famous Rawlsian principles of justice (Rawls, 1971, pp. 11ff). For this paper, we can dispense with the actual content of these principles. More importantly, for our purposes, is to be sure about the peculiarity of Rawls’s contractual procedure. This procedure, namely, is hypothetical in a double sense: “It imagines an event that never really happened, involving the sorts of beings who never really existed” (Sandel, 1998, p. 105).

Rawls’s theory - Not a genuinely contract theory at all?

This first and most fundamental criticism maintains that Rawls, despite claiming so, does not produce a real social contract theory. This accusation is mainly related to three important features of Rawls’s theory: that his contract is purely hypothetical, that there is no state of nature in the theory, and that the contractors operate behind a veil of ignorance.

For Ronald Dworkin, a “hypothetical contract is not simply a pale form of an actual contract; it is not a contract at all” (Dworkin, 1975, p. 18). As one can see, this criticism not only relates to Rawls’s theory: “it applies to the use of any hypothetical decision model in ethics” (Freeman, 1990, p. 135). The argument can be illustrated by the example of a poker game, in the middle of which the two players find out that the deck is one card short. According to Dworkin, it is very unlikely that the losing player can convince the winning player to throw the hand in, even if he can convince the latter that both of them would have agreed to such a rule had the possibility of the deck being short been raised before the game. The same logic applies to those well-off in a society: Why should they accept rules that – based on a hypothetical contract – restrict their liberty by linking it to the benefit of the worst-off?

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