For a long time there has been a judicial and political effort in the USA to overturn the measures taken in the past that favored the presence of black students and in general people from minorities in the Universities. Essentially, these are “affirmative action” policies to favor students who came from less privileged social classes and minorities. These practices were part of a whole network of political and legal choices that began with the first measures to reverse the effects of racial discrimination in the 1960s. At the same time, however, they were also connected to a whole debate in the field of moral philosophy in the US but and the wider English-speaking world, a debate that was ultimately about what liberalism means and what policies it should end up with.
A central figure in this debate was the philosopher John Rawls. And this is because Rawls not only tried to reconstruct a Kantian argument for justice, compatible with the particular way of philosophers we used to describe as the analytic tradition, but also to give a strongly egalitarian dimension to the political program of a modern liberalism, a dimension that coincided with the great debates about the welfare state and the various variants of social democracy. This debate is reconstructed by Katrina Forrester in her book “In the shadow of justice. Post-war liberalism and the reconstruction of political philosophy”.
The two great debates on civil disobedience and war
Forrester does not stick to presenting the development of Rawls’ positions, but also tries to see the wider political and philosophical debate within which they were formed. It is not limited to the way Rawls formulated his basic principles of justice as exact justice, but also stands in two major debates that have been particularly influential in shaping modern liberalism.
The first debate was about civil disobedience, a debate that focused precisely on the relationship between morality and political action, marking the turn of philosophical debate towards politics. The second was about the ethics of the war, as it is the era of great controversies and movements about the Vietnam War and the need to support its moral condemnation, which also meant a conflict with the philosophical traditions that could be used as a justification for the war , mainly utilitarianism and consequentialism, a debate that grappled with all the open questions of how moral responsibility in relation to war can be determined.
Inequality and redistribution
For Forrester the new liberal egalitarianism best encapsulated in Rawls’s 1971 “Theory of Justice” focused on principles of justice that found application in institutions, focused on distribution, and “adopted a cooperative view of society as a community of principles.” In addition, the way Rawls formulated the principle of difference, constituted a particularly strong position in favor of the possibility and necessity of a political redistribution, compatible with the claims of the powerful social movements of that period. It also highlights how these debates, especially in the 1970s, extended to questions of economic justice at the global level as well. It is no coincidence that in these discussions on the redefinition of justice, the current that was to become known as “analytical Marxism” would also play a role.
Forrester does not neglect to stand at the limits of this philosophical effort. Limits that concerned both the terms of construction of these arguments, and the way that as early as the 1970s there was a systematic attempt at a philosophical and political counterattack to this egalitarian version of liberalism. The book records the way in which criticisms were made against the claims of objectivity, neutrality and universality of this version of liberalism, the emergence of a form of communitarianism that tried to respond to the individualism of classical liberalism, but also the emergence of an aggressive version of neoliberalism that was hostile to every concept of redistribution, while the variants of the “Third Way” in social democracy and the broader center-left, considered that it no longer made much sense to include the limitation of social inequality in the political priorities. However, this does not invalidate the need, especially in times when the world is becoming more unequal, to return to philosophical theories that, even if they were the products of specific circumstances, do not cease to have the interest that they faced inequality as a problem and not as inescapable and legitimate. physical condition”.
Rawls and capitalism
Rawls insisted that his conception of justice as exact justice was compatible neither with laissez-faire capitalism nor with state socialism, but with either a republic of individual owners or democratic socialism. Although Rawls accepted the starting points of liberalism (from individual rights and liberties to the importance of private property), he nevertheless insisted on being opposed to most variants of modern capitalism.
