Conversing with the Tradition: John Rawls and the History of EthicsAuthor(s): by Martha C. NussbaumReviewed work(s):Source: Ethics, Vol. 109, No. 2 (January 1999), pp. 424-430Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/233901 .Accessed: 29/09/2012 23:01

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Conversing with the Tradition:John Rawls and the History of Ethics*

Martha C. Nussbaum

John Rawls is the most distinguished political philosopher of our cen-tury. Furthermore, his work and teaching are responsible for much of theother fine work currently being done in this subject: for he revitalized thefield and renewed its confidence, after positivism, challenging its valueas practiced, had reduced it to a narrow type of linguistic and concep-tual analysis. Those who did not study with Rawls might therefore expecta volume of essays in his honor to consist of contemporary theorizingabout political questions. Many will be surprised to discover that his stu-dents have presented him, instead, with a volume of essays on the majorfigures of the historical tradition in moral and political theory: Aristotle,Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, and, above all, Immanuel Kant.

The choice, however, is far from surprising. Rawls always viewed hiswork not only as the articulation of a particular theoretical view, but alsoas an attempt to reclaim the space within which the great thinkers of thetradition worked. Those thinkers were in considerable disrepute at thetime when Rawls began to teach. Positivism suggested that they had madefundamental errors about what philosophy could achieve; the fashion forlinguistic analysis suggested that they were unsophisticated and out ofdate; the trend toward highly formal work made them look cheaply prac-tical, too close to the earth. This bad state of things was compounded bythe way historical texts were typically approached by those who did ap-proach them: for either they were taught only to be dismissed as hope-lessly behind the times, or else uncritical veneration and deference madethem look like scripture rather than like philosophy. (This was conspicu-ously not the case in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, where theRawlsian approach found valuable allies.)1

Rawls’s teaching and writing did much to change this unfortunate

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Ethics 109 ( January 1999): 424 – 430q 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/99/0902-0005$02.00

* A review of Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard, eds.,Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997). Parenthetical references in the text are to this work.

1. It was, however, true of an earlier generation in the study of the Greeks: GilbertRyle reports that his tutors treated Plato’s Republic ‘‘like the Bible,’’ and that he, in conse-quence, judged that ‘‘most of it seemed, philosophically, no better’’: see ‘‘Autobiographi-cal,’’ in Ryle, ed. O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1970),

situation. His writing has revivified not only the social contract tradi-tion and the tradition of Kantian ethics, but also the Aristotelian searchfor the well-lived life, Hume’s and Rousseau’s theories of moral develop-ment, and Henry Sidgwick’s account of method in ethics. And his teach-ing contributed even more profoundly to the revival of interest in thehistory of ethics. Given Rawls’s great personal modesty and his love forthe great works of the tradition, he almost always taught from historicaltexts. As the editors write, ‘‘What was so influential about Rawls’s workwas not only the confidence it inspired in the fruitfulness of the methodsof philosophy and the potential practical value of its results. It was also arenewed confidence in the subject’s tradition, in its classics’’ (p. 2). Rawlsoffered two standard courses, one called Moral Philosophy and the othercalled Political Philosophy. He varied the readings from year to year, butthe philosophers represented in this collection (along with others suchas Hegel and Mill) made up the staples of the curriculum.

Rawls’s teaching exemplified an approach to texts that is respectfulwithout being deferential: students were to treat the works as examplesof especially fine and complex attempts on the great questions of moraltheory, but they were to grapple with them critically, as attempts to solvephilosophical problems. They were urged to treat the views as systemsor theories, not just collections of observations on particular topics, andto ‘‘make the best of’’ a thinker’s position, bringing out ‘‘the deep in-sights and vision that were moving their authors,’’ what we might calltheir ‘‘philosophical core’’ (p. 3); in that way, Rawls urged, they wouldlearn the most from the texts. Approaching the texts systematically putup a barrier to superficiality: if you had an objection on a particular issue,you always needed to see whether it could be answered within the theo-retical framework, or whether it would require a deep alteration in theframework.

In other words, Rawls rejected a detached historicized engagementwith the texts as insufficiently philosophical, unlikely to yield a deep un-derstanding of what a great thinker was undertaking. The great thinkersare seen as addressing fundamental problems of political life, albeit is-sues that arise in particular historical settings. But he also rejected a su-perficial and ahistorical importation of modern concepts and ideas intothe text: for if one did that, one would be unlikely to learn from the text,which is likely to be richer than modern fads. (One day at an Ameri-can Philosophical Association meeting, Rawls and I interviewed a glib jobcandidate who had lambasted utilitarianism with relish. When the candi-date left, Rawls spoke critically of the department that had educated him:it had encouraged him to focus on simple forms of utilitarianism ex-emplified in contemporary journal articles, rather than the deeper and

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p. 2. Ryle’s own vigorous teaching of the Greeks in B. Phil. classes in Oxford, alongside thedistinguished contributions of G. E. L. Owen and Gregory Vlastos, changed things, rightaround the beginning of Rawls’s career.

more complicated views of Sidgwick and Mill.) In short, Rawls wantedyoung philosophers to carry on ‘‘a kind of conversation with the his-torical tradition that uses it as a resource to understand present andperennial problems in the subject’’ (p. 4). He was convinced that theconversation would teach them far more than the trendy conversationsthey might easily have with new work in Mind, the Philosophical Review —or even Ethics.

Historicist interpreters of historical texts will surely feel that theRawlsian approach has some real risks. For one thing, the Rawlsian criticwill overlook some parts of a thinker’s work that have historical interestbut do not seem to offer much to contemporary thought. This one oughtto grant: the Rawlsian reader of Aristotle is indeed unlikely to focus onAristotle’s recondite views of the cosmic bodies and their motions. Letsomeone else do that if she wants to. In some areas of philosophy, thismight lead to distortion of the aspects of the work that one does treat,for they may have important links with the neglected parts. In ethics,however, there are few such dead spots, because the central problemskeep recurring, and it is a rare part of a great work that seems utterlyoutdated. Thus the Rawlsian critic is unlikely to adopt a piecemeal ap-proach to an ethical text that would single out only certain bits for up-date, thus obscuring the structure of the whole.

But another worry remains: for if the aim is to make the best of atext and thus to learn something from it oneself, one may overlook genu-ine historical differences of concept and context that are germane to thecorrect interpretation of a text. And this means, too, that one may actu-ally lose sight of some insights from which one might learn: for if one has-tens to make the text answer to contemporary questions, one may missthe novel and surprising ways in which some great texts do so, recastingour very concepts and categories. So the Rawlsian project has potentialdangers for the Rawlsian enterprise itself, but those dangers will threatenless menacingly if one keeps reminding oneself that one is reading his-tory to learn something that one does not know and to be in contact witha conversation partner who sees things in a way different from one’s own.This warning is heeded by the best Rawlsian criticism in the contempo-rary academy.

Reclaiming the History of Ethics shows how much Rawls’s approach tothe history of ethics has done to enrich both moral philosophy and thestudy of its history. All the contributors were students of Rawls; they in-clude both early students such as Onora O’Neill and much more recentones, such as Sharon Lloyd and Hannah Ginsborg. (When we note thatten out of the fourteen contributors are women, we notice how muchRawls’s teaching has done to increase the gender justice of our profes-sion, as well as its excellence.) All contributors are fine philosophers; allshow their respect for Rawls by producing work at the top of their capaci-

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ties. Moreover, close reading of the notes makes it clear that the editors,and Reath in particular, have done a great deal to improve the papersby careful criticism: whenever Reath is thanked by an author, one usuallynotices an argument being made more subtle and nuanced by the articu-lation of a pertinent distinction.

Because there is no dead wood of the sort one finds in most editedvolumes, respect seems to militate against a substantive engagement withthree or four articles to the neglect of others. It therefore seems best togive a brief sense of what each essay contains (without repetitive praise—all are hereby praised) and then to turn to one article as an exemplar ofthe Rawlsian method of doing history and the contributions it can maketo our philosophical understanding.

Marcia Homiak’s ‘‘Aristotle and the Soul’s Conflicts’’ argues thatAristotle’s analysis of akrasia diagnoses incontinence as resulting from afailure of proper self-love; it is thus a problem at once intellectual andemotional. Contemporary virtue ethics, she plausibly claims, can be il-luminated by Aristotle’s complex moral psychology. In ‘‘Coercion, Ide-ology, and Education in Hobbes’s Leviathan,’’ Sharon Lloyd argues thatHobbes’s account of social indoctrination is less easily dismissed thanmany have believed; if we ponder its elements, asking which ones wereally have reasons to reject, we will have made progress in thinkingabout education and the public shaping of social norms. The late JeanHampton, in ‘‘The Hobbesian Side of Hume,’’ sets out the tension inHume’s moral psychology between a view about rational self-interest thathe derives from Hobbes and a complex doctrine of sympathy that is anti-Hobbesian in its emphasis on the importance of ‘‘the general point ofview.’’ Hume, she argues, thus helps us to think critically about Hobbes-ian elements in contemporary theories of rational action, and the rea-sons we may have for rejecting them in favor of a richer psychology. SusanNeiman’s ‘‘Rousseau on the Problem of Evil’’ follows the complexitiesof Rousseau’s response to Voltaire and the Lisbon earthquake, as he at-tempts to show that philosophical explanations need not capitulate tothe sense that evil is fundamentally incomprehensible.

Not surprisingly, by far the greatest number of the essays deal withthe thought of Immanuel Kant, who has remained at the heart of Rawls’swork and teaching. In ‘‘Within the Limits of Reason,’’ Onora O’Neill of-fers a clear account of Kant’s views about religion, arguing that a Kantian‘‘hermeneutics of reason’’ evinces profound respect for religious textsand persons. Barbara Herman’s ‘‘A Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends’’ fol-lows the cyptic and tortuous course of Kant’s appeal to the idea of a ‘‘king-dom of ends,’’ arguing that we cannot understand why Kant felt the needfor such a notion without thinking of how social unions can express therational nature of persons. The demands of this idea require us to thinkcritically about existing institutions, especially in the area of property;

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they also (in circumstances of social pluralism) require us to extend thecommunity of moral judgment: the Categorical Imperative thus groundsa cosmopolitan ideal. Andrews Reath’s ‘‘Legislating for a Realm of Ends’’provides an especially lucid account of the social dimensions of the Kan-tian idea of autonomy, arguing that autonomy ‘‘presupposes as the locusof its exercise a community of agents with the ability to guide their con-duct by what they regard as good reasons’’ (p. 226); the ability of othersto accept one’s conclusions is thus constitutive of one’s own autonomy.If this account is correct, many communitarian critiques of liberalismneed rethinking. Reath argues that Kant’s ideal entails a deeply egalitar-ian conception of political authority that can and should inform moderndemocracies.

In ‘‘Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law,’’ Adrian Piper tacklesKant’s metaethics, arguing that Kant helps us think well about the rela-tionship between objectivity in ethics and scientific objectivity. NancySherman’s ‘‘Kantian Virtue: Priggish or Passional?’’ argues that modernproponents of virtue ethics can find in Kant far more interesting ma-terial about character and motivation than is usually supposed; Kant’sconception of character offers valuable guidance in thinking about howmoral interest relies on nonmoral desires and emotions. Christine Kors-gaard’s ‘‘Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Rev-olution’’ unpacks Kant’s arguments against this right, trying to squarethem with Kant’s evident enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Thevirtuous person, Korsgaard argues, accepts the authority of law; yet incircumstances in which institutions systematically violate human rights,reason is ‘‘turned against itself,’’ without a justification of justice for itsrevolutionary choice, yet with a demand of virtue that something bedone. This shows us that autonomy is a lonely business, offering no easyconsoling answers.

In ‘‘Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness,’’ Hannah Gins-borg investigates the account of teleology in the Critique of Judgment, in-terpreting purposiveness as conformity to normative law and arguingthat the purposiveness ascribed in an aesthetic judgment is to be under-stood in terms of the judgment’s claim to universal agreement. ThomasPogge’s ‘‘Kant on Ends and the Meaning of Life’’ identifies two distinctstrands of Kantian thinking about the point of the universe and human-ity’s role within it. The religious account makes the highest good foreverout of reach and does little to direct human endeavor. The ‘‘worldly ac-count,’’ by contrast, makes room for the value of human enlightenmentand directs us to an urgent practical political task: the realization of mo-rality, hence of reason, in this world. Pogge argues that the ‘‘worldly ac-count’’ is one that modern Kantians can and should adopt. Finally, DanBrudney’s ‘‘Community and Completion’’ interprets the early Marx’sideas about sociability and the process of production, showing that they

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offer us useful ways to clarify some modern debates between communi-tarians and liberals. The most overtly contemporary piece in the collec-tion, it argues that the citizens in Rawls’s ‘‘well-ordered society’’ can beseen as Marx sees the producers and consumers of communist society—as reciprocally appreciating and confirming one another’s talents andthus as completing one another. These ideas can help us reflect betterabout what a community is and thus to assess better both the views ofRawls’s communitarian critics and the changes introduced by Rawls inPolitical Liberalism.

All the essays, then, engage with historical texts in a systematic andtextually rich way, showing how such an engagement can help us answerlive philosophical questions. But the Rawlsian method of historical exe-gesis can best be understood by a more extended engagement with oneessay, which outstandingly exemplifies its idea of how one ‘‘reclaims’’a historical text in order to learn from it. Joshua Cohen’s ‘‘The NaturalGoodness of Humanity’’ is, at thirty-seven pages, by far the longest in thecollection. Detailed and painstaking in its exegesis, it will clearly rank forsome time as among the major accounts of Rousseau’s moral psychology;indeed, Cohen’s mastery of text and historical context makes it perfectlyplain that a Rawlsian constructive use of history need in no way entailhistorical superficiality. Cohen argues that Rousseau’s views about evil,which appear confused and contradictory, are really not so. Rousseaureally does believe what he says: ‘‘that man is naturally good, and that itis solely by [our] institutions that men become wicked’’ (p. 103). The ap-parent contradiction between this claim and other texts that ascribe topeople a diseased type of self-regard can be resolved if we carefully distin-guish, as Rousseau himself does, between the abstract potentialities in-herent in human nature and the determinate expression of these poten-tialities as the result of social circumstances. About the former Rousseau,like his Stoic forebears, was an optimist: human nature is intrinsicallygood, containing only a nonvicious form of self-love, and containingas well the roots of compassion. (Cohen gives a good account of Rous-seau’s debt to Seneca, something too seldom appreciated in Rousseauscholarship.)

About the latter, however, Rousseau, again like the Stoics, is a pessi-mist: greed and inequality have caused the basically innocent amour pro-pre to turn into ‘‘inflamed’’ or ‘‘diseased’’ amour propre, and have in-hibited the operations of compassion by preventing people from seeingall humans as sharing possibilities with them. Much of the work of theessays consists in the careful textual demonstration that this distinctionmakes sense of the evidence and in the detailed unpacking of the inter-estingly complex moral psychology that results. Thus it is Rousseau’s viewthat the ubiquity of vice does not compel us to conclude that humanityis basically evil; therefore nothing forces us to reject as unrealizable the

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hope for political justice, understood as requiring that citizens respectand treat one another as equals.2 Although Rousseau knew that he couldnever finally prove the believers in original evil wrong, he felt that hehad satisfactorily shifted the burden of argument. We may and shouldpursue a society that ‘‘answers to the demands of self-love and freedom’’(p. 131) unless it has been shown to be utterly unrealizable.

Cohen’s essay is surely a fine example of a constructive reading of atext that ‘‘makes the best’’ of it. Where, however, is its relevance in solv-ing contemporary philosophical problems? Cohen says nothing directabout contemporary issues, and yet they are with us at every turn. Cohenmakes it clear that Rousseau’s moral psychology, especially his accountof the deformation of desire by social inequality, is a valuable concep-tual resource for modern political thought, which has frequently lackeda subtle account of desire, its formations and deformations. Self-interest,frequently treated by social science as exogenous, a hardwired elementin our makeup, can be understood far more plausibly in Rousseau’s way,as an expression of a deformed idea of self-worth deriving from an ab-stract capacity that itself might have been expressed differently in differ-ent social circumstances. Inequality perpetuates itself, not because that ishow human beings are, but because that is how unequal structures havemade them.

An equally valuable resource is supplied by Rousseau’s larger argu-ment about goodness and evil. Like Rousseau, we are wrestling with evilall the time, and it is very tempting to say that it is the way human natureis. If we say this, we console ourselves for our failures to achieve justice.Nor does empirical observation appear to settle the question: for everyobservation that confirms natural evil, there is another that seems to dis-confirm it. Cohen urges us, with Rousseau (and also Kant), to think ofthe problem not as a theoretical problem, which we may never be ableto answer, but as a practical one, which we can answer. We can, that is,provide a convincing argument that natural goodness is not ruled outand that therefore this worldly progress toward a just society is possible.We may no longer offer hopelessness as an excuse for laziness. If we canhope for justice, we can’t abandon its pursuit. John Rawls’s entire careeris honored in this conclusion.

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2. One might deny that we need so much natural goodness in order to support thehope for some kind of political justice; one might maintain that intelligent self-interest wasby itself sufficient for a certain sort of just political order. A part of the social contract tra-dition would take this line, and Rawls appears to take a related line in A Theory of Justice,when he asserts that both an optimistic Rousseauian psychology and a darker psychologywould be compatible with his general account.