Is Metaphysics an Essential
Buttress or a Dispensable Luxury for a Theory of Human Rights?
by
David Thunder
31st March 2000
Is Metaphysics an Essential Buttress or a Dispensable Luxury for a Theory of Human Rights?
“Political liberalism...does not criticise...metaphysical accounts of the truth of moral judgments and their validity. Reasonableness is its standard of correctness, and given its political aims, it need not go beyond that.”
- John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993), p. 127
Jeremy Bentham, one of the founding fathers of modern utilitarianism, dismissed the Declaration of the Rights of Man issued by the French revolutionaries of 1789 as ‘nonsense upon stilts’[1]. He argued that the concept of a natural or human right (I use the terms interchangeably) was a human invention used to give an air of legitimacy to one’s demands and interests. Rights or entitlements are conferred by positive law alone, and any appeal to the ‘nature’ of man or to ‘natural’ equality and freedom was nothing more than a mask for the particular prejudices and preferences of an individual or group of people. This positivistic understanding of the status of human rights does not enjoy the support of many legal, political or philosophical theorists today, nor indeed would many educated Western citizens take it seriously. Nonetheless, I believe it poses a serious challenge to human rights advocates and theorists to justify their conviction that there is such a thing as a pre-legal human right antecedent to and superior to positive law.
In face of the Benthamite challenge, there is a stark need to clarify what the concept of a ‘right’ entails, to probe beneath the rhetoric of rights and find out if its underlying intuitions are philosophically defensible. One of the most influential and distinctively modern attempts to provide a philosophical framework for a culture of rights is known as ‘political liberalism’. Although this movement, led by the British theorist, John Rawls, does locate itself firmly within the liberal tradition, it departs radically from previous liberal theory by attempting to remove itself from the wider premises and world-view of the philosophy of liberalism. [2] In order to neatly capture this aspiration towards metaphysical and philosophical neutrality, Rawls designates his theory as ‘political’ liberalism, rather than ‘philosophical’ liberalism. The principal question which this paper addresses is, ‘can a philosophical defence of rights as widely understood in the Western world be credibly undertaken to the exclusion of metaphysical premises, as intended by Rawls?’ I will examine widely held and respected beliefs about human rights with a view to establishing whether their logical conditions include the acceptance of a ‘metaphysics’ of sorts, that is, the acceptance of a particular account, or part of an account, of the fundamental nature of reality.
By starting with widely held and respected beliefs, I do not mean to suggest that the fact that a belief happens to be widely held guarantees its veracity. However, I would suggest that moral beliefs held across most philosophical and religious divides do merit special consideration and can provide a constructive starting point for political philosophy. Let us call them ‘provisional’ assumptions, which may, upon further reflection, need to be refined or even reformulated. Whether these fundamental shared moral convictions are true or valid is an issue which political philosophy must, sooner or later, contend with. However, the truth status of such beliefs (though important) is not the primary concern of this essay. Rather, this essay will try to identify the most plausible and defensible philosophical argument in favour of human rights, critically evaluating the non-metaphysical and metaphysical approaches respectively. In other words, I will accept as worthy of defence the basic principle that the human being should be treated as a unique subject of rights or entitlements, and, with this in mind, investigate how best this principle can be philosophically defended. A more fundamental or ‘a priori’ defence of the special status of human beings is not intended here.
Before I proceed to consider the ‘political’ (in the Rawlsian sense) and metaphysical theories of rights, I would like to state briefly what I understand by the term, ‘metaphysics’, since it is so central to our concerns. I understand metaphysics as an investigation into the fundamental nature of reality, in all its aspects, understood not merely phenomenologically, but ontologically and existentially. In other words, metaphysics presupposes the capacity of the human being to discover principles which can be meaningfully and objectively applied to an existent and mind-independent reality. Ever since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the very possibility of metaphysics as a viable endeavour has been brought into question, as has been the concept of truth – which are intimately related to each other, since the traditional concept of truth is the correspondence of a concept to a real object or a mind-independent order of reality. While the general relevance and value of the discipline of metaphysics per se undoubtedly warrants much discussion, I restrict myself in this paper to considering the relevance of metaphysics to a discussion of human rights in political philosophy.
The first kind of defence of human rights I propose to examine has been elaborated by John Rawls in the Dewey Lectures [3] and is known as ‘political liberalism’. ‘Political liberalism’ sees metaphysics as a dispensable luxury rather than a prerequisite of a theory of human rights. John Rawls perceives metaphysics as an unhelpful stumbling block to popular consent, in view of the wide array of metaphysical views at large in modern Western societies. His theory, political liberalism, claims metaphysical ‘impartiality’ – that is to say, it claims to elaborate the basic principles of political justice without relying on any particular, disputable metaphysical or philosophical doctrine. My critique of Rawls’s theory will focus in on issues of human rights, in order to investigate whether his theory of justice is consistent with our most fundamental shared beliefs and practises in this area (section 1). As far as I am concerned, this is the primary criterion upon which Rawls’s theory of justice stands or falls.
Even should Rawls’s theory prove to be generally implausible, it remains to be demonstrated that this failure is attributable, either fully or in part, to Rawls’s eschewal of metaphysics. I will argue that the failure of political liberalism is the inevitable outcome of its attempted metaphysical ‘impartiality’ (section 2). My argument may not have the force of a logical demonstration (i.e. that, as a matter of logical certainty, no theory of rights could plausibly dispense with metaphysical premises). However, the failure of the Rawlsian model of justice and rights constitutes a heavy blow to the plausibility of the general norm of metaphysical eschewal which it attempts to embody. This is because Rawls’s theory is widely recognised as the most influential and plausible attempt to construct a metaphysically-neutral political theory available to date. Its failure would therefore cast a serious doubt over the entire project of ‘political liberalism’ which Rawls is leading in the Dewey Lectures.
So much for the negative argument. The positive argument in favour of the relevance of metaphysics to political theory and praxis is a number of observations – which will arise during the course of my critique of Rawls’s account – about how the acceptance of metaphysical principles could ‘fill’ certain gaps in Rawls’s analysis, and provide a more coherent and intuitively attractive explanation of the modern understanding of human rights. Finally, I will elucidate further my understanding of a metaphysical account of rights by answering the classic objection that moral concepts such as rights cannot be derived from metaphysical concepts such as being and substance (section 3).
Political Liberalism: a ‘Non-Metaphysical’ Theory of Justice
In order to set the scene for the main argument, it will be necessary to set out in brief the motivation, founding principles, and methodology associated with the movement of ‘political liberalism’ brought to the fore by John Rawls during the early 1990’s. Political liberalism contends that a reasonable conception of justice, designed to establish and adjudicate between the rights of citizens, can and indeed should be elaborated without committing itself to a particular metaphysical conception of reality, or indeed of man himself. The reason for eschewing strong metaphysical commitments is to make room for an ‘overlapping consensus’, that is, a space where diverse philosophical and religious doctrines can find common ground. It is worth quoting Rawls at length to see what the reason for aiming for a ‘political’ rather than ‘metaphysical’ conception of justice is:
...political liberalism looks for a political conception of justice that we hope can gain the support of an overlapping consensus of reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines in a society regulated by it. Gaining this support of reasonable doctrines lays the basis for answering...[the] fundamental question as to how citizens, who remain deeply divided on religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines, can still maintain a just and stable democratic society.... Public reason – citizens’ reasoning in the public forum about constitutional essentials and basic questions of justice – is now best guided by a political conception the principles and values of which all citizens can endorse. That political conception is to be, so to speak, political and not metaphysical. (10)
Rawls’s conception of justice is ‘political’ in two senses. First, in the sense that it does not argue for the truth (or truth status) or metaphysical validity of its grounding principles. Just like Kant’s categorical imperative, which at no point can be said to correspond to ‘reality’ but is simply posited by practical reason, Rawls’s ‘political constructivism’, as he calls it, “does not...use (or deny) the concept of truth... Rather, within itself the political conception does without the concept of truth.” (94, my italics) In this sense, Rawls’s conception of justice is supposed to be profoundly ‘non-metaphysical’. Secondly, Rawls’s conception of justice is ‘political’ in the sense that rather than being derived from a comprehensive philosophical doctrine, it is derived instead from the principles latent within a particular political culture and tradition, namely that of liberal constitutional democracies.
a political conception of justice...is expressed in terms of certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society. This public culture comprises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge. (13-14)
Rawls’s ‘political’ conception of justice is not simply ‘intuited’ or grasped immediately by the human intellect as self-evident. It is the outcome of a complex process of reasoning, whereby the reasoning or intelligent agent identifies certain ‘facts’ around him concerning the way in which he and others order their common life, and, applying certain moral categories e.g. justice as fairness (which are themselves shaped by his surrounding culture) – he sees some aspects of that ordered life as just and others as unjust, and may construct a theory or set of principles which express his considered judgements on these matters. Following Kant, Rawls distinguishes two aspects of this reasoning process and calls them ‘theoretical reason’, which simply knows certain objects as ‘given’, such as mathematical and sociological ‘facts’; and ‘practical reason’ which affirms certain actions as right or just and other actions as wrong or unjust. This could be simplified by saying that theoretical reason is concerned with the ‘is’ of facts, while practical reason is concerned with the ‘ought’ of human action.
Now, a worked out, comprehensive political conception of justice is, in so far as it embodies and instantiates the concept of justice and other values implicit within justice, a product of ‘practical reason’. This means that it is not simply ‘known’ in the way in which an object of nature or a mathematical theorem is known, but rather, it is constructed by human reason in accordance with a certain conception of justice, which is posited by practical reason. As Rawls puts it, practical reason “is concerned with the production of objects according to a conception of those objects...while theoretical reason is concerned with the knowledge of given objects” (94). The conception of justice, once it is consistent and rationally affirmed in good conscience by the agent, needs no other justification than itself – that it, it is essentially self-validating and needs no metaphysical validation.
The way in which Rawls’s construction proceeds is as follows: it starts with “the fundamental idea of a well-ordered society as a fair system of cooperation between reasonable and rational citizens regarded as free and equal” (103). It then lays out a procedure that “exhibits reasonable conditions to impose on the parties, who as rational representatives are to select public principles of justice for the basic structures of...a society” (103). The precise conditions of this procedure are reflected in ‘the original position’, which is proposed by Rawls as a hypothetical device of representation designed to model the conditions implicit within one’s general conception of justice. It is through the device of the ‘original position’ that a political conception of justice is constructed. The precise conditions imposed on contracting parties by the original position, and the outcome of the procedure, are not relevant for the purposes of this essay.
I: The Inadequacy of Political Liberalism as a Theory of Human Rights
Now that I have provided a brief outline of Rawls’s constructivist and culture-specific methodology and principles for elaborating a framework of fundamental political rights, we can proceed to assess the feasibility of the founding principles of his theory as a whole. The primary criterion of plausibility will be the consistency of these principles with our most fundamental shared beliefs and practises in the area of rights. I will not consider here the content of the political conception of justice which results from Rawls’s construction. However, I believe that the very procedure proposed by Rawls for establishing a conception of justice, and its basic founding principles, are fatally flawed. Even if it succeeds in maintaining some degree of political and civil order (which it may, at least in the short term, succeed in doing), Rawls’s construction provides neither a politically effective nor a philosophically compelling basis for administering to and adjudicating between the rights of citizens.
As Rawls says, political constructivism “proceeds from the union of practical reason with appropriate conceptions of society and the person and the public role of principles of justice” (107). Now, Rawls’s theory of justice, in order to remain consistent with its disavowal of metaphysical doctrines, cannot rely on a metaphysical conception of the person. But clearly, it does require some notion of personhood. The answer Rawls proposes to this dilemma is what he calls a “political” conception of the person. Rawls proposes as a guiding premise of political justice, a conception of the person and society that is powerful enough to generate the requisite principles for a just political order, yet not so substantial, ‘metaphysical’ or ‘deep’ that it contradicts the reasonable philosophical and religious conceptions of personhood which are espoused by citizens. A ‘political’ conception of the person, not unlike a political conception of justice, is understood to be implicit in a constitutional democratic culture. In this sense, Rawls’s conception of the person is not meant to say anything new to citizens of liberal democracies, but merely to make explicit what, as democratic citizens, they already believe. As a conception of practical reason – since it is, after all, a moral conception – the political conception of the person does not claim (nor does it deny) to be grounded in any order of reality beyond that of reason (and reasonableness) itself.
According to the political conception of personhood, a person is regarded as someone who can be a citizen, “that is, a normal and fully cooperating member of society over a complete life” (18). Starting within the democratic tradition, a person, as a member of society or citizen, is also thought of as free and equal to other persons. The freedom and equality of citizens are made possible, and indeed attested to, by what Rawls calls the two basic moral powers of the person, namely, “a capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception of the good” (19), united with the powers of reason. While the capacity for a sense of justice and to form and pursue a conception of the good is what makes a person free, it is precisely by virtue of this shared freedom that I can claim to be equal to you, and vindicate my attendant rights. Therefore, it is not surprising that Rawls argues that citizens’ “having these powers [a capacity for a sense of justice and a conception of the good] to the requisite minimum degree to be fully cooperating members of society makes persons equal.” (19, my italics)
Rawls’s ‘political’ conception of personhood has dangerous implications for what are almost universally considered to be fundamental moral tenets of the democratic tradition of rights. It is fair to assume that the ‘political conception’ of the person specifies the subject of rights or entitlements in a political context. The political conception of the person is deliberately ‘thin’ or minimal so that it can form the basis of an ‘overlapping consensus’ of diverse but reasonable philosophical and religious doctrines. The problem is, if it becomes too ‘thin’ or narrow, we fall into the danger of defining certain persons out of existence as persons: By specifying that the person is the citizen, and that the citizen is someone possessing the ‘two moral powers’ of reason already discussed “to the requisite minimum degree” (19), there is an implicit exclusion of someone who possesses neither of these powers, at least not actualised. This includes the handicapped, the senile, the demented, and infants. Rawls has defined the ‘person’ so narrowly that he has excluded a whole host of entities that we normally consider as the subjects of fundamental human rights. Equally, he has provided a model of personhood so narrow that at best, it has nothing to say about a whole series of human rights controversies afflicting the modern state, while at worst, it simply extinguishes the rights of those who fail to meet Rawls’s narrow criteria of personhood.
Rawls’s account fails in another crucial respect: it fails to provide a sufficient public moral basis for civic loyalty and obedience to the law. From a moral and motivational point of view, it is difficult to see what the enduring appeal of Rawls’s account could be, when Rawls will not be drawn on its truth status. [4] His position is based on a distinction between what is true and what is reasonable. What is reasonable may conceivably have some metaphysical basis, but Rawls feels that it is both unnecessary and counterproductive to try to ground maxims of practical reason (the content of the ‘overlapping consensus’) in an order of reality beyond reason itself.
Political liberalism...does not criticise...metaphysical accounts of the truth of moral judgments and their validity. Reasonableness is its standard of correctness, and given its political aims, it need not go beyond that. (127)
While Rawls’s refusal to affirm his theory as true is understandable in light of his central concern to achieve an ‘overlapping consensus’, I doubt very much that in the long term, respect for human rights and dignity can be preserved in a political culture which refuses to commit itself publicly to respect a moral order independent of (though participated in by) human reason. If the requirements of civil society do not claim to express a fundamental truth (and not merely a maxim of practical reason) about who we are and what we are, then it is difficult to see why they are morally binding at all.
II: Rawls’s Metaphysical Eschewal – a Failed Strategy
The implausibility of Rawls’s theory on the one hand and his evasion of metaphysical premises on the other, are not a mere coincidence. Indeed, I would argue that the failure of his account may be attributed in no small part to his attempt to cut his theory loose from metaphysical assumptions. Firstly, the fact that he forms a narrow and inadequate conception of the person can be traced back to his refusal to ground his theory in metaphysical principles. For Rawls mistakes certain capacities specific to the human being for the source of his dignity and value before his fellow citizens, when those capacities (whether potential or actual) while primary in the order of knowledge, are not primary but secondary in the order of being. In fact, those capacities are not what we reverence and respect, but the human being who possesses them by virtue of his or her nature. It is who and what a person is that we respect, not what he or she does. In other words, we know a being through its acts; the acts are themselves manifestations of being. John Finnis states this basic epistemological principle as follows, attributing it to St. Thomas Aquinas: “One understands human nature by understanding human acts, and those acts by understanding their objects.” [5] By shoring off a political conception of the person from metaphysical principles, one may easily be led down the path of taking certain capacities or potentialities of the human person to be the sole repository of human dignity, when it is in fact the human being, and not reason or any other human power, which is the concrete, existent subject of rights.
The fact that Rawls displaces the concept of truth in the political sphere with the concept of the ‘reasonable’ [6] is also a consequence of his rejection of metaphysical arguments as a basis for justice in a democratic regime. If we exclude metaphysical descriptions from moral and political theory, we find that there is no room for the concept of truth, traditionally understood as a description of a state of events or an order of reality which is valid even if a majority of citizens cease to perceive it or accept it as true. The concept of the ‘reasonable’ is not, to my mind, a sufficient substitute for truth, even for political purposes. First of all, I take it that Rawls’s concept of the ‘reasonable’ is not some unconditioned, timeless and universal understanding, but the specifically conditioned understanding of this citizen within this constitutional democracy, which espouses this shared set of values. While Rawls believes that the concept of the ‘reasonable’ is a shared currency among citizens with different lifestyles and comprehensive doctrines, this concept nonetheless does not escape the threat of cultural relativism. For surely, what is seen as ‘reasonable’ by a majority of citizens in one time or culture is not seen as ‘reasonable’ in another, and so on. Therefore, the principle of ‘reasonableness’ and rationality does not sufficiently express the intent of several of our moral convictions, including the belief that murder of innocent citizens is wrong, illegal arrest and deportation are an infringement of our human rights, and so on. Only the concept of truth or metaphysical validity can possibly capture the force of these moral convictions and preserve them against the Benthamite argument that rights are no more than inventions of the law.
III A Reply to the ‘Is/Ought’ Objection
So far, I have highlighted what I see as certain fatal flaws in the Rawlsian project known as ‘political liberalism’, from the point of view of finding a reasonable and just basis for preserving and advancing a human rights culture. I have argued that these flaws are due at least in part to his exclusion of metaphysical claims from a theory of fundamental rights. I have showed how the introduction of metaphysical premises can fill certain ‘gaps’ that we have identified in Rawls’s theory. I now propose to address an objection to the very possibility of a metaphysical conception of justice, and hopefully, by so doing, I will further elucidate what is meant by a ‘metaphysical’ theory of rights.
A conception of justice is clearly a moral conception. Essentially, it involves claims about the way persons ought to treat each other. In other words, it posits certain basic duties and obligations, which are morally, and often legally, binding. In this context, it would seem that the point, commonplace by now, that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ or a moral concept from a metaphysical one – is a valid one. Kant argued persuasively that the order of practical reason or morality is distinct from, and cannot be logically derived from, the order of ‘theoretical reason’ or knowledge of objects. [7] Even if we accept that Rawls’s non-metaphysical account of rights is problematic, that is no justification for pretending that we can derive a moral theory of rights from a metaphysical description of the person.
This objection is valid, so far as it goes. I accept that one cannot derive a moral ‘ought’ from a factual ‘is’. However, as is often the case with objections, the terms of the objection itself prove to be crucial. The objection (which I will refer to henceforth as the ‘is/ought’ objection) relies on a rigid division, along Kantian lines, of our knowledge into theoretical/factual and practical/moral knowledge. It is only within the context of this division that the notion of logically deriving a conception of justice from a metaphysical account of the person makes sense. However, if metaphysics is understood as embracing human goods and not just inert ‘facts’, then the ‘is/ought’ objection against the relevance of metaphysics to political theory loses its force. It is clear that the statement, “She is a woman,” taken as a purely factual description, cannot yield the conclusion, “She ought to be treated with respect” unless we introduce the second premise, “Women ought to be treated with respect.” This is a valid logical observation. However, it does not mean that metaphysics and morality are somehow free-standing, independent, disciplines or realms of knowledge. The distinction between theoretical and practical reason has useful conceptual applications, but it should not be taken to mean that our knowledge of reality – and hence, in a sense, reality itself – can be neatly and independently divided into these two categories. Objects and people we encounter do not come with an ‘is’ or ‘ought’ tag on them.
In order to illustrate the interdependence of morality and metaphysics, consider how one would describe a person. One of the first things we will say about a person is that a person is a moral being, that is, a being capable of intelligently exercising free choices in the pursuit of good or evil. We will also say that a person’s life is of such value that it ought not be violated by other persons. This moral dignity is not just a dictate of practical reason, but intrinsic to the very nature of a personal being. How do we know this? We know it by applying our reason to the persons around us, and to our own person, and recognising certain more or less fundamental human goods which we pursue both naturally and with our reason, including the good of bodily integrity, the good of life and procreation, the goods of knowledge and sociability. We can describe human beings as beings who participate in various levels of reality, from inanimate to biological to spiritual, but above all beings with a transcendent and incalculable worth, which no law or judge can take away.
The basic point is that being is one. While the logician may separate ‘ought’ propositions from ‘is’ propositions, neither being nor our understanding of being comes in ‘ought’ and ‘is’ packages. Being already comes laden with capacities, potentialities, tendencies, values. If I know a person, I know a person as a single, existent moral being. It is not satisfactory from a moral, or indeed, political point of view, to separate out our moral account from our metaphysical account of the person, and then proceed as if the moral account could be validated independently of being itself. The only compelling basis for treating everyone as my equal is because they are my equal, not merely that reasonableness and practical reason dictate that they are my equal.
The ‘is/ought’ objection calls for one more important clarification, which follows from what we have just said: a metaphysical theory of justice does not perceive ‘a-moral’ being first, and then deduce a moral property from it. Rather, I know being and perceive being itself, and existence (most obviously, my own) in its various manifestations, as something good in itself. I know the particular beings around me, and discover in them both good and evil qualities. I frequently use moral concepts or values to describe the people around me and their actions. I may say, for example, that she is a good person, or that he deserves a just wage, and so on. These values and moral concepts are not derived from a-moral being, but a part of the order of being. Human dignity and rights are recognised in virtue of real, existent human beings, their worth as the beings that they are, and the goods which lead to their fulfilment. Values are not just posited extra-metaphysically by practical reason; ends are sought, and affirmed by it, as contributing towards the agent’s, or another agent’s, fulfilment as a human being. In this framework, justice is seen as conducive towards the common good of a group of human beings, and each individual human being, the subject of justice, makes demands upon the wider community by virtue of their shared, value-laden, metaphysical nature.
In conclusion, I hope to have shown that Rawls’s attempt to elaborate a metaphysically ‘neutral’ theory of justice fails to satisfactorily explicate and justify the fundamental values inherent in modern human rights discourse. Furthermore, I have argued that the inadequacy of key assumptions of political liberalism concerning reason and personhood, is largely a consequence of Rawls’s refusal to invoke metaphysical principles in defence of his theory. While the failure of Rawls’s theory may not prove that a theory of rights without metaphysics is logically impossible, it does, in my view, seriously undermine the plausibility of the anti-metaphysical attitude. An acceptance of the validity of metaphysics in the political sphere gains relative plausibility in light of the failure of Rawls’s account, especially when various aspects of a metaphysical account can be shown to compensate for certain conspicuous inadequacies in the ‘non-metaphysical’ account of justice. If there are any cogent philosophical grounds for approving a culture of rights, they must lie in a theory that respects and affirms the concrete person as an entity whose dignity lies not in its potentialities and acts, but in its very being as the substantial ground of those potentialities and acts.
Bibliography
Finnis, John, Aquinas: moral, political, and legal theory (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998)
Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
Waldron, Jeremy, Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London and New York: Methuen, 1987)
END
REFERENCES
[1] Jeremy Bentham, ‘Anarchical Fallacies’, republished in Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, ed. Jeremy Waldron (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 46-76 (53).
[2] Liberal theorists prior to Rawls, although they too were concerned to promote the toleration of diverse religions and opinions, firmly grounded this doctrine of toleration on one or other variant of a liberal philosophy and conception of man. One such doctrine historically associated with liberalism is Kant’s ideal of rational autonomy (cf. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason).
[3] The published and expanded version of John Rawls’s Dewey Lectures is entitled Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Henceforth, all page references in brackets refer to this work.
[4] I am not attributing to Rawls any form of moral relativism or skepticism, for that is not justified by his arguments.
[5] Finnis, John, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90
[6] “...political
constructivism specifies an idea of the reasonable and applies this idea to
various subjects: conceptions and principles, judgments and grounds, persons
and institutions... It does not, however, as rational intuitionism does, use
(or deny) the concept of truth; nor does it question that concept, nor could
it say that the concept of truth and its idea of the reasonable are the same.”
(Rawls, Political Liberalism, 94, my italics)
[7] Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith’s (London/Melbourne/Toronto: MacMillan, 1968), A319/B375: “…whereas, so far as nature is concerned, experience supplies the rules and is the source of truth, in respect of the moral laws it is, alas, the mother of illusion! Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what is done, or to impose upon them the limits by which the latter is circumscribed” (A and B refer to the first and second editions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason).