/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12522342]

I hear from his critics, mostly on the left, that Rawls liberalism is built on false axioms and other hopeful assumptions. Could anyone more familiar with (((Anglo))) philosophy elucidate?

[Anonymous No.12522354]

>>12522342
As an asexual male, I'd like to know what those false axioms are said to be.

[Anonymous No.12522400]

>>12522354
fuck off

[Anonymous No.12522593]

pls someone respond

[Anonymous No.12522637]

Robert Paul Wolff's Understanding Rawls is a decent and friendly critique of Rawls from the left. I don't remember much of it at this point, to be honest, and though I had a lot of Rawls forced down my throat early on in grad school, I've forgotten most of it because I fucking hated Rawls.

That being said, I think the general left-wing critique is that his focus on universality ignores difference (between the genders, between religions and ethnic categories, etc) because our contemporary leftism is so damned focused on identity.

A right-wing criticism of Rawls from within the same tradition would be Nozick's Anarchy, State, Utopia.

[Anonymous No.12522657]

>>12522637
>That being said, I think the general left-wing critique is that his focus on universality ignores difference (between the genders, between religions and ethnic categories, etc)
That seems way more right wing than left
> because our contemporary leftism is so damned focused on identity.
oh i see

So what are the gaping flaws in his theory then? I heard that the veil of ignorance is based on flawed assumptions as people as tabula rasa, but i cannot really find anything about it.

Also why is Rawls taught so much on politics? He seems less prolific and profound than Marxist philosophers on the left, and conservatives (or even fascists like Schmitt) on the right.

[Anonymous No.12522704]

>>12522657
I'm probably the wrong guy to be asking about this since I'm not very sympathetic to Rawls, but since no one else is answering, I guess I'm all you got.

Yeah, the general gist is that his view of human beings is based on a liberal metaphysics of human beings as tabula rasa. That is, we are all basically empty vessels that can be filled up by whatever, nothing is essential about us, and all people are basically the same. In order to respond to these criticisms, he later wrote a book called "Political Liberalism" that includes the essay "Liberalism - Political Not Metaphysical" that responds to this exact criticism. You might want to take a look at that essay.

I find Political Liberalism in general to be a better work than Theory of Justice but it still evinces many of the same flaws that personally bug me about Rawls in general, the worst one being his tendency to state the obvious intuitions of American liberals in the most obtuse way possible. The idea of the overlapping consensus in particular just strikes me as something blatantly obvious presented in such a hand-holding, fussy way. It's like watching someone reinvent the wheel.

Anyway, Rawls is taught so much on politics because he's really influential. He was doing political philosophy in an academic context at a time when most people were calling it dead. This is also kind of cynical of me, but I think he's popular partly because he tells liberals what they want to hear. He admits from the very beginning that he's working on justifying the intuition of American liberals (see his essay on a process of ethical decision making for this). There were other writers in the Anglosphere doing interesting work on political philosophy just before Rawls was writing (Arendt, Strauss, Berlin come immediately to mind) but for some reason they were not as influential institutionally as Rawls was.

tl;dr: Rawls is taught because Rawls is influential because Rawls is taught. It's like how Kim Kardashian is famous for being famous because she's famous. I don't like Rawls, you probably should take everything I saw with a grain of salt. But maybe take a look at Political Liberalism.

[Anonymous No.12522724]

>>12522704
>Anyway, Rawls is taught so much on politics because he's really influential. He was doing political philosophy in an academic context at a time when most people were calling it dead. This is also kind of cynical of me, but I think he's popular partly because he tells liberals what they want to hear. He admits from the very beginning that he's working on justifying the intuition of American liberals (see his essay on a process of ethical decision making for this). There were other writers in the Anglosphere doing interesting work on political philosophy just before Rawls was writing (Arendt, Strauss, Berlin come immediately to mind) but for some reason they were not as influential institutionally as Rawls was.

I was thinking about this as well, although i didn't know that he was one of the few to even do political philosophy in the anglosphere, especially when the field had so many philosophers in continental Europe (more Marxist than liberal, though).

Also, what are your own political views if not liberal? Socialist?

[Anonymous No.12522755]

>>12522724
I actually am a liberal, maybe a little bit more on the conservative side, but I only came around/came back to liberalism after reading a ton of the Greeks and Germans. I was entranced by Heidegger for awhile, still really love Nietzsche, still love Plato, and I find Schmitt fascinating. I came back to liberalism because I read stuff like Mill and Locke and the Federalist Papers and discovered that they aren't stupid like my pomo-loving college classmates thought and that liberalism actually has a lot going for it. It really is the least terrible option currently available and has benefited the world immensely (inb4 someone quotes the Unabomber). Machiavelli and Hobbes, though not liberals themselves, also swayed my thinking. A society based on acquisitiveness and self-interest really is more stable than one based on idealism of one sort or another. It's not pretty but it does, at least, work.

What rubs me the wrong way about Rawls is that he tries to justify the intuitions of liberal society without examining them. They very well maybe true, but we won't know that from reading him. He just takes liberal intuitions regarding (for example, but particularly) fairness and starts building off of them. It's kind of like if the Republic just stopped about Polemarchus' definition of justice as "benefit to friends, harm to enemies" and Socrates told everyone to go home after that.

By the way, if you want a friendly critic of liberalism who is well aware of liberalism's weaknesses, I recommend Leo Strauss. His "Natural Right and History" is a good place to start. As for socialism and communism, none of that ever really appealed to me and I know less about that subject than about Rawls, so I don't feel qualified to pontificate.

[Anonymous No.12523015]

>>12522755
How do Nietzsche and Schmitt fascinate you? They're pretty fervently anti-liberal.

[Anonymous No.12523037]

>>12523015
Yes, exactly. It's shocking and refreshing to read something so eloquent and persuasive that's so utterly counter to what you believe. But you don't have to utterly endorse everything you read; in fact, you shouldn't. But you should read things that challenge your preconceptions, as much as you should resist utterly surrendering to whoever you're reading.

I will just straight-up admit that I have a romantic longing for a grander, more tragic politics but that I recognize that this isn't necessarily practicable or desirable.

[Anonymous No.12523048]

>>12522342
His social justice theory is utter bulllshit in that it is based on assumption of perfectly rational beings deciding best possible society which happens to be something very much like 1970's Sweden. In other words, Rawls bases his theory of social justice on non-human comprehensible fictional beings in fictional scenario producing observable result. Rawls is no better at producing theory of social justice than shitty fantasy writer who shoddily imagines fantastical alien beings inhabiting place unwittingly like some modern society. Rawl's rise to fame and impact are purely product of his prestigeous position and propagation of his ideas via academia due that prestigeous position. Intellectually he is lower than average isekai fantasy author.

[Anonymous No.12523050]

>>12523037
>I will just straight-up admit that I have a romantic longing for a grander, more tragic politics but that I recognize that this isn't necessarily practicable or desirable.
Give it time

[Anonymous No.12523299]

>>12523048
what else did he do besides his social justice theory?

[Anonymous No.12523348]

>>12523299
Nothing, he had one idea about fairness once sometime in the 1950s and literally spun that one 30 page essay in several books and thousands and thousands of other pages over the course of 50 years. If you want the quick and dirty Rawls, just read "Justice as Fairness", either the original essay or the short book he wrote sometime in the 90s. Easily the most overrated thinker of modern times.

[Anonymous No.12523694]

>>12523348
But if he's so influential then he mustve added more than just that to philosophy, right?

[Anonymous No.12523731]

>>12522342
>philosophy explicitly built on ignorance
that's a no from me

[Anonymous No.12523780]

>>12523694
If you're so curious, then just read him already and decide for yourself. But I swear to god that there are much more interesting people, even writing in English at around the same time.

[Anonymous No.12523862]

>>12522342
I don't know why so many people call him analytic philosopher when he is clearly not. analytic schools back that time treat any question of moral and justice like shit, and in the current time analytical theories can't match up with political philosophy in some degrees unless it is heavily affected by rawls.
His philosophy, and the followup theories like michael walzer's or robert nozick's should be classified as another kind of anglo philosophy, not analytic, just like pragmatism.

[Anonymous No.12523925]

>>12523048
I assume you hate everyone in analytic ethics. What's your most favorite continental etics philosopher?

[Anonymous No.12523934]

>>12523925
Heidegger obv

[Anonymous No.12523993]

None of you need to be talking

[Anonymous No.12524254]

>>12523993
fuck off

[Anonymous No.12524284]

>a former senior foreign office official explained wryly about "the Wykehamist fallacy", a trap into which FO mandarins are prone to walking.
>"Intelligence failures very often come not because you can't see what's happening," he smiled, "but because you misinterpret the intentions. You read their intentions as if they'd been educated at Winchester, you know, and they haven't been – they're a bunch of thugs. And actually their intentions aren't our sort of intentions, and they may not be bluffing – they may be out to do something catastrophically dangerous."
This is the basic problem with Rawls. He assumes we're all nice chaps who went to Winchester

[Anonymous No.12524342]

>>12523048
>>12523348
>>12523780

I have a question, How you even managed to have... that quite marginal opinion to john rawls? Which way did you go to think that way?
everyone can have a opinion, someone is positive, someone is negative because of Nozick, so on... but what you did is literally bashing him calling him a man of no one. this is just out of my mind.

I always thought john rawls is the most important one in ethics. I have personal story for that; when I was 10, my grandfather who works in a law Firm give me a gift. It is not a game console, not a chocolate, it was the biggest book I've ever seen. It was A Theory of Justice, He is the one who helped translation of the book. He told me read 15 pages a day and try to find a message about the life. He basically treated A Theory of Justice as a bible.
I admit he is gone too far, but I think this clearly shows the postion of A Theory of Justice in today's political philosophy. ... well at least in anglo. It is THE most important book. this kind of facts makes your opinion very weird.

You said "it is based on assumption of perfectly rational beings deciding best possible society which happens to be something very much like 1970's Sweden."
and that is the one of two thing why he is so suck you presented, the other one being he had nothing to do with except for his dissertation on ethics. (IDK why this is such a problem)
but is it really fair? Locke introduced a theory to the basis by writing his ethics.
although tabula rasa is very idealistic and dumb assumption,
he made a successful theory, arguably the most phenomenal at that time. and this kind of thing doesn't make your opinion that reasonable, eventually every theories will have exact same problem no matter how much they try to get out. I don't think even heidegger is safe from this.

[Anonymous No.12524405]

>>12524342
what

[Anonymous No.12524568]

>>12524342
he's just saying that he had one idea which is true

[Anonymous No.12525579]

>>12523348
this, except the value of "having one original idea" cannot be overstated. most philosophers go through their whole life without having any such thing. also 90% of people who casually talk about rawls never really understood this one idea, because it was so influential that it ended up being taught by idiots who didnt understand it themselves. the "criticisms" in this thread are another example how most people miss his point completely.

[Anonymous No.12525726]

>>12524342
You're talking to two different anons. The anime poster is not me.

Okay, I admit I'm being polemical. I just do not like John Rawls. I have read several hundred pages of John Rawls. This is not an uneducated opinion. I am, however, aware that a lot of people disagree with me. I think that Rawls is shallow and not that interesting for the reasons I have laid out: he builds off of intuition rather than interrogating it, he acts like he's reinventing the wheel when discussing something like fairness or building an overlapping consensus between disparate political factions, and, finally, I think his writing is tedious and his thought superficial. My absolute major problem with him is that he sets out to justify what he already believes and he admits as much from his earliest writing [1]. I'm going to admit that I generally study political theory, and not academic philosophy (of either the Anglo or Continental school, though I admit to being slightly closer to the latter), and I generally work on books written before Christ was born.

I got to this negative opinion of John Rawls partly by reading John Rawls late and partly by reading stuff that is so much better than him early. In undergrad, I focused primarily on Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians and historians, and Heidegger and Hegel (with some Nietzsche on my own). By the time I got to Rawls, I found that the picture of human life he presented was shallow. Rawls's soul has no basement. I cannot believe, after having read Plato and Nietzsche, that all human lives are equally praiseworthy (cf. Rawls's discussion of the grass counter) nor that all human beings are entitled to "the social bases of self-respect." I'm not even sure what "the social bases of self-respect" are, or why these are a "primary good."

Furthermore, as far as defenses of liberalism go, I found much stronger direct defenses in the Federalist Papers and Mill, and stronger indirect defenses in Machiavelli and Hobbes. I have not read Montesquieu extensively, but from what little bit I have read, I think he is a stronger defender of liberalism than Rawls. Hell, there's also Kant (who was supposed to be a huge influence on Rawls, but I'm not sure how, exactly). Not to mention Spinoza. The list of liberals that are better defenders of liberalism than Rawls goes on.

I don't want to make you feel bad for liking Rawls. This is 4chan; even polite discussions on here have a veneer of hostility. If you have learned from him, then good for you. But I will admit that I find his success perplexing and undeserved and that I honestly believe that there are far better writers out there even if what you are interested in is liberal political thought specifically.

I'll finish by saying something nice about Rawls: the distinction between rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism is actually a clever and useful distinction.

[1] See his "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics."

[Anonymous No.12527517]

>>12522342
Do critics on the left really say that? Mostly he’s criticized for not going far enough when considering what and how things are distributed. And It’s not so much that his axioms are too hopeful, it’s that the liberal focus on the individual as the fundamental unit of society doesn’t reflect how actual human communities work. But that second point is a critique shared by communitarian as much as leftists.

>>12522657
I’d argue (even as a non-rawlsian) that there isn’t any ‘gapping’ holes, just a lot of small problems, and that’s why even people who disagree with him still take him seriously.

He’s so important because when he came around liberal political theory was in bad shape. This was the hieght of second wave feminism, black rights, new indigenous struggles, anti-colonial conflicts, and the start of the gay rights movements. 1/3 of the people on earth lived in a country that claimed commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Communist politicians were being openly elected to parliaments in Chile, Italy, France, and across Central America, and running succeful revolutionary movements in Vietnam, Laos, and across Africa. If you were a died in the wool liberal in 1970 there was a lot of reason to be pessimistic.

And then John Rawls comes along and publishes a massive tome that presents a rigorous, robust model for a just society within the framework of liberalism. This was the first sign there was a real middle way between being a communist and being a hayekian. People like Von Mises and Hayek argued against socialism on the basis that there were theoretical reasons to think its impossible, or that capitalism would be so much more efficient that no other option was feasible, but Rawls gives support to the idea that liberal democratic capitalism wasn’t just the only functional option but that there is a version of it that fulfills a standard of social and economic justice that the left demands.

This system was also bare enough that it left room for dozens of other philosophers to expand on ideas he only mentions, or make more categories and distinctions in his concepts. Not to mention all the book length critiques from libertarians, Marxists, feminists, communitarians and so on.

[Anonymous No.12528626]

>>12527517
>And then John Rawls comes along and publishes a massive tome that presents a rigorous, robust model for a just society within the framework of liberalism.

I wouldn't call it 'robust', since it has some epistemological assumptions that are not robust at all.