Barry Gardiner

Yeats's poem The Second Coming is an apocalyptic nightmare of a world that has lost the unifying moral force of divine revelation:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;”

What Yeats calls mere anarchy Nietzsche might have called perspectivism. But John Rawls would have recognised it as pluralism.

I am a politician now, not a philosopher. Twenty years ago I had pretensions to be a philosopher but I found that I got less satisfaction out of analysing injustice than from tackling it. In those days I was lucky enough to have spent time doing research under Rawls, who has had more influence on the conduct of contemporary politics than most politicians.

In an article he wrote in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1985 Rawls spoke of pluralism as the central fact which political philosophy ignores at its peril. He argued that we can no longer expect some shared moral conception to provide us with an adequate basis for a theory of justice. Any workable conception of political justice in Rawls's view “must allow for a diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting, and indeed incommensurable, conceptions of the good affirmed by the members of the existing democratic societies.”

The idea is that political theory and the resulting conception of justice should be as independent from substantive philosophical or religious positions as possible and to this end Rawls suggested that we must “apply the principles of toleration to philosophy itself.” I want to look at two ways in which Rawls followed through on this suggestion. One is his concern to show that justice as fairness makes no claims to, and does not rely upon, an understanding of universal truth. The second is his concern to show that justice as fairness rests upon no particular metaphysical claims about human nature.

One of the great merits of Rawls' procedure of Reflective Equilibrium is the seriousness with which it takes our “Considered Moral Judgements”. These are not simply our particular judgements about individual matters. They also include the moral principles we hold and our judgements concerning standards of reasoning and formal requirements on principles themselves.

That Reflective Equilibrium can give Considered Moral Judgements the importance it does is largely due to the fact that it is a theory of practical justification whose aim is agreement, rather than a theory of moral knowledge whose aim is to arrive at the truth. Considered Moral Judgements are regarded as the non-fundamental building blocks to be modified or discarded as necessary, rather than as immutable premises from which a theory of justice must flow deductively. The method of Reflective Equilibrium starts with a set of Considered Moral Judgements at different levels of generality and seeks to modify, reject, or add new judgements to the set in accordance with the principles of consistency and coherence that are themselves part of the set.

Rawls never maintained that there could not be an independent moral order, but his practice sets this firmly to one side. In a pluralist society, agreement on such a metaphysic is highly improbable and in the Rawlsian Well Ordered Society pragmatism rules. Appeals to such moral authorities will, it is hoped, pass away as citizens recognise that social policy requires no more validation than that it succeeds in accommodating one citizen to another.

In addition to his claim that justice as fairness makes no claims to, and relies upon no understanding of universal truth, the second aspect of Rawls I want to look at is his concern to show that justice as fairness rests upon no particular metaphysical claims about human nature nor any particular conception of the person. Rawls wrote, “The conception of the citizen as a free and equal person is not a moral ideal to govern all of life, but rather is an ideal belonging to a conception of political justice which is to apply to the basic structure and restricted to an explicitly political conception of justice.” In this sense, the conception of the person is a political one – persons can accept this conception of themselves as citizens and use it when discussing questions of political justice without being committed in other parts of their life to comprehensive moral ideals often associated with liberalism.

First principles then have no place in a Rawlsian constructivist view of justice as fairness. Not as a starting point in our Considered Moral Judgements and our conception of the person; nor as the end point of the Reflective Equilibrium. But if this retreat from the high ground of first principles appears to leave all the important questions begging, then we may be able to provide an answer in what Richard Rorty once called the “priority of democracy over philosophy”. That is to “disengage the question of whether we ought to be tolerant and Socratic from the question of whether this strategy will lead to truth... [to be] content that it should lead to whatever intersubjective Reflective Equilibrium may be obtainable, given the contingent make-up of the subjects in question.”

On this view, truth is irrelevant to politics in contemporary constitutional democracies. So too philosophy in so far as it is concerned with what Rawls refers to as “an order antecedent to, and given to us.” Thus when the two come into conflict, democracy must be held prior to philosophy. The claims of truth, on this account, must be relegated to the private, not the public lives of citizens. This is the perhaps acceptable cost that modern constructivists may be prepared to pay for a workable polity that accommodates the particular historical social persons we consider ourselves to be.

All of this is highly pertinent to the political problems we face today. This priority of democracy over philosophy, of tolerance over truth, is the pre-war consensus that has broken down, not just in Britain, but around the world. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent war against terrorism has seen the claims of the absolutists – those who believe that they are the guardians of truth – reassert themselves above the claims of Reflective Equilibrium and democratic, political negotiation.

More specifically, and closer to home, the development of the truly multi-cultural, multi-faith Britain rather than a Britain where minorities are tolerated is one of the great domestic challenges that we face. I represent a borough that has over 160 different ethnic communities speaking 120 different first languages. In Brent, white Anglo-Saxons no longer constitute a majority and are scarcely even the largest single ethnic group. The patronising tolerant stance that says “we welcome you to our country and we enjoy the colour and diversity that you bring here” is simply offensive. People don't want tolerance – they want respect.

This is one reason why a Rawlsian Reflective Equilibrium fails in my view: it fails to meet the demands for respect between people with different Considered Moral Judgements. Rawls is offering a constructivist model of justice. More than this, he is demanding that we not only follow a constructivist process but that we hold our Considered Moral Judgements as constructivists. This might sound rather an innocuous tautology. But if justice as fairness must preclude realist assumptions then it violates Rawl's claim to neutrality on substantive philosophical matters.

Consider the moral realists, such as Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who hold their Considered Moral Judgements because they believe them to be true. How is Rawls to persuade such people to settle on an initial set of Considered Moral Judgements? They will complain either that false Considered Moral Judgements have been included or true ones left out. The whole process of Reflective Equilibrium, with its rather haphazard way of modifying and rejecting Considered Moral Judgements, is anathema to the moral realist.

However much one may agree that there are no moral facts, it is impossible to accept that this is to apply the principles of toleration to philosophy itself. Nor will it do to say that outside the contact of political dialogue – from the point of view of personal morality, say – we are free to regard things differently in a non-constructivist way.

Such a concession is in reality a poisoned gift for it makes of us not rational and reasonable citizens, but moral and intellectual schizophrenics. Consider the Well Ordered Society and the citizen within it. Participation in the public institutions is a key feature of its structure. For it is by participation that the citizen achieves what Rawls regards as “perhaps the most important primary good” – that of self-respect. We are affirmed in our own eyes through the mirror of other people and the respect they afford us. Now consider the fundamentalist. He sent his child to the local school only to find that his fundamentalist view of creation is not only not reinforced, it is mocked and rejected. In this public institution he finds no affirmation of his conception of the good, no confirmation that his life plan is worth carrying out and no primary good of self-respect. The well-ordered society has at its centre the suction of participation in the public institutions. But suddenly he feels the centrifugal force of this vortex repulsing him back out.

It seems incontestable that for moral realists, especially of a religious fundamentalist ilk, the divorce between truth and Considered Moral Judgements will have enormous psychological impact. What makes them want to see their Considered Moral Judgements instantiated in normative political principles is precisely that they believe them to be true.

When they no longer believe this or when this is threatened, their very motivation to engage in the process of political dialogue evaporates. Unfortunately this throws out of kilter what for Rawls is the foundation of the liberal constructivist process: our equality as moral persons, which he defines as that “sufficiently strong desire to act upon whatever principles are eventually adopted” on reaching a settled Reflective Equilibrium.

This of course is a matter which philosophers have to leave to empirical psychology: but if, as I suspect, the reason most people are committed to their Considered Moral Judgements is that they believe them to be true, then constructivism, by demanding that we set this belief aside, will have undermined its own foundations.

Barry Gardiner is the Labour Member of Parliament for Brent North, before which he was a lecturer in philosophy.