A Defense of Rawls - Josh Morganstein

The Okin reading, while certainly enjoyable and enlightening, presents a quite different lens for viewing Rawls than I had when reading A Theory of Justice. Okin levies a thoroughgoing criticism of Rawls’s perceived dismissal, exclusion, or lack of attention paid to gender structures in society. This critique has many facets, many of which have already been illuminated by other blog posts: Rawls’s reliance on a tradition that was certainly flawed in terms of its treatment of women, assumption of a just family, and emphasis on heads of family (presumably male, unless in a single-parent household) being represented in the original position, to name a few. But I don’t think these critiques quite detract from the utility, viability, or persuasiveness of Rawls’s theory. 

Let’s start with Okin’s complaint about the assumption of just families. To be quite frank, I don’t really see the problem with that assumption. Of course, the family structure has not been historically just, but Rawls’s view isn’t a historical view. It is an ideal social process view. Rawls assumes other things that we would take issue with if we were concerned with history and real-world details. For example, he assumes that the original position participants are rational and mutually disinterested. That would be quite a dubious assumption in the real world, but Rawls isn’t operating from that framework. The whole point of Rawls’s ideal theory is to demonstrate a theory of justice as fairness, arrived at through certain assumptions and principles in a thought experiment. Rawls’s assumptions and theory is intentionally divorced from history—it’s not supposed to take into account those factors, as that would defeat the point of the theory. A Rawlsean framework gives us an ideal to strive for as a society. Moving back into the practical realm, the measures we would take to get to that society would of course pay close attention to the injustices of history—not just from a feminist perspective, but with attention paid to race and class and a whole host of other factors. 

As Jemma mentioned in her blog post, Okin’s argument for the ranking of gender injustice above that of race or class injustice is unproductive at best and blatantly inaccurate at worst. Indeed, critical theory serves its best purpose when it’s used as a lens from which to view the world, one which implicitly complements other lenses. Some of the most useful academic exercises I’ve ever experienced have been in Professor Taw’s Gov 70 and 156 classes, when we read traditional IR theory (Waltz, Morgenthau, Thucydides, Mearsheimer, Locke, Hobbes, etc.), and then read critical theory from a wide range of perspectives (feminist theory, Marxist theory, critical race theory and theories of indigeneity, post-colonial theory, and a couple others). Each reading gave us a lens through which to view the world, and a way to critique conventional theory for leaving out marginalized perspectives. What is completely unhelpful, however, is when critical theorists assert the supremacy of their lens over all other lenses in what quickly turns into Oppression Olympics.

We can certainly critique Rawls for not sufficiently addressing gender discrimination, and also critique Okin for not sufficiently addressing racial discrimination, and then critique those critiques for not sufficiently addressing a wide range of other types of oppression. Eventually, we will get to a point in which we say, “Okay, we must address all the oppression and discrimination that has occurred throughout history. We will do this by creating a just society in which every human, regardless of race, class, gender, etc. will have basic civil and political liberties, equal access to education, access to all careers, a baseline set of social and economic advantages, and so on.” But at that point, we have literally just returned to Rawls’s ideal theory.

I know that Okin’s critique is more complex than I am laying it out to be, and I think she does have some really amazing points (I found the point about Rawls and conscription to be particularly interesting), and I am admittedly using the other blog posts’ eloquent summaries of her argument as a crutch. Yet I believe that an accurate reading of Rawls fundamentally accounts for the overwhelming majority of issues Okin raises. As Henry pointed out in his blog post, Rawls can quite easily be read from a feminist perspective. In addition to what Henry brought up, I would simply pose the question: How could a society that truly treats every member as a free and equal moral person ever support or condone injustice on the basis of gender? How could such a society ever endorse an unjust family structure? In fact, doesn’t a society that truly believes in free and equal moral persons have an obligation by virtue of the nature of its very existence to do all it can to rectify the past injustices on the basis of gender in order to preserve its basic principles? I think an accurate reading of Rawls actually gets us to a place in which we are considering gender injustices, but it does so by building a framework that considers all injustices.