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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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57. John Rawls

Professor John Rawls teaches philosophy at Harvard University. He published in 1971 A Theory of Justice, which according to the New York Times Book Review of December 3, 1972, is one of the five most significant books reviewed during 1972.
John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1921. He obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University, and taught both at Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1962 he was nominated to the faculty at Harvard University.

Justice seems an expensive commodity. How would you formulate the two main principles of a required social justice, which would be needed for an equilibrium in a society, which seems a priority of the greatest importance. How could this be achieved in the immediate future without losing the kinds of freedom we have now - we are talking now about the Western World, of course.

 

What I described in the book1 is a kind of justice that would be characterized by two different principles: One that would apply to political institutions and to the right of civil law and economic institutions; that principle says that liberties ought to be equal, that all citizens ought to have in a certain class equal liberties. If these cannot always be equal, at any rate there should be a sense in which the total system of liberties is equal for all menbers of society. The other principle deals with the distribution of economic and social advantages and it concerns the organizations, say, of firms, universities, and other forms of association; the other principle holds that social advantages and economic goods ought to be always, so far as possible, distributed, that those who have more make a contribution to those who have less.

 

But is this somewhat utopian theory not contrary to the grain of human nature, to accept less growth, less wealth, for the benefit of all?

This raises a very different kind of question, namely, to what extent is the view that I discuss a kind of view that might hold within an advanced industrial and technological society? What you mean is, How far can different nations be expected to make sacrifices or, to use your phrase, to share the wealth with others in the world? There's a complicating factor about the imperfections, to use an euphemism of governments elsewhere. Political problems arise. In my book I discussed more or less what form justice would take or should take under reasonably favorable conditions within one society.

 

Is it not against the nature of man to be willing to share the wealth of one small minority with the overwhelming majority? Also in affluent nations? You know what Michael Harrington2 in the Accidental Century pointed out, that forty million people in American were still poor.

 

Whether it's against their nature I don't know. It has been argued that what the nature of people is depends upon the society in which they grow up. I'm inclined to think - although I cannot give a real argument for this - that if you had the kind of society that I try to describe and if people grew up and developed under those kinds of institutions answering to these principles, then I think that they would be prepared to share. At least within the same social unit. I do agree that it's a lot harder to make this argument if you're talking about people in other cultures and other nations, where you don't have some kind of common political institutions in regard to regulating each others demands. It is a lot harder, I agree, to extend any such notions on a global scale. There's no doubt about that.

 

You argue in your book with Hobbes3 that man should enter into a social contract. But how do you envisage this?

 

Well, it is not any sort of actual historical contract. What I imagine is a certain way in which people view their relations. They can be asked, or at any rate they might entertain this thought and try to see how this view would work, so that they asked themselves what sort of contract or agreement they would make, if they were under a certain sort of condition. The ideal would be to ask oneself, What would I be prepared to agree to if I did not have certain kinds of information, if I did not know my special position, if I did not know some things about my particular taste? And questions of that kind.

Those are reasonable sorts of constraints for people to accept. The ideal would be to try to develop in some detail, the kind of principles that people would agree to if they lack certain kinds of information. For example, take international law: If a representative state did not know who had the larger armies, who was best situated and all the other military information, then it might agree to certain principles of international law; but it is the possession of so much information about particular contingencies and imbalances of power that makes it hard to reach an agreement. The same thing applies between members of the same society. If we don't know our social class and if we don't know a lot of other things about ourselves, then it's possible for us to recognize that we would assent to certain sorts of general principles. I try to argue in my book that those turn out to be things that we would recognize as principles of justice.

 

But the science of computers, the ‘computer spaghetti,’ as Kenneth Boulding4 says, is flourishing at such a fantastic speed that in the near future people will not have less information about each other at their fingertips, that it would make it even harder to enter into a social contract.

 

I don't mean that people actually lack this information. In order to construct a moral theory, the kind of contract that one ought to make is that one, so to speak, agrees not to rely on certain sorts of information. One reasons as if one did not have that information. Although, of course, actually we do have that information. The moral argument has to be that there are moral grounds for excluding that information and not using it. The theory is not designed as a political theory in a sense that it is to account for the things that actually happen. It's not meant to account for actual international behavior, or actual political behavior. It's supposed to account - insofar as it accounts for anything - for the sorts of moral judgments that we might make when we are ourselves impartial and uninvolved. It would account for the sort of moral ideals that we have - insofar as we have any - and could be persuaded to act on them. It's supposed to be a moral theory, not a social theory.

 

It would require moral geometry to work this theory out?

 

I make the assumption that one does not have certain kinds of information, that we have certain general sorts of ends and all these other things,

and then from those assumptions I try to show the way. The argument is intuitive and has lots of gaps, as it has now. But the idea is to show that certain sorts of moral principles would be adopted and agreed to under these conditions. Conditions being those of an idealized sort that need certain kinds of constraints.

 

But, as you call it, we must develop a sterner, more fastidious kind of justice. Increasing people's awareness for this kind of social justice you speak of. Would you tend to agree with Skinner5 that there could be ways to achieve these results by rearchitecting, by redesigning, by programming the environment in order to make this kind of approach generally available?

 

Well, I think it's true. Most would agree that the kind of institutions that we live under, in fact the kind of desires that we come to have and the kind of ideals, moral or otherwise, that we acquire, there's no doubt that most would agree that a certain amount of programming would have to be done. The important issue is by what principles is the environment to be programmed. The view which I am suggesting in my book is that in choosing a principle of justice or in arguing a certain conception of justice, one wants to adopt a conception that if it is institutionalized, that if the institutions satisfy their conceptions, people do come to have the kinds of desires and ideals that will affirm their conception - in other words, that they will come to adopt it. One argument that I argue, indeed, is that the principles of justice I propose are of the kind that they do encourage people, as if they were actually followed, to adopt these very same principles. They have to be kind of self-reinforcing. Where I would differ with Skinner is the principles on which I think it should be programmed and how it should be done, as well as the end result which we are aiming at.

 

Where does politics and dire reality come into this? Because society is definitely still run by politicians, who have no notion what you are talking about.

 

Well, I wouldn't say they had no notion. But undoubtedly they have a different one, or they don't pay all that much attention perhaps to any moral notions. This is a problem. How one gets from a situation where any social ideals or justice that one thinks to be correct are not fol-

lowed - how one moves from that to a situation where they are followed, that's a part of the moral theory that I haven't really talked about very much. Indeed, hardly at all, because that involves all kinds of, particularly political, matters about the sort of strategy that one should follow in trying to bring those things about.

 

Limits to Growth is based on a global how-to-manage-this-planet. It seems rather hard to make even a beginning of entering social justice into the present global structures. How do you view this overall dilemma we face at this late hour?

 

I haven't attempted at all to discuss any of these matters, global matters. One ought to recognize - and I would be the first to recognize - that it's obvious; that - as all philosophers do, discussing various kinds of morals, ideals and the like - they have to recognize that these are, viewed in a certain way, very impracticable, while any political action to bring them about is very, very remote. How to create a more just international order? I have not actually discussed any of these matters. Frankly, I am very pessimistic that the kind of ideas that I discuss would have any real substantial influence on that process.

 

You know Camus6 believed that the absurd was born out of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world, in other words you have set forth in great detail a highly valuable theory on how to improve social justice in your country, in this part of the world.7 How hopeful are you that mankind, increasing to seven billion people in the next twenty-five years, will live then, by what kind of justice?

 

I don't really know. Of course nobody knows. I guess I am a bit pessimistic. I see the direction even in my own country less bright than it was twenty years ago. It is a matter of political fact that the military have a lot more influence in our country than they used to. This is a result of more and more of our taking over certain gaps in the structure of world power. All this is having bad effects. We haven't been able to solve the problems of racial minorities in our country. I think that the presidential leadership the last few years has been very bad in these respects. I am not really very optimistic, even in my own country, that one would see in the near future the definite trend towards a more just

society in a sense in which I would conceive it. It's practically possible in America, there is a material base for it. But I don't think that socially it's bound to come into existence.

 

Have you had any reactions from politicians on your best-selling book?

 

No, I haven't.


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