| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 413 tables and pillows. Nor should it consist in a cross-cultural statistical study of the variety of moral codes that govern various human societies. Instead we need to learn from the procedures of decision-making and verification used in the natural sciences, and from the conception of objectivity defined by those procedures. We have seen in Chapter IX.4 that in the natural sciences, a judgment is taken provisionally to be objectively valid if it is the outcome of the procedures of inductive logic: observation, adequate gathering of data, inductive hypothesis formulation, deduction of predicted outcomes, testing of those predictions under controlled conditions, and intersubjective replication of predicted experimental results. Objective scientific truth ideally is conceived as a function of rational investigative procedure carried through without error. Similarly, Rawls suggests, objective moral truth, ideally, is a function of a rational decision procedure carried through without error. In the remainder of this early paper, Rawls proposes such a procedure, and refines it further in the series of publications that succeeded it.6 But it is not until A Theory of Justice that he is prepared unapologetically to defend the thesis that moral philosophy is to be considered "part of the theory of rational choice (TJ 16, 47, 172);" and to assert that "[t]he argument aims eventually to be strictly deductive (TJ 121)." In yet later writings, Rawls had occasion to revise and qualify this stance.7 In Political Liberalism, he decisively disowns it (PL 53, fn. 7). His considered qualification of his earlier enthusiasm about the extent to which moral philosophy could aspire to objective universality is a tribute both to the seriousness with which he took his critics' objections, and to his commitment to the value of Socratic metaethics more generally. I believe Rawls took his critics' objections a bit too seriously, and did not need to retrench quite as much as he did. Nevertheless, there are serious problems with the Instrumentalist strategy of metaethical justification to which Rawls, like all devotees of the Humean conception of the self, is committed; and in this chapter I examine the particular ways in which this strategy leads his metaethical project astray. My analysis has no implications for the truth or falsity of Rawls's substantive, normative theory of justice. Nor does it imply that this normative theory cannot be metaethically justified. Indeed, I argue, finally, that Rawls's concept of wide reflective equilibrium See his "Justice as Fairness," The Philosophical Review 57 (1958); "The Sense of Justice," The Philosophical Review 62 (1963); Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice," Nomos VI: Justice, Ed. C. J. Friedrich and John Chapman (New York: Atherton Press, 1963); "Distributive Justice," in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Third Series, Ed. Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967); "Distributive Justice: Some Addenda," Natural Law Forum 13 (1968); and "The Justification of Civil Disobedience," in Civil Disobedience, Ed. H. A. Bedau (New York: Pegasus, 1969). 7 See, for example, his "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, 3 (1985), 223-251. 6 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
