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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 445 with identifiable tastes, interests, and values. Thus they must be prepared, as we have seen a transpersonally rational moral point of view requires, to give up all that is central to their prior sense of self for the sake of those principles which they agree are to regulate their behavior. But since they are also assumed by Rawls to be primarily concerned in the original position to advance their own interests and conceptions of the good in the subsequent society, it is difficult to see how both conditions can be satisfied; and how they can therefore choose principles of justice under the constraints of the original position at all. Rawls's Humean commitment to principles of egocentric rationality comes into direct conflict with the transpersonally rational moral point of view he so eloquently describes at TJ 537. 7. Rawls's Instrumentalism But now suppose this dilemma solved, as do Rawls's critics. Suppose, that is, that the truth of the continuity thesis is consistent with the parties' choice of some principles of justice that govern their society once the veil of ignorance is lifted. In this case, there are implications both for Rawls's essentially Instrumentalist justification of the two principles of justice, and for the method of wide reflective equilibrium in which they are embedded. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls seems clearly committed to justifying these principles as necessary, instrumentally rational means for furthering the interests of free and instrumentally rationally persons (TJ 11, 16, 47, 94, 172), regardless of what these interests are (TJ 129; also see 432). In determining the basic structure of the well-ordered society, these principles indirectly constrain the interests, aspirations and conceptions of the good of its citizens, and so the actions they take to realize them: In justice as fairness, persons accept in advance a principle of equal liberty ... They implicitly agree, therefore, to conform their conceptions of their good to what the principles of justice require, or at least not to press claims which directly violate them (TJ 31; emphasis added). Rawls's concept of the original position is thus designed to produce the choice of the two principles of justice as an outcome of the parties' recognition in the original position that under conditions of moderate scarcity of resources to which all have a prima facie equal claim, this is the most instrumentally rational way for each of them to secure their own interests in the resultant wellordered society (TJ 119; also see Section 22). Now the continuity thesis also implies that from the point of view of any single individual in the original position, the two principles of justice are necessary means to the realization of his system of ends under the circumstances of justice only if, when the veil of ignorance is lifted, and he discovers his own conception of the good, he has no cause to regret his choice of the two principles, no matter what that conception of the good turns out to be (TJ 421-22). But as we have already seen, Rawls himself acknowledges that © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
