| OCR Text |
Show Chapter X. Rawls's Instrumentalism 448 situation in which equally positioned agents compete for scarce resources to further their unstated, mutually conflicting ends. These circumstances are compelling to us because most of us understand what it means to have to compete for scarce resources in our daily lives. To show that these circumstances plus the other special conditions that define the original position generate certain principles of justice would provide a powerful incentive for us to accept them, for it would depict those principles as a rational outcome of conditions essentially reflected in our experience. It would thereby appeal to our actual life situations, independent of the particular values and moral convictions any of us may happen to have; and in so doing, gain objective authority for each of us. This is what an objective moral justification should do. By contrast, the reformulations in the Dewey Lectures require that each of the parties' conceptions of the good be constrained by their shared highestorder interests in developing and exercising their senses of justice. To stipulate at the outset that the parties are overridingly motivated to act on principles of justice is to ascribe to them a motivation that a fortiori overrides the motivational incentive of the circumstances of justice. This means that each of the parties is more concerned to develop and exercise her sense of justice than she is to acquire sufficient resources to further the other ends that are peculiarly hers. That is, each party wants to become just more than anything else, and everything else she wants is subordinate to this one. Second, the parties must therefore share the interest of developing and exercising their senses of justice as a nonconflicting highest-order interest. Third, this interest must be partially determinate, since they must therefore have some prior conception of what justice is, in order to be moved to develop and exercise their sense of it (to see this, try substituting "sight" for "justice"). But the relative determinateness of the parties' conception of justice in turn further undermines the sense in which they can be said to choose just principles through rational negotiation, consistently with the assumption of pure procedural justice (TJ 120, 136). It is hard to see how a shared antecedent desire to develop and exercise one's sense of justice, of which each party has an antecedent conception, could fail to influence the outcome of the procedure of rational deliberation that the parties undergo in the original position; and how that antecedent conception of justice could fail to bias the process of deliberation as well. These revisions thus move Rawls's account closer to a conception of perfect procedural justice, in which we begin with an antecedent conception of what justice requires and rig the procedure so as to produce that outcome. These revisions also undermine Rawls's claim, first made in A Theory of Justice (128) and developed more fully in the Dewey Lectures (557-60, 561, 564, 571), that the parties are not bound by antecedent moral ties. How can they have an antecedent conception of justice and a shared, overriding interest in © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
