| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 449 developing and exercising their sense of it without being bound by antecedent moral ties? This overriding, nonconflicting interest in justice is an antecedent moral tie. To each party, it stipulates not that that individual should try to obtain as large a quantity of primary goods as he can, but rather that that same individual should see to it that each and every one of the parties, including himself, should obtain a fair allocation of primary goods. That is, it requires each party in the original position to be cognizant of the well-being of all of them, thereby violating the stipulation of mutual disinterest. Furthermore, the more fully the sense of justice is conceived as a motivationally effective intentional object for the parties in the original position, the more motivationally otiose the subjective and objective circumstances of justice become - and the less the rational appeal of Rawls's argument to the unconverted, the cynical, the opportunistic, or the unabashedly self-seeking, all of whom may hold, rather like the Hobbesian Free Rider, the belief that giving primacy to justice for all over the exigencies of personal self-aggrandizement is a naiveté of those with the noblesse oblige to indulge it. Indeed, that the parties are overridingly motivated to realize and exercise the "capacity ... to understand, to apply and to act from (and not merely in accordance with) the principles of justice" (DL 525) tautologically requires them to choose the two principles of justice in order to realize this aim. Rawls has ensured that it is instrumentally rational for the parties in the original position to choose the two principles of justice by stipulating in advance that this is what they are most highly motivated to choose, regardless of the further ends they serve. He has built the choice of the two principles of justice into the original position in such a way as to effectively nullify the force of their instrumental rationality altogether. Thus Rawls has in effect dropped the Instrumentalist strategy of justification and substituted a more purely deductive one, just as he originally intended (TJ 119-120). The two principles of justice are, in the Dewey Lectures, no longer justified as instrumentally rational means to the promotion of even a circumscribed range of conceptions of the good. They are stipulated to be final ends, i.e. part of each of the parties' conceptions of the good itself, in the premises from which they are then deduced as outcomes of deliberation. This stricter form of Deductivism creates its own problems. Whereas Gewirth began with very weak premises and had to add stronger, more value-laden assumptions to the argument as it proceeded in order to derive his principle of generic consistency as a conclusion, Rawls adds stronger, more value-laden assumptions to his premises - the conception of the original position - in order to preserve the value-neutrality of the derivation itself. But this makes it harder to conceive the original position itself as generating, rather than presupposing, the moral ties it was its original function to justify. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
