the implicit assumptions of dividing a cake: political or comprehensive?

307Human Studies 27: 307–334, 2004.C© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The Implicit Assumptions of Dividing a Cake: Politicalor Comprehensive?

MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOUDepartment of Education, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus(E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. Rawls’s recent modification of his theory of justice claims that political liberalism isfree-standing and “falls under the category of the political. It works entirely within that domainand does not rely on anything outside it.” In this article I pursue the metatheoretical goal ofobtaining insight into the anthropological assumptions that have remained so far unacknowl-edged by Rawls and critics alike. My argument is that political liberalism has a dependenceon comprehensive liberalism and its conception of a self-serving subjectivity that is far morebinding as well as undesirable than it has been so far acknowledged. I proceed with a heuristicapproach that introduces us to the possibility that political liberalism presupposes tacitly theOccidental metanarrative of reason harnessing rampant self-interest and subordinating it to ahigher-order interest. As the presuppositions of political liberalism emerge, I draw from thedebate between Rawls and Habermas in order to illustrate my argument for the existence of adependence on these presuppositions. I outline some implications of the anthropological basisof political liberalism and conclude by exemplifying them with reference to Rawls’s commentson the division of a cake.

“Ah! That model of equal pieces of cake, a model that has perhaps neverstopped haunting our dreams of a just distribution, even if it leads to theimpasse of a theory of justice!”

(Paul Ricoeur, 2000, p. xi)

Introduction

According to Rawls, political liberalism “can be formulated independentlyof any particular comprehensive doctrine, religious, philosophical or moral.[I]t is not presented as depending upon, or as presupposing any such view”(emphasis added; 1995, p. 135). What it presupposes is a notion of the person;therefore it is crucial for Rawls’s new version of his theory that a “conceptionof citizens as persons be seen as a political conception and not as one belongingto a comprehensive doctrine” (Rawls,1988a, p. 255). I argue that neither polit-ical liberalism nor its conception of the person is political if by the latter termone means, as Rawls does, independent of any comprehensive view. I detect adependence of political liberalism on comprehensive notions of interest and, tosome extent, on anthropological presuppositions of an egoistic self, enshrined

308 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU

by hegemonic philosophical doctrines and Occidental political culturesalike.

Rawls distinguishes between the political and the comprehensive also inhis debate with Habermas (1995). What is most relevant from that historicand fascinating debate to our discussion is the following. Habermas, as Rawlsacknowledges, argues that political liberalism cannot avoid the questions oftruth and the philosophical conception of the person. Rawls maintains that“political liberalism avoids reliance on both of these ideas” (1995, p. 150).To justify my criticisms of Rawls, I shall discuss Habermas’s ethics later on,not to take sides in their debate, but only to better illustrate the dependenceof the political on the comprehensive. My argument is closer to Habermas,but whilst he places the emphasis on the tacit epistemological commitmentsof political liberalism to philosophy, I stress the unspoken anthropologicaldependence of political liberalism on traditional-comprehensive liberalism.True, some criticisms concerning the ethnocentrism of liberalism and its un-comfortable dependence on forms of individualism could equally apply toboth theories, albeit in a different way. But Habermas’s awareness of the in-eluctable comprehensiveness of the Political facilitates the deployment of myargument and will serve as a directive in this paper without any assump-tions that his theory is the only alternative to Rawls’s or the most satisfactoryone.

However, before we proceed, it should be noted here that to find a residueof a certain worldview in a theory does not amount to inflating this residue to amain characteristic of the theory. Rawls may not break totally with the notionof an egocentric self and with the opposition of private versus public (as weshall see later on) but he departs notably from other theorists of the AmericanSchool on this specific point. “Mainstream classical theorists of the Americanpolity [. . .] begin with accounts of (self-interested) human nature, and regardpolitical institutions as mechanisms designed to minimize the evils thatresult when individuals pursue private gains – whether through the marketor through politics” (Kukathas and Petit, 1990, p. 126). Rawls’s distancefrom the above should be emphasized but without losing sight of those unac-knowledged affinities of his theory with liberal orthodoxy. To anticipate therest of the article, I shall argue that Rawls’s unacknowledged anthropologicalassumptions resemble those of continental liberalism and Kantianism inparticular.

Rawls’s assertions to the opposite are due to his missing, possibly, thesubtle dependence of the political on comprehensive views about moralselfhood as a result of the concessions he has made to communitarianism.Those concessions have pushed him to demarcate clearly what is politicaland what is metaphysical. But the dependence of political agents on inter-pretations of interests and selfhood I trace here is not limited to the sense

THE IMPLICIT ASSUMPTIONS OF DIVIDING A CAKE 309

put forward by Sandel (1982), i.e., the agents’ inescapable embeddedness intheir communities. It operates at a metatheoretical level too, i.e., in the in-eluctably philosophical-anthropological ways of articulating the agents’ beingpolitical.

A disclaimer is needed here. My argument is not that Rawls’s claim ofpolitical liberalism is contradictory. It is true that his later work has beenentirely consistent in its insistence on the break with metaphysics. And by“free-standing” theory, he means not free of all assumptions whatever, but freeof disputable or controversial philosophical or religious accounts of human-ity and the world. My argument is, then, that the way he defines the politicalagainst the comprehensive is unwittingly tailored to the Western metaphysicalneed to elevate intuitive1 and hegemonic liberal ideas about the self to thetranshistorical status of nondisputable and commonsensical wisdom.2 Thus, Ido not question the pertinence of his theory to the whole debate on justice byassuming that there is supposedly a theory that is more “political” than his.What I am saying is that the problems of a just regulation of human affairs can-not be solved by a radical segregation of the political and the comprehensive.The former is never uncontaminated with the latter and claims to the contrarymerely accommodate in political theory a subtle ethnocentric blindness to ourown dependence on our implicit assumptions.

Rawls, I shall argue, has not questioned enough the anthropological modelthat underlies modern political-moral theories and its comprehensive charac-ter. As a result, his account of procedural justice seems vulnerable to criticismsderiving from a postmetaphysical point of view.3 If we overcome the tradi-tional versions of essentialism about human nature that present it as stable andfixed (i.e,. morally loaded with inherent kindness or unsocial self-centerednessor both tendencies) and pursue the potentialities of nonessentialist accountsof selfhood, we may find ways to articulate moral and political theory Other-wise. We may radicalize our conception of justice as well as our expectationsfrom human beings, their cultures, and institutions.

My criticisms are not to diminish the significance of Rawls’s contributionto a progressive turn in Occidental politics and the drastic shift liberalism hastaken after Rawls’s reformulation of his initial insights. They show, rather, theshortcomings of a theory that does not sufficiently radicalize its conceptualdevices and strategies due to its appearing unsuspecting of its own “philo-sophical” character. Like other formalist and cognitivist ethics of liberalistaffinities (Habermas’s ethics being also one of them) it abstains from dis-cussing or brackets questions of anthropology and subjectivity. However, asGadamer (1981, pp. 21–39) has shown, there is no formal ethics that does notinvolve some material presuppositions concerning the self and social consti-tutions. I will examine some of these presuppositions in order to show howthey affect the liberal idea of the Political.


A Heuristic Approach to the Implicitly Individualist Assumptionsof Political Liberalism

Rawls’s theory is one of the most widely discussed political and ethical ac-counts in the 20th century and needs no detailed presentation of its basicpoints. Hence I will refer here only to those ideas that are directly relevant tothe issue of political liberalism’s noncomprehensive dimension.

Rawls has developed a theory within which “the principles of justice areagreed to in an initial situation that is fair” (1981, p. 12). Roughly sketched, thisconjecture is reminiscent both of contractarian and Kantian insights, divestedhowever of all past metaphysical undertones. The contract among Rawls’sparticipants in a moral discourse is the outcome of an “original position” ofequality – a model conception in which everybody is a free and rational subjectwilling to discuss what is just or unjust. Divested of any contingent properties,the self in the original position appears disinterested and unprejudiced, andis equipped only with the armature of the moral personhood (Rawls, 1971,p. 12).

This cognitivist approach to moral questions by the early Rawls, assuminga free, rational and autonomous social actor, appears at first glance to bridgethe gap between the Is and the Ought, society and individual, reason andmaterial world and other dualisms that Kantianism sharpened. The validityof a principle is not guaranteed by maxims that are monologically tested byisolated actors. It is guaranteed by society itself as totality of rational memberswho are concerned to further their (generalizable) interests and claim a fullparticipation in the total goods of society (Rawls, 1980, pp. 552–553). Rawlsuses the notions of a “reflective equilibrium” (1971, p. 20) and consensus inorder to further his reformulation of Kantian ethics and avoid the pitfalls offoundationalism and rigourism.

Rawls has moved from his initial demand for an empty moral self afterhaving being criticized for favoring a cluster of Western liberal ideals ascandidates for universalization. Sandel’s (1982) and other communitarians’criticisms of Rawls’s formalist account of the moral self 4 led him to reformu-lations. Since 1980, the veil of ignorance that divests the self of preexistingproperties and goals is no longer thick enough to cover all the actors’ beliefsand interests so long as they do not affect the actors’ political attitudes. Inthis way Rawls allows room for religious or metaphysical views to flourishwithin a pluralist society. He no longer demands that his actors be bereft ofall contingent orientations as well as philosophical standpoints. He expectsthem to agree on a political conception of justice and act as political personsregardless of the specific ways they find to ground the political liberalistvalues they endorse in their own comprehensive worldviews. “A conceptionof the person in a political view, for example, the conception of citizens as freeand equal persons, need not involve, so I believe, questions of philosophical


psychology or a metaphysical doctrine of the nature of the self ” (Rawls, 1999,p. 395).

With this minimalist account of the political, Rawls hopes to minimizedrastically the exclusive character of traditional liberalism. Thus, “central tothe idea of public reason is that it neither criticizes nor attacks any compre-hensive doctrine, religious or non-religious, except insofar as that doctrineis incompatible with the essentials of public reason and a democratic polity”(Rawls, 1999, p. 574). The consensus that is attainable within such a po-litical liberalism is termed “overlapping” (Rawls, 1985, p. 225). This can beachieved only under conditions of justice, that is, equality and opportunity, andit can guarantee social order and integrity. Evidently, this political consensusis far more secure than the fragile consensus occurring when the coordinatingmechanism is the individual or group interest (Rawls, 1988b, p. 8). Anotherconsequence of this shift is a concession to pragmatism: the narrowing of therange of the moral compared to the range of the political. It is made clear thatno metaphysical or epistemological claims by this theory are allowed (Rawls,1999, p. 394).5

Within the new version of Rawls’s theory, even if one has reasons to reject adoctrine as irrational, one has no means and no authority to exclude it from thesociocultural landscape so long as it does not jeopardize social stability andpolitical order. Thus, people should limit metaphysics to the private sphere(Rawls, 1985) (and/or what he calls the “background culture”) and engagein deliberation on justice within the confines of public political culture in thelight of a public reason (Rawls, 1999, p. 576). Rawls proposes a “reasonablepluralism” to replace the mere pluralism of Western liberalism.

The Reasonable, the Rational, and the Dependence on Metanarratives

Certainly, a “reasonable pluralism” presupposes also a specific meaning ofthe “reasonable.” The Rawlsian segregation of the reasonable and the rationalis reminiscent of Kant’s distinction of reason in its practical and pure modes.Reason itself appears to be in some way commonsensical. “The actors arerational in their deliberations to the extent that sensible principles of rationalchoice guide their decisions” (Rawls, 1980, p. 528). The reasonable elementdictates the fair terms of cooperation whereas the rational offers the concep-tions of the good that move the members of a group (Rawls, 1993).6 In Rawls’swords,

all who cooperate must benefit, or share in common burdens, in someappropriate fashion as judged by a suitable benchmark of comparison.This element in social cooperation I call the Reasonable. The other elementcorresponds to the Rational: it expresses a conception of each participant’srational advantage, what as individuals, they are trying to advance (latteremphasis added; 1999, p. 316).


In my interpretation of Rawls, the reasonable presupposes and subor-dinates the rational, because the principles of the former “limit, and in aKantian doctrine limit absolutely, the final ends that can be pursued” (em-phasis added; Rawls, 1980, p. 530). This interpretation may seem arbitrary,granted Rawls’s insistence on the complementarity of the two elements, but itfinds textual support in the following Rawlsian formulation: “The Reasonablepresupposes the Rational, because, without conceptions of the good that movemembers of the group, there is no point to social cooperation nor to notionsof right and justice [. . . ]. The Reasonable subordinates the Rational becauseits principles limit [. . . ] the final ends that can be pursued” (Rawls, 1999,p. 317). If the ends are set by the rational and then purified by the reason-able, it follows logically that the rational is temporally or logically prior tothe reasonable and the reasonable normatively prior to the rational. The factthat the reasonable and the rational are complementary does not entail thatthey are necessarily symmetrical temporally (or logically) and normatively.Therefore, my examination of them here in terms of priority is not at oddswith the admission of their complementarity.

In other words, as I see it, the rational element corresponds to the strate-gic reason that urges agents, collectives or particular groups to promote theirprivate or group interests according to their own understanding of the good ina self-affirmative way. In this sense it is monological.7 The reasonable corre-sponds to practical reason that defines what is right and limits those strategicaccounts of the good that would be in conflict with the right. The idea thatthe reasonable presupposes the rational proves that Rawls, at least in his laterwork, avoids giving a temporal/logical priority to the right over the good.Communitarian critics seem to confound the different kinds of priority (tem-poral or normative) when criticizing Rawls.8 The above definitions of bothelements prove that, for Rawls, the rational (setting and justifying particularconceptions of the good) has a temporal/logical priority over the reasonable(limiting the ends to be pursued on grounds of public appropriateness) whereasthe latter has a normative priority over the former. The temporal priority ofthe rational guarantees the accommodation in liberalism of the idea of thesubject’s embeddedness in civilization and staves off the charge of ethno-centrism, since no worldview is presented as less rational than another.9 Thenormative priority of the reasonable (i.e., its limiting the final ends) guaranteesthat such embeddedness will have no political cost. Of course, the reasonableis not meant by Rawls to operate only as a dam of undesirable individualchoice but also to ward off the possibility of a state power that would beservile to a single dominant comprehensive view and coercive to all others.It also removes the problematic – and ethnocentric – claim that somehow wehave access to knowledge of other people’s true interests.10 Awareness of thisleads me to clarify that my account of priorities above should not be read


as an assumption that Rawls treats the plurality of worldviews as a result ofself-serving tendencies. For Rawls, more often than not, pluralism is simplythe outcome of the free exercise of reason. However, the fact of pluralismand its significance for democracy and fighting oppression is one thing; theassumption of people’s clinging on their rational advantage (see quotationsabove) as specified by, or associated with, their particular doctrine is quiteanother. It is this latter point that is amenable to my analysis and not theformer.

In what follows, I will use my account of priorities concerning reason inRawls’s theory as a springboard for broaching the issue of political liberalism’santhropological-metaphysical commitments.

If the reasonable is less strategic and more “centrifugal,” and if the ratio-nal denotes private or specific group self-affirmative accounts of the good,then the temporal or logical priority of the latter over the former evidentlyreflects anthropological-theoretical assumptions and has concomitant impli-cations. It has an anthropological significance, for it entails that a sense ofprivate or group interest (in its form, not its varying content) is transhistoricaland always at one’s disposal prior to an openness to the Other, i.e., prior toopinion-formative deliberation. If that is so, the rational might correspondto a survival mechanism of subjects and communities perennially aiming attheir own perpetuation and hence being essentially introverted and centripetal.By being temporally prior to the disinterested reasonable, and disrupted byit every time the reasonable sets limits to final ends, the rational functions,by implication, as an indicator of the anthropological limits and obstacles adisinterested and other-oriented Ought confronts.11

Thus, I would argue that the problem with Rawls’s rationalism is not theabstraction from concrete social accounts of the good, as communitarianswould claim, but the distinction of reason in such a way that one of its parts ispronounced guilty of strategic, self- or group-interested concerns. This verypart happens to be the one that has temporal or logical priority and has to becontrolled by a more “innocent” and normatively more appropriate element.This distinction affirms a qualitative political asymmetry in the relation be-tween the parts of reason, since as we saw, one element is more appropriate todeal with the private (or group-collective) sphere whereas the other concernsthe public sphere of action coordination. And it also establishes implicitlyand simultaneously an inner conflict within the subject (echoing Kant’s ideaof human “unsocial sociability”). The subject is moved first by conceptionsof the good associated with the rational element and, by implication, investsemotionally in them. But then the reasonable element enters the picture tobridle the unsocial dependence on self- or group-interest and motivate anattachment to generalizable interests in justice and social order. This segrega-tion of reason in two elements attributes, again by implication, an ahistorical


(or transhistorical) character to the conflict between (un)conscious desires onthe one hand and the drive of self-preservation and life within a society onthe other.12

It also renders rational persuasion more problematic than it actually is,for it sets insuperable psychological-anthropological limits to opinion- andwill-formation. The reasonable might be accommodated within the rational,or found in it, i.e., a political conception of justice might be locatable in oreven justifiable through a comprehensive doctrine. But this would amountto a true dismantling of the tension in orientation between them only if onecould show that all possible (including future) rational worldviews would notor could not go beyond political liberalism or transgress it. Apart from beingblatantly metaphysical, such a move presupposes that one turn to each andevery worldview to corroborate the claim that private autonomy as inwardlyoriented always comprises public autonomy as outwardly oriented (and of aspecific version, that of political liberalism). As this move is not desirable,the Rawlsian tacit anthropological architectonic allows the overcoming of theconflictual interconnection of public and private to be merely accidental andat the surface – as the conflict lurks within. The moral subject may be movedby any kind of reasons for acting in one way or other but as a political subjects/he has to harness whatever private goal-setting undermines the acceptablestandards of political conduct. Although I believe that this truly reflects aminimal expectation one might have from a political agent, I find it insufficient.It presupposes that public dialogue has no deep reforming effect on people’smoral feelings (to the extent that those are indeed self-oriented) since thepossible conflict between their rational life choices and the reasonable publicexpectations is not resolved but rather glossed over. The conflict becomespossible by the fact that, as presented in Rawls’ theory, most rational choicestend to follow self- or group-interest whereas a reasonable choice tends topromote the highest-order interests. The restriction of the former by the latter,however, appears as a form of self-control, not as a profound relativization ofone’s position for the sake of the other members of society, and in this waythe conflict remains underneath.

This conflict, with regard to inward and outward orientation, between therational and the reasonable within the self, appears to enjoy an indisputablecurrency in most Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theories, from liber-alism to utilitarianism, and from Freud to Foucault.13 Hence it has remainedso far unchallenged. Later on, we shall see how it crops up in many Rawl-sian arguments surrounding his theory of justice. What is important here isthat it speaks for a general tendency in the Western philosophical and socialself-understanding to consider the interest-seeking private subject an anthro-pological constant that has to be either combated or checked by the Political.But in this way, individualism as a model of explanation gains precedenceover other possible accounts of human potentialities.


Reason, the Private and the Public, and the Moral Self

The obvious affinity of the asymmetry of the reasonable and the rational withthe well-known Kantian subjugation of pure to practical reason suggests threethings. First, Kantianism and American post-Kantianism achieve the unity ofreason through an inflation of its practical dimension, which sets limits to thetack of pure reasoning (and prevents either acting on the basis of a detrimentalamoralism or the reaching of theoretically ethical-sceptical conclusions).This is because pure reasoning is seen as inherently monological (expressedindividually or collectively), promoting a subject’s or a group’s interest.

Second, Rawls retains Kantian dualisms in this account of the unity ofreason.14 Evidently, the subordination of the rational to the reasonable supportsthe tension between the private and the public – a tension that remains intact inthe following sense. If individuals are to a significant part rational egoists, theirprivate sphere of life, no matter how interconnected with and influenced by thepublic it might be, acquires qualitative priority over their public one, seen fromtheir own point of view. The brittle balance between the two is another thingthat relies on such an implicit tension, since the public sphere is respectedby subjects only insofar as it does not intervene with their understanding oftheir private interest and insofar as it is necessary for their own protection andwell-being.15

Third, Rawls’s assertion that his account of the moral agent refers only topublic identity appears problematic when examined together with the reason-able/rational distinction. For the very normative prioritization of the reason-able over the rational demonstrates that to the extent that the rational is relatedto individualism (or to collectiveness acting as self-interested monad), theindividual (or social group) must be intrinsically interest-seeking. Evidently,this is very far from being a noncomprehensive account of the self. This thirdpoint is crucial for my argument because showing that there is indeed an un-derlying particular conception of the self in Rawls’s theory leads to the idea ofpolitical liberalism being dependent on comprehensive liberalism. Therefore,further elaboration on and examination of it by reading Rawls more closelyis necessary.

Is the Heuristic Justified?

Let us clarify first that being interest-seeking does not determine by itselfthe character of the interest that is sought. Thus, to pursue some interest – tobe “committed” in other words – does not necessarily mean to be an egoist.That is why in my introduction my argument is presented as bifurcated. Iclaim that Rawls presupposes a conception of interest demarcating moralpersonhood that is redolent of anthropological-philosophical assumptions andthereby comprehensive. And I also claim that the very promotion of “political”


liberalism is implicitly preconditioned by an anthropological accommodationof an egoistic dimension of human personhood. If thought through to itsimplications, the following passage suffices to prove the first aspect of myargument:

In formulating a conception of justice for the basic structure of society, westart by viewing each person as a moral person moved by two highest-orderinterests, namely, the interests to realize and to exercize the two powers ofmoral personality. These two powers are the capacity for a sense of right andjustice (the capacity to honor fair terms of cooperation), and the capacityto decide upon, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of the good(emphasis added; Rawls, 1999, p. 365).

Can an account and a hierarchization of interests be political qua free-standing? Are we not interpreting human motivation the moment we starttalking about interests? Furthermore, the moment we consider the humanbeing as capable of developing a sense of right and justice and decidingaccordingly, no matter how formal these capacities appear, the very fact that weemploy the term “capacity” shows that we interpret humanity. And to interpretis to select among competing, existing or possible, alternatives. Evidently,Rawls would not question the inescapability of interpretation and by “free-standing” he would not mean “extra-linguistic.” But he seems to overlook thatany interpretation, no matter how dependent on “intuition” or “common sense”it may be, is relationally (i.e., by being that one and not another) comprehensiveor reliant on a potentially disputable comprehensive set of conceptions aboutthe world. Finally, in this quotation Rawls affirms tacitly what Kant saw asthe anthropological capacity (and necessity) of human beings to be social.However, just as Kant (1978, p. 250; 1992 p. 44) complemented this capacitywith the anthropological human tendency to be egoistic and unsociable, Rawlsacknowledges elsewhere this anthropological parameter, too.

That leads me to consider the second aspect of my argument. Taking dis-tance from Hobbes, Rawls writes:

[. . .] I do not want to be interpreted as assuming a general theory of humanmotivation. When it is supposed that the parties are mutually self-interested,and are not willing to have their interests sacrificed to the others, I amreferring to their conduct and motives as they are taken for granted incases where questions of justice ordinarily arise. Justice is the virtue ofpractices where there are assumed to be competing interests and conflictingclaims, and where it is supposed that persons will press their rights againstone another. That persons are mutually self-interested in certain situationsand for certain purposes, is what gives rise to the question of justice inpractices covering those circumstances. Among an association of saints, ifsuch a community could really exist, disputes about justice could hardlyoccur; for they would all work selflessly together for one end, the glory ofGod as defined by their common religion (emphasis added; 1999, p. 205).16


First, reading between the lines reveals that the association of the tran-scendence of egoism with religion speaks for the supposed impossibility of asecular postmetaphysical drastic limitation of egoism and strategicality. Thecondition of the phrase “if such a community could really exist” underminesthe very claim that this theory has nothing to do with human motivation, forit reveals the ontoanthropological transhistorical space allocated to egoismby Rawls. But even when it comes to the actual claim that all situations ofjustice involve egoism there are problems. Quite often people raise issuesof, let us say, distributive justice for long deprived fellow beings even whenthey expect no direct profit for themselves. Besides, any theory of justice,by being a theory, seeks to determine a situation before it actually occurs,so it works independently of the psychological parameters of a conflict at anempirical-pragmatic level. Thus, the assumption that actual conflicts over jus-tice emanate from self-interest is at best inadequate to cover the whole groundand at worst totally unnecessary.

Moreover, a conception of justice such as the political can be cultivatedin familial and educational settings, hence prior to the entanglement of apolitical actor in a real conflict of that sort. The cultivation of a political con-ception of justice in schools can prove to be valuable for teaching citizenshiplong before children are in a position to take part in actual public debates orexperience conflicts over justice. But, if such cultivation carries with it theideological baggage that in every actual situation to which justice is relevantegoism is also present, then it will perpetuate the conditioning of childrenalong those tacit liberalist lines that are closer to individualism. Education-ally, the assumption that egoism is involved in the very conception of conflictover justice leads to a self-fulfilled prophecy that conserves the centripetaltendencies of Occidental subjectivity. Philosophically, it cannot but pictureself-interest as a pivotal transhistorical element of human association. Theconception of a phenomenon as transhistorical gives it ontological perma-nence in a quasitranscendental way and can only belong to a comprehensiveframework of thought.

The above repercussions hold even if we assume that the only politicalsense of justice is the one that confines itself to distribution alone or even ifwe consider the psychological parameters of a conflict.17 To summarize, theaspect of egoism is not only nondefensible at the level of human motivation,but it is also not always present in actual situations of conflict. It is misguidingto think of it as always present especially in cases where both sides believethat they are right and disinterested, i.e., defend their standpoint feeling thatit is the only one that is just. Had they been exposed to the claims of theiropponents or to a self-analysis of their ideological commitments, they wouldhave had the opportunity perhaps to take a different position as to who isright and who is wrong. But above all, what is important here is that, re-gardless of its accuracy in depicting the parameters of conflicts over justice,


the above citation reveals that Rawls does assume a weak human motivationtheory – although half-heartedly and, admittedly, without direct recourse toessentialism.

Another revealing point is the one that concerns the relation between aconception of the person and a theory of human nature.

[T]he conception of the person is a companion moral ideal paired withthat of a well-ordered society. Like any other ideal, it must be possiblefor people to honor it sufficiently closely; and hence the feasible idealsof the person are limited by the capacities of human nature and the re-quirements of social life. To this extent such an ideal presupposes a the-ory of human nature, and social theory generally, but the task of a moraldoctrine is to specify an appropriate conception of the person that generalfacts about human nature and society allow (emphasis added; Rawls, 1980,p. 534).

The highlighted parts of this quotation raise the following question. Can atheory rely in one way or another on interpretations of human nature and itscapacities, presuppose a theory of human nature, further assuming indirectlythat there are “facts” about human nature that are not only learnable but alsomorally/politically informative, and still be noncomprehensive?

The next quotation displays the Rawlsian reliance on common sense re-garding ultimate questions of theoretical justification, as if Occidental com-mon sense is not a sociohistorical projection of metanarratives but a pragmaticwisdom beyond interpretation. In this way, it reinforces the impression thatthe Rawlsian debt to comprehensive liberalism is heavier than it appears atfirst sight.

A theory of human nature and a view of the requirements of social lifetell us whether these ideals are feasible, whether it is possible to realizethem under normally favorable conditions of human life. Changes in thetheory of human nature or in social theory generally which do not affectthe feasibility of the ideals of the person and of a well-ordered society donot affect the agreement of the parties in the original position. It is hard toimagine realistically any new knowledge that should convince us that theseideals are not feasible, given what we know about the general nature of theworld, as opposed to our particular social and historical circumstances. Infact, the relevant information on these matters must go back a long time andis available to the common sense of any thoughtful and reflective person.Thus such advances in our knowledge of human nature and society as maytake place do not affect our moral conception, but rather may be usedto implement the application of its first principles of justice and suggestto us institutions and policies better designed to realize them in practice(emphasis added; Rawls, 1980, p. 566).

The overall impression given by this citation is that Rawls assumes a fixedhuman nature and an accumulated knowledge of it that can be modified only


cognitively, but not in terms of a possibility for alterations in human natureitself. I do not imply that those thinkers who doubt the existence of a fixedhuman nature and defend an antiphysical thesis of mutability are right andRawls is wrong. This debate cannot be given space here. But does the afore-mentioned Rawlsian view not exclude those comprehensive accounts thatquestion the possibility of a theory of a stable human nature or of a humannature at all? Are Rawlsians aware of the repercussions such theories will haveon the plausibility of justice as fairness? These theories would not go in a di-rection that would question freedom and equality, as seems to be the concernof Rawls in the above passage, but, by contesting the assumptions of hu-man nature, they would offer moral and political discourse an unprecedenteddynamic.

A reconsideration of human nature cannot only follow a negative path(questioning higher-interests of freedom and equality) but also a positive one(questioning egoistic interests). Rawls dismisses the first, rightly in my view,but does not consider the second possibility. He presents the theory of humannature he assumes as a commonsensical and noncontestable fact uncontami-nated with metaphysics, hence escaping the charge of being comprehensive,but this would be convincing only if such a theory of human nature were notthe outcome of a particular culture, i.e., historical and contingent. Of course,a counterargument here is that the anthropological assumptions of politicalliberalism may be irrelevant because they are encountered in most Occidentalphilosophical theories and in many religious standpoints. Hence, they are notpresent in Rawls’s theory because comprehensive liberalism is lurking un-derneath but because they encapsulate what is pragmatically current as wellas theoretically commonplace. Rawls explains that we should avoid disputedphilosophical or other comprehensive questions, but the question that ariseshere is whether some nondisputed questions are for that matter less philo-sophical or comprehensive. This move of political liberalism may not excludeexisting theories but is too weak to cope with the possibility of future shiftsof interpretation. This concerns obviously not so much freedom and equality,which are admirable aspects of liberalism, but those undesirable egoistic ele-ments that may (mis)inform the very interpretation of what counts as freedomand equality.

Finally, political liberalism’s claim of reliance on nondisputable tenets ap-pears problematic not only when projected to the future but also when appliedto the past and the present. By elevating some anthropological assumptions totranshistorical common sense, political liberalism loses sight of the possibilitythat those assumptions may have obtained their status in the Western worlddue to hegemonic concordance rather than epistemic validity. From the Stoicsdown to Rousseau, Marx, and some forms of anarchism, political philosophyhas generated undercurrents that contested the homo homini lupus principleas well as the unsocial sociability view of humanity (Papastephanou, 2002,


pp. 26–28). Such undercurrents remained in penumbra for many reasons thatcannot be analyzed here – some of which concern, however, the predominanceof opposing accounts associated with more influential trends in theory, suchas Kantianism, Hegelianism, Nietzsche, psychoanalysis and Anglo-Americanliberalism itself.

Communicative Ethics and Justice as Fairness18

To avoid ethnocentrism and dogmatism, Rawls appears reluctant in his laterwork to employ as a justificatory or explanatory principle any reference toan interpretation of human nature, apparently because he wishes to remainwithin a strictly defined politicotheoretical language game. However, as wehave seen, his decision not to involve metaphysics (in the traditional sense) isundermined by implicit and most probably unintentional metaphysical viewsof the human self.

“Justice as fairness regards each person as someone who can and whodesires to take part in social cooperation for mutual advantage” (emphasisadded; Rawls, 1999, p. 365). His notion of reciprocity is typically liberalist inits individualistic emphasis on unconditional equal advantage (here I do notuse “equal” quantitatively) – which is indisputably preferable to libertarianalternatives but inadequate with respect to potential claims of those citizensthat have been wronged or deprived of opportunities for long. Communica-tive/discourse ethics (Habermas/Apel), on the other hand, without falling intotraditional metaphysics either, embeds reason and human interests in lan-guage.19 Human beings have an interest in emancipation and solidarity dictatedby their being human, and as such socialized and individuated intersubjec-tively/linguistically. Such an interest is disclosed via reason (discourse) in allits forms. The idea of reciprocity that may emerge from such a frameworkextends beyond the egalitarian one (Young, 1997).

Discourse ethics is indeed comprehensive but Rawls’s theory is no less so,merely by circumventing the issue of the inescapable metaphysics of the Polit-ical. Although Rawls postulates a rational process for justifying norms similarto that promoted by discourse ethics, his notion of justice lacks any link withthe intersubjective construction of identity, regardless of Rawls’s relative reha-bilitation of the communal element compared with other liberalist approaches.The modelconception of a momentary abstraction from social determinationtacitly relies on the possibility of a segregated reason and cultural-linguisticconditioning. This reliance proves that Rawls’s liberalism has not totally dis-pensed with the old metaphysical definition of the human being as a “citizenof two worlds.”20 Only this time, and unlike other theorists who rely on itsphilosophical form, he borrows it from its secularized and “domesticated”embeddedness in the empirical pragmatics of Occidental societies, in whichthe philosophical origins of their culture are forgotten.


The differences between the implicit assumptions of justice as fairnessand discourse ethics reflect the different traditions from which the twotheories emerge. It is a defensible thesis that Kant’s continental liberal-ism (especially in concepts like the “unsocial sociability of men [sic]”)has residues of the Hobbesian philosophical accommodation of antago-nism and egoism (Papastephanou, 2002) whilst Marxism challenges pre-cisely this liberal anthropological-ontological commitment to strategicality(Sayers, 1998). Now, Rawls draws heavily from Kant but not from Marx,whereas Habermas draws from both, Kant 21 and Marx. Hence, althoughRawls and Habermas share an optimism as concerns the possibility of a ra-tional consensus, their account of the “nature” of those who are to achievea consensus is different enough to give a different content to such a con-sensus. Due to the initial openness of the human being as a member of life-worlds, and the reflective character of language that allows the redemptionof validity claims by offering them epistemic warrant, a priority is given tocommunicative rationality over strategic.22 Consequently, “the egocentric per-spective is not something primary, but rather something socially produced”(Habermas, 1990, p. 49).

However, the priority of private over generalized interests is so entrenchedin the liberalist world and theory that the significance of this point often goesunnoticed. Some criticisms directed against Habermas for having supposedlyso far purified reason from any strategic element that reason turns out to appear“unreal” (Kariel, 1989) show how deeply ingrained in Occidental individu-alistic cultures liberalist anthropology is.23 Even in Rawls’s theory, as I haveinterpreted it, the moral agents are indeed to some extent enlightened egoists(despite Rawls’s assertions that this is not true). They would endorse somemoral principles only if deprived of the knowledge of their private interestsor if they could fit them in their own world interpretations. As typical liberal-ists, political liberalists do not appeal at all to the moral feelings of politicalactors and other-oriented tendencies are given no priority whatever. This ispredictable considering the implicit assumptions of political liberalism, butwhat is worth noting is that ironically this very fact reveals the dependenceand commitment of political liberalism to comprehensive liberalism. A prac-tical discourse of the sort suggested by discourse ethics is not only a processof justification of norms but also a process of will formation. By contrast,in a Rawlsian practical discourse, as Benhabib remarks, “individuals do notdebate the content of their interests, but bargain about the distribution of apackage of primary goods which all are assumed to want whatever else theywant” (1986, p. 313).

In discourse ethics and its comprehensive account of procedural justice theactors do not need an ascetic self-emptying from their desires and wishes be-cause these very desires undergo, through argumentation as discursive will for-mation, a purifying scrutiny that unveils ideologies, strategicality, and power


relations. As to the danger of ethnocentrism,24 prima facie, in my opinion, aproperly performed critique of, let us say, the ideology of ontological egoismwould not affect religious or other comprehensive views as much (and dras-tically) as it would affect the Occidental self-understanding. Thus politicalliberalists need not worry that much about the impact of a comprehensivetheory of justice over other cultures. 25 Nor should they make things easierfor themselves by assuming that only illiberal fundamentalism (religious orother) could be negatively affected by their “political” position.26

The actors achieve more lucid self-understanding when they decide toput aside their strategic concerns and to take part in a sufficiently uncoercedcommunication (Benhabib and Dallmayr, 1990). Self-realisation and concernfor the other are not incompatible and as concepts they can both be extractedfrom discourses that ask for no other origin than their being shared by aspecies. This is a comprehensive view, one might argue, but the point isthat its opposite is also a comprehensive view. The renegotiation of whatone considers a private concern in this context is the outcome of convincingrational argumentation and of desire and willingness to be convinced. Thishas obvious repercussions for the issue of the legitimacy of rights and libertiestreated monologically-individualistically in Rawls’s model.27

What is gained by this contrast of Habermas and Rawls is the following.Rawls preserves and accommodates in his theory, among other elements ofWestern liberalism, two that are interrelated: the egocentric side of the self,and the strategic dimension (instead of the communicative) as the covertlyprevalent one in reason and reasonable consensus. We have seen how the firstidea is smuggled in, so we need not dwell upon it.

The second point is borne out by the obvious reluctance on Rawls’s part toresort to a comprehensive account of intersubjectivity. Communicative ethicsis comprehensive, among other things, also because it does not see language asa morally neutral zero point of human interconnectedness. Language mirrorsan initial and primordial human interest in engagement and communicationwith otherness. It proves, therefore, an intersubjective constitution of the self, alogical and temporal priority of other-orientedness in the construction of indi-viduality. Whereas communicative action has normative and logical priorityin communicative ethics (with the admission that empirically strategicalityenjoys primacy especially in the Occidental world), in justice as fairness logi-cal/temporal priority is granted to strategicality. This ties with those criticismsin previous sections that concern the temporal priority of the rational over thereasonable and the self-denial imposed by the veil of ignorance. We cannotexpect the reality of the individual preceding the reality of discourse to openitself up to modification as long as the former refers to individual or groupinterpretations of subjective ends. Rawls’s consensus is limited because – os-tensibly – people themselves set limits to the content of deliberation; but in


fact the limits have been set by those convictions about subjectivity that aremost enshrined by the Occidental liberalist culture.

Implications

Having argued that political liberalism is dependent on some comprehensiveaccounts of the self, I shall turn to the implications these particular accountshave for Rawls’s theory. The downplaying of morality in favor of the orderof civil society is based, I believe, on two crucial presuppositions. It is notnecessary or even possible to ask of people something more than to compro-mise (or, in other words, the influence of discourse on people’s wills is verylimited) and second, the essential function a consensus can have ultimatelyis to be the guarantee of social order. And that holds even if that kind ofsocial order is moral in the sense that it is stability for the right reasons,28 asRawls argues against Habermas’s charging him with the opposite (1995, p.142). There are two implications stemming from the above assumptions. Firstis that the Western liberal philosophical account of the moral self remainsalmost untouched. Second, the consensus achieved through discourse has ameaning only within the Western society that has engendered it. (Rawls’s laterwork appears reconciled with this, but one wonders whether a political theorymeant only for regulation of Western affairs would be pertinent in a glob-alized world in which precisely the Western political handling of economic,cultural and environmental issues has enormous effects on other peoples andthe nature). As a result, universalism is sacrificed on the altar of postindustrialsociety. I shall explain why by the following.

Rawls remains Kantian when uncoupling questions of morality from ques-tions of human nature. “Like Kant, he wants to supply justifications for moralprinciples which are not dependent for their legitimacy on the vagaries ofhuman nature – on human desires, passions or instincts” (Kukathas and Petit,1990, p. 125). Assuming, however, especially in his earlier work, a veil ofignorance that would guarantee precisely this independence of moral prin-ciples from desires and passions, Rawls introduces a sort of moral a priorithat sharpens the opposition between wish and duty and hierarchizes reasonand experience, keeping the latter marginal. Thus Rawls’s moral agent, de-prived of its contingent, “ontic,” features, retains only its moral character,momentarily, in order to define its principles on a rational basis, and thenbecomes social again having undergone a process of self-denial. This in-volves a primary incrimination of the social, the contingent, the “ontic,” as ifit were impossible to surrender to a moral impetus by disregarding the pri-vate for the sake of the general interest in full awareness of one’s own socialspace allocated in advance. He takes somewhat for granted then that the ten-sion between the private and the public will never be toned down enough to


allow dialogue to become opinion- and will-formative and acquire a universalsignificance.

Rawlsian assertions like “the parties in the original position do not recog-nize any principles of justice as true or correct and so as antecedently given;their aim is simply to select the conception most rational for them, given theircircumstances” (Rawls, 1980, p. 564) echo a rejection of moral intuitionism.There are no absolutely and invariably valid principles or norms intuitivelyknown to us. To the extent that they voice an antiessentialist tendency, theseassertions are very conducive to a new discourse on noncoercive consensualagreement. But interpreted as expressing a touch of relativism, they may beseen as a redundant concession to a Rortyan pragmatism, by not doing justiceto a proper moral legitimation usually understood as transcending particularcontexts and circumstances. Has Rawls shifted to a pragmatic consensus?29

In the effort to escape the violent and ethnocentric expectation that aliencultures or worldviews conform to the hegemonic ones, justice as fairnessappears to care only for political balance and action coordination. True, Rawlsdraws an important distinction between an overlapping consensual agreementon a random and nonpolitical basis and a reasonable overlapping consensusfrom which follows stability for the right reasons (1995, p. 147). His notion ofstability demands more than a modus vivendi can give, but only at a practicallevel, and normatively only to the extent that the basis of social unity ismost reasonable. To the extent that this basis does not place upon politicalactors any demands for opinion alteration and unconditional renegotiationof one’s interests, its normative thrust is attenuated. Between normative asprescriptive/authoritarian, and normative as reasonably expected from all,there is a lot of room for mediating alternatives.

It is plausible that stability for the right reasons can be more secure andlong-lasting than the one based on a mere modus vivendi. But the collapse ofthe difference between right and wrong brought about by the introduction ofthe notion of the reasonable which is politically operative but epistemically ir-relevant cannot but encourage a modus vivendi logic. It does so since it effacesthat surplus meaning of justice that emanates from the distinction between so-cial currency and validity. As Kukathas and Petit remark, “Rawls’s liberalisticconcern for peace [. . .] gives Rawls’s politics a decidedly Hobbesian flavour,since he now ties his conception of justice, not to autonomy or individuality,but order” (1990, p. 140). Thus, even after the reply to Habermas, in whichRawls explains the difference between political overlapping consensus andother accounts of consensus, the questions persist.

By regarding equality and freedom as the most central intuitive ideas indemocratic societies (Mouffe, 1990, p. 220), Rawls does not provide anyjustification for them, of the sort that would transcend the spatiotemporalparameters of Western liberalistic lifeworlds.30 He confronts the either/or ofuniversalism versus contextualism and succumbs half-heartedly to the latter.


There are good reasons for such a shift and there is also a general trendin philosophy and other disciplines against universalism. The possibility ofpeople sharing some deep properties owed to their humanity, properties whichthe philosopher as a self-appointed prophet can pin down and clarify for thehuman beings, has proved to be a declaration of Western narcissism ratherthan an empirical fact.

However, even if one avoids taking up the dubious task of finding substan-tive universal meanings, one can preserve a version of universalism through areconstruction of language that allows for a reformulation of a noncontingentnotion of autonomy and moral personhood. If consensus is to be valued as theoutcome of a process that presupposes the participation of all affected by it,and presupposes reflective and deliberative subjects, then it cannot be limitedto the Western societies. For one thing, globalization has in many cases ex-tended the “all affected” to the “whole world,” as Occidental decision-makinghas short-term and long-term effects on the environment or on other lifeworlds.Moreover, if we assume that the Occidental subject is capable of a reasonablestance toward generalizable interests, to deny this to the non-Occidental sub-ject is more ethnocentric than considering the possibility of including aliencultures in the process. To jettison the old essentialist universalism is onething, to lose sight of a universalism that is the aftermath of globalizationand could be radicalized through a difference-sensitive cosmopolitanism anda nonessentialist conception of humanity is quite another.

Different ideas of consensus are relevant to each kind of universalism.Both kinds rely on an implicit anthropology that, if spelled out, will affect thecorresponding conceptions of consensus. A consensus that is not universalis-tic in the old sense must not be justified through a conception of the humannature as a fixed, immutable, and context-transcendent totality of elementaryproperties. But to be universalistic in a new sense, consensus must also giveup the residual commitments to the liberalist account of human nature thataccommodates egocentric competitiveness ontologically. Such accommoda-tion renders a comprehensive and inclusive consensual process on the basis ofeverybody’s willingness to relativize her/his understanding of private interestnot only currently unfeasible but also eternally impossible.

The Cake

To exemplify the implications I have drawn from my critique of justice asfairness and the role this diagnosis of residues of comprehensive liberalismin the Political can play in the context of political philosophy, I discuss brieflyRawls’s idea of a perfect procedural justice.

The connection between procedural and substantive justice may be illus-trated by recalling briefly two clear cases involving procedural justice. The


first is perfect procedural justice as illustrated by the common-sense pro-cedure of dividing a cake. The point is that the procedure illustrates perfectprocedural justice only because it always gives the accepted fair outcome:equal division. If it failed to give a fair outcome, it would not be a procedurefor justice, but for something else (1995, p. 171).

In my opinion, equal division of a cake might be a fair outcome onlyin “symbolic” situations like birthdays where the issue of justice as such issecondary and nonproblematized. In actual situations where the division of the“cake” matters and the beneficiaries come from diverse backgrounds, some ofwhich are existentially far more supporting than others, “equal division” is anuncertain and vague concept. If it means that the distributed pieces of the cakeare the same size then the procedure is not of justice, but indeed of somethingelse. The needy, the poor, the hungry, and the exploited may deserve a largershare – especially if the other beneficiaries have been their oppressors andhave already had the lion’s share in previous distributions.31 Thus true justiceto them might be tied to compensation and extra allowances. As life has beenfar from just to people in this sense, perfect procedural justice as meant bypolitical liberalism would be unjust in most cases, at least all those cases thatare significant. To overlook that quantitatively equal division is just only inmodel cases like the birthday cake is not a political stance but a comprehensiveone relying on a very partial (individualistic) sense of what equality is.

But we must not assume that Rawls considers equal share fair. Indeed, hissecond principle of justice safeguards that “while the distribution of wealthand income need not be equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage, and at thesame time, positions of authority and offices of command must be accessibleto all” (emphasis. added; 1971, p. 61). However, as sociologists such as PierreBourdieu have shown, accessibility does not suffice to neutralize the asymme-tries in cultural capital resulting from disadvantaged environments. And one’sadvantage is not independent from personal as well as social interpretations ofwhat counts as “advantage.” Moreover, if equal division means that the cakeis divided according to need, feelings, responsibility, and awareness of rightand wrong, then the procedure is fair but comprehensive. It is so, because itdoes assume a comprehensive conception of personhood and life-history anda relativization of people’s stubborn insistence on private interest. It is so, too,because it is incompatible with the political-liberalist interpretation of justice,equality, and the person and dependent on an interpretation that rehabilitatesthe connection between justice and other-oriented responsibility. With regardto perfect procedural justice, then, what we have here is not a political accountof justice against a comprehensive one, but two comprehensive accounts atvariance.

But Rawls’s emphasis on a supposedly political sense of equality becomeseven more problematic when he employs the notion of impartiality. Consider


the following: “procedural and substantive justice are connected and not sep-arate. This still allows that fair procedures have values intrinsic to them – forexample, a procedure having the value of impartiality by giving all an equalchance to present their case” (1995, p. 170). A lot has been written about theproblems of liberal impartiality (Young, 1986), but let us refer only to a coupleof difficulties: Is the impartiality of an observer fair when one of the conflict-ing parties violates blatantly the rights of the other? Is it impartial enough togive all an equal chance to present their case, when to present one’s case pre-supposes skills or means 32 that less advantaged members of liberal societiesor foreign cultures may lack? (This is a problem that affects communicativeethics, too.) Can matters of this sort be settled justly without some referenceto less political (in the Rawlsian sense) and more comprehensive principles?Is “free and equal” enough to replace “moral persons” in an original posi-tion? Do the parties need to be also caring? This addition would be neitherpolitical nor liberalist, due to its going counter to “commonsensical” (I read“comprehensive”) liberalist assumptions about the openness of the self. Thenthe question arises whether a political conception of justice is just. To be so,it should be supplemented with other conceptions of justice or acknowledgeits comprehensive and partial character.

Conclusion

Rawls’s account of justice presupposes a nondogmatic deliberative negotiationof what public interests mean. It also escapes from the weaknesses of an ab-stract formalism to the extent that the two substantive principles of justice savethis theory from the ambiguities and vagueness that a cut-and-dried distinctionof form and content entails. By being substantive, these principles attenuatethe abstraction, indifference, and inapplicability that have traditionally beenattributed to formalism.33

But from another point of view, this quality of Rawlsian ethics has its down-side, since its very substantiveness gives it a somewhat prescriptive characterexceeding the proper scope of philosophy. Justice, even in its most “politi-cal” conception, is so dependent on interpretation that cannot be articulatedwithout being tacitly dependent on comprehensive doctrines. In the case ofRawls’s conception of justice such dependence on comprehensive liberalismhas been pushed down to such an extent that it needs much greater effort to beunearthed than other theories do. To secure an informed and willing politicalagreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons, “we try, so faras we can, to avoid disputed philosophical, as well as disputed moral andreligious, questions” (Rawls, 1999, p. 394).

Despite Rawls’s motives and rationale for proposing an overlapping con-sensus and despite such consensus’ plausibility with respect to the idealof a fair redistributive policy compared with existing political practices or


some alternative philosophical theories, this theory entails some undesirableimplications. These are due to its liberalist interpretation of moral person-hood and reason. By aiming at social stability as a multidimensional andpluralist contribution to lifeworld reproduction rather than vindication ofthe Other, this type of consensus theory is not critical enough of, and caneven be compatible with, Hobbesian anthropology and its conception of thePolitical.34

If a rational consensus can function only as a guardian of social order “forthe right reasons,” that might amount to a tacit admission that moral agentsare so “contaminated” with self-interest that the only domain upon whichthey could consent willingly is the Political (as defined by Rawls). The logicalconclusion of this is that, insofar as we operate within a discourse on ultimatequestions, people could agree only that all, being rational, wish the preserva-tion of their society and of themselves. Self-preservation alone, and not care,death, love, responsibility, truth, and imagination can motivate agreement. 35

It is on this point that the liberalist ontoanthropological landscape becomessadly lunar.

Finally, political liberalism cannot sidestep the problem of its ethnocen-trism easily because no matter how effectively it suppresses its own temporal-ity it cannot dispense with it. Rawls is right to think that political liberalismcan be grounded in each comprehensive doctrine, religious or metaphysical,in different ways because history has shown that the unnoticed metaphysicalassumptions of political liberalism are not only enduring, but are shared orcan be shared by other comprehensive views. And this not only with respectto the good side of such assumptions but also with respect to the side thatencourages antagonism, self-centered action, and privatism. This is proved bythe adaptability of the whole world to capitalism. But as those assumptions donot concern only freedom and equality (which, despite their openness to inter-pretation are in general attractive) but also egoism and self-centeredness, theyburden philosophy once again with the task of unmasking its own complici-ties and those of liberalism. Its task should be also to incorporate and respectliberalism but ask for more. As theoretical undercurrents running against thepolitical-anthropological accommodation of antagonism from antiquity to thepresent have remained unexploited, philosophy has shown that, sadly, it hasnot so far carried out this task well.

Notes

1. By intuitive here I mean whatever derives from the accumulated experience of historicalbeings and informs unconsciously their positions. I attribute no transcendent qualitiesto this notion and consider its products subject to the vagaries of human embeddednessin society. Thus, my use of the term differs from Rawls’s (for a Rawlsian definition seeRawls, 1999, p. 4) and along with it the epistemological function I attribute to this notion.


Contra Rawls, I argue that what is most significant for moral and political theory is thecounter-intuitive and not the intuitive – but that is the subject of another paper.

2. For these clarifications I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers of Human Studies. Iacknowledge also that an important way of formulating the main argument could involvea discussion regarding whether Rawls’s assumptions about the moral person are indeedpolitical qua noncontroversial or not. This could be done by reference to non-Occidentalphilosophical or religious traditions but, since this requires an account of those traditionsand a presentation of their possible conceptions of justice along different anthropologicalviews that go far beyond the scope of this essay, I shall leave it aside.

3. By “post-metaphysical” here I do not mean “post-philosophical.” Metaphysics in the con-text I employ it signifies the answers a society gives to the ultimate questions it asks.Hence in this case, “metaphysical” are some entrenched “social imaginary significations”(Castoriadis’s terms in Curtis, 1997) of the West, and “postmetaphysical” are those an-swers to questions of human nature, subjectivity, eros and death, language, and reason, thatchallenge entrenched Occidental thinking.

4. The plausibility of such criticisms is itself disputable as Axel Honneth (1995) argues. Formore on Sandel’s critique of Rawls and its controversial character see Kenneth Baynes(1990, p. 66 and ff).

5. Also, in his introduction to Political Liberalism (1993, p. xvi), Rawls explains the reasonsfor his turn toward a limited conception of justice. In his modified view, the old justice asfairness appeared unrealistic because it did not take into account the existence of a pluralityof sensible, but incompatible, comprehensive doctrines (p. xvii). It is unrealistic to expectpeople to give up their religious or other beliefs in order to endorse another metaphysicalor comprehensive belief, this time chosen by philosophers.

6. This also justifies, in my view, Gerald Doppelt’s argument that Rawls does not necessarilyfavor, as communitarians charge him of doing, a priority of the right over the good but over“particular conceptions of the good” (Doppelt, 1988, p. 422).

7. My charging justice as fairness with monologism draws from Habermas (1995, p. 117) butdiffers somewhat from his, and Rawls’s response does not apply to it. Rawls has respondedto Habermas on this point as follows: “it is you and I – and so all citizens over time, oneby one and in associations here and there – who judge the merits of the original positionas a device of representation and the principles it yields. I deny that the original positionis monological in a way that puts in doubt its soundness as a device of representation”(Rawls, 1995, p. 140). I agree that justice as fairness is not monological in the sense thatit blocks the true engagement of all citizens and replaces their contribution by that of thephilosophers or experts. But it is monological to the extent that it presupposes citizenswho experience an orientation to private interest as if in isolation. If to be reasonablemeans to regulate your public position in such a way that your sense of private interestmay remain intact and non-negotiable as long as it does not cause problems, then thereasonable is monological. It is so because it does not truly take into account the self-formative influence the Other may have on your conception of private interest. To theextent that reasonableness is crucial for the original position then the latter is monological(as much as the former) in the sense of presupposing fixed accounts of what is to one’s ownadvantage.

8. At least with the admission that the reasonable presupposes the rational, Rawls does notrepeat the “basic error of atomism” as Charles Taylor defines it: “[T]he basic error ofatomism in all its forms is that it fails to take account of the degree to which the freeindividual with his own goals and aspirations, whose just rewards it is trying to protect,is himself only possible within a certain kind of civilization” (Taylor, in Chantal Mouffe,1990, p. 222).


9. As is well known, exclusion and oppression of other cultures has often been justifiedthrough the Occidental prejudice that all other cultures are less rational than ours.

10. I thank an anonymous reviewer of Human Studies for the opportunity for this clarification.The notion Rawls uses in order to elaborate on this problem is the burdens of reason(judgment). See Rawls (1999, pp. 475–478).

11. It should be noted here that even if not interpreted in such a way, Rawls’s new theorywould have difficulties in accommodating broad morally relevant notions like solidar-ity, responsibility, autonomy, empathy, and moral identity. To the extent that these relyby definition on epistemic assumptions as well as Other-orienting feelings (apart frommerely respecting the other as free and equal), they cannot be considered political. Forthis reason, liberalism would be reluctant to give them space in the basic structure ofsociety.

12. Unless, of course, one argues that reason as such is a historical device, in which case anysplit characterizing reason would be contingent and surmountable. But this cannot hold fora cognitivist ethics such as Rawls’s.

13. This is not the only convergence between Rawls and postmodernist theorists, but itis the one that, in my opinion, has remained most unnoticed even by Donald Beggs(1999), whose account of other affinities of political liberalism and postmodernism isilluminating.

14. What Rawls’s theory gains, I believe, from such a unity of reason is a way out of theso-called Weberian paradox, namely, the fact that rationality undermines its own premisesby leading in the secular industrial societies to a loss of meaning, freedom and identity.A reasonable pluralism is a balanced one, because it is based on a rationality that isunder control, a rationality that, while setting limits, acknowledges its own. A contrastof this with Habermas’s approach would be telling: Habermas solves the Weberianparadox by distinguishing between strategic and communicative rationality, granting thelatter priority over the former, and justifying it through a reconstruction of a theory oflinguistic validity claims. Strategic and communicative elements are common to everyform of reason. Because of that, no mode of the latter has to subordinate the other modes,and thereby, the priority of the communicative over the strategic is not an ontologicalpriority of the noumenal over the phenomenal or vice versa but a pragmatic priority of theuniversal-transhistorical over the contingent-historical.

15. In replying to Habermas, Rawls denies “that liberalism leaves political and privateautonomy in unresolved competition.” As he writes, “in liberalism properly interpreted,[. . .] public and private autonomy are also both cooriginal and of equal weight [. . .], withneither externally imposed on the other” (1995, pp. 163, 166). There is a misunderstandingof the term “tension” in this context, for Rawls seems to equate it with “asymmetry” andthus feels justified to leap from “internal connection” to “non-competition.” In his words,political liberalism “does not leave the liberties in unresolved competition” because withinit “the two forms of autonomy have been internally connected” (emphasis added; p. 168).But internal connection is not necessarily nonconflictual connection and Rawls’s responseappears to me as missing the point of Habermas’s criticism.

16. And further, “the conjectural account involves, then, no particular theory of human mo-tivation; and it obviously does not imply that persons as human individuals are rational(or irrational) egoists. What it does is simply incorporate into the conception of justicethe relations between persons which set the stage for questions of justice” (Rawls,1999, p.206).

17. Having said that for the sake of the argument, I must make clear that I believe we cannotand should not restrict issues of justice to the distributive paradigm for reasons that IrisYoung (1997, pp. 98–99) gives cogently.


18. This section does not aim to claim that the debate between Habermas and Rawls can bedecided in favor of Habermas, as Rawls raises some very apposite criticisms of Habermasthat point to actual problems in the latter’s theory. It only aspires to employ those elementsin communicative ethics that facilitate the understanding of the presuppositions of Rawls’santhropology and the discussion of their implications that will follow.

19. This explains why there is a difference between reconstruction and construction. In a foot-note (fn. 57), in his “Reply to Habermas” (1995, p. 164), Rawls writes that he is “unclearabout how a construction differs from a reconstruction” and whether that is relevant to thecontext of the private versus the public binarism. I believe that the crucial difference isin the justification Habermas obtains for his theory through reconstruction, a justificationthat in his view is impossible to be obtained via a mere construction. In this context, aconstruction is always dependent on theories where decision and invention play a con-stitutive role and in turn rely on extralinguistic philosophical foundations, explicitly orimplicitly. Or, if they try to avoid foundationalism, they appear to rest on thin ice. Bycontrast, a reconstruction draws its validity from its being a discovery of formal objectivequa intersubjective structures of reasoning embedded in language, hence neither positednor dependent on a philosophical tradition. The relevance of the distinction to the privateversus the public, as I interpret it, is due to the possibilities the reconstruction of inter-subjectivity opens for divesting egoism of its anthropological significance and the role itplays in interpreting the private and the public with regard to interests and needs. CompareHabermas’s ”Postscript” in Knowledge and Human Interests (1987) with Rawls (1999, pp.13, 365, 373). Finally, consider the following: Political liberalism limits ”relevant humaninterests to fundamental interests of certain kinds, or to primary goods” (Rawls, 1999, p.178). Can what is fundamental about a fundamental interest be decided without recourseto a comprehensive theory about what counts as fundamental? Or, are such limitations car-ried out by liberalism not dependent on some kind of general explanation that may reflectcommon sense if taken at face value but goes well beyond it if examined through to itsend?

20. John Locke’s tabula rasa had the following ethicoanthropological significance. Because atan initial stage of individuation reason is totally absent, the self is bad and egoistic due tobeing prey to instincts and unbridled passions, as there is no rational dam there to controltheir flow. Then reason enters the picture, harnesses them and renders the self politicallycultivated and sociable. Compare such two-world metaphysics of reason versus feelings,the private versus the public, good and evil, and the mind versus the body with 20th centuryliberalism (Rawls’s notwithstanding). Some similarities are striking and telling, despite themajor differences at first sight.

21. On the relation of both theorists to Kant as this relation is revealed in their debate, seeHoward Williams (1999).

22. This priority is achieved neither through an essentialist conception of human nature, northrough volonte generale, but through language – and leads, by implication, to a conceptionof human beings as not primarily self-interested.

23. Kariel’s criticisms can be better addressed via a defence of the priority of communicativereason over the strategic. For such a defence, see Dryzek (1995, pp. 107–108).

24. Communicative ethics is often charged with ethnocentrism mainly for two reasons. Thefirst concerns its emphasis on the argumentative language game – an emphasis that ap-pears to overlook subtle forms of exclusion of otherness introduced in dialogue throughextra-linguistic power relations. I believe that this charge is quite convincing and has notbeen addressed plausibly yet (to my knowledge). The second concerns the issue of theirrationality of the opponent. When the other is deemed irrational, s/he is colonized bythe hegemonic discourse or excluded from deliberation. In my opinion, this latter charge


misinterprets the Habermasian social epistemology, but, as there is no space for this here,see Papastephanou (2001) where I discuss this point in detail.

25. Still, whether communicative ethics can ward off charges of ethnocentrism is a very bigissue, which in my view cannot be treated successfully by communicative ethics as such,without some serious modification.

26. Liberal neutrality does not stop only when democracy and public reason are at stake butalso when democratic but nonliberal conceptions of the good become the issue. There couldbe, for instance, Occidental antiwork life-choices such that their being parasitic would bemerely a matter of interpretation, but liberalism does not even begin to treat them seriously.See for instance Rawls’s footnote 7 in his Collected Papers (1999, p. 455).

27. Rawls refutes Habermas’s criticisms concerning the former’s treatment of legitimacy plau-sibly, in my view, by drawing on the distinction between legitimation and justice. But thediscussion of this issue in light of Rawls’s tacit anthropological assumptions can recastand radicalize this criticism making a response to it more difficult. In Jean Cohen’s words(1990, p. 104), “Habermas, unlike Rawls, provides a principle of democratic legitimacyand not simply, or even primarily, a theory of political obligation. Rawls’s theory works wellto legitimate basic liberties and even state redistributive policies. But it does not provide atheory or principle of democratic legitimacy since no actual dialogue, no actual participa-tion in collectively (discursively) tested political/legal norms is required by Rawls. Instead,he settles for monological testing along Kantian lines – a process appropriate to moralquestions but not to political questions of legitimacy.”

28. “As secured by a firm allegiance to a democratic society’s political (moral) ideals andvalues” (Rawls, 1999, p. 589).

29. One might give a positive answer to this question. Then again, as Baynes points out, ”theprinciples of justice are not justified by a direct appeal to simply any set of widely-sharedviews, but by an appeal to views that have been refined and adjusted in a process of reflectivedeliberation” (1990, p. 68). Therefore, one has to be cautious before lumping justice asfairness with other theories of a neopragmatic character (e.g., Rorty’s). In this sense, mycriticisms of Rawls’s overlapping consensus differ from criticisms stemming from otherstandpoints that appear similar at first sight and his sacrificing universalism cannot beexplained simply by reference to pragmatism.

30. Discourse ethics, by identifying equality and freedom of all people as the normative pre-suppositions of every argumentative discourse, justifies linguistically two notions which, ifleft unjustified, may be questioned as to their universality, and if nonlinguistically justified,need either a theory of metaphysics or a theory of volition.

31. That is the case with many old and new empires with respect to small countries andprivileged citizens with respect to the marginalized ones.

32. Example articulate speech, rhetoric, good command of the dominant language or dialect,and deep knowledge of the hegemonic culture, etc.

33. Rawls himself has elaborated some more politically concrete aspects of the merits ofsubstantive principles in his reply to Habermas. Habermas (1992) highlights precisely thisrisk in Rawls’s reception of Kant. Any “material” contribution to the search for concreteethical principles anticipates what should be strictly and only the outcome of a “realtalk” (Walzer): a true practical discourse involving all those affected by the principlesin question. It brings back to the fore the problem of the role of philosophers and thelimits of the prescriptivism that has characterized mainly past philosophies. Rawls showsthat this charge can be directed at Habermas himself for different reasons and concerninghis own normative presuppositions of argumentation. This is true, I believe, and reveals(indirectly and perhaps unwittingly) indeed what is ontoanthropologically taken for grantedby Habermas in his justification of those presuppositions via the priority of communicative


rationality, which he takes rather axiomatically. But where Rawls misses the point is onthe implicit assumption that his conception of justice or any conception can be purelypolitical. What is substantive cannot be noncomprehensive if that means, after all, beyondinterpretation. Perhaps there is substantiveness that characterizes particular narratives andsubstantiveness that characterizes metanarratives but such distinction is much fuzzier thanit appears at first glance.

34. We have seen how, although, it has to be said, it is Hume’s philosophical anthropologyand not Hobbes’s that Rawls himself recognizes as very close to his, according to Ricoeur(2000, p. 43).

35. Here I am not suggesting that the essentialist proclamation of self-preservation (anArchimedean point of political philosophy) must be replaced by an equally essentialistvariety of grounding principles of a less anthropologically pessimistic character. I amrather arguing for an abandonment of all essentialisms and the acknowledgement of theimportance of interpretation as inescapable mediation between the self and its relation tothe world. Hence, the self is anthropologically neutral at an axiological level but alwaysinvested with meaning at a pragmatic level. It is up to people to reinterpret this pragmaticmeaning of the self in directions that can be anthropologically more desirable than thoseso far followed.

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the implicit assumptions of dividing a cake: political or comprehensive?

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