According to Rawls, the strong point of a theory of justice lies in its modesty:
only if it rests on the most generally shared, noncontroversial premises possible is there the prospect that it will be acceptable reasonably. "Ideally, to justify a conception of justice to someone is to give him a proof of its
UNIVERSALISM AND CONTEXTUALISM I79 principles from premises that we both accept, these principles having in turn consequences that match our considered judgments" ( 1 97 1 , sSo-8 1 ) . Such a justification cannot rely, as a "Cartesian" (578) theory does, upon self-evident principles from which a system of norms would be derivable;
the justification of the theory is a hermeneutic undertaking insofar as it must correspond to the "considered" and "reasonable" moral judgments that can stand the test of a reflective equilibrium. This method of reflective equilibrium is a hermeneutic-"Socratic" (578) one: to find out what prin
ciples of justice can raise a justified claim to validity, they must be accept
able as just principles to free and equal persons-and the conditions for this free and equal acceptance must be mutually clarified and laid down in the equilibrium between the specific resulting principles and "our" moral judgments.
By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly Jnuned and adjusted. ( 1 97 1 , 20;
italics added)
The reflective equilibrium therefore expects of the candidates for princi
ples of justice not only that they be in accord with moral intuitions (Rawls 197 1 , 40-4 1 ; cf. Hare 1 g8g; Feinberg 1 g8g) , feelings, andjudgments, but that they also order these coherently (Lyons 1 g8g; Hoerster 1977 ) . Here, the original position takes up a mediating position: it is the "rationalizing"
medium on the basis of which generally acceptable judgments on fairness and equality can be formulated in such a way that substantive principles of justice spring from it. From this method of bringing intuitions, principles, and abstract procedural conditions coherently together, Rawls expects the possibility of enlightening the sense of justice about itself in a reconstruc
tive manner-indeed, doing so via the connection to simple concepts that make possible a "fairly sophisticated mathematics" ( 1 97 1 , 4 7) or "moral geometry" ( 1 2 1 ) , which actualize the implications of these concepts. These concepts are not manifest; rather, they must be critically reconstructed, as Rawls ( 1993a, g) emphasizes:
The public political culture may be of two minds at a very deep level. . . . This suggests that if we are to succeed in finding a basis for public agreement, we must find a way of organizing familiar ideas and principles into a conception of political justice that expresses those ideas and principles in a somewhat different way than before.
The central presupposition of a theory of justice from which Rawls pro
ceeds is the idea that only those principles that can stand up to a rational
z8o UNIVERSALISM AND CONTEXTUALISM
discussion among the citizens affected by them can raise a claim to valid
ity-which is supported by his linking of autonomy and objectivity: 'Thus acting autonomously is acting from principles that we would consent to as free and equal rational beings, and that we are to understand in this way.
Also, these principles are objective" ( 1 97 1 , 5 16) . In this way, the idea of justification becomes self-reflexive: a conception of justice is reasonably justified if it is built on the principle of autonomous practical-rational ac
tion and, with regard to questions of the justice of the basic structure, operationalizes this principle as best as possible. This conception of auton
omy and reason is therefore the foundation for the conception of justice;
and the model of norm justification based on reflective equilibrium has the task of representing this foundation in an appropriate manner. In re
spect of this model, Rawls's approach is located
between
an empirical, contract-theoretic tradition, on the one hand, and a Kantian tradition, on the other, insofar as the procedural model-which he believes can be affirmed in a "narrow" reflective equilibrium (which orders a person's beliefs ra
tionally and coherently) and in a "wide" one (which takes alternative con
ceptions of morality as well as normative substantive considerations into account)-is conceived of in the specific form of the original position.13 This ideal initial situation connects rationality assumptions and empirical considerations concerning necessary primary goods with a Kantian concep
tion of practical reason and of the impartiality and autonomy of principles that, without the influence of individual or social contingencies, apply to all "rational and reasonable" persons. " [ 0] ne conception of justice is more reasonable than another, or justifiable with respect to it, if rational persons in the initial situation would choose its principles over those of the other for the role of justice" ( 197 1 , 1 7). Rawls can therefore call the principles of justice categorical imperatives (253), which apply "to a person in virtue of his nature as a free and equal rational being." The procedural principle of general and autonomous justification is connected, in a hypothetical thought experiment, to certain assumptions about a "rational" choice of subjectively desirable primary goods-this thus clarifying Rawls's remark that the original position is "a procedural interpretation of Kant's concep
tion of autonomy and the categorical imperative [within the framework of an empirical theory] " (256) }4
The resulting double character of Rawls's theory, moving between Kan
tian moral concepts and more empirically founded assumptions, is evident in his theory of the moral person. An elementary presupposition, which seems "reasonable and generally acceptable" to him, is to assume "equality between human beings as moral persons, as creatures having a conception of their good and capable of a sense of justice" ( 1 97 1 , 19). The principles of justice that best reflect these attributes of persons are "fair," as are the principles that are agreed in an original position that best expresses this
UNIVERSALISM AND CONTEXTUALISM r8r equality and freedom of persons. The Kantian side of this conception of
the person consists in the fact that it rests on an ideal of autonomy accord
ing to which principles of justice must be justified without attention to contingent considerations or differences between human beings. The "ra
tional" side of this conception of the person lies in the assumption that persons have plans of life that they want to realize as best as possible. The procedural rule that those principles are justified that can be rationally accepted by these kinds of free and equal persons prompts Rawls to expli
cate this conception of the person in a Kantian,
reasonable
and an empirically
rational
respect and to make it the substantive foundation of the theory and of the primary goods to be distributed-in the sense of the satisfaction of "rational desire" (93) . In his writings after the publication ofA Theory of justice,
Rawls strongly emphasizes the role of the conception of the person, which allows him to make this connection between various elements of the theory. In the article "A Kantian Conception of Equality," for instance, he writes: "When fully articulated, any conception of justice expresses a conception of the person, of the relations between persons, and of the general structure and ends of social cooperation" ( 1 975a, 94) .
In the Dewey lectures on "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," the moral person clearly comes to the fore, while its strong justification in "our
nature
as free and equal rational being [s] " (as Rawls writes inA Theory
[ 1 9 7 1 , 2 56; italics added] ) recedes. Rawls spells out the core of his constructivist conception as follows: ''The leading idea is to establish a suitable connection between a particular conception of the person and first prin
ciples of justice, by means of a procedure of construction" ( 1 g8o, 5 1 6) . From the perspective of the "wide reflective equilibrium" (534) , he says, it is important to combine the perspectives of the citizens of a well-ordered society and the perspective of the parties in the original position in such a way that the description of the parties and the constraints imposed upon them lead to principles that are, in "our" view, reasonably acceptable to the citizens of a well-ordered society. The self-interested "rational autonomy"
of the parties must do justice to the "full autonomy" of citizens "in their social life," that is to say, the original position must embody the two "moral powers" of the person-having a
rational
conception of the good and having areasonable
sense of justice.According to Rawls, a "constructivist" position does not claim to be "true"
in the sense of "rational intuitionism" or other versions of moral realism;
it is just "reasonable" (569) insofar as it rests on a "reasonable" conception of the person-a conception, however, that bears "critical reflection" and constitutes the center of an "objective," public conception of justice. It is in this sense that we are to understand Rawls's remark that a conception of justice must be "the most reasonable doctrine for us": "Kantian construc
tivism holds that moral objectivity is to be understood in terms of a suitably
182 UNIVERSALISM AND CONTEXTUALISM
constructed social point of view that all can accept. Apart from the proce
dure of constructing the principles of justice, there are no moral facts"
(5 1 9) . He distinguishes here-in contrast to
A Theory of
]ustic
�between a theory of human nature and a (less demanding) conception of the moral person; in his view, however, this distinction strengthens the conception of the moral person since it becomes independent of controversial theories of human nature: "It is hard to imagine realistically any new knowledge that should convince us that these ideals [of the person and the wellordered society] are not feasible, given what we know about the general nature of the world, as opposed to our particular social and historical cir
cumstances" (566) . The basic ideals of the moral person and the well
ordered society are "available to the common sense of any thoughtful and reflective person" (ibid.) . Here, though his theoretical self-restriction seeks to avoid controversial philosophical and scientific truth claims, Rawls clearly understands his conception of the person in a strong sense. That the "fundamental ideals" to which he refers are immanent in a democratic political culture does not mean that their claim to validity is restricted a priori to this culture. Nevertheless, the "political" conception of the moral person (in the manner Rawls has described it since 1 985) has a moral
"Kantian" and substantive-"political" double character.
The latter plays a role especially in the context of Rawls's explication of the principles of justice with regard to their function of socially enabling in a substantive sense the development of the two moral powers of persons (see the discussion in chapter 3.4) . The primary goods are thus justified as
"all-purpose means" for satisfying persons' "highest-order interests. " Vari
ous elements therefore enter the conception of the "political" as well as the "reasonable": a "moral" element with reference to the priority of justice and the practical-reasonable character of the moral person; a (first) "po
litical" element pertaining to the restriction to "political" conceptions of
"citizen" and "social cooperation"; and, finally, a (second) "political" ele
ment in respect of the assumptions about certain "citizens' needs." It is against this background that his theory of "political constructivism" is to be examined, which is no longer understood as
Kantian
constructivism inmoral
theory ( 1 985, 2 24n. 2; 1 993a, gon. 1 ) , as was still the case in the Dewey lectures. This new understanding however entails a distancing not from the theory's moral validity claims as a whole, but from certain moraltheoretic assumptions (Kant's, in particular) and especially from ethical doctrines.