3 Rawls at Work
3.2 The First Moral Power
Justice as fairness takes it as axiomatic that we should view society as a fair system of
social cooperation between free and equal citizens. The subsequent task for political philosophy, then, is to identify the implications of this claim. Or, more precisely, it is to
specify what individuals owe each other as a matter of justice, if each is a free and equal participant in a fair system of cooperation.
According to Rawls, to treat an individual as free and equal requires that we recognise that she has an interest in possessing the two moral powers.14 The first moral
power refers to each individual’s capacity ‘to understand, to apply, and to act from (and not merely in accordance with) principles of political justice that specify the fair terms
of social cooperation’.15 That is, the first moral power refers to each individual’s
capacity for a sense of justice.
The second moral power refers to each individual’s capacity ‘to have, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of the good’.16 That is, the second moral power
refers to each individual’s capacity for ambitions. More specifically, justice as fairness states that each individual has a weighty political-ideal-based interest in the adequate
development and exercise of her two moral powers.17 In turn, this justifies a right to,
and a corresponding enforceable duty to protect, the opportunities necessary for the
adequate development and exercise of her two moral powers. This is how I shall understand the content of the principle of basic liberties.18
14 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 19. 15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. As I understand it, the adjective ‘adequate’ governs both the development and the exercise of the two moral powers, such that each individual has an interest in the adequate development and adequate exercise of her two moral powers.
17 John Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, The Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980), 515-72 at 525.
18 Ibid., 45. Strictly speaking, Rawls characterises the principle in terms of the ‘full exercise of the two moral powers’, but this is misleading and can be replaced with the phrase ‘adequate exercise of the two moral powers’, as I have done. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 332; and Jeppe von Platz, ‘Are Economic Liberties Basic Rights?’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 13 (2014), 23-44 at 32-4.
There are two caveats to this. First, the principle of basic liberties asserts that each individual has a right to the political and social conditions necessary for the adequate
development and exercise of the two moral powers.19 The principle does not protect a
range of other conditions, such as psychological conditions, that are necessary for the
adequate development and exercise of the two moral powers. The justification for restricting the principle in this way appeals to the publicity test and, in particular, to the
fact that we are incapable of effectively regulating certain conditions, such as psychological conditions, that are necessary for the adequate development and exercise
of the two moral powers. To be sure, it is consistent with this conclusion that the principle of basic liberties should protect the political and social conditions necessary
for satisfaction of other conditions, such as psychological conditions, that are themselves necessary for the adequate development and exercise of the two moral
powers.
Second, it is important for me to note that the name of this principle may be
misleading, since, in its most plausible form, the principle of basic liberties requires us to protect things other than certain liberties. In particular, the principle of basic
liberties requires us to protect entitlements to certain opportunities (such as to education, work, and leisure) and to basic material goods and services, when doing so
is necessary for the adequate development and exercise of the two moral powers. This is because there is no reason to single out liberties in particular, when certain
opportunities and basic material goods and services can be as important. It is for these reasons that Arnold concludes that we should abandon the principle of basic liberties,
understood as concerned exclusively with liberties, and instead embrace a principle that takes seriously the full range of liberties, opportunities, and goods that are essential to
the adequate development and exercise of the two moral powers.20 I am sympathetic to
this line of argument, though I shall continue to refer to it as the principle of basic
liberties. What’s important, though, is that I shall understand this principle in a much more expansive way, so that it accommodates Arnold’s concerns.
The principle of basic liberties is important to an account of justice in work for several reasons. For example, some political philosophers, including Rawls, claim that
the principle of basic liberties may justify a basic right to freedom of occupational choice.21 Since I will examine this claim in chapter 7, I do not do so in this chapter.
Instead, I elaborate and defend two different implications of the principle of basic liberties, one relating to each of the two moral powers.
Let me begin with the first moral power, which refers to the capacity for a sense of justice. According to the principle of basic liberties, therefore, each individual
has a basic right to the political and social conditions essential for the adequate development and exercise of her capacity for a sense of justice. By implication, this
justifies a basic right both to those political and social conditions that secure an individual’s capacity to maintain a sense of justice, and against those conditions that
jeopardise it.
As I noted in the previous chapter, some Rawlsians appeal to this implication
to defend greater democratic provisions within firms. There are a wide range of
20 Samuel Arnold, ‘Putting Liberty in its Place: Rawlsian Liberalism Without the Liberalism’, (unpublished manuscript).
21 John Rawls, ‘The Basic Liberties and Their Priority’, Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 3-87 at 50. See also Michael Titelbaum, ‘What Would a Rawlsian Ethos of Justice Look Like?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 36 (2008), 289-322; and John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), ch. 2. Rawls excludes freedom of occupational choice from his list of basic liberties in Political Liberalism, 181 and 308.
possibilities here. One dispute concerns whether the argument implies a basic right to democratic provisions at work or merely a basic right against certain undemocratic
arrangements at work.22 Proponents of the former view claim that there is a basic right
to democratic provisions, since these are allegedly necessary for individuals’ adequate
moral development.23 By contrast, proponents of the latter view claim that there is a
basic right against certain undemocratic arrangements, since these dampen individuals’
sense of justice.24 The latter view is more modest than the former in so far as we can
meet its demands by not working at all. A second dispute concerns the nature and
extent of these democratic provisions. For example, whereas some commentators seek, ultimately, to justify a basic right to worker ownership, others favour a form of
democratic corporatism, whereby a number of associations that represent various groups of individuals (workers, owners, etc.) meet regularly to discuss matters relating
to their firms and to the parameters of the market more generally.25
I shall focus specifically on the position that O’Neill advances. He appeals to
the principle of basic liberties in order to defend ‘measures to increase the discretion that individual workers have over their role in the workplace; policies for the
protection and promotion of strong trade union rights; the enactment of forms of co- determinism; and so on’.26 According to O’Neill, the reason for this is that ‘unless
individuals have some first-hand experience in the deliberative direction of some
22 For pushing me to clarify this, I thank James Christensen. 23 For example, see Hussain, ‘Nurturing the Sense of Justice’.
24 For example, see Hsieh, ‘Workplace Democracy, Workplace Republicanism, and Economic Democracy’.
25 For example, see O’Neill, ‘Three Rawlsian Routes Towards Economic Democracy’; and Hussain, ‘Nurturing the Sense of Justice’.
collective enterprise (such as a firm), then they will lack the skills that will be needed in order to participate fully in “the free use of public reason” in democratic politics’.27 I
focus on this view not because I take it to be the most plausible or well-argued possibility. Instead, it is because this position is illustrative of these kinds of arguments
and, therefore, my treatment of it should be generalisable to variations on O’Neill’s position.
This argument fails. It relies upon unsupported empirical speculation about the necessity of greater democratic provisions to maintaining a sense of justice. There are
two grounds for suspicion. According to the first, we should reject O’Neill’s argument on the grounds that it is incorrect to claim that, in order to maintain a sense of justice,
each individual needs ‘some first-hand experience in the deliberative direction of some collective enterprise’. Within a society that has a healthy regime of civic education, say,
there is no reason to accept this claim. According to the second, even if some first- hand experience is necessary, there is no reason to think that this experience cannot be
gained in other, non-work-related spheres, such as in schools or private associations.28
To be sure, it may be that, in the society in which we currently live, many individuals
lack these opportunities outside of work, say, because work takes up so much of people’s time.29 However, this simply gives us reasons to ensure that this is not the
case; by itself, it does not cast doubt on the present point.
We can, though, justify a more modest conclusion. Rawls remarks that
economic and social inequalities tend to ‘arouse widespread attitudes of deference and servility on one side and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other’.30 This is a
27 Ibid., 35.
28 O’Neill acknowledges this reply. See ibid., 41.
29 For this worry, see Hussain, ‘Nurturing the Sense of Justice’, 195. 30 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 131.
familiar psychological claim about the formative effects of economic and social inequalities.31 It draws our attention to the fact that, in arousing the aforementioned
attitudes, economic and social inequalities may jeopardise an individual’s sense of justice. If correct, the principle of basic liberties would then justify a basic right against
those economic and social inequalities. Though this argument does not justify a basic right to greater democratic provisions at work, it might justify a more limited basic
right against certain kinds of workplace relationships, namely those that threaten an individual’s capacity to maintain a sense of justice.
We must determine the content of this basic right by referring to empirical facts that concern the formative effects of various workplace relationships on the
capacity to maintain a sense of justice. For two reasons, this is a very difficult task. First, there are very few psychological studies, if any, that investigate the formative
effects of various workplace relationships on the capacity to maintain a sense of justice. This is in part because psychologists tend to focus on the other formative effects of
certain kinds of workplace relationships, such as their effects on a worker’s self- confidence or intelligence, but also in part because the Rawlsian idea of ‘a sense of
justice’ is a quite specific one that is not commonly discussed by psychologists, who instead tend to investigate the predictors of other senses, such as a sense of empathy or
fairness.32 Of course, this is not to deny that it may be possible to use empathy or
fairness as highly imperfect proxies for a sense of justice.
31 For example, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 [1754]). See also Judith Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 276-293, esp. 288-90.
32 For example, see Kohn and Schooler, ‘The Reciprocal Effects of the Substantive Complexity of Work and Intellectual Flexibility’; Kohn and Schooler, Work and Personality; and Kornhauser, Mental Health of the Industrial Work.
Second, it is also a very difficult task because the formative effects of various workplace relationships are themselves sensitive to a multitude of further variables.
The extent to which a given level of economic and social inequality within a workplace relationship threatens a worker’s capacity to maintain a sense of justice is sensitive to
the number of hours that she spends at work, public attitudes towards the kind of work that she does, and a whole host of other factors. Put simply, there is no reason to
think that the same workplace relationships that threaten to undermine a sense of justice in one society will also threaten to undermine it in another society. This makes
it very difficult to speculate generally and accurately about the content of this right, even with the use of regression analyses.33
Having said this, it is plausible to suppose that the principle of basic liberties grants protection against those workplace relationships that involve a very large
inequality in decision-making, defined in terms of the power to determine the worker’s goals, working conditions, and work activities, including the order in which the
activities must be performed.34 This is because workplace relationships marked by
these properties are the ones most likely to arouse attitudes of servility and arrogance,
which are the most antagonistic to the maintenance of a sense of justice.35 For this
reason, I shall call this thebasic right against relationships of servility.
33 Rawls similarly writes: ‘Which of these systems and the many intermediate forms most fully answers to the requirements of justice cannot, I think, be determined in advance. There is presumably no general answer to this question, since it depends in large part upon the traditions, institutions, and social forces of each country, and its particular historical circumstances.’ See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 242.
34 Fabian Schuppert, ‘Being Equals: Analyzing the Nature of Social Egalitarian Relationships’, in Carina Fourie, Fabian Schuppert, and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (eds), Social Equality: On What It Means to Be Equals
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 107-27.