 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell and I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is Kevin Valier. He's associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and he contributed the chapter on Rawlsianism to Libertarianism.org's book, Arguments for Liberty. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Kevin. Thank you for having me. Who is John Rawls? Well, for many people John Rawls is the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. He is famous for a wide variety of reasons but they all are sort of centrally concentrated on his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. The theory of justice he develops there is widely known as what's called Justice's Fairness and Rawls basically says that our social institutions are just when they're organized in accord with two principles. First, a principle of liberty where people are owed a certain wide range of personal and civil liberties and then a second principle which is actually two that social and economic inequalities have to both be open to to all or rather half the political powers and offices available in society have to be equally available to all and that social and economic qualities also have to work to the maximum advantage at least advantaged. That latter part's actually called the Difference Principle and it's the principle that Rawls is most famous for. So so John Rawls is the philosopher who defended a liberal theory of justice known as Justice's Fairness, which is comprised by those two and really three principles. Now, if you think about, I mean that was fairly complex, but in terms of the way people might know about him because actually John Rawls has been referenced by politicians, but they're not usually libertarian or conservative politicians. It's generally been interpreted to endorse something like a modern social welfare state. The interesting thing about that is how little influence Rawls has among politicians. I mean, he's a liberal egalitarian in the sense that he's a big believer in the redistribution of wealth, extensive social insurance, and even at times public ownership of some of the means of production despite his liberalism being extremely left-leaning, he has the smallest fraction of influence in comparison to figures like Marx or even a variety of 20th century Marxist or postmodern intellectuals. It's kind of surprising. I think it has to do with the density of his work. That could be. I definitely I've heard him referenced more in a popular sense. And I think part of that, as I said, just it's assumed, which is why your chapter is so interesting in a book about arguments for liberty, but it's sort of assumed that he is the philosopher that justifies the kind of situation most Western democracies have, which is some amount of freedom and civil liberties, but a pretty robust welfare state. So somewhere between Marxism and pure capitalism. Social democracy. Yeah, I mean it's interesting that. I mean, when a theory of justice came out, a lot of people did sort of think of it that way. And in this later restatement of his position in justice fairness or restatement, he actually says more clearly than in the theory of justice that the welfare state is actually unjust. The welfare state's unjust because it doesn't correct for inequalities in the holdings of wealth and capital. That it can create a permanent underclass of people who think that they're living off of other people and that in fact the government needs to be even more involved. It needs to redistribute capital holdings widely to many people. And this is a system of what's known as property owning democracy. So it adds that capital dispersing and redistributing function to the welfare state. He was even open to liberal socialism, which would add to those two things. Modest public ownership of the means of production. So actually Rawls is quite left-wing in his economic theory, which makes this chapter even more surprising, I think. Rawls, was he when he wrote theory of justice in 1971, you said? Yeah. Was he, what was he responding to in the field of political philosophy? Like we often hear that he kind of revitalized political philosophy that was more about before he showed up. So what did the field look like and was he responding to a particular thing happening in it? Obviously, there's a couple of things. First, and sort of this is the general story that's told, in the 20s and 30s, Anglo-American philosophy began to be very influenced by logical positivism. And on this view, the only sort of meaningful and interesting and important philosophical questions had to be in some way given empirically verifiable or falsifiable answers. And as a result of that general attitude, the whole field of ethics and political philosophy contracted dramatically because normative claims don't seem like they're subject to empirical verification. How do you empirically verify that murder is wrong? So for several decades, at least within philosophy departments, political philosophy went into hibernation. And while there are a number of people writing in the 50s and 60s that were trying to revive it, Rawls is remembered as the person who did the most to sort of bring it back by offering a kind of systematic and careful and clear approach to these issues. So he's seen as reviving political philosophy. He was one of a number of figures, but he sort of went from being first among equals to Pope, I suppose. You mentioned the two principles of justice, which typically Rawls is, he's very long-winded. He tries to be very clear, but it is somewhat of a difficult read. But those two principles are usually not actually what he is most remembered for. I mean, the difference principle, but it's usually the process that he uses to think of these, quote unquote, think of these two principles, which is known as the veil of ignorance. What is the veil of ignorance? All right. So I'll speak to that, though. I think I should add one more thing in response to your last question, which is that Rawls is also understood as responding to utilitarianism and by providing a rejection of utilitarianism and utilitarian approaches to politics. So that's important, I think, for listeners to know. But to your other question, so what Rawls wants to do, he wants to try to figure out what the true principles of justice are. And the way that he proposes to do this is by developing a kind of social contract procedure on which people under certain idealized conditions will choose particular principles of justice. And if you get the idealization right, if that idealization represents certain moral commitments that we have, then the choice that's made under those conditions will actually uncover what the correct principles of justice are, the later he would say the principles that are most reasonable for us. The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment, which is intended to try to help us figure out what the right principles of justice are, given our sort of deeply held, considered convictions about moral and political matters. And the veil of ignorance does is it asks people to consider what principles of justice they would choose abstracted from a wide array of contingent facts about their society and about themselves. So for instance, you're too abstract away from your race, your gender, your class, your religion or philosophy of life, the country that you live in its level of economic development, your social position broadly, your own history, even your own natural talents. And under those conditions, you're supposed to be making fair and rational choices or rational and reasonable choices because you don't have appeal to any factors that would unfairly or irrationally bias your opinion. And so choice under those conditions would be fair. And so they're most likely to arrive at fair principles, principles that will be the correct principles of justice. So that's what he's trying to do with the veil of ignorance behind the veil of ignorance, we're ignorant of all of these factors that would bias us. And when we are ignorant of the factors that would bias us, the choice that we would make will yield what justice requires. So when he's looking for these principles of justice, are these kind of free floating, like justice is something that exists out there in the universe in some sort of platonic form? Or is this justice as it is for us as embodied beings? Because it seems like the, if you, all of those things that he's asking us to strip away are the things that make us human, they're like who we are. And so we're then, we're like choosing a, we're choosing a justice that is detached from the very things that like matter to us most. So this is actually a pretty interesting question because Rawls very much and this becomes very clear later in his work after a theory of justice, and it's actually clearer before in his articles before theory of justice, that he thinks that the enterprise of the theory of justice is about making sense of the convictions of our society broadly. And that we're trying to choose principles of justice, not for purely abstract people, but for the societies in which we live. And he thinks it's very important that the correct principles of justice be stable under free conditions, at least under certain idealized or favorable conditions. So he's not interested in just identifying some sort of mind independently true principles of justice. If Rawls even believed there was such a thing, he's interested in a choice of principles of justice for us. So then that creates a very important question, which is why exactly did he choose such an abstracting approach? Well, he thinks that our self understanding as thinking of justice as being impartial, well, or rather based in reciprocity, as he would put it, means that we already think about justice as abstracting away from these factors about ourselves. And I think in many cases he was right. I mean, right, we don't think that the principles of justice should depend on your race or your gender or your level of wealth. But to abstract away, say from your natural talents and your religion now, that's going sort of too far. But I do think most people would agree that at least some of the things that were ignorant of behind the veil of ignorance aren't taking us too far away from real people and their real self understanding. I sometimes describe the elevator pitch of Rawls' veil of ignorance process as an attempt to try and make traits that are irrelevant to justice not matter. And then the real question is what traits are irrelevant to justice? But as you pointed out, if you said, I always say that, okay, imagine you're going to have a society where there will be people with black on the white, right side of their face and white on the left side of their face and then the flip side like the Star Trek episode. And you don't know if you're going to have black on the right or left side of your face, but you still have to design the society. So you presumably will not design it to hurt just one of those groups of people. And the way to do that is to keep people from knowing what they're going to be when they enter into the society. This is, I think, a huge part of the appeal. There is something really intuitively appealing about Rawls. And it's a really good testament to the fact that if you're a philosopher and you come up with like a really memorable mind game that makes intuitive sense, it can get you a long way in your career. Well, that's certainly true. Yeah, I think that that is one of the attractions of Rawls. And though it's been also endlessly controversial, and it's also been something that many people have found propellant. And I don't use that word lightly. I mean, some people really, really hate Rawls. So whatever reason his work tends to inspire very strong reactions, both people who find it intuitive and people who don't. So let's go to the difference principle and sort of get down into the libertarian possibilities behind Rawls. But the difference principle is a big part of this. Let me just get the right formulation on the table. So the difference principle was that social and economic inequalities rather inequality, social and economic inequalities are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. So this means this is not purely egalitarian. You're allowed to be an unequal, but it has to be an inequality that is to the greatest advantage of the least wall off. And just kind of, I think actually, I think ask you a question and then help illustrate this for our listeners. You do at one point in your chapter say that you're not going to talk about whether or not capitalism itself can satisfy the difference principle because that'd be one way of interpreting it when we say, hey, having unequal Steve Jobs, it really helps out poor people. It helps out people with the fact that he's so rich to have an iPhone in their pocket and they can become Uber drivers and all this stuff. So that's an inequality that is allowed because it helps the least off. But you say you're not going to do that, that process. Yeah. So there's a couple of reasons. One is that a lot of libertarians have already pursued the argument that say capitalism works to the greatest benefit for the least advantaged. Another reason though is that the classical liberal philosophers who have tried to engage Rawls's thought in order to defend the principles of a free society have tended not to go that route for a number of different reasons. One is that the difference principle is not Rawls's first principle. The liberty principle is the first principle and the liberty principle is what Rawls said was lexically prior to the difference principle. So that means that satisfying it has to come first in cases of conflict. And it might be the case, for instance, there's a more promising Rawlsian route to the principles of free society given the priority of liberty. And if, for instance, economic liberties turn out to be part of that principle, that's going to give a sort of more powerful defense. There's some other reasons too, but I think, for listeners, that's I think one reason that you don't want to just say, oh well capitalism helps the difference principle because we've got this liberty principle to explore. So I think that's one kind of consideration. It also goes to the idea that this is a fundamentally non-consequentialist theory. It's what we call a deontological theory where the justice of outcomes doesn't depend solely on their consequences. And so if you really want to work out a kind of non-consequentialist Rawlsian approach to say economic justice, you don't want to just appeal to whatever works for the greatest benefit of the least advantage. You want to appeal to all the different features of that theory of justice in order to defend a free society. So I have maybe a big question because I think it draws in a lot of what we've discussed with, so with the difference principle, there's a question there of what it is that we're maximizing when we're maximizing the minimum. Are we talking about material wealth? Are we talking about subjective satisfaction and so on? But the reason I'm thinking about that is because when you say, so we would all, if behind the Val of Ignorance, we've abstracted away all of these kind of arbitrary traits or contingent traits, and these are the principles that we would agree to, that we would agree to a system where you could have inequalities as long as those inequalities benefited ultimately the people at the bottom, but we see the really hardcore egalitarians today, the people very concerned about say income inequality. Even if you make the argument that like look, these people being very wealthy, they created a lot of jobs and they did enormous benefits for the poor. So on the policy side we'll make the argument that yes, the people who own Walmart are extraordinarily wealthy, but Walmart has created so much good in terms of lower prices for food and so on and so forth for so many people, but they say, no, there's just something inherently bad about the very fact of inequality itself. But it seems like Rawls would say that kind of attitude is just not allowed behind the Val of Ignorance or it's not the kind of thing that people would agree to. So what are we maximizing? Do these kind of psychological traits get abstracted away like the very fact that we just were envious people maybe or we don't like seeing others with more than us? And then how do we tease out what is reasonable agreement or not reasonable? Like how do we say, no, if you were reasonable, you'd agree to this. So the fact that you don't agree to this means you're not reasonable. So the reasonableness issue is pretty vexed. I think we'll start with the somewhat easier of those two difficult questions, having to do with certain kinds of psychological dispositions and what role those play in the Val of Ignorance. And the answer is essentially what we're trying to do is we're not building, people can appeal to the ordinary facts of economics and psychology, something Rawls says, but the choosers behind the Val of Ignorance aren't thought to have any fundamental desires of that. So they're abstracted away from pretty much any kind of sectarian or abnormal or unusual or even corrupt desire. What they're essentially doing, they're a philosophical fiction intended to give us an idea of a fair and rational choice of principles. Now features about how to address our psychology and how justice fits in with our psychology and to what extent envy matters. Rawls actually talks about this in the theory of justice, but it comes towards the last third of the book, which very few people read and a lot of it has to do with the way in which justice fairness is supposed to mesh with our moral psychology. So the choosers themselves are not going to be subject to these considerations, but Rawls does address those kinds of concerns. And he does find that there are certain ways of being preoccupied with equality that are unhelpful or somehow inappropriate to shaping society. As far as reasonableness goes, this is a pretty complicated issue because it becomes a huge point of contention in his next big work, political liberalism. But the basic idea of what's going on in the earlier book is that you're using the term reasonable to try to refer to something that goes beyond just mere rational choice. So the choosers behind the veil of ignorance are meant to model a reasonable and rational choice. And it's a reasonable choice because it's fair and reciprocal. So the idea is that the reasonable goes beyond mere sort of practical rationality and allows us to say that certain kinds of rational bargains would be morally inappropriate or morally problematic. Say one that was based on my extracting a benefit from you just based on a threat that I make to you, not cooperating with you or something on those lines. Now, you discuss, we kind of alluded to it a little bit, but you discuss two other theorists who are in the classical liberal libertarian camp, broadly speaking, who kind of write in the tradition of Rawls, but adapt it or not adapt it, interpret it in such a way or argue in such a way that certain classical liberal or libertarian principles would be acceptable. The first one is John Tomasi, who is a philosopher at Brown University. And in his theory of this, focus is more, as you pointed out, on the first principle, correct? That's right. Yeah. I mean, he also talks about the second principle, but I think the main innovation in John's approach, Tomasi's approach to Rawls, is in the development of the first principle in a very different direction from Rawls. What does he argue? So, Tomasi thinks of Rawls as one of a group of theorists that he refers to following Sam Freeman, who's a philosopher and a major exposer of Rawls, calls high liberalism. The high liberal view is a kind of left-wing egalitarian liberalism that draws a really sharp distinction between traditional liberal liberties like civil liberties, freedom of speech, religion, procedural liberties like the right to fair trial, political liberties like the right to vote, on the one hand, and then the classical liberal economic liberties on the other. And they think the first set of civil liberties should be protected at that sort of highest moral and constitutional level. And the other liberties, these traditional classical liberal liberties like freedom of contract should be basically discarded or dramatically curtailed. And Tomasi says that this is a kind of what he calls economic exceptionalism, and that all the same arguments that would lead Rawlsians to prioritize these personal and civil liberties apply with equal force, or at least with nearly as much force, to the case for the traditional classical liberal liberties. And so he's arguing against economic exceptionalism in order to sort of come up with his own sort of alternative to justice as fairness or free market fairness. So that means that if you're respecting the equal liberties principle or the liberties principle of the first principle of justice, that means you include things like the right to earn a living and the right to contract. And then you get a, even if you run through the rest of the principles of justice, you get something that looks pretty classical liberal at the end of that. That's right. In fact, it's not even clear how much more room there is for the other principles to function, which is something that some people have criticized Tomasi for, because if you have these strong classical liberal liberties, it's not clear what the rest of social justice can do. So here's a sort of way to make it a little more nuanced, the view. Rawls actually acknowledges that there are two basic liberties that are economic liberties and that are absolutely fundamental on the same level as freedom of speech. The first one is the right to own personal property, you know, like family heirlooms and clothes and stuff like that. And the second is a right to freedom of occupation. So the problem with command, economy, socialism for Rawls is that the government tells you what job you have to have. And a really good question that Tomasi is able to pick up on is why only those two? Why does Rawls restrict the basic liberties to those two? Because those are fundamental liberties. They must be protected for a society to be just, legitimate, and stable among real people. And so, you know, John gives this example, like you imagine a woman who, say, is a small business owner, Amy's pup in the tub, and she's responsible for, you know, basically cleaning, you know, grooming, dog grooming. And you think, I mean, to develop her own life in her own way, her own projects, her own morality, that she ought to have not just, you know, the liberty of where to work, but the liberty to own a small business and operate it according to her own wishes within certain kinds of constraints. So the way I like to put this point in my own work is that if you think there's a right to choose where to work, that implies a right to go into business for yourself. And, you know, imagine that Amy ran the pup in the tub out of her home, which is her personal property. She's using her home as capital. And so it seems like if you acknowledge these two liberties, you should acknowledge her, at least a restricted right to own capital, which is how you get the case for capitalism off the ground. So what Tomasi wants to say is, you know, look, you just can't divide up the case for liberties and get all the egalitarian liberal liberties you want, but not get the classical liberal liberties and his sort of case of Amy's pup in the tub is supposed to help illuminate that. Why does Rawls only privilege those particular economic liberties? Why is he less concerned about the others? I mean, you could, the kind of cute, psychologizing answer might be that those, the ones that he seems to think are important are the ones that as, you know, a tenured professor at Harvard matter to him. Like, he's not really, he's not interested in starting his own small business and probably neither are many of his friends, but, you know, he needs to be able to own his books and he wants to be able to choose what he writes about. But is it, is there a more philosophical reason for not accepting this wider range of economic liberties? You know, I thought a lot about this and Rawls just doesn't help give us much help on that question at all, far less than he should have. My best guess is that when he's writing at the time, those classical liberal liberties are extremely controversial and he's starting this project, thinking about this project in the late 40s, early 50s, it's developing throughout the 60s in a time where classical liberalism is in a bad way. And I think he's thinking that those liberties are just ones that are not part of our shared self-understanding in the way that, you know, freedom of occupation is. But that still doesn't, it still doesn't make sense. I mean, however popular socialism, full-blown socialism was and the liberal democratic countries never abrogated the fundamental right to own private capital. They nationalized the major industries, but they never destroyed small businesses and, you know, so it's very peculiar that he didn't have almost anything to say at all. I mean, it's incredible, really. So, I'm at a loss. I just don't know what to say. I know that for the harder core classical liberties, like really strong freedom of contract, there's going to be standard worries that, you know, people will recognize more from Marx about those being sort of fake liberties. Their liberties are the rich to oppress the poor. But if you sort of pare it down a bit, you don't allow, say, freedom of contract to, you know, allow a businessman to pay someone no matter, you know, anything they want to pay them, no matter how little. Or you put a limit on saying a pharmaceutical company can't charge a million dollars for lifesaving. Like, just suppose you just restricted freedom of contract just a bit to get rid of some of these seemingly nastier cases. Why not endorse that? I mean, why not endorse a modified, a sort of limited freedom of contract? And I don't know the answer. I just don't know the answer. Yeah, I've wondered the same thing and the best I've come up is something similar to what you just said. Moving out of a theory of justice, and you mentioned this a little bit previously, that Raul's ideas started changing pretty quickly after a theory of justice, that he was sort of working on a different but related project that came out in a book called Political Liberalism, which I think was published in the early 90s, if I remember. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Most of the material is getting out of it, getting out there in the 80s. But it's, but yeah, it's the first edition is a 1993, I believe. And what is he, what is his new task there? Or I mean, I guess it's related to his previous task. But what is his, how is he thinking about it now in that book? This is an interesting question on which there's been a lot of recent scholarship. It's complex. And I will try to keep it as simple as I can. Raul thought a very important thing for a conception of justice to do, like his two principles, would be that it could keep a society under favorable conditions stable in a moral way. So for instance, a society could be stable in an immoral way if you just have a dictator that's just really good at crushing opposition and dissent. But Raul's wanted a liberal society to be one where people could affirm the conception of justice they lived under after sustained moral reflection on those institutions. They want to see them as things that they can endorse and complied with freely. And so it was very important for Raul's for a conception of justice to be stable. But in a theory of justice, the account of stability he gives involves embracing certain kinds of goods and excellences and sort of ignoring or downplaying others. And Raul's eventually came to realize that in his own understanding of a stable society, what he called a well-ordered society, there would be a dynamic that would lead it to unravel and destabilize on its own. And this is what he called the fact of reasonable pluralism. And this is basically the fact that reasonable people can fundamentally disagree about ultimate religious, moral, and political matters. They can disagree about the conception of the good life in particular. And so they would end up with different what Raul's called reasonable comprehensive doctrines. And this myth that there was not going to be any one story that you could tell about why people had a particular moral reason to be just or to go along with principles of justice. And so what he tries to do is reconstruct his model of a well-ordered society to take the form of what he called an overlapping consensus. So you would take a conception of justice like the two principles and say, okay, well as long as everybody from their own comprehensive doctrine can accept the two principles, then a society could be stable in the right way or it could be stable for the right reasons. And so basically what he's doing is saying, I want to adjust society to be one that's stable for moral reasons, but people are going to come to freely disagree about morality. And that means we have to see if justice's fairness can be justified to multiple reasonable points of view. And out of that problem, the project of political liberalism grows. So is this different than sort of like we talk a lot today about conservatives and Democrats and how different their worldview is. And maybe they're not even agreeing on the fundamental things that government should be doing and what it's for. And it's becoming a big problem because maybe there's not an overlapping consensus. Is it something like that or am I am I dumbing it down a little bit too much? No, you're not dumbing it down. A lot of these questions are complex ones because Rawls just his views have a lot of moving parts. But it's something like that when people... It's not really about political ideology because at least until very late in Rawls' career, he just didn't think there was going to be that much reasonable disagreement about justice, which is usually what conservatives and libertarians and progressives disagree about. He was thinking more about conceptions of the good and he's particularly thinking about religious people and he's thinking about people with secular moral doctrines like utilitarian or Kantians. And so he's trying to show how his conception of justice and maybe some other related ones can be accepted by different groups who have different understandings of the good life. So that's really the kind of pluralism or reasonable pluralism he's worried about addressing. Now late, he starts to see that reasonable people can disagree about justice, but he... And in my opinion, someone notoriously says that libertarianism is not a reasonable conception of justice. So he's bending over backwards to accommodate religious people, including... I mean, he says every major of the major religions ought to be able to be politically liberal, but not libertarianism. That's pretty amazing. He's got nose and down the hall, remember, right? So I mean, they're both there at the same time. He's just down the hall, right? And this guy's beyond the pale for Rawls. That comes back to that question I asked earlier about reasonable disagreement and reasonable doctrines because it seems like it's almost either circular or maybe stacking the deck to say like, well, we're gonna figure out all of these reasonable people, what they would agree on is justice, are the principles of justice that we're gonna use. But at the same time, the way that we kind of judge whether they're reasonable in the first place is what sorts of principles they endorse. So presumably, nose and down the hall is an irrational person because his principles and his core ideas are themselves irrational or just nuts. So is this... Is it circular? Is there a way to meaningfully get to figuring out which people are rational or reasonable and which ones aren't without picking your end goal and then seeing which ones line up with it first? I mean, literally, if you read the text, Rawls's definition of the reasonable is circular. Like he defines reasonable people in terms of referring reasonable doctrines and reasonable doctrines is one that could be affirmed by reasonable people. And so it's very hard to sort through exactly what the reasonable is and what one can do with it. But let's suppose we're trying to give our best reconstruction of Rawls and I take it, what a reasonable person is supposed to be is they've got sort of two dispositions. One, they're going to recognize that there's reasonable pluralism or they recognize what Rawls calls the burden of judgment. So they're going to believe that other people can disagree with them about the good and so on without being a bad will and without being fundamentally confused or stupid or irrational. The other condition is that you be prepared to propose reciprocal terms of cooperation. Like the rules that go for you will go for me and vice versa. If you have those two features, that you believe in reasonable pluralism and you're prepared to offer reciprocal terms of cooperation, then you're reasonable. So then why wouldn't Nozick be reasonable? Except for, I mean, maybe Rawls just thought he used an unreasonable amount of italics in his writing or something. But I mean, those things would seem to apply to Nozick. You know, it's weird. There's this one section in political liberalism about it and it has to do with the fact that he thinks that libertarians see the state as like a corporation and that our self-understanding of government is that it is a public entity that is supposed to represent all of society as a collective whole. And so that's the problem with Nozick's view is it sees the state as basically a sort of fiduciary institution. However, suppose that we're a fair criticism of Nozick and whether it is, I think is, well, it's complicated. But there are plenty of libertarian views on which that just isn't true. I mean, it's just not true of Hayek, for instance. He doesn't see the state as just a sort of another private corporation. And there's a variety. You know, I mean, Jay, you can and isn't going to see it that way. Milton Friedman is not going to see it that way. I mean, Nozick doesn't say give us a theory of democracy or anything like that. But you know, I mean, most classical liberals have been some kind of small D Democrat despite wanting very strong constitutional protections of liberties. But Rawls wanted strong constitutional protections of liberties. So I mean, I think that, you know, if you have a sort of constitutionalist libertarianism, I don't think Rawls can rule you out as having an unreasonable conception of justice. And certainly, he can't rule out John Tomasi's free market fairness, which is quite libertarian as being unreasonable, because it's just so much like his view. It would be very difficult for him to rule it out. So long story short, libertarianism in the Nozickian or Rothbardian form isn't the only kind. And so even though I don't think Rawls is criticism of Nozick is successful, it just doesn't touch plenty of versions of libertarianism. So it's just not... I mean, remember Rawls wants utilitarianism to be reasonable. So I mean, that's going to include like a gigantic number of libertarians. So yeah, I mean... I think that I always got the sort of... I kind of believe that Rawls just didn't spend a lot of time thinking about libertarian theory. It just wasn't the circles that he walked. I mean, he had Nozick there, but I don't know how much they... But he didn't go to the parties or... So I just think it wasn't what he was really talking about. But I want... We were talking about political liberalism and this sort of idea of overlapping consensus as Rawls calls it. But there's another guy you write about in your chapter, Jerry Gauss, Gerald Gauss, who's a philosopher at Arizona, correct? Yes. And he goes more... Where John Tomasi goes for Rawls and talking about one of the things... Big things he highlights is one of the rights and liberties of the people. But Jerry Gauss is really looking more at the kind of things that Rawls is wrestling with in political liberalism. That's right. So Tomasi is explicitly engaging Rawls in a way of developing a Rawlsian view. Gauss was working on political liberalism at the same time Rawls was developing it. And there are certain ways in which he's building on Rawls and is built on Rawls, but there's other ways in which his project is more self-contained. But there is an affinity in this way. There's a question about how we are to have an ongoing system of social cooperation that preserves our understanding of persons as free and equal and treating others with respect. But it also recognizes that disagreement about fundamental moral and normative matters is inelimitable from political life. So it's also a social contract theory in that it's trying to justify moral and political order in terms of what can be justified and acceptable to each person. So there's a lot of similarities in terms of the project. It's a contract theory and project that is grappling directly with the fact of reasonable disagreement. What Gauss calls evaluative pluralism. And the project differs in a variety of respects that I explain in the chapter, but it ends up being more classically liberal for a couple of different reasons. One, Gauss thinks that among in his kind of original position equivalent there are a lot more different kinds of disagreements that are present. So I mean really in Rawls's veil of ignorance everybody's so abstracted that they all end up agreeing about they all end up pretty much agreeing on all the same views. And so it's not even really a bargain at all even though it's presented as one. But for Gauss he allows just a lot more diversity and disagreement, weighting of different values and things like that. And so he thinks there's certain fundamental liberties like Rawls does that includes some economic liberties. But he also thinks that the case for some rights that we have is that they help us to resolve disagreements that we couldn't otherwise resolve. So for instance one of his main arguments, contract theory arguments for a right of private property, is that because people disagree so much about the good life and they disagree so much about justice we need economic and political institutions that allow us to go our own way and to live our own lives. And so a fundamental argument for a strong right not a fully libertarian right but a strong right of private property is that it helps to economize on disagreement. So for instance the reason that socialism for Gauss can't be justified to each person or what he calls publicly justified is that the you know people can't agree on which plan to appeal to. People can't agree on what all to do in their publicly owned housing complex even. And so part of the case for market order and for classical liberalism is that it acknowledges and deals with disagreement in some really kind of magnificent ways that Rawlsian and egalitarian liberals seem at least largely unable to appreciate. Does this end up dealing with the because something that libertarians talk about a lot because I like the idea in Gauss about private property. It's good fences make good neighbors but in a more profound sense that yeah when you have fundamental ways that you're constructing your life and the things that you value it doesn't really work to have everyone I don't know voting about that and trying to control each other's method of deepest held values and deepest held convictions and but how does that get us to any sort of do we have a theory of coercion at all or about the state in Gauss whatsoever. Yeah so it's interesting in Rawls's work particularly this is explicit in Justice's fairness review statement and it's basically explicit in political liberalism it's entailed by two explicit things he says and then that's there's a presumption against coercion that if the government is going to coerce it needs a good reason and for Gauss if the government's going to coerce it has to show that the coercion can be justified to the people who are coerced and it turns out that's hard to do in many cases because people reasonably disagree about what not only what the state is permitted to do but they disagree about the effects of what the state may do so they're going to disagree about all kinds of things and so many policies and approaches and you know constitutional forms are going to be reasonably rejectable by somebody or at least some sizable group and because Gauss allows for a much broader range of reasonable disagreement than does Rawls there will be libertarian and conservative members of the public that are reasonable and that have a good reason to reject extensive forms of government so property owning democracy and liberal socialism can't be publicly justified because of the reasonable objections of conservatives and libertarians now he doesn't go fully libertarian because he thinks that folks on the left are going to have reasonable objections to that but the key idea is this there's a problem with coercion it has it is sort of generally bad and that people have a kind of right against legal coercion that can only be met if the laws imposed upon them can be justified to them given their own principles and values and since so little can be justified we end up with a pretty libertarian order so if if we're saying that the the role of the market or the reason that this is a classically liberal libertarian theory ultimately is that you know if the people that one of the benefits of private property and and limiting coercion is that we're not forcing upon each other those things we can't agree on you know but so so in a sense the the freedom there is kind of a the default it's like the background like look you know if if we can't all agree on what to do then we're going to do nothing which is you know letting people have their own property and letting them live their own lives but it feels like you know you look around the the political culture today our latest elections the elections going on Europe it's like the one thing that everyone except you know us principled few at the Cato Institute can agree on is that we should never leave anything to the market that you know we may not be able to agree on what government should do but the not having government do something is is worse and so is that you know how do we have to do we have to kind of agree to have all reasonably agree to have the the market and freedom and classical liberalism be that kind of default option to get it off the ground yeah this is a good question there's gas actually has a number of different things to say about this but i'll just try to stick to the basic idea among the things that he thinks that is recognized widely and cross-culturally is a kind of presumption against coercion and different people think about you know which policies are coercive in different ways but generally they think if the state's going to course they need a pretty good reason so he thinks that that basic presumption against coercion runs really deep through humanity and so if you show that not a lot can meet that presumption it's not that everybody has to endorse libertarianism it's just that it's an implication of fact that they endorse a presumption against coercion so in that sense libertarianism is sort of endorsed by implication people say okay we agree on this presumption oh wow look at how much other people disagree with us i guess we can't meet that presumption very easily so the idea is if you can confront people with the fact that so many of their disagreements are fundamentally reasonable ones then they'll get sort of drawn by matter of logical rational consistency towards a more classically liberal position it's also the case that gals does does it's not about what people would agree to sort of as they are there is idealization in gals so considerably less than there is in Rawls the idea is that you're you're trying to turn what's justifiable to people based on their commitments and values and not just whether they say yes or no at a particular moment so you're trying to base the law on their diverse reasons but not merely based on you know for the fact that people are extremely risk averse and have a sort of irrational beliefs about what would happen if the government weren't acting so in a publicly justifiable order there are going to be lots of situations in which you say yeah i mean most people think that uh this is going to be a disaster but they don't have any good argument for that so we can go ahead and have have the policy now we have to be wary about not idealizing too much we have to be very careful to keep the idealization sort of close to the ground otherwise we're going to course people without it a good reason but we're not just going to have the order the political order entirely the victim of people's basic irrationalities and biases can you clarify you mentioned that with idealization and it's it's mentioned in your chapter and it's an important kind of distinction in political philosophy that the ideal theory versus the non ideal theory and gauss kind of does a little bit of both it seems like yeah so it's not sort of fully non ideal theory in the sense that you know you're just looking at power relations and how best to balance them um it's a it's an enterprise within a kind of moral theory that's looking at what we could reasonably aspire to under certain conditions so that so when you but in terms of defining a so is it because i was when we talk about for example does anyone in this someone not very philosophical who's listening to this might be wondering whether or not anyone is talking about the actual behavior of government agents and the actual conditions under which they behave and and we say well that's because it's a different it's a different kind of game we're playing yeah no for for for gauss when we are choosing the terms of political life we are able to appeal to the fact that um government agents for instance are often going to be self-interested in ral's theory it's it's so much closer to the ideal theory end of things that you do presume that people generally comply with the law and that government officials are generally well meaning um and capable um although ral's doesn't really defend that assumption but gauss does not accept that assumption and i think that's another reason that his view inclines in a class deliverable direction because once you're prepared to say mark i mean rals thought markets failed all over the place but there's no role for government failure in his his uh his theory almost at all um there there may be some little gaps for gauss they're they're all on the table market failures government failures and what can be justified is going to be based on our best assessment of of which laws accomplish the the ends that we can agree upon um given a real social scientific assessment of those those possibilities so of these two sorts of rals classical liberal theories we talked about tomassi's and gauss's is there one that you prefer or i think is stronger yeah i mean i'm i should just say to listeners i mean i'm i was one of gauss's students uh at arizona um and i i i wrote my dissertation under him um so that may be part of the reason i'm partial to the gaussian view um right after i finished at arizona i was a postdoc uh at brown with tomassi while he was finishing up free market fairness so um you know i was influenced by john as well but um i inclined towards the gaussian view and the reason that i inclined to the gaussian view i think may be the main reason anyway um is this uh rals acknowledged toward the end of his career that there was reasonable disagreement about justice and if you allow that that runs as deep as reasonable disagreement about the good you can no more have a free open stable society based on a single conception of justice than you can on a single conception of the good so it's no longer possible i think under modern conditions for the catholic church to be the dominant political force in a society because there are reasonable good people who aren't catholic um and in the same way we can't have justices fairness as the basis for justice because there are reasonable good people who are not liberal egalitarians and so i worry that the project of trying to come up with the correct conception of justice to govern our social order um is hopeless in the same way that coming up with the right conception of the good uh uh uh is hopeless so i think that tamasi is too much like the early rals and that his view succumbs to the same kinds of difficulties that led rals to political liberalism and i think if he'd live longer would have led him even away from his emphasis on justice's fairness and gauss accepts that there's reasonable disagreeing about justice just like there is reasonable disagreeing about the good and i think that's a more realistic uh place to start uh doing uh sort of traditional political theory so libertarians have typically been fairly dismissive of rals he certainly doesn't have a place in the the libertarian philosopher pantheon um do you think that rals has value for libertarians yeah i think he has enormous value and i think he has enormous value for a couple of reasons um first he's a good philosopher and an important one in his own right uh and libertarians who are interested in political philosophy can just learn a lot by understanding his view another reason he's valuable is if you really want to understand what's driving at least certain kinds of elite liberal egalitarian opinion rals is someone to go to to understand those you disagree with um another reason to take rals very seriously is that rals is a liberal and libertarians i think are broadly liberal as well and many of the arguments that rals uses on behalf of certain kinds of liberal institutions are ones that i think libertarians will find congenial where they just they agree with liberal egalitarians um but also they'll see i think and hopefully by taking a look at the chapter that i wrote they can see this that many of the arguments that rals gives he just didn't see that they had libertarian implications and that by studying rals you might find some very powerful arguments for libertarianism that you may not have otherwise been aware of if you were dismissive of rals thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org