Rawls, Constructivism, and the Tragic
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چکیده
In 1980, the liberal political philosopher John Rawls delivered a remarkable series of lectures at Columbia University. The Dewey Lectures, subsequently published in the Journal of Philosophy as “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” detailed a metaethical procedure–or method for formulating principles–that informed his earlier A Theory of Justice (1971) and that would make possible its sequels, Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999). Rawls situated himself in the Kantian tradition and explained that many of his ideas and themes–such as the constructivist thesis that human agents make practical principles out of their own mental faculties rather than discover them in the natural or supernatural realms–originated in Kant’s critical philosophy. Rawls began his lecture, however, by stating that he shared John Dewey’s ambition to overcome the dualisms in Kant’s philosophy, such as between reason and sensibility. Philosophers for over three decades have been debating whether one can combine Kantian and Deweyan materials to build a sturdy theoretical edifice. Taylor and Weber, in the excellent books under consideration here, answer no, though, intriguingly, from opposite sides of the spectrum on which Rawls tried to place himself in the middle. Taylor reworks Rawls’s philosophy to bring it closer to Enlightenment, or Prussian, liberalism that endorses a Kantian conception of the person and the basic contours of his moral-political outlook. Weber argues that Rawls’s philosophy, like Kant’s, is marred by metaphysical realism, and that Dewey highlights how we may forge a robust constructivism that better serves the needs of democratic citizens. In this review, I describe Taylor’s and Weber’s critiques of Rawls’s conception of constructivism, illuminate a common theme in their books, and defend the tragic vision that informs much of Rawls’s work and bothers many of his critics.
منابع مشابه
Political Cosmopolitanism
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