John Rawls: On My Religion

[midcan5]

One of my favorite liberal thinkers on religion.

How Rawls's political philosophy was influenced by his religion
by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel

"Those who have studied Rawls’s work, and even more, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings, whatever may have been his beliefs. He says, for example, that political philosophy aims at a defence of reasonable faith, in particular reasonable faith in the possibility of a just constitutional democracy; he says that the recognition of this possibility shapes our attitude “toward the world as a whole”; he suggests that if a reasonably just society is not possible, one might appropriately wonder whether “it is worthwhile for human beings to live on earth”; and he concludes A Theory of Justice with powerfully moving remarks about how the original position enables us to see the social world and our place in it sub specie aeternitatis. Religion and religious conviction are also important as themes within Rawls’s political philosophy. For example, his case for the first principle of justice – that of equal basic liberties – aims to “generalize the principle of religious toleration”. More broadly, his theory of justice is in part a response to the problem of how political legitimacy can be achieved despite religious conflict, and how, among citizens holding distinct religious views, political justification can proceed without reference to religious conviction."

John Rawls "On My Religion" Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel TLS

 

[Avatar4321]

Shame you dont believe that.

 

[Diuretic]

Distancing himself from deism, Rawls emphasizes that natural religion or reason alone can tell us very little about God, and that community with God requires that he reveal himself to us in person.

The thesis does not offer much detail about the condition of fellowship and interpersonal openness that delivers us from sin and aloneness. In particular it does not present a worked out positive morality, either individual, social, or political. Nevertheless the thesis makes some strong negative points that are consonant with Rawls’s later views.

One of these is the attack on social contract theories, which the young Rawls understood as claiming that society is founded on a bargain among self-interested individuals. “The idea of justice expressed in the political theories of Hobbes and Locke, the view of Adam Smith that we best serve our fellow-men by enlightened self interest, are all false views of community. Any society which explains itself in terms of mutual egoism is heading for certain destruction.”

In his later work, Rawls is not a social contract theorist in this sense. His account of justice as fairness uses the idea of a contract under a veil of ignorance – which keeps us from knowing our class, sex, native talents, ambitions, race, or religion – principally as a device for representing the value of fairness and the equal freedom of moral persons. The well-ordered society of justice as fairness is not founded on a bargain; it is a social union in which institutions that express our social nature are valued as good in themselves. What attaches people to those institutions, according to the later Rawls, is not self-interest but an allegiance to principles of justice founded on respect for one another as equals. This respect is shown by a willingness to abide by principles that would be chosen under fair conditions in which individuals are assumed not to know their place in society or the particulars of their endowments or convictions.

Good read thanks mid

 

[midcan5]

Shame you dont believe that.

But I do believe in many parts of that, just maybe not the ones you do.