Rawls's Political Liberalism by Thom Brooks

Author:Thom Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, Philosophy/Political, PHI005000, Philosophy/Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

§7. THE TEXTUAL PUZZLES

Rather than attempting to fill in details on Rawls’s behalf, I want return to textual puzzles I surveyed at the end of §3 and show that the reading offered here suggests some solutions.

As I noted earlier, a showing of legitimacy is sometimes thought to be a demonstration that states have the right to impose obligations and claim obedience. This way of thinking about legitimacy is central to the standard reading. Rawls’s treatment of political obligation in A Theory of Justice is notoriously controversial.56 If showing citizens’ duty to obey the law were as central to Political Liberalism as the standard reading asserts, we would expect the later Rawls to revisit these topics in his later work. For if the standard reading is right, then the addition of a principle of legitimacy to his theory positioned him to answer many of the questions raised about his earlier account. But with the exception of a passage I cited previously in which Rawls says that legitimate laws are “politically (morally) binding” and that citizens are “not to resist [such laws] with force,” he seems not to have revisited the subject of political obligation at all (CP 578, 606).57

I believe Rawls touched on the subject only in passing because he did not think he had anything to add to what he had said before. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls had argued that the duty to obey the law follows from the natural duty of justice, for that duty requires us “to support and to comply with” just or reasonably institutions that exist and apply to us (TJ 99). The duty of compliance also “binds us to comply with unjust laws and policies, or at least not to oppose them by illegal means as long as they do not exceed certain limits of injustice” (TJ 311).

This last claim and its defense in A Theory of Justice are often overlooked. But in that book, Rawls had said that “being required to support a just constitution, we must go along with one of its essential principles, that of majority rule. In a state of near justice, then, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust laws in virtue of our duty to support a just constitution” (TJ 311). Thus even in A Theory of Justice Rawls had clearly stated that citizens of the well-ordered society have a duty to comply with laws they regard as unjust, or not resist them with illegal means, if they satisfy what he would later describe as the conditions of legitimacy. And even in A Theory of Justice he had clearly implied that if citizens recognize the duty of compliance, it is because they recognize that laws they regard as unjust satisfy those conditions. Political Liberalism and other late writings return to the duty to obey the law because the difficult cases concern citizens who are subject to laws they might not think themselves duty-bound to obey. If political liberalism is to be possible, it must be possible for these citizens to recognize their duty.

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