John Rawls by Andrius Gališanka

Author:Andrius Gališanka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

This meant that Rawls had to carry out a more limited argument: draw limits on the range of views that could be made compatible with natural feelings. He maintained that only certain moral principles could be made compatible with moral (and therefore also natural) feelings. Yet instead of focusing on substantive moral theories, such as utilitarianism or Marxism, Rawls turned to emotivism and its claim that any principle can be a moral principle. Taking R. M. Hare’s The Language of Morals as representative of emotivism, Rawls argued that some principles, such as “Do not walk on the sidewalk,” could not be connected to typical moral feelings, such as guilt or shame. As he wrote, “What I have attempted to show, after having examined some of the moral feelings, is that the standard moral feelings could not be defined with respect to any content: that is, that these feelings require certain objects.”58 Rawls argued that only certain objects can give rise to moral emotions and reasons. Referring to the already-mentioned example of Philippa Foot, he argued that moral principles such as “Do not walk on the sidewalk” cannot evoke the moral emotion of guilt when this rule is breached. Connecting such rules with moral emotions would be “in some instances nonsensical, in others the conduct itself would be unintelligible.”59 Considering this principle a moral principle would require a “very great … shift” in “our whole way of viewing morality and human feelings.… This is [a] drastic conceptual shift.”60 Such a view would “completely unhing[e] our moral vocabulary, and further, our vocabulary of natural attitudes and personality.”61

This argument may work against bizarre principles of justice, but it has less purchase against actual moral theories, the principles of which are more defensible. Perhaps for this reason Rawls did not evaluate the more traditional moral theories against the background of his naturalistic philosophy. The main problem with the argument was the breadth of the terms “person” and “recognizing.” If one defines a “person” as someone who has interests and wishes, and “recognizing” the person as acknowledging the person’s having of those wishes, then a variety of behavioral patterns could count as recognizing the person. As Rawls himself noted, “We certainly recognize others as persons in revenge and retaliation.” Similarly, we may recognize persons while behaving toward them in an unjust or otherwise inappropriate manner. As Rawls wrote, we “may certainly recognize … others as persons when we shove them aside in the pursuit of our own interests. Cheating, or stealing from another, doesn’t presuppose that we fail to recognize him as a person.”62 Such broad understandings of “person” and “recognizing” therefore allowed all kinds of behavior—and certainly Marxist and utilitarian—to count as recognizing another as a person. On the other hand, narrowing the meaning of “person” and “recognizing” would have required building in specific interpretations of moral concepts and therefore arguments beyond moral psychology. Rawls did not attempt to go in that direction, and so the achievement of this line of argument was the rejection of emotivism but not any substantive moral theory, such as utilitarianism or Marxism.

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