A Theory of Justice - Criticism

Criticism

In 1974, Rawls' colleague at Harvard, Robert Nozick, published a defense of libertarian justice, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Another Harvard colleague, Michael Walzer, wrote a defense of communitarian political philosophy, Spheres of Justice, as a result of a seminar he co-taught with Nozick. In a related line of criticism, Michael Sandel, also a Harvard colleague, wrote Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which criticized A Theory of Justice for asking us to think about justice while divorced from the values and aspirations that define who we are as persons, and which allow us to determine what justice is.

Robert Paul Wolff wrote Understanding Rawls: A Critique and Reconstruction of A Theory of Justice, which criticized Rawls from a Marxist perspective, immediately following the publication of A Theory of Justice. Wolff argues in this work that Rawls' theory is an apology for the status quo insofar as it constructs justice from existing practice and forecloses the possibility that there may be problems of injustice embedded in capitalist social relations, private property or the market economy.

Feminist critics of Rawls, such as Susan Moller Okin, largely focused on weakness of Rawls' in accounting for the injustices and hierarchies embedded in familial relations. Rawls argued that justice ought only to apply to the "basic structure of society." Feminists, rallying around the theme of "the personal is political," took Rawls to task for failing to account for injustices found in patriarchal social relations and the gendered division of labor, especially in the household.

The assumptions of the original position, and in particular, the use of maximin reasoning, have also been criticized (most notably by Kenneth Arrow and John Harsanyi), with the implication either that Rawls designed the original position to derive the two principles, or that an original position more faithful to its initial purpose would not lead to his favored principles. In reply Rawls has emphasized the role of the original position as a "device of representation" for making sense of the idea of a fair choice situation for free and equal citizens. Rawls has also emphasized the relatively modest role that maximin plays in his argument: it is "a useful heuristic rule of thumb" given the curious features of choice behind the veil of ignorance.

Some egalitarian critics have raised concerns over Rawls' emphasis on primary social goods. For instance, Amartya Sen has argued that we should attend not only to the distribution of primary goods, but also how effectively people are able to use those goods to pursue their ends. In a related vein, Norman Daniels has wondered why healthcare shouldn't be treated as a primary good, and some of his subsequent work has addressed this question, arguing for a right to health care within a broadly Rawlsian framework.

Philosopher Allan Bloom, a student of Leo Strauss, criticized Rawls for failing to account for the existence of natural right in his theory of justice, and wrote that Rawls absolutizes social union as the ultimate goal which would conventionalize everything into artifice.

Other criticisms of Rawls' theory have come from the philosopher Gerald Cohen. Cohen's series of influential papers culminated first in his book, If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? and then in his later work, Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cohen's criticisms are leveled against Rawls' avowal of inequality under the difference principle, against his application of the principle only to social institutions, and against Rawlsian obsession with the using primary goods as his currency of equality.

Philosopher and Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, a former student of Rawls', critiques and attempts to revitalize A Theory of Justice in his 2009 book The Idea of Justice. He defends the basic notion of justice as fairness but attacks the notion that the two principles of justice emerging from the Original position are necessary. Sen claims that there are multiple possible outcomes of the reflective equilibrium behind the veil of ignorance.