Reflective Equilibrium, Primary Goods, and the Limits of the Theory

Rawls''s reflective equilibrium is his methodological account of how moral reasoning works and how we justify principles of justice. The process involves moving back and forth between two kinds of inputs: our considered judgments (particular moral convictions we hold with high confidence, such as that slavery is wrong and that natural disasters do not by themselves make one person less deserving of justice than another) and our principles (the general theoretical framework we are attempting to construct).

The process is neither purely top-down (deriving moral conclusions from first principles) nor purely bottom-up (simply systematizing pretheoretical intuitions). When a principle conflicts with a considered judgment, we face a choice: revise the principle to accommodate the judgment, or revise the judgment in light of the principle. Reflective equilibrium is achieved when principles and judgments cohere: when we have a theoretical framework that systematizes our strongest convictions and a set of convictions that have been critically revised in light of the best available principles.

This methodology is one of Rawls''s most enduring contributions to moral philosophy: it offers a non-foundationalist account of moral justification that avoids both the dogmatism of deriving everything from first principles and the conservatism of simply systematizing existing convictions. Critics argue that it is too conservative (it cannot generate radical revisions of existing moral views because it anchors on considered judgments that are themselves products of the social conditions being evaluated) and too coherentist (it provides no external check on the system of beliefs and could in principle generate internally consistent but deeply objectionable moral views).

Primary goods are Rawls''s answer to the question of what the currency of justice should be: what should be equalized or distributed fairly across persons. Primary goods are things every rational person is presumed to want regardless of their particular conception of the good life: basic rights and liberties, freedom of movement and choice of occupation, income and wealth, the social bases of self-respect. By distributing primary goods fairly rather than aiming at equal welfare, Rawls avoids the utilitarian aggregation problem and the problem of adaptive preferences (people who have been oppressed may have adjusted their preferences to expect very little; equalizing their welfare might require giving them very little).

The communitarian critique of Rawls, developed by Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, argues that the original position presupposes an ''unencumbered self,'' a self that can step behind its own values, commitments, and communal attachments to choose principles of justice from an ''Archimedean point.'' But this picture of the self is, communitarians argue, incoherent. We are always already constituted by our communal attachments, cultural traditions, and shared practices. The Rawlsian contractor, stripped of all particular attachments and conceptions of the good, is not a more impartial self but no self at all. Justice cannot be derived from a fictional pre-social subject; it must emerge from the actual practices of actual communities.

Rawls responded to the communitarian critique in Political Liberalism (1993) by distinguishing between a comprehensive doctrine (a full account of the good life, which citizens in a pluralist democracy will reasonably disagree about) and a political conception of justice (a freestanding account of fair social cooperation that does not depend on any particular comprehensive doctrine). Justice as fairness, in its revised form, is not a metaphysical claim about the nature of the self or the good. It is a political conception that can be endorsed by citizens holding diverse and incompatible comprehensive doctrines, because it is justified by public reason: the kind of reasoning that all citizens can in principle accept regardless of their deeper commitments.

The libertarian critique of Rawls, developed most sharply by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), takes a different angle. Nozick argues that Rawls''s difference principle, and more broadly any patterned theory of distributive justice, requires continuous interference with voluntary transactions. If people are free to exchange their talents, labor, and resources, then over time any pattern of distribution that justice requires (including Rawls''s) will be disrupted by voluntary transactions. Maintaining any pattern requires forbidding the free exchange of holdings, which amounts to a violation of individual rights. Nozick''s alternative is an entitlement theory: holdings are just if they arose through just acquisition and just voluntary transfer, regardless of the resulting pattern of distribution. The difference principle, on this view, is not a principle of justice but a principle of forced redistribution that violates the rights of the naturally talented and the economically successful.