John Rawls

Author:

Frazer Michael L.1

Affiliation:

1. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Abstract

John Rawls shares the Enlightenment's commitment to finding moral and political principles which can be reflectively endorsed by all individuals autonomously. He usually presents reflective autonomy in Kantian, rationalist terms: autonomy is identified with the exercise of reason, and principles of justice must be constructed which are acceptable to all on the basis of reason alone. Yet David Hume, Adam Smith and many other Enlightenment thinkers rejected such rationalism, searching instead for principles which can be endorsed by all on the basis of all the faculties of the human psyche, emotion and imagination included. The influence of these sentimentalists on Rawls is clearest in his descriptive moral psychology, but I argue that it is also present in Rawls's understanding of the sources of normativity. Although this debt is obscured by Rawls's explicit “Kantianism,” his theory would be strengthened by a greater understanding of its debts to the sentimentalist Enlightenment.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Sociology and Political Science,History

Reference41 articles.

1. “ The moral sentiments arguments of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers,” Joan C. Tronto observes, “represent the `losing' side in moral thinking in the eighteenth century”; Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 36.

2. Ibid., par. 3.2.2.14, 317. This psychological holism is common to most Enlightenment sentimentalists, and is especially prominent in Herder's work. “The thought processes of our mind are undivided entities,” Herder writes, “producing in their totality the diverse effects or manifestations which we treat as separate faculties”; J. G. Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 259. If we sometimes speak of the faculties of the human mind as separate entities, Herder explains, it is only as a philosophical abstraction, “because our weak spirit was unable to consider them all at once”; J. G. Herder, Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83.

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