So today we're going to continue talking about John Rawls, and we're going to focus on what I will call the post-metaphysical Rawls. That may sound not particularly illuminating as a bumper sticker, but I think its meaning will become clearer as we move along. One of Rawls's big slogans to describe his views in this more mature period is the slogan political not metaphysical. Now when I say the word political, what comes to mind? >> Earthly. >> Earthly? What else? What comes to mind? >> Reasons that your constituents would want you to, you know. Okay, reasons that your constituents would want you to affirm, maybe? Okay, that's pretty close but you're both being more sophisticated than I'm looking for. By political, Rawls really means political. Focus on politics. I have this picture here from Yalta. Stalin, FDR, and, and who's the third one now? >> Churchill? >> Yes, Churchill, agreeing on a postwar settlement. And I'll come back to why I've chosen that particular picture to illustrate political. Later on we'll see if you can join the dots. But I'll, I will, I'll leave it open for now. But that's politics, right? We couldn't get more political than that meeting. Metaphysical suggests what? >> Heavenly? [LAUGH] >> Heavenly? Well, I, I, certainly that particular image of metaphysical does. But what, what comes in your mind when I say metaphysical? >> Emerson. >> Yes. >> [LAUGH]. >> Spiritual or wishy washy. That's what that- >> Spiritual or wishy washy? Okay well, we'll, we'll leave aside the wishy washy. Could be spirit, Joel, but the idea of metaphysics is comprehensive, complete theory of the whole universe and everything that goes with it. We'll come back to this further, further on. But this is, Rawls' is going to say I'm not interested in metaphysical questions, I'm interested in political questions, and a big part of the motivation for that was the sorts of difficulties we saw with Rawls' theory. Oh, yeah on and he, he found that people disagreed with bits and pieces of his theory. And so he wanted to put it on a different kind of basis, but I want to just take us a little backwards in, in this analytically speaking and give you something to ponder on before we get to the disagreements. When I was teaching this in a, in a course a big lecture course one time Arthur had finished the exposition of roles, I had gone through the general conception of justice, the two principles of justice, two a and two b, and in those days I was, I was less forthcoming about the difficulties until I'd given the complete exposition, so I gave a very sympathetic exposition of Rawls' theory of justice, didn't talk about any of the problems. And at the end of it, a student put up his hand in the class, to ask a question, and he said, if Rawls's theory has been established, why hasn't the constitution been changed to incorporate it? And the interesting thing is that people started laughing in the class, they, they, they thought this kid was, there was something funny about, that question. Why would they have laughed? Assuming he was right, that there were no problems with this theory. It was the best theory he had done to date. Seemed like it solved the problems of the predecessor theories. It was the winning theory. Why do you think they laughed. >> They were just mean? >> Yeah, they were just mean, yeah people are mean, that's, some of them were just mean, but, still getting beyond that, why might they have laughed? >> I personally wouldn't rewrite the constitution with every prevailing theory. I mean, you're going to be rewriting it every five years until the end of time. >> You know, Jefferson thought it should be rewritten every 17 years. But that's part of it, but I don't think that's all of it. Think remember when we talked about Hobbes? He said civil philosophy is demonstrable because we make the commonwealth and there was this idea we could get certainty about what our political principles should be, in a way we couldn't get certainty about other things. We could get answers in the same sense that we can get an answer to the question, what is the sum of the interior angles of a triangle. Right? That's was Hobbes' aspiration. I think that with this student, the reason that people laughed at him was that he was taking for granted some kind of aspiration. Now, it was as if a competition had held, being held for getting an engineering plan for building a dam, and somebody had won the competition, and then they just went with the winning, you know, the winning plan. Why wouldn't you? But they were laughing because unlike Hobbs they didn't think there was a right answer in the same way that the students seemed to be pre-supposing. So why would that be? Why would people think it, it isn't like coming up with the best plan from building a dam? That in politics, it's somehow not that way. >> Because there is never a definite answer to anything, and we cannot determine, one answer for the next 50 generations, which- >> So there's no definite answer? So there, there isn't a best plan in the sense that there's a best plan for building a dam? >> It can be so many best plans, not only one. >> So there's a kind of pluralism assumption there. >> Yeah. >> What, what would you say? >> Well, in the scientific world,. The world, in the world at the hard signs this you know, two plus two equals four. But it, it's not like that in every other field of study and there's the one, just because it's a prevailing theory does not mean that it's definitive answer for your Constitution or the rest of the world. >> Okay. Why else don't people believe that today? Think, is, you've certainly got large parts of it. But I think there's a little more. One of the messages of this course, has been, gone, as we've gone along, that you, you can't wring the politics out of politics. That every choice that we make has winners and losers. And even when everybody wins as with the parade of superior outcome, people can still have different relative benefits to one another. And so this notion, this early enlightenment idea that we're going to get beyond the welter of disagreements and, you know, at some point as Marx put it, politics will be displaced by administration because people will just agree, just never going to happen, right? So people think it isn't going to happen and at some level it shouldn't happen, because there is no answer that is a lay-down hand best solution. So this student had a kind of Hobbesian, early enlightenment, methodological aspiration that most people in the room just didn't take seriously. And that's why they laughed at him. So that's what the mature role is all about, the political, not metaphysical move that he makes later on his in his life basically amounts to giving up on this early enlightenment scientific aspiration to look for something more modest. His focus is now not going to be on can we justify the principles of justice from the ground up, from first principles if you like. But rather, what our focus is going to be simply on the notion of legitimacy. What is it that makes principles seem, to people, to be legitimate? Now that might not obviously be a more modest question. But in fact, it turns out that it is a more modest question. And, and the idea of the political, not metaphysical move, is, is to try and show you how it's, it's more modest.
