Lecture Notes Wallace Matson, What Rawls Calls Justice (1978) Keith Burgess-Jackson 6 December 2016

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1 Lecture Notes Wallace Matson, What Rawls Calls Justice (1978) Keith Burgess-Jackson 6 December 2016 Biography. Wallace I. Matson (born 1921 in Portland, Oregon; died 3 March 2012) was, at the time of his death, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (the flagship of the UC system). He was a member of the Berkeley Philosophy Department from 1955 to He wrote the entries on Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-c. 356 BCE) and Cyrenaics for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006). (The Cyrenaics were hedonists; they believed that pleasure is the goal of life.) Matson was described by a reviewer as an historian of philosophy. He preferred to call himself teacher of philosophy rather than philosopher. He said that he never acquired a specialty. Compare a general practitioner in medicine. Bibliography. Here are Matson s books ( What Rawls Calls Justice appears as Chapter 8 of Uncorrected Papers; The Study of Philosophy as Prophylactic Against Bullshit [1991] appears as Chapter 27 of the same collection): 1965: The Existence of God (Cornell UP). 1968: A History of Philosophy (American Book Company). 1976: Sentience (U California Press). 1978: The Warren-Matson Debate on the Existence of God (National Christian Press). 1987: A New History of Philosophy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). 2000: A New History of Philosophy, 2d ed. (Wadsworth). 2006: Uncorrected Papers: Diverse Philosophical Dissents (Humanity Books). 2011: Grand Theories and Everyday Beliefs: Science, Philosophy, and Their Histories (OUP). In his short introduction to the Rawls essay, Matson claims that John Rawls s book A Theory of Justice (1971) is not about justice (45). He supports ( defends ) this provocative claim in Part I and tries to explain how Rawls could make such an egregious mistake in Part II. I. Support for the claim. 1

2 Concepts and conceptions. Rawls distinguishes between concepts and conceptions. A conception can be thought of as an interpretation, theory, account, analysis, or understanding of a concept. Rawls conceives of justice as fairness. Matson says that Rawls fails to put forward any conception of justice at all (45; italics added). The chastity analogy. Chastity is sexual purity. That is the concept of chastity (46; italics in original). Here are some conceptions of chastity: (1) abstention from illicit sexual activity; (2) abstinence from sex; (3) avoidance of impure sexual thoughts. [W]hat makes them different conceptions of chastity is that they all agree in presupposing a certain minimal definition (46; italics in original). OAD (1999): chastity =df. being chaste. Chaste =df. abstaining from extramarital, or from all, sexual intercourse. Chaste comes from the Latin castus, meaning clean, pure, of persons and things. Controversy. Concepts... are non-controversial (46). Conceptions, by contrast, are controversial. ( It does not follow that every attempt to express a concept is correct (47).) A Theory of Chastity. Suppose someone wrote a book with this title supporting two principles of chastity : (1) a person should own no more goods than absolutely necessary to support life ; (2) a person should obey his superiors in all things (46). This book is not about chastity! For poverty and obedience are not conceptually linked to chastity (46). The author is simply confused, as is Rawls. The concept of justice. Rawls formulates the concept of justice as follows: institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life (47). This is contentious. The traditional (Aristotelian) formula of justice is that it is the rendering to each person his due (47). Rawls might say that he is concerned with institutional justice rather than personal justice, but Matson says that institutions (laws, customs, the basic structure of society if you will) are just to the extent that they facilitate rendering to each man his due, unjust when they frustrate it (47). Conceptions of justice. These vary, though the underlying concept does not. Some theorists say that a man s due is the 2

3 market value of his product (47); some say that it is commensurate to the social benefit of his work (47-8); &c. The conceptions work within the concept, so to speak. Competent speakers and the resort to ordinary language. It is manifestly self-contradictory (48) to say, This is not his due, yet it is just for him to have it or This is his due, but it is just to deprive him of it, just as it is self-contradictory to say, He is chaste but sexually impure or He is sexually pure but unchaste. The content of a concept is determined by the speech of competent speakers of the language. This makes dictionary definitions relevant. Here is the 11th definition of justice in the Oxford English Dictionary (1971): 11. Phrase. To do justice to (a person or thing): a. to render (one) what is his due, or vindicate his just claims; to treat (one) fairly by acknowledging his merits or the like; hence, To treat (a subject or thing) in a manner showing due appreciation, to deal with (it) as is right or fitting. Here is the second definition of just from the OED: Upright and impartial in one s dealings; rendering every one his due; equitable. Here is the second definition of just from The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide (1999): (of treatment, etc.) deserved (a just reward). The problem with Rawls s conception of justice. The Principle of Equal Liberty contains an extraneous notion, namely liberty (48). The Difference Principle contains no reference, either explicit or implicit, to desert which is the essence of the concept of justice (49). The Principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity is a principle of fairness rather than of justice (about which more below). Desert. Rawls holds that no one deserves anything, really (49). Rawls goes beyond saying that natural endowments are not deserved; he says they re undeserved. (Compare I m not happy with I m unhappy. ) The Rawlsian argument seems to be: No one deserves his natural endowments. Therefore, no one deserves the fruits of their exercise. This is of course a nonsequitur (50). Institutional desert. Rawls allows for this. What he rejects is natural (i.e., pre-institutional) desert. If the government announces that a certain behavior will be rewarded, then those who behave in the prescribed manner deserve the reward (50). 3

4 II. Explanation of Rawls s mistake. A Rawlsian reply. The book is about social justice, not personal justice or justice per se. Matson: My rejoinder would be that there are not two kinds of justice, social and personal, but only one. Justice exists only in transactions between persons (51). There are of course derivative uses. Determinism. Rawls is a determinist (genetic and social). Man is a machine a computer, in fact. And it makes no sense to speak of a machine s deserving anything (52; italics in original). Rawls has accepted this view of man and has constructed an ethics appropriate to it: an ethics without desert (52-3). In an ethics without desert, justice giving each man his due, more to whom more is due becomes a vacuous concept (54). We might call Rawls s theory Justice for Robots. Equality. Rawls provides no argument for equality (53). He simply assumes it, as an absolute presupposition (53). This is rich, since many egalitarians criticize Nozick for providing no argument (or foundation) for rights (much less absolute rights). Fairness. Matson admits that justice and fairness are near synonyms (54). But they are not exactly the same thing. Criticism, for example, can be at one and the same time both fair (it doesn t misrepresent, it doesn t appeal to prejudice and irrelevance) and unjust (it fails to assign the mark due to the piece criticized). And a contract might be awarded fairly though mistakenly, but not justly though mistakenly (54). However, the main difference between fairness and justice is that the former but not the latter applies to distributions where desert plays no part (54). If pirates distribute booty unequally or disproportionately to services rendered, the distribution is unfair but not unjust (since no pirate deserves the booty). [F]airness, unlike justice, does (in general) demand equality (54). Social justice. There is in fact no concept... of social justice nothing in which those who hold different conceptions of social justice can still agree. Social justice is neither an expression of ordinary language, nor a term of art in a branch of learning. It is mere cant, an empty bottle ready to be filled with any brew that envy and sentimentality can concoct (55). Title. A better title for Rawls s book (based on what Matson is 4

5 saying) is An Alternative to Justice. 5