Justice and the 'metaphysical impulse' (John Rawls)

My dissertation is in part diagnostic, in part constructive. The diagnosis involves an argument for a tension in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice ; namely, that between a conception of justice rooted in a transcendent self and a conception of justice grounded in a self that is empirically situated and historically conditioned. I argue that this tension suggests the lingering hold that a “metaphysical impulse” has over Rawls. My constructive contribution consists in a proposal for resolving the tension.; In his later work, Rawls eschews this tension by arguing for a strictly political justification for liberalism, which I contend comes at a rather high price. My dissertation attempts to restore a philosophical justification for liberalism, but one that I argue is particularly well suited to garner broad support in a pluralistic society. The key feature of this conception that enables it to address the problem of democratic pluralism is its identity of the right and the good.; I propose then a conception of justice that allows us to maintain the universality and primacy of justice without also committing us to a philosophically dubious ontology of the person, and without flouting the fact of pluralism. I call it the “transcendental” conception of justice as fairness. On this view, our autonomous nature is rooted in our “moral personality” construed in a more philosophically benign way. Our autonomy is understood as the expression of a basic human potentiality: the capacity for a conception of the good and for a sense of justice. The transcendental conception considers the normative conception of autonomy that undergirds Rawls' theory to be revealed by a kind of transcendental deduction. Starting with our ordinary understanding of certain basic practical human capacities, we arrive by analysis at a normative condition of the possibility of our having these capacities; namely, a moral conception of ourselves as free and equal rational beings.; This is the self that we express when we act autonomously, the self that answers to that familiar enjoinder, “Be human (be just).” The transcendental conception thus restores the concept of the person to its status as an ordinary normative notion, not one imbued with some kind of numinous significance; it is a conception that “brings words back from their metaphysical to their everyday uses,” as Wittgenstein puts it.