Rawls meant his theory of justice to be an ideal model by which to judge existing arrangements. I don't think he meant to imply that it would be that easy to reach. Of course the same was true of Plato's ventures into an ideal republic.
Rawls also claims that aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they incorporate contingencies found in nature. Wow. Rawls is a chaos theorist. I would think that the injustice of aristocratic and caste societies had something to do with the way that they treated non-aristocrats and lower castes. That x is born an aristocrat or of lower caste is contingent in a sense but that is not the point. Even if it were not contingent it would surely still be unjust to treat non-aristocrats and lower castes in the way that aristocratic and caste societies do.
Rawls is eminent mainly because: i) he gives a clear defence of liberal capitalism--even though he says his theory of justice could apply under socialism. ii) he melds together the tradition of social contract, the maxi-min strategy of game theory, the assumption of rational egoists behind the veil of ignorance, and the Kantian universalisation principle, together with the odd fashionable poke at the principle of utility. Of course this is all put together in a lucid but incoherent fashion. When state intervention in the econony became unfashionable, the spotlight turned to Nozick who also uses contract theory as Yoshie points out.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Christian:
>
> >Where does Derrida say that subjects are traces? The point, to summarize at
> >the risk of being really reductive, of Derrida's bit about the trace is that
> >"it"--the trace or mark; he also calls it "differance," "dissemination,"
> >"pharmakon," "glas,""parergon," "+R" among others--is the *condition* of
> >communicability, of information, of writing conventionally understood. Put
> >differently: it is the phenomenological condition of *the intention to say
> >something.* Derrida never says that your intentions (or anyone's intentions)
> >aren't clear to you or anyone else, only that those intentions don't
> >circumscribe the meanings that can be made of your statements.
> >
> >Put differently: Derrida says that, instead of "deformations" of your
> >intentions being marginal or accidental--deformations such as "lies" or
> >"deception," "taking someone's words out of context"--the possibility of
> >lying, deception, or taking someone's words out of context is "built-in" to
> >the structure of utterances. That is, they are not "accidents" against which
> >there is some "normative" mode of enunciation. They are as much a part, tho
> >not necessarily more a part, of "communication" as "good intentions,"
> >"clarity," "non-irony," "saying exactly what you mean," "meaning exactly
> >what you say" and so on. All constructions of meaning (not just lies,
> >deception, and taking someone's words out of context) are conventional,
> >historical, and depend on the agreement, the AGENCY of people ("speaking
> >subjects," in the lingo) involved
>
> Your interpretation of Derrida sounds fine, but to say "X is conventional"
> and to say "X is historical" do not mean the same thing; I should like to
> discuss the difference in some detail, because the last sentence quoted
> above ends up implying the identity between "conventional" and
> "historical." When philosophers such as Rawls and Nozick discuss justice,
> their discussion involves the use of heuristics of the kind developed by
> Social Contract theorists of yore: treating principles of justice -- be
> they actual or counterfactual -- as if they were merely "conventions," or
> "patterns of human action," as Rawls puts it, which are pure
> "contingencies" with no necessary relation to the mode of production (not
> even "in the final analysis"):
>
> ***** The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it
> unjust that men are born into society at some particular position. These
> are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that
> institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are
> unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for
> belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The
> basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in
> nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these
> contingencies. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human
> control but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to
> share one another's fate. In designing institutions they undertake to
> avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only
> when doing so is for the common benefit. (Rawls, _A Theory of Justice_)
> *****
>
> For Rawls (as well as Habermas), it is possible to "design," in a
> voluntaristic fashion, the institutions & principles of justice (in the
> case of Rawls, the "difference principle" elaborated through "a
> hypothetical initial arrangement in which all the social primary goods are
> equally distributed") that would be "acceptable both to the more advantaged
> and to the less advantaged individual" (in the case of Habermas, the ideal
> speech situation as a counterfactual ideal of procedural justice). The
> word "convention," in philosophical discourse, therefore carries the
> dualist worldview that posits, on one hand, "individuals" or "people"
> (imagined as a collection of individuals with perhaps Weber-like "social
> positions," more or less "advantaged") and, on the other hand,
> "conventions," _both_ abstracted from social relations, so "conventions"
> may become matters of consumer choice. Individuals, considered from a
> historical materialist point of view, do not exist in separation from the
> ensembles of social relations; in fact, individuals are their ensembles of
> social relations.
>
> Now, what of Derrida and other late modern philosophers? Do they regard
> meanings as "conventional" or "historical"? In so far as they do not
> consider the necessary relation between language and social relations
> (however "relatively autonomous" the former may be from the latter), they
> end up implying that language is "conventional," as opposed to
> "historical." Derrida's philosophical bent, in particular, seems to me to
> be transcendental, in that his primary interest lies in finding the _same_
> conditions of linguistic (im)possibility _throughout_ the history of what
> he thinks of as "Western metaphysics." Despite its name and multiple
> avatars, _differance_ is "itself a powerful principle of unity," as Peter
> Dews puts it in _Logics of Disintegration_. Further, since Derrida insists
> on the logical priority of _differance_, he ends up returning, again and
> again, to the "idea of the first." As Adorno says, "The first of the
> philosophy of origins must become more and more abstract; the abstracter it
> becomes, the less it explains..." (qtd. in _Logics..._). Dews notes: "When
> Derrida speaks of the 'historico-transcendental scene of writing', he
> continues -- like Husserl and Heidegger before him -- to erase the
> contingency of the historical process, a contingency which can only be
> approached through empirical investigation...". So, if Derrida does regard
> "constructions of meaning" as "conventional," for him "conventions" must be
> at once purely contingent (= with no necessary relation to social
> relations) _and_ eternal (which is the meaning of "always already"). In
> other words, eternalized, abstract contingency (which can only exist in
> transcendental speculation) negates _both_ historical necessity and
> contingency. In this sense, _differance_ is a Platonic idea.
>
> Yoshie