Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

John Rawls and the sin of merit

Posted on | March 26, 2009 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

For those who have always suspected a strong religious undertone in the writings of John Rawls, the following piece by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel will come as a revelation. Reflecting on Rawls’s senior thesis “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community” they write:

…the moral and social convictions that the thesis expresses in religious form are related in complex and illuminating ways to the central ideas of Rawls’s later writings on moral and political theory.

Most illuminating is the continuity between Rawls’s older and later views on merit:

He sides with Augustine in denying that we can earn salvation by our own merit – by freely choosing virtue, or by works of any kind: “There is no merit before God. Nor should there be merit before Him. True community does not count the merits of its members. Merit is a concept rooted in sin, and well disposed of.

It should be no surprise then that some writers have identified Rawls as a cryptocalvinist:

My contention is that Rawls is not a philosopher, but a minister. Like his Calvinist forebears, he is trying to establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Unlike them, he doesn’t admit it….The great engineering problem of designing a system in which fallible humans can govern each other and get along simply does not exist in Rawls’ philosophy.

In another post the author proposes “the “ultracalvinist hypothesis”:

the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.

This perspective reflects a respectable Nietzschean tradition in which modern liberalism and socialism are not departures of religious thinking but the logical culmination of a religious / communitarian mindset. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this phenomenon is the highly puritan nature of contemporary “political correctness. “

John Rawls is often associated with rationalism but the concept of rationally in Rawls’s work is not that of the classical economist but that of the pre-Hobbesian moralist. His work offers little if any contribution to the scientific study of human nature or human interaction.

HT Marginal Revolution

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