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Originally Posted by v1k1ng1001
Let me be more fair to Rawls. I credited him for taking a narrowly pragmatic turn late in his career but I also think he was insightful for pointing out that we need to start thinking collectively of justice in terms of shared or "overlapping" values rather than our individually-held "comprehensive moral and religious doctrines."
But my problem with Rawls is that deriving justice as such is obsolete. Or, as he points out himself, only relevant during a constitutional crisis or the formation of a new nation. I really don't care about deriving justice as such, but rather I think the issue is how ought we to collectively create, rather than derive, more just conditions. The Rawlsian model of the authority deriving, once and for all, some transhistorical conception of democratic justice itself enacts an aristocratic form inquiry which necessarily excludes the citizen.
I, of course, much prefer the model of inquiry offered by John Dewey where the philosopher creatively offers a cosmology which encourages democratic participation, tries to clarify the problems that the public faces and the tools that they can then use to ameliorate them. As Dewey pointed out, the intellectual energies of some our brightest folks have been misdirected toward the relatively artificial problems of the academy. Meanwhile the common citizen gets the distinct impression that he has no part in the sort of serious work that only the professional intellectuals can handle.
So I agree with you about the significance of cultural lag. We are Lockean liberals by nature, and that inheritance has significantly confounded the advancement of democratic politics in America certainly. We still act as if our problems can be solved my moving west or waiting for the aristo/technocrats to take care of it. As far as I'm concerned, Rawls just continues that aristocratic pattern of inquiry.
I think the future of political thought has to be or ought to be at least somewhat Deweyan in the sense that focus on democratic institutions has to be secondary to the focus on building up the critical intellectual and moral resources of the citizenry. In other words, first and foremost, democratic thought has to become about how to a foster a moral community capable of collectively managing the procedures and institutions, and then only secondarily and collectively about the specifics of how we are going to engage in institutional transformation. For a long time we've been putting the cart before the horse to no effect.
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I'm sorry, I cannot reply to that because I really have no idea what you are talking about
