Abstract
John Rawls was what we might call a “frenemy” to Stanley Cavell. Time and again, Cavell states his admiration for Rawls's political philosophy but criticizes it for two reasons. First, he believes that Rawls too hastily dismisses a perfectionist tradition that is essential for a flourishing liberal democracy. Second, he attacks certain aspects of Rawls's theory of justice as moralistic and legalistic. The first half of this article examines Cavell's critique of Rawls and argues that the two authors are more closely aligned than suspected. It begins by reconstructing Cavell's critique of Rawls, and using archival materials from Harvard University, presents for the first time Rawls's interpretation of this critique. The second half of the article highlights perfectionist themes in Rawls's A Theory of Justice. The contribution of this article is to reevaluate the relationship between two of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century and also to provide a more expansive theory of liberalism that incorporates the psychological depth, moral subtlety and political hopefulness of moral perfectionism.
Keywords
Introduction
Stanley Cavell was a very loyal reader, in the sense that he drew inspiration from a handful of authors at every stage of his career. Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin were always at his side. So too was Ralph Waldo Emerson, right from the epigraph of Cavell's magnum opus, The Claim of Reason (1979), to his later work on film and moral perfectionism. To this list, we can add another thinker: John Rawls, the great political philosopher of the twentieth century, as well as Cavell's colleague in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University for over thirty years. Yet unlike his other lifetime interlocutors, Rawls plays a special role in Cavell's oeuvre. If, to speak a bit loosely, Wittgenstein and Austin provide Cavell with a method, and Emerson a moral vision, Rawls serves time and again as a foil and point of contrast—a “frenemy,” if you will—for Cavell to develop his point of view by way of respectful yet thoroughgoing critique.
Cavell's critiques of Rawls have been aptly summarized and assessed many times (Hammer, 2002: 119–147; Marrati, 2011; Norris, 2017: 118–129, 194–198; Patton, 2014). I will not spend much time repeating these efforts. I am of the view, however, that his criticisms were not always fair and that Rawls could be interpreted as more congenial to Cavell's thought than readers of either Rawls or Cavell have appreciated. In this article, I will highlight themes from Rawls that fit and advance Cavell's work on moral perfectionism, and then use Cavell to amplify those same themes in Rawls. My argument is that Rawls meets the criteria to be counted by Cavell as a moral perfectionist and should be considered a friend, rather than a foe, of the broad moral (and social and political) tradition that Cavell defined and defended in his later work.
Why does this matter? Why, beyond specialist scholarship on Cavell and Rawls, should anyone care whether these two thinkers are companionable? If I am right, and if Rawls can be included in Cavell's pantheon of perfectionist authors, then it becomes possible to show how Rawls's brand of liberalism is attractive for all the reasons that Cavell admires moral perfectionism, including its psychological depth, moral subtlety and political hopefulness. At a point in history when liberalism is threatened worldwide, and when its ideals seem to have lost their élan, an infusion of moral perfectionist energy and insight seems timely.
Cavell on Rawls
The main goal of this article is to emphasize points of accord between Rawls and Cavell. To begin, however, I want to outline the two main criticisms Cavell makes of Rawls. I do so, in part, for reasons of context. Although Rawls never published replies to Cavell, they did meet in person to discuss these points and Rawls took notes, archived and open for viewing with his personal papers at Harvard University. In the next section, I present a few observations Rawls recorded that suggest a way forward in his engagement with Cavell and moral perfectionism.
The main reason to start with Cavell's criticisms, however, is because he repeatedly developed his conception of moral perfectionism in a critical response to A Theory of Justice (1971, 1999 revised edition). To be clear, Cavell repeatedly expresses admiration for Rawls and his masterpiece: as an intellectual feat that gives liberal democracy tools to internally criticize itself, and also as a work of great humanity and moral encouragement (Cavell, 1990: 3, 25, 29; 2004: 165–168). Yet the fact remains that Cavell worries that Rawls hastily dismisses the tradition of moral perfectionism as incompatible with liberal democracy. Worse, he depicts Rawls's conception of moral conversation and moral encounter, and so too of social and political responsibility, as prone to a grave sin from the perspective of perfectionism: moralism, a word Cavell uses to refer to concern for (and criticism of) how other people live, all the while taking one's rectitude for granted.
Briefly, let us turn to Cavell's critique of Rawls. His first criticism concerns a seemingly minor section of A Theory of Justice: §50, “The Principle of Perfection.” There, Rawls considers two forms of perfectionism: one moderate and associated with Aristotle, and the other extreme and associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. To make a long story short, Rawls rejects both as incompatible with a just democratic society. On his account, perfectionism requires the state to dedicate greater liberty and/or resources for certain individuals, “on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value” (Rawls, 1999a: 289). Interpreted this way, perfectionism runs afoul of core liberal democratic tenets. It violates equal rights by allowing greater liberty for certain individuals; it breaches state neutrality by advancing particular conceptions of the good; and it flouts distributive equality by privileging already privileged people and their activities (Quong, 2011).
Cavell's narrower objection to Rawls's depiction of perfectionism need not concern us. He takes issue with Rawls's interpretation of Nietzsche, especially as it brings Emerson into the fray given that the material Rawls quotes from Nietzsche's “Schopenhauer as Educator” amounts to a virtual transcription of passages from Emerson (Cavell, 2004: 164–89, 208–26; Lemm, 2007). Cavell's wider objection, however, is significant. In a nutshell, and this claim is found throughout his later writings, he argues that moral perfectionism is not opposed to liberal democracy (Cavell, 1989: 77–118). Against Rawls's apparently hasty dismissal, he maintains that the moral sensibility at the heart of perfectionism is integral to the aspirations that we liberal democrats set for our polity and ourselves. Moral perfectionism, Cavell boldly states, “is the condition of democratic morality” (Cavell, 1990: 125).
How to make sense of this? Here it helps to turn to Cavell's second criticism of Rawls, which concerns what he sees as the troubling implications of how Rawls envisages morality, and in particular, moral conversation and moral encounter. For this criticism, we must go back to Cavell's very first engagement with Rawls, a chapter from The Claim of Reason titled “Rules and Reasons,” which dates from the part of the book that Cavell initially wrote for his 1961 PhD dissertation. This textual history is relevant because the article by Rawls that Cavell comments on is one of his (i.e., Rawls's) first: “Two Concepts of Rules” (1955), published sixteen years before A Theory of Justice, and at a time when Rawls was still working within the utilitarian tradition in moral and political philosophy.
The problem the young Rawls wrestles with in “Two Concepts of Rules” is the following: if utilitarianism justifies practices and institutions based on the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, then we might think that it can also justify awful outcomes. To take a notorious example, what stops a utilitarian from punishing an innocent person if it has wider beneficial effects? And why not break promises if, on the whole, the consequences are better? Doesn’t utilitarianism open the door to such abuses?
No, says Rawls. The only reason we think so is because we tend to confuse two kinds of rules, which he calls “summary” and “practice”. Summary rules, strictly speaking, aren’t really rules. They are more like rules of thumb or maxims, which you can take or leave as the situation requires, and of the “look both ways before crossing the street” variety (1999b).
Practice rules are different. These rules define a practice or institution and establish the offices and actions possible within them. Such rules can be as complex as a political constitution that sets up electoral procedures or as simple as the rules that establish the practice of a coin toss. But the point is that practice rules establish the moves and actions that are possible within a practice or institution.
Take baseball, beloved by Cavell and Rawls. A strikeout is defined by Rule 9.15 of the Major League's Official Baseball Rules, as “a statistic credited to a pitcher and charged to a batter when the umpire calls three strikes on a batter” (Baseball, 2018). Rule 9.15 is a practice rule. It establishes and defines the action of a strikeout as consisting of a call by the umpire of three strikes on a batter (and, of course, the offices of “batter” and “umpire,” along with everything else in the world of baseball, are defined by other practices rules).
To save utilitarianism from the charge that it can justify outrageous practices (such as punishing the innocent and breaking promises), Rawls argues that utilitarian justifications apply only to practice rules. Utilitarians can rightly ask whether a practice or institution such as promising or punishing (or baseball, etc.) will favor the greatest happiness of the greatest number. What the utilitarian cannot do, however, is ask on a case-by-case basis whether punishing an innocent person or breaking a promise (or allowing four strikes in baseball) will favor the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The reason stopping them is not moral (as if it would be really bad or nasty to make exceptions in this way) but logical: if a utilitarian justification has been given for a practice or institution, a utilitarian justification cannot then be brought to decide on particular cases of that practice or institution. It would be like saying, “Promising is great because holding people to their word brings greater happiness,” and then following it up with, “It's fine to break promises if it brings greater happiness.” The issue is not immorality but incoherence. The utilitarian cannot justify and break a practice by using the same calculation. Doing so for the case undermines the initial justification of the practice rule.
I’ve given an extended explanation of practice rules because Rawls draws a conclusion from it that is fateful for Cavell's career-long engagement with him. It concerns the kinds of questions and justifications that can be raised within practices or institutions. Allow me an extended citation from Rawls to set the scene: When a man engaged in a practice is queried [or challenged] about his action he must assume that the questioner either doesn’t know that he is engaged in it (“Why are you in a hurry to pay him?” “I promised to pay him today”) or doesn’t know what the practice is. One doesn’t so much justify one's particular action as explain, or show, that it is in accordance with the practice… When the challenge is to the practice [itself], citing the rules (saying what the practice is) is naturally to no avail. But when the challenge is to the particular action defined by the practice, there is nothing one can do but refer to the rules. Concerning particular actions there is only a question for one who isn’t clear as to what the practice is, or who doesn’t know that it is being engaged in. (Rawls, 1999b: 39)
The idea is this: when someone is questioned or challenged about what they’re doing when engaged in a practice or institution, there are three possible responses, depending on how the question is intended. If the question amounts to a challenge of the practice or institution itself, it should be discussed on its own: as in, “Why are you playing baseball? It's so boring!” If the question, however, pertains to an action falling within the practice, for Rawls it can be answered in only one of two ways: Either by supplying a missing piece of information to someone who already knows the practice (“That's not strike three, the first pitch was a ball”); or by citing a rule to someone who doesn’t already know the practice (“I’m still at bat because in baseball you get three strikes”). And here is the point Cavell pounces on: the kind of conversation Rawls envisages depicts the questioner as either ignorant (and needing an item of information) or incompetent (and needing an explanation of the practice). Positions of ignorance or incompetence, it would seem, exhaust the spectrum of questions that can take place within practices and institutions defined by practice rules.
This may not be concerning when it comes to baseball, but for Cavell it is deeply troubling to treat promising, and other moral forms of life, in the same manner: as if in response to any question raised about your conduct all you need to do is provide a piece of information or cite a rule to acquit yourself. As he puts it, “That moral conduct cannot be practised in that way, that you cannot become a moral champion in that way, and that no one can settle a moral conflict in the way umpires settle conflicts, is essential to the form of life that we call morality” (Cavell, 1999: 296). The issue is not that you can’t do what Rawls says. You can; and it is often justified to respond to a question about an action within a practice or institution by supplying information or a rule. But the consequence of doing so is to position your interlocutor as ignorant or incompetent. That means taking a stance that disqualifies the other as an equal partner in moral (and so too, in democratic) life. More generally, it means taking a proceduralist and rule-like approach to morality that misses—or worse, elides—the core opportunities and responsibilities of moral life.
Keep in mind that Cavell is criticizing the very young Rawls. This was Rawls well before “Rawls,” so to speak: before justice as fairness, before A Theory of Justice, and at a time when he was working for rather than against utilitarianism. Remarkably, however, the gist of Cavell's criticism is unchanged when he revisits Rawls in his later writings on moral perfectionism. He even confirms in his final published work which discusses Rawls that he finds “still to be pertinent” what he said some forty years earlier (Cavell, 2004: 173). After all those decades, and confirmed for him in A Theory of Justice, Cavell continues to find Rawls's conception of morality too proceduralist and his conception of moral encounter potentially moralistic.
In these later writings on moral perfectionism, Cavell seizes on a particular phrase from A Theory of Justice which, for him, encapsulates his worries. The phrase in question is Rawls's claim that a person can say, with fairness and justice, that his or her conduct and plan of life have been “above reproach” (Rawls, 1999a: 371). Here is how Cavell sets out the dispute: I am taking it that “above reproach” is something that is imagined as something serviceable to say (since to oneself) to another who questions your life plan, since that plan affects everyone whom you affect. In particular, I imagine that the claim, levelled against those who express resentment, is to be taken as formulating something that you can say to one (perhaps one who you have known all your life) who expresses resentment at your good fortune… The sense I get is that the claim is meant to work the way invoking rules works: your resentment shows you don’t know the rules of the game. That is what I hear “I am above reproach” to say. In imagining it as said to oneself Rawls takes it as a counter to misfortune. In imagining it said to others, I take it as a defence of fortunateness. (Cavell, 1990: 101–126; 2004: 177–178)
To speak frankly, this is an unwarranted and ungenerous reading of Rawls. It is unwarranted because, as Cavell himself acknowledges here and elsewhere, when Rawls introduces and discusses the phrase “above reproach” it is in the context of someone saying it to him or herself to relieve the guilt of having their plan of life go awry. It is a self-soothing statement to take the sting out of circumstances beyond one's control. “I am above reproach” is explicitly not uttered by one person to another. Nor, despite Cavell's interpretation, is it said to oneself in defence of one's privilege. This illocution is meant to console one's misfortune, rather than to vindicate one's advantage. And so, in trying to align “above reproach” with the moralism Cavell perceives in “Two Concepts of Rules,” he takes this phrase out of its language game. He makes Rawls say something he never intended and which the text of A Theory of Justice does not support.
I am not the first to point out the license Cavell takes in reading “above reproach” as inter-subjective (rather than intra-subjective) and as a vindication (rather than as a consolation). As Andrew Norris states, “To move from [Rawls's] concern with “self-reproach” to the issues that concern Cavell is not to make explicit what is initially only implicit, but to change the topic altogether” (Norris, 2017: 126). But even as strong an interpreter as Norris concedes the bigger point to Cavell: yes, his reading of the specific phrase “above reproach” is amiss, but he's still right to fault the overall “rationalism and proceduralism” of Rawls's moral and political philosophy (Norris, 2017: 2, 127–130). This I take to be an ungenerous reading of Rawls by Cavell (and so too by Norris, but this is less pressing for me), and the purpose of this article is to explain why. The short version is that Rawls's conception of morality, and so too of subjectivity and democracy, complements Cavell's own. It might even be called perfectionist.
Rawls on Cavell
Given that Rawls never published a reply to Cavell, we might think he did not pay any mind to his criticisms. That would be incorrect. When we consult Rawls's personal papers archived at Harvard University it is clear that he was deeply interested in what Cavell had to say. He met with friends and (then) students of Cavell's to get a better handle on the issues, including Burton Dreben, James Conant, Daniel Conway, and Eli Friedlander. He met twice with Cavell to discuss moral perfectionism and drafts of Chapters 1 and 3 of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Rawls, 1989, see also Cavell, 1990: xxii).
The notes Rawls took from his meetings with Cavell have an odd quality. It is difficult not to feel that the two thinkers were, at least in some respects, ships in the night. Pages are filled with Rawls jotting down key Cavellian concepts and phrases, as if all he could do was write fast enough to scribe what Cavell was saying. To cite a section almost at random, under the heading Emerson Rawls notes, “Doubleness in the self: Doubleness of K[ant]-ian standpoint, as member of both worlds. I am constrained by the standing (standing) of the true man, that is, the on-wardness of (a) man. This onwardness has no specific content; it is a structure.” To me, this reads like someone scrambling to get the lay of the land rather than a genuine conversation.
Still, there are moments when the two minds meet, as when Rawls captures what is at stake in the intersection between Cavell's conception of moral perfectionism and his own theory of justice as fairness. Here are the real and weighty questions he poses for himself in light of his encounter with Cavell:
What do we have to become (as ind[ividual]s) to act from J[ustice] as [F]airness? What do we have to become (as inds) to talk to one another (in dialogue) in accordance with J as F? Does becoming the kinds of inds. specified by (1) and (2) distort us as inds? That is, does it distort our individuality (perfection) + our achieving that? (Rawls, 1989: unpaginated).
These questions are an excellent jumping-off point to develop Rawls's moral perfectionism. The first two strike me as particularly apt, for they signal a feature of Rawls's philosophy that, while dear to him, is underappreciated by sympathetic and critical interpreters alike. I mean his attention to subjectivity and subject formation: that to act in and for social justice— and his particular version of it, “justice as fairness”—requires genuine personal transformation on the part of the subject him or herself. As readers, I suspect that we associate themes of subjectivity, selfhood, self-transparency, and self-opacity more readily with Cavell than with Rawls. But the fact that he noted them down in conversation with Cavell reveals a key point of resonance. To develop it, let us explicitly turn to moral perfectionism: first, as presented by Cavell, and next as discoverable in Rawls.
Moral perfectionism
Moral perfectionism—or “Emersonian perfectionism,” as he sometimes calls it—is Cavell's reinterpretation of the wider tradition of perfectionism in philosophy and literature that includes such thinkers as Aristotle, Nietzsche, T.H. Green, and George Bernard Shaw. At the heart of this tradition is the claim that the good life consists of the cultivation of human capacities to their highest potential. Beyond this, however, there is little agreement as to what these particular human capacities are, how exactly they should be cultivated, or whether we should understand perfectionism in terms of achieving a definite ideal or as a series of renewed and never fully attained strivings. And given that there is no agreement on these key questions, there is also no single canon of texts to explore them with (Wall, 2007).
Cavell's moral perfectionism is his attempt to inherit and shape this tradition by amplifying some of its insights and firmly blocking others. With respect to the latter, Cavell immediately rules out extreme versions of perfectionism that contradict the core tenets of liberal democracy. And he is entirely on board with Rawls's rejection of perfectionism to the extent that it requires unequal distributions of rights, freedoms, and resources to realize certain kinds of excellence (Cavell, 2004: 218–224). On the positive side, the key theme that attracts Cavell to the perfectionist tradition is the pursuit of self-knowledge. To this end, he harnesses insights to help make the self more intelligible to itself, more intelligible to others, and ultimately more responsible to both. The characteristic questions that animate Cavell's moral perfectionism are of this kind: What kind of life do I want to lead? Are my desires my own? Are my words my own? Do I feel that I can consent to the state of society as it is? Am I committed to reforming it, and by consequence, myself as well? To what extent? These are just a handful of questions that Cavell raises, but we can see that they are preoccupied with, using his term, “the state of one's soul” (Cavell, 1990: 2; 2004: 24–25).
There are excellent overviews of Cavell's moral perfectionism and this article is not the place to survey it (Mullhall, 1994: 249–282; Norris, 2017:177–222). I propose, instead, to identify three key themes from Cavell's moral perfectionism and show that they are integral to Rawls's philosophy and moral psychology. They are:
Discovery of the kind of person we want to be; Disappointment that we are not yet that person; Work on the self to become that person.
With his emphasis on disappointment and cultivating the self, Cavell's perfectionism is “critical and therapeutic,” as Paola Marrati puts it. The journey toward self-intelligibility passes through “discontent with the present state of the self and world” and strives for “transformative change” (Marrati, 2012: 398). Yet to state what makes Cavell's Emersonian perfectionism distinctive, a fourth and final criterion is needed: A conception of self-cultivation that is open-ended, ongoing, and without a final destination of individual or collective perfectibility.
This last criterion departs from more mainstream perfectionist moral philosophies—including the classical versions of Plato and Aristotle and more contemporary accounts such as the one proposed by Joseph Raz—which are teleological and posit an ideal of perfectibility. Whether we consider Plato (who elevates the philosophical life above all others), Aristotle (who adjudicates between hedonistic, political, and contemplative modes of existence), or Raz (who insists on the objective goodness of autonomy), perfectionists traditionally posit the highest moral goods to match our essential human nature. The final destination of human perfectibility, in other words, is known and the task of living well consists of reaching it and remaining there.
Cavell is not like this. Neither, I will claim, is Rawls. These thinkers are, to adapt Norris's expression, “perfectionist[s] without perfection”—not because the ideal of perfection is so demanding that we poor mortals can only approach it asymptotically, but because moral life is an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-creation without a final end (Norris, 2017: 216, 222). While the moral principle(s) that we profess may be known at a general level—for Rawls, we will see it is fairness and seeing society as a fair system of cooperation—the precise form it will take in our lives cannot be known in advance or settled once and for all. Cavell has a nice expression for this. “‘Having’ a ‘self’,” he writes— and note well the scare quotes he uses to problematize notions of self-possession and unity—“is a process of moving to, and from, nexts” (Cavell, 1990: 12, emphasis added). Something very similar is found in Rawls. In the following three sections, I will explore his (i.e., Rawls's) interpretation of the first three perfectionist criteria, all the while remaining faithful to Cavell's fourth criterion of a moral perfectionism that does not seek ultimate perfectibility. My narrow goal, recall, is to make the case that Rawls can be called a moral perfectionist in Cavell's sense. My wider goal is to suggest how the version of liberalism that Rawls advances can be made more attractive by showing how it engages the types of questions that Cavell finds so attractive in moral perfectionism.
The kind of person we want to be
Aspirations to discover our authentic desires and to become the kind of person who acts on them are front and center in Cavell's writings on perfectionism. It is the leitmotif of his reading of philosophers such as J.S. Mill, Emerson and Thoreau, as well as classic Hollywood films, whether comedies or tragedies. But it is not the kind of issue that we tend to associate with Rawls. The received interpretation of him, by general readers and many specialists, is that he sought to derive moral principles and legal rules to establish the constitutional and political framework for a just society. Call this a “rights-based” interpretation of Rawls. Advanced by such readers as Ronald Dworkin, it consists of reading Rawls as belonging to a long line of political philosophers who identify the core feature of liberalism as consisting of basic rights to equal concern and respect (Dworkin, 1977: 182–222).
No doubt, the institution of equal rights is crucial for Rawls. He did not enshrine it as the first principle of justice as fairness for nothing (Rawls, 1999a: 266). But following interpretations of Rawls by such thinkers as Paul Weithman, Arnold Davidson, Andrius Gališanka and Susan Neiman, I take Rawls to be a “conception-based” (and not a “rights-based”) philosopher (see especially Weithman, 2010: 11–14). By this, I mean that for Rawls the real foundation of a liberal society does not lie in the rights and rules it legislates but instead in the conception of the person (according to early Rawls) or citizen (according to late Rawls) it upholds and promotes. 1 Basic rights and constitutional rules are simply institutional measures to express, defend and promote a particular conception of the person and citizen.
Consider a striking passage from an article by Rawls, the sentiment of which is found throughout A Theory of Justice as well: “When fully articulated, any conception of justice expresses a conception of the person, of relations between persons and of the general structure and ends of social cooperation. To accept the principles that represent a conception is at the same time to accept an ideal of the person, and in acting from these principles, we realize such an ideal” (Rawls, 1999c: 254–55). The spirit of moral perfectionism is alive and well in these lines. This passage can even be summarized by borrowing a wordplay of Cavell's, itself taken from Emerson, on the two meanings of the word “constitution”: referring to, on the one hand, one's personal constitution, and a political constitution on the other hand (Cavell, 1989: 77–118, 1990: 11, 2004: 139–140). Rawls does not use this exact language but his message lends itself to it. What he expresses here is a reinforcing loop between personal and political constitutions. Putting it all too mechanically, we can say that for Rawls an ideal of a (personal or citizenly) constitution inspires and supports a (legal and political) constitution, acting in line with the letter and spirit of which, helps people to realize that very ideal conception of personhood and citizenship in themselves (as their own “constitution,” as it were). The crucial, indeed Cavellian, point is that such a political constitution (which Rawls calls a “political conception of justice”) clarifies the kind of person we want to be and the sorts of regulative and highest-order desires we aspire to have.
What kind of personal and political constitution does Rawls have in mind? Put it this way: A Theory of Justice is a notoriously complex book of political philosophy. But at its root interpreters (along with Rawls himself) have identified a simple and unifying idea behind it: a liberal democratic society, says Rawls, should be a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next (Chandler, 2023; Rawls, 1999a: 4, Rawls, 2001: 5). How did he arrive at this idea? Significantly for our Cavellian purposes, he did not launch his grand theory of liberalism by stating first-order moral and political principles. He starts, instead, by observing the major moral ideas embedded in the public institutions and culture of liberal democracies (in his case, the United States and its Constitution, judicial decisions, public political culture, and more), and from there reconstructs their foundational idea (i.e., that society should be a fair system of cooperation). 2 Just as Cavell remarks that philosophy always begins by listening rather than speaking, Rawls too states, “One thinks of the moral theorist as an observer, so to speak, who seeks to set out the structure of other people's moral conceptions and attitudes” (Rawls, 1999d: 288). Of course, Rawls is not oblivious to real-world injustices. He knows perfectly well that no liberal democratic society lives up to its ideal of fairness. Nor does he think that citizens of liberal democracies are clueless optimists. Still, he grounds his theory on the assumption that his fellow citizens recognize that a liberal democratic society should be a fair system of cooperation for all its members and, starting from that assumption, leads his readers to principles and concepts that will flesh out this idea and make it a reality.
That liberal democratic societies are (or rather, must urgently be) fair systems of cooperation places great demands on its members. On the one hand, it mandates structural reform, such that our fundamental institutions are oriented to this goal. On the other hand, as Rawls and many fellow egalitarians realize, it requires individual members of liberal democracies to become liberal in the deep and original sense of the world—that is, generous and giving persons who are concerned with the fate of their fellow citizens. 3 Throughout his work Rawls is explicit that people aren’t just born liberal selves who naturally act from concerns of justice. It takes work. A liberal character is a hard-won achievement of education, self-reflection, and friendship. But what a conception of justice such as justice as fairness does for us here and now is to display a certain ideal self that we might well wish to cultivate in ourselves. It makes possible, in short, a vision of the self as what Cavell calls a series of nexts, a process of becoming a certain kind of self that is always still to be attained (Cavell, 1990: 12). A conception of justice crystallizes and publicizes that ideal, and makes it available for us to realize in our own lives.
An example can make this concrete. 4 Far from a fanciful thought experiment, it's the kind of powerful moral encounter we might expect to find in Cavell's writings on melodrama. Tara Westover's Educated (2018) is a memoir by someone who was exposed to liberal ideals of fairness remarkably late in life. Born in 1986, Westover grew up in Idaho, homeschooled within a Mormon survivalist family that maintained minimal contact with the outside world. The extremity of her upbringing is shocking: her education was limited to the Bible, Book of Mormon, and speeches of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young; she was unaware of the Holocaust until reaching adulthood; she grew up working in her father's extremely dangerous scrapyard; and she endured severe abuse from her brother.
To make a long story short, Westover's journey is one of determination and bravery as she self-educates, earns admission to Brigham Young University, and ultimately completes a doctoral program in history at Cambridge University. The memoir reaches its climax when her parents visit during her studies with a singular mission: to expel what they perceive as the devil from her and reconcile her with the family. Anticipating their intentions, having witnessed a similar scenario with her sister, Westover remains conflicted about consenting to the exorcism despite her enduring struggles. Ultimately, she decides against it for the following reasons: [My father] was offering me the same terms of surrender he had offered my sister. I imagined what a relief it must have been for her, to realize she could trade her reality – the one she shared with me – for his. How grateful she must have felt to pay such a modest price. I could not judge her for her choice, but in that moment I knew I could not choose it for myself. Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me. (Westover, 2018: 350)
Westover doesn't explicitly state where she learned this “one privilege” to “construct [her] own mind.” It's unlikely that it came from a single source. She immersed herself in the works of authors who championed this notion, such as David Hume, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Traveling abroad surely helped as well. But it also came from living, for the first time, in a world saturated with the kind of liberal values and principles Rawls identifies—fairness and freedom foremost among them. I say so because the reasons she provides for refusing her parents are a veritable precis of a liberal ideal of personhood. Firstly, she rejects the notion that she is predetermined to adhere to the ideals she was born into. Secondly, she asserts her inherent power and right to self-creation, emphasizing her individual significance and capacity to advocate for herself. Lastly, she assumes responsibility and self-direction over her life, as she puts it, exercising “custody” over her mind.
I have dwelled on Westover's case because it reconciles two criteria of moral perfectionism that may otherwise seem to be at odds, and precisely in the way that Rawls envisages. On the one hand, Westover knows, at an abstract and general level, the kind of person she wishes to become: a free and fair individual who has made signature liberal principles her own. The first perfectionist criterion, of self-intelligibility, is thus satisfied. On the other hand, and here we come to the fourth criterion of moral perfectionism, Westover cannot know the exact shape her life and character will take on, precisely because the ideals of character she holds for herself will be negotiated and specified in singular moral encounters, each of which will send her in a new direction. The point is not that life is unpredictable but that, from a perfectionist point of view, personal transformation will always remain partial, incomplete, and calling for renewal. The Tara Westover who reclaims her freedom through this interaction with her parents will be a changed person, to whom other people will respond differently and launch her on new adventures of self-assertion and self-creation. Plural and provisional in the manner of Cavell's moral perfectionism, a conception-based view of liberalism identifies certain moral principles that inform the public culture of liberal democracies, which citizens can (and often do) use to understand themselves and undertake ongoing and open-ended work on the self. 5
Disappointment with who we are
The very first idea that Cavell introduces in Cities of Words is the divided self. As moral perfectionists, he says, we feel ourselves to be divided when we reflect on what the world—and us along with it—could ideally (yet realistically) become. On the one hand, we are attracted by what could be; on the other hand, we are disappointed by what is. This notion and experience of the divided self is even seen by Cavell as a litmus test for admission into the perfectionist tradition: “So common is this pattern of disappointment and desire, in part or whole, as represented in the philosophical figures to follow here, that I think of it as the moral calling of philosophy, and name it moral perfectionism, a register of the moral life that precedes, or intervenes in, the specification of moral theories which define the particular bases of moral judgment of particular acts or projects or characters as right or wrong, good or bad” (Cavell, 2004: 2).
This dialectic of disappointment and desire is also present in Rawls. At times it can be difficult to detect due to the method he adopts in his writings on justice: ideal theory. Rawls's rationale for ideal theory is that moral and political philosophers first need to work out what justice looks like in the context of an ideal “well-ordered society” before going on to examine thornier questions of how to improve our own all too flawed societies (Rawls, 1999a: 6–10). Naturally, the dialectic of desire and disappointment is not going to be found in the realm of ideal political theory. Hypothetical members of a well-ordered society are unlikely to be split between the desire for what can be and disappointment with what is. They’re already in the good place. But when Rawls departs from this method and speaks of the real world and our contemporary liberal democracies, he expresses the very dialectic that Cavell places at the center of moral perfectionism.
Rawls's treatment of moral emotions is exemplary in this respect, especially his extended analyses of the guilt and shame we feel for failing to live up to certain ideals and self-conceptions (Rawls, 1999a: 388–391). But rather than focus on these emotions—which depend on a certain sense of culpability and even failure—I’d like to spotlight a different kind of disappointment in Rawls's thought that is, if anything, more quotidian: his lifelong impression that the world as it stands needs redemption. 6 An unpublished vignette from an interview is telling. Near the end of his career, he spoke with students over a range of subjects spanning his life and work (Rawls, 1991). But in his draft copy of the interview, he adds a fascinating section that was not included in the published version. Upon answering all the questions his students asked, he notes down a few “Questions They Didn’t Ask Me” and plays the role of both interviewer and interviewee:
Questions they didn’t ask me
There were lots of questions they didn’t ask me in the HRP [Harvard Review of Philosophy] interview. Some of those they could have asked I’ll answer here:
HRP (as imagined): You never talk about religion in your classes, although sometimes the discussion borders on it. Why is that? Do you think religion of no importance? Or that it has no role in our life?
JR: … On the role of religion, put it this way. Let's ask the question: Does life need to be redeemed? And if so, why; and what can redeem it? I would say yes: life does need to be redeemed. By life I mean the ordinary round of being born, growing up, falling in love and marrying and having children; seeing that they grow up, go to school, and have children themselves; of supporting ourselves and carrying on day after day; of growing older and having grandchildren and eventually dying. All that and much else needs to be redeemed.
HRP: Fine, but what's this business about being redeemed? It doesn’t say anything to me.
JR: Well, what I mean is that what I called the ordinary round of life—growing up, falling in love, having children and the rest—can seem not enough by itself. That ordinary round must be graced by something to be worthwhile. That's what I mean by redeemed. The question is what is needed to redeem it? (2003: unpaginated)
What indeed? 7 For the young Rawls, redemption came by way of God and forming “personal” relations with fellow human beings through His grace (Adams, 2009; Bok, 2017; Nelson, 2019). For the later Rawls who had lost his faith, redemption was figured in terms of a reasonably just society and the conceptions of personhood and citizenship it supports. But whatever form it took, the crucial point is that, as Thomas Pogge states, “All his life, Rawls was interested in the question of whether and to what extent human life is redeemable—whether it is possible for human beings, individually and collectively, to live so that their lives are worth living (or, in Kant's words, so that there is value in human beings living on earth)… In light of such thoughts, Rawls has tried to lead a worthwhile life in part by trying to show what might make human life worthwhile. He has focused these contributions to the political realm: Is it possible to envision a social world in which the collective life of human beings would be worthwhile?” (Pogge, 2007: 26).
The question as to whether liberalism could serve as a substitute for religion—or even be a religion—is fraught. The word religion can be used to criticize liberals as either soulless (and lacking religion) or dogmatic (and possessing only the worst aspects of religion). Furthermore, attempts to define what constitutes religion can lead to complicated discussions. In his interview addendum, however, Rawls offers a potential way forward. He maintains that religion fulfills a certain function: When a need to redeem everyday life is felt, and where there is an organized attempt to provide for it, there is religion. Liberalism may lack a defined metaphysical framework, and may not contain ideas about the soul, the afterlife, or the overarching purpose of existence. However, despite this, a fundamental purpose of religion—to seek meaning in something beyond us—remains intact. In liberalism, it isn't situated in another realm of existence but in something worldly just beyond our grasp—a vision of becoming a free and generous individual within a society characterized by fairness and justice.
We have traveled far from Cavell's interpretation of Rawls's phrase of being “above reproach.” For what Cavell reads as a potentially moralistic vindication is, in light of these remarks, closer to the opposite: a safety valve to relieve pressure from too much self-reproach, too much disappointment in self and world. As we said, Rawls knows that we do not live in well-ordered societies and that the ordinary lives of citizens in contemporary democracy are compromised by injustice through and through. Like Cavell, angst-ridden questions such as the following are very much live for him: “How do you live with yourself, knowing and seeing what you know and see?” (Cavell, 2004:184) But equally, and again just like Cavell, Rawls is not prepared to give up on the broader project. He has a regulative faith that our liberal societies embody “justice good enough to warrant defence, say loyal opposition” (Cavell, 2004: 165). The question, then, becomes how to carry on in light of this awareness of being willingly compromised by our imperfect societies. Resignation is not a mood of either thinker. Encouragement is, and in the next section, we see how Rawls envisages and exhorts personal transformation by citizens of liberal democracies to realize in themselves the ideals of their society.
Work on the self to become who we want to be
In one respect, at least, Rawls contributes something to moral perfectionism that Cavell does not: practical techniques for people living in liberal democracies to work on and transform themselves. Read in a certain light, Rawls can be seen as laying out a regimen of what could be called spiritual exercises.
The term “spiritual exercises” has been revived today by the historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot. Over his career, Hadot presented and defended the sense in which philosophy can be more than a theoretical discourse but also a way of life. Specifically, he argued that ancient philosophy consisted almost entirely of spiritual exercises, which are voluntary personal practices—such as meditation, thought exercises, diary keeping, and dialogues—intended to cause a transformation of the self (Hadot, 1995; 1998; 2002). Rawls does not mention Hadot in his work, nor does he work in the tradition of ancient philosophy. Yet if we keep in mind that Rawls is a “conception-based” thinker, meaning that he locates the essence and stability of liberal democracy in the desire of its members to live up to a certain ideal of personhood and citizenship, then a number of his most famous concepts—including the original position, reflective equilibrium and public reason—can be interpreted as spiritual exercises to cultivate a particular kind of person and/or citizen. Call it self-help for liberalism: Rawls in part envisaged these ideas as formative, that is, as techniques of the self for people living in contemporary democracies.
It would take a book-length study to portray Rawls's major concepts as spiritual exercises (Lefebvre, 2024; see also 2022). For the time being, consider only his most famous idea: the original position, which consists of people asking themselves what kind of principles of justice they would choose to regulate their society if they were choosing solely based on their standing as free and equal subjects. Readers of Rawls, including Cavell, refer to the original position as a thought experiment (Cavell, 2004: 169). This is true, of course. Like any good thought experiment it strips away the complexity and detail of real-life situations to isolate a specific issue in a plain and stark manner. But the original position is so much more than that. Rawls is explicit that it is not just a theoretical construct to exposit his theory of justice but also a point of view—a perspective on self and world—that citizens of liberal democracy can adopt at any time.
A Theory of Justice even concludes on the note that the original position is a formative technique of the self. Listen to its final moving lines: Finally, we may remind ourselves that the hypothetical nature of the original position invites the question: why should we take any interest in it, moral or otherwise? Recall the answer: the conditions embodied in the description of this situation are ones that we do in fact accept…. Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view. (Rawls, 1999a: 514)
Is this not a spiritual exercise? It meets the criteria of a voluntary personal practice intended to cause a transformation of the self. It also ties together several perfectionist themes. First, as per Cavell's defining feature of moral perfectionism, the original position is a device of and for self-knowledge: its purpose is to help us step outside the partiality of our contingent social position which distracts us from the considered (we might call them “genuine”) desires and ideals we have for ourselves and society. By donning Rawls's famous “veil of ignorance” to suspend knowledge of our social position and personal attributes, the original position works as an exercise of relinquishing our personal biases and attachments, such as those to family, friends, social class, and profession. By temporarily suspending our knowledge of preferences and social status regarding matters of fundamental justice, we adopt a selfless, objective, and de-individuated perspective. In doing so, the original position engenders a viewpoint that transcends individual biases. This perspective enables us to connect with a shared, impersonal self that we share with others both presently and in the future. Seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis is not a mysterious or mystical perspective. It is a point of view, at once intellectual and sentimental, that ranges across space (within a society) and through time (between generations) to discount personal biases and social status. By regularly engaging in this process and cultivating a genuine commitment to these principles, we expose ourselves to, and may eventually become committed to, the underlying values driving our most considered judgments. We disengage from our social position; we reengage with our social position; and in that ever-renewed activity, we strive for impartiality.
Second, there is an intimate connection between the original position and Cavell's dialectic of desire and disappointment. The very fact that we have to make a conscious effort to adopt this perspective means that it is not our default or natural point of view. Third, the original position as a spiritual exercise is consistent with Cavell's view of the self as a series of nexts. Its purpose is to pursue a certain kind of self (graced with “purity of heart” and “self-command”) that is always still to be achieved (“if one could attain it”). Fourth, the original position does not impose an ideal of selfhood or citizenship that is external or foreign to the self-conception members of liberal democracies have of themselves. As Rawls says, “the conditions embodied in [the original position] are ones that we do in fact accept.” The trick is to find a way—and the original position is one such practical way—to unlock this ideal and to realize a vision of self and society that is latent yet all around us.
Liberalism and moral perfectionism
The sense of the latency, or immanence, of something better lying just beneath the surface of our liberal democratic societies is shared by Cavell and Rawls. Rawls speaks of a “realistic utopia,” which refers not to some radically other social and political dispensation, but to our own, provided we could slightly, yet thereby also comprehensively, shift it (Rawls, 2001: 4–5; 2007: 10–11). 8 Cavell too has a favorite formulation. In his commentary on Emerson's essay “Experience,” he dwells on the phrase of a “new yet unapproachable America,” which refers to the at once tragic and hopeful condition of already being in the land of promise yet failing to see and realize it for what it is. Why is this new America unapproachable? Cavell responds: “It is unapproachable if [one] is already there (always already), but unable to experience it, hence to know or tell it; or unable to tell it, hence to experience it” (Cavell, 1989: 91). What is this if not a realistic utopia? A better world that inheres within our own but, because unrealized, remains not fully known and calls on each of us to specify—which is to say, to build and create—it in ways that none of us can predict.
Allow me to sum up. To stage a constructive encounter between Rawls and Cavell I cited a question that Rawls raised for himself in light of his meetings with Cavell on moral perfectionism: “What do we have to become (as ind[ividual]s) to act from J[ustice] as [F]airness?” (Rawls, 1989: unpaginated) It should now be apparent that this question does not come out of the blue, as if only his encounter with Cavell provoked it. On the contrary, the connection between personal transformation and a just society is at the root of Rawls's conception-based approach to justice as fairness, his dialectic of desire and disappointment, and the spiritual exercises he devises. In this article, I have presented these key features of Rawls's moral and political philosophy as consistent with Cavell's understanding of moral perfectionism. My goal was to show that Cavell was rash in taking Rawls to be incompatible with moral perfectionism. I also wanted to use Cavell to amplify moral perfectionist tendencies in Rawls's thought.
Why bother to bring out these perfectionist tendencies? Because it helps to show liberal democracy in the best possible light. A moment ago, I cited Rawls's belief that, with a tweak here and there, liberal democracy might be considered a realistic utopia. Well, the mood has certainly changed since his death. Over the past several years, liberalism has faced a series of challengers going by the names of populism, authoritarianism, nativism and nationalism. What can be done by defenders of liberal democracy? There is, of course, a pressing need for renewed defence of core liberal legal and political institutions such as the rule of law, individual rights, an independent judiciary and division of powers. Yet there is also a need and opportunity for an ethical defence of liberalism, in the sense that its ideal of the person and citizen has the potential to be attractive. As a recent history of liberalism concludes, “Liberalism, there are those who say, contains within itself the resources it needs to articulate a conception of the good and a liberal theory of virtue. Liberals should reconnect with the resources of their liberal tradition to recover, understand, and embrace its core values” (Rosenblatt, 2018: 277).
I could not agree more. Liberals, and liberal political philosophers especially, are often reluctant to speak about the “good life” (Habermas, 2010). There are valid reasons for that, tied to the rejection of the kind of perfectionism that Rawls and Cavell criticize for infringing on state neutrality and equal liberty. But that should not mean that liberals should refrain from examining how liberal principles and values can be adopted by citizens to enrich their way of life. Indeed, if citizens of liberal democracies were to recognize the potential costs of a shift away from liberalism—in particular, those associated with the disappearance of a valuable source of selfhood that Rawls and Cavell's writings exemplify—then perhaps they would be less inclined to resignation or indifference to its fate. They may even come to challenge the adage that a liberal is someone who won’t take sides even in defence of their cause. 9
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
