The take-up of Rawls’ theory of the good in philosophy of education

Abstract

Personal well-being is a central concept in philosophical discussions of education and its aims. Although the work of general philosophers like Nussbaum, Griffin, Raz and Sen on the topic has been influential here, there has been next-to-no interest among philosophers of education in John Rawls’s work on ‘the good’ – in great contrast to interest in his work on ‘the right’, and despite the key place that his theory of the good has in his Theory of Justice (TJ), Chapter 7. This paper explores a likely reason for this lack of interest. This is connected with Rawls’s 1942 undergraduate thesis on the meaning of sin and faith. While there are many continuities between this – eg. to do with communitarianism and equality – and the theory of the right in TJ, there are none in the area of the good, since the thesis rejected the notion for theological reasons. In writing TJ, therefore, having long abandoned his Christian belief, Rawls had a rich background of earlier work on the right which he was able to work up into a powerful argument, while in the area of the good he had to start from scratch. The result, drawing on Josiah Royce’s ideas about plans of life, is disappointing and open to fairly obvious objections. In the light of this, it is not surprising that Rawls’s views on the good have had so little influence in philosophy of education.

Helping to promote the personal flourishing, or well-being, of students themselves and of others in their society and beyond are widely seen as central aims of education. Philosophers of education writing on aims have drawn on the work of many well-known philosophers who in the last half-century have worked in the area of personal well-being, including Arneson, Griffin, Nussbaum, Raz and Sen. In John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971) the concept is also pivotal. His theory of the principles and institutions on which a democratic community should be founded requires an investigation into what its ends should be, and these include the ends of the individuals who compose it. In his terms, an account of ‘the right’ requires an account of ‘the good’.

Invited to contribute to this retrospective on Rawls’ work and its significance for our field, I decided to see what influence his theory of personal well-being has had on our thinking. The core of this is in Chapter 7 of TJ on ‘Goodness as Rationality’ in his ‘thin theory of the good’ that revolves around rational life-planning and ‘the Aristotelian principle’ – a theory briefly touched on earlier in the book in Rawls’ account of primary social goods and expanded later into a ‘full theory’, drawing on the principles of justice, of the inseparability of individuals’ flourishing from that of the democratic community as a whole.

To my surprise, in the books on philosophy of education by other people that I looked at, although there are plenty of references to the original position, the difference principle, equality of opportunity and to a lesser extent moral development, I could find no trace of Rawls’ core ideas about personal well-being apart from brief mentions in McNamee and Bailey (2010: 475–476) and Crittenden (1988: 110–111). Why is this? What can explain the overwhelmingly greater interest in Rawls on the right than in Rawls on the good?

My answer is speculative and invites critical discussion. To some extent, the difference may reflect the fact, if it is one, that over the years, more philosophers of education have been involved in issues around equality and citizenship than those interested in personal well-being. True, any concern with equality of opportunity must bring with it some notion of the personal goods – for example, in the shape of income, access to higher education and so on that are to be distributed – and the point no doubt applies in a more general form to studies of citizenship and other themes connected with Rawls’ theory of the right. But as regards his ideas in Chapter 7, interest in these has been minimal. Given this, a fuller answer to the question I posed above must lie elsewhere.

First, let me say more about Rawls’ theory of the good. As he sees it, what is good for an individual person is to be understood as what it is rational for them to want in the light of their circumstances, abilities and plan of life, provided that this plan of life is itself rational. A good watch for someone, for example, is one that keeps accurate time, given that this is required in their case by these three factors. What is good for any person is what it is rational for anyone to want in the same way (p. 399). This includes Rawls’ ‘primary goods’, including the ‘primary social goods’ like liberties and opportunities that play a central part in his principles of justice (p. 92).

Rawls’s notion of the good, then, depends on the notion of a ‘plan of life’ and requires that plan to be rational. What makes it this? Rawls states that

a person’s plan of life is rational if, and only if, (1) it is one of the plans that is consistent with the principles of rational choice when these are applied to all the relevant features of his situation, and (2) it is that plan among those meeting this condition which would be chosen by him with full deliberative rationality, that is, with full awareness of the relevant facts and after a careful consideration of the consequences. (p. 408)

Rawls’ long elucidation of this statement is in his own words ‘somewhat tedious’. For our purposes, it is enough to know that his account of someone’s following a rational life plan does not imply that they actually review all the possible life plans that meet the conditions specified and then choose the one described under (2). Rawls stresses that ‘the hypothetical nature of the definition must be kept in mind’ (p. 423).

He goes on to say that

The definition of good is purely formal. It simply states that a person’s good is determined by the rational plan of life that he would choose with deliberative rationality from the maximal class of plans. (p. 424)

What the definition does not do is allow us to infer ‘what sorts of ends these plans are likely to encourage’ (p. 424). For this, we have to turn to empirical facts about human nature embodied in what he calls ‘the Aristotelian principle’:

other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity. The intuitive idea here is that human beings take more pleasure in doing something as they become more proficient at it, and of two activities they do equally well, they prefer the one calling on a larger repertoire of more intricate and subtle discriminations. (p. 426)

An example Rawls uses to illustrate this point is preferring the more intricate game of chess over the less intricate one of checkers (draughts).

This brief account of Rawls’ two central concepts in this area may give us enough of an introduction to his idea of a person’s good. It also gives rise to some problems.

One of these is whether human flourishing does indeed depend on having a plan of life. Some people working in education seem to take this for granted. ‘Life-planning education’ has been prominent in recent secondary school policy in Hong Kong, for instance (Lee et al., 2019). In that context, it has to do with vocational education. In this sense, too, although current English educational policy does not use the term ‘life-planning’, many would see our own system, with its focus on exams, an exam-friendly curriculum and league tables, as largely orientated towards students’ getting into higher or further education and securing a ‘good’ job.

Vocational preparation is a part of Rawls’ notion of a plan of life, but the latter goes wider to cover one’s life as a whole. In this wider sense of the term serious doubts have been raised by Williams (1981: 33–35) and especially Larmore (1999) about whether life-planning is indispensable for anyone’s well-being. Williams questions the perspective on one’s life involved in life-planning – a timeless perspective, as if one’s life is being seen from the outside, the proper viewpoint being, in his view ‘from here’ (p. 35). Larmore takes aim against the assumption ‘that what is good for a person must hinge on his purposes’ (p. 110). He emphasises the role of the unexpected, instancing the contribution of having a child to a person’s flourishing even though they have not planned this. No one would deny the importance of planning in human fulfilment, but whether this should be as all-embracing as Rawls demands is dubious (Heyd and Miller, 2010: 34–35). This may be a part of the reason why Rawls’ theory of the good has made such a little impact on our field. We may also have been put off by the lavish superstructure of the hypothetical choice of the most rational plan of life that he builds into the picture.

There are also problems about the Aristotelian principle. One is about the extent to which it does indeed reflect people’s preferences. Whereas there is obvious truth in Rawls’ claim that ‘the forms of life that absorb men’s energies, whether they be religious devotions or purely practical matters or even games and pastimes, tend to develop their intricacies and subtleties almost without end’ (p. 429) – and this also applies to much of our involvement in personal relationships as well as the arts and scholarship, it is by no means always the case. Very often, people enjoy revisiting works of art for the same kind of delight they experienced previously – and not only for new insights they get from them. The same is true of walking in the countryside, meeting loved ones again and many other things. These are not exceptions, contrary to what I think Rawls would claim, but everyday phenomena.

Rawls produces a fictional case to illustrate the point that even where the Aristotelian principle does not apply, one may still validly talk of a person’s good. He imagines someone whose only pleasure is to count blades of grass in various lawns (p. 432). Given that for him this is in line with his rational plan of life, his good is to engage in this activity. For many readers, the absurdity of this as an example of a life of well-being must make Rawls’ approach to the topic of human flourishing harder to accept.

It may be for reasons like these that Rawls’ account of the good, as compared with his theory of the right, has been so little taken up by philosophers of education. But I think there is more to be said. Leaving on one side the former theory’s arcane complexity, central ideas in the theory of the right – for example, about the original position, the difference principle and equality of opportunity – speak to philosophical concerns about what a more just society would look like and what policies, including educational policies, we might adopt for our own society to become one. Rawls’ ideas about the good, however, give minimal guidance to those of us interested in human well-being and how it should figure in educational aims and curricula. His whole approach through rational plans of life tends, I would hypothesise, to leave many of us cold.

But we may not have reached the bottom of why Rawls’ impact has been so different in these two areas. His early academic background may provide a clue. While a Princeton undergraduate in 1941–1942, he was deeply concerned with theology and considered training for the Episcopal priesthood, before deciding to enlist for the army instead. Because of his experience in the war and his reflections on the Holocaust, he gave up his traditional Christian beliefs. Meanwhile, for his bachelor’s degree, awarded in 1942, he had submitted a senior thesis in the philosophy department called A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community. In their introduction to this thesis together with Rawls’ On My Religion (discovered after his death in 2002), Cohen and Nagel argue that ‘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’ later writings on moral and political theory’ (Rawls, 2009: 7). They mention, as continuing themes

(1) endorsement of a morality defined by interpersonal relations rather than by pursuit of the highest good; (2) insistence on the importance of the separateness of persons, so that the moral community or community of faith is a relation among distinct individuals; (3) rejection of the concept of society as a contract or bargain among egoistic individuals; (4) condemnation of inequality based on exclusion and hierarchy; (5) rejection of the idea of merit. (Rawls, 2009)

As Rawls’ religious perspectives on these things were based on a purely moral rather than a political conception of society, it is not surprising that ‘ideas about rights, law, constitutions, and democracy play no role in the thesis’.

When he came to write TJ, Rawls thus had a solid basis of thought dating back to his religious period on which he could build that fitted his newer, political interests. Since he had thought about and developed his ideas on (1) to (5) over three decades before publishing TJ, philosophers of education for whom these areas have been relevant have had access to a highly sophisticated, fully worked out theory in which they figure.

The same continuity of interest and the intellectual rewards arising from it for readers are totally absent in his work on the good. This is because Rawls’ ethical perspective during his religious period had no place for this concept. As he stated in his 1942 thesis:

The outlook which these principles lead us to accept will be contrasted with another point of view which we shall call ‘natural ethics’, which is the ethics of Plato and Aristotle, and to which we oppose the Christian or ‘communal’ ethics. Proper ethics is not the relating of a person to some objective ‘good’ for which he should strive, but is the relating of person to person and finally to God. (Rawls, 2009: 115)

So when Rawls came to write TJ and needed a secular theory of the good as a key component of his overall account, he was not able to build on any ideas from the undergraduate thesis but had to start from scratch. How did he do this?

We know from TJ that his inspiration for the idea of a plan of life came from the American philosopher Josiah Royce’s (1908) The Philosophy of Loyalty. In introducing his account of a rational plan of life, Rawls writes,

The rational plan for a person determines his good. Here I adapt Royce’s thought that a person may be regarded as a human life lived according to a plan. For Royce an individual says who he is by describing his purposes and causes, what he intends to do in his life. (p. 408 and fn. 10)

What struck me on looking at Royce (1908) on this topic is the intensity of his attachment to the idea that we should lead our lives according to a single plan. Here are two examples:

Loyalty, then, fixes our attention upon some one cause, bids us look without ourselves to see what this unified cause is, shows us thus some one plan of action, and then says to us, ‘In this cause is your life, your will, your opportunity, your fulfilment’. (p. 42)

When I look to my cause, it furnishes me with a conscience; for it sets before me a plan or ideal of life, and then constantly bids me contrast this plan, this ideal, with my transient and momentary impulses. (p. 174)

Parker and Pratt’s (2021) article on Josiah Royce in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as the leading American exponent of Absolute Idealism and reveals his interest from a Christian standpoint in philosophical ideas about religion, including ideas about communities as logically prior to individuals. They also shed light on his views about plans of life, mentioning his view that these cannot be created by the individual from the chaos of their own desires and impulses, but

are found already largely formed in social experience: we come to consciousness in a world that proffers countless well-defined causes and programs for their accomplishment . . . When one judges a cause to be worthwhile and freely embraces such a program, several momentous things happen. The individual’s will is focused and defined in terms of the shared cause. The individual becomes allied with a community of others who are also committed to the same cause. Finally, a morally significant commitment to the cause and to the community develops. This commitment is what Royce calls ‘loyalty’.

This is perhaps an example of Heyd and Miller’s (2010: 34) view that in his attachment to the idea of a life plan Royce, along with Mill and Rawls, ‘tend(s) to overdramatize’ the idea of the unity that self-forming human beings give to their lives in making plans for their future, ‘to the point where it becomes conceptually incoherent or psychologically unrealistic’. They go on to say,

Taken literally, the concept of a life plan turns out to be a fallacious attempt to replace the metaphysical teleological setting for the conduct of human life with an equally ordered program that is subjectively set by individuals for themselves.

This is especially interesting in relation to Royce, given his deeply held Christian beliefs. Can we see him as (perhaps unintentionally) transmuting a traditional religious view about God’s plan for our each of our lives into a form more acceptable to a liberal age?

To come back to the quotation from Parker and Pratt. It is perhaps not surprising that, when writing TJ and having to construct a theory of the good ab initio without any guidance from his undergraduate thesis, Rawls should have been attracted to a philosopher who shared his communitarian sympathies. And although by then Rawls had long abandoned his religious belief, it is perhaps less of a surprise than might be expected that he was drawn to a thinker whose religious outlook permeates his work. As Cohen and Nagel tell us, ‘Those who have studied Rawls’s work, and even more, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings, whatever may have been his beliefs’ (Rawls, 2009: 5; see also Reidy, 2010).

This, then, is my speculative explanation of why Rawls on the good in TJ has had far less impact in philosophy of education than Rawls on the right. In the latter area, bearing in mind the continuities in his thinking before and after his loss of faith, he had been able to hone his ideas over decades and present to the world a carefully thought-through system. As for the topic of the good, he had nothing to carry forward from his religious period into his secular one. He had to do the best he could. There is still a sliver of continuity in the fact that he turned to the religiously minded Josiah Royce for his – Rawls’ – central concept of a plan of life, but beyond this, he was on his own. The unsurprising result is that his treatment of the good in Chapter 7 is unconvincing and contains several fairly obvious major flaws.