Injustice in American liberal democracy: Foundations for a Rawlsian critique

Conclusion Rawls stipulates that nonideal theory must include theories of punishment and compensatory justice, as well as a justification for the forms of opposition to unjust regimes, from civil disobedience and conscientious refusal to militant resistance, rebellion and revolution. (TOJ, p. 8) Given the Kantian interpretation of nonideal theory we now can see that each of its parts must be constructed to contribute to the teaching of justice. The preferred theory of moral development enables us to understand how persons come to adopt nonideal conceptions and practices, and how they can be convinced to change their thinking. The theory of history enables us to determine which traditions contain empirical causes of contemporary conceptions and practices.We recall that Rawls identifies the parties in the original position as we ourselves; when we ground our judgments upon its procedures, then we can perceive the world as persons in that position do. Our view need not be obscured by the economic determinism of traditional Marxism, nor does it require a psychoanalytic corrective in the manner stipulated by contemporary critical Marxists. A Rawlsian critique of American liberal democracy resolves the question of these determinants in the same way as it resolves all questions of an empirical nature, by placing them in their systematic unity according to a Kantian moral anthropology. If we can see what judgments result regarding empirical injustices and their removal we may ourselves learn something of how to redesign nonideal culture to conform to ideal principles of justice. And this prospect in turn is identical to the prospect of constructing a bridge between social theory and practice within liberal democracy.An earlier draft of this paper was read at the Tenth Interamerican Congress of Philosophy on Human Rights, Tallahassee, Fla., 1981.