Abstract
The paper analyses Rawls’s teleology/deontology distinction, and his concept of priority of the right. The first part of the paper aims both 1) to clarify what is distinctive about Rawls’s deontology/teleology distinction (thus sorting out some existing confusion in the literature, especially regarding the conflation of such distinction with that between consequentialism and nonconsequentialism); and 2) to cash out the rich taxonomy of moral theories that such a distinction helpfully allows us to develop. The second part of the paper examines the concept of priority of the right. It argues that such a concept should not be identified with that of deontology—indeed, deontological theories do not necessarily assign priority to the right over the good. However, it contends that the concept of priority of the right is essential to explaining what specific kind of deontological theory “justice as fairness” is. Justice as fairness is a deontological theory which assigns priority to the right as a consequence of its commitment to a neutral position with respect to different accounts of what is ultimately valuable and good.
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Notes
See Gaus (2001a). Gaus contends that an approach based on reasons to act is more promising both in order to capture what deontology really is about and why it is a more plausible approach to normativity than teleology (Gaus 2001b). Incidentally, it is worth noting Gaus also identifies the concept of teleology with that of consequentialism (Gaus 2001a, pp. 27, 35–39).
See Parfit (2000), p. 84. The fact that Parfit calls such a view telic (as a short version of teleological), rather than consequentialist, egalitarianism, suggests that he too might have misunderstood Rawls’s concept of teleology.
“Non-instrumental egalitarians care about equality. More specifically, on my view, they care about undeserved, nonvoluntary, inequalities, which they regard as bad, or objectionable, because unfair. Thus, the non-instrumental egalitarian thinks it is bad, or objectionable, to some extent—because unfair—for some to be worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. Importantly, non-instrumental egalitarians need not believe that equality is all that matters, or even the ideal that matters most. But they believe that equality is one ideal, among others, that has independent moral value” (Temkin 2002, pp. 129–130, emphases in the original; see also Temkin 1993, p. 13, and fn. 21 on that page).
The considerations made about distributive equality in the remainder of this paper apply to any form of distributive pattern (based on sufficiency, priority, merit, desert, or some other criteria) or to any non-distributive moral criterion (like rights violation) that is not instrumentally justified in terms of its potential to maximize some non-moral good. In these scenarios, states of affairs are evaluated, inter alia, by taking into account moral features that they possess or lack—like a certain distributive pattern or the fulfillment of certain rights.
See also Freeman (1994), p.314.
This is particularly evident in Sen’s consequentialism, where certain procedures (whether some rights have been violated or not) affect directly the evaluation of states of affairs.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising these issues.
See Freeman (2007), pp. 85-87. Admittedly, Freeman does not phrase his objections to what he there calls “plural or mixed consequentialst conceptions” in this very way, and the one offered here is therefore a re-phrasing of his argument.
Indeed, most current egalitarians, who generally do not identify themselves as consequentialist, react to this objection by claiming that egalitarians concerns are only part of justice, and need to be balanced against other demands of justice, such as moral rights or claims of autonomy and dignity (See, for instance, Cohen 1989, p. 908 and Swift 2008).
Unless, of course, the latter are themselves elements of the theory’s notion of the good. However, a conception of the good needs to be relatively self-contained and cannot contain an infinite number of morally constraining elements; hence, any deontological theory of the first kind necessarily encounters the difficulty that I am discussing here.
This seems, for instance, to be the general structure of G. A. Cohen’s approach, for whom justice—the realm of what we owe to people as matter of right—does not coincide with “what we should do”, but might need to be balanced against other considerations; see Cohen (2008), pp. 274–292.
See again Cohen’s discussion on incentives, the difference principle, and Pareto optimality (Cohen 2008, pp. 27-115). Although Cohen believes that there need not be an incompatibility between equality (understood as what justice demands) and the best possible prospects for the worst-off, he claims that, where the two are not simultaenously achievable, sacrificing equality (and thus justice) might sometimes be the right thing to do all things considered.
Freeman (2007), p. 64. Incidentally, it might be worth noting that this account of the right clearly shows how Kymlicka is not only wrong in claiming that utilitarianism can be deontological (because deontology and priority of the right are not the same thing), but also in arguing that it assigns priority to the right. The good of utilty is not defined by any references to the constraints of the right within the utilitarian framewrok; units of utilty are counted equally simply because that is the corrrect procedure to aggregate the good, and this is the only egalitarian constraint within the theory.
I defend elsewhere the stronger view that the constructivist outlook, if not the Rawlsian model literally taken, can be conceived as taking an agnostic approach towards what is ultimately of value in life. See Ronzoni (2010) and Ronzoni and Valentini (2008). The present article defends the more modest view that the Rawlsian perspective is committed to the acceptance of pluralism and disagreement among different conceptions of the good, and cannot therefore offer a full-blown acccount of what is ultimately of value, but rather only the contours that a permissible account must have. I am grateful to an anonimous reviewer for rightly remarking that I could not defend a full-blown agnostic view within the scope of this article.
A wide literature, which I cannot adequately address here, has discussed this approach and its implications. Critics of Rawls have raised doubts both about whether primary goods are as neutral as Rawls takes them to be, rather than been instead biased in favour of a set of liberal and individualistic conceptions of the good; and about whether the thin theory of the good can constitute a sufficiently informative basis for the parties to be able to chose a set of principles of justice in the original position (see, for instance, Sandel 1982). These problems are crucial, but they fall outside the scope of this paper. I am not interested in whether Rawls’s account is successful and defensible, but rather in cashing out its conceptual structure and aims, regardless of whether these are then reached or not by the actual theory.
In a way, then, we might say that, whereas teleological theories have an account of the right that is fully derivative from the good, the reverse is true for justice as fairness: here conceptions of the good as recognized as such—as conceptions of the good proper—only if they are compatible with the right. As Rawls puts it, “the principles of right put limits on which satisfactions have value” (Rawls 1999, p. 27).
Given the conceptual nature of the present paper, I cannot discuss here the complexities of, and the possible challenges one could raise to, a moral theory which aims to deliver valid principles whilst remaining silent as to what is ultimately of value in life. The topic is discussed in detail Ronzoni (2010) and Ronzoni and Valentini (2008).
On this account of the right, see also Kant’s definition of the basic principle of justice: “act externally in such a way that the free use of your will is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to a universal law” (Kant 1965), p. 231.
This, conversely, has implications for the content of our theory of the right, which will have to be permissive enough to allow for a plurality of conceptions of the good to be pursued within its boundaries.
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I am grateful to Daniel McDermott, to an anonymous reviewer, and to the Editors of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for helpful comments, and to the Max Weber Programme for its support during the preparation of this article.
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Ronzoni, M. Teleology, Deontology, and the Priority of the Right: On Some Unappreciated Distinctions. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 13, 453–472 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9209-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9209-z