Political Liberalism: The Argument from Moral Psychology

AbstractThis paper consists in two parts. In the first one, I analyze what Itake to be the crucial weakness of political liberalism, unresolvedeven in its latest iterations – its dependence on values ‘implicitin democratic culture’. I argue that the reference to democraticculture is too weak a starting point to sustain the full-fledgedtheory of justice that follows. In order for political liberalism tobe plausible, some further justification of its normative startingpoint of free and equal, reasonable and rational persons sharingmoral personality is necessary. The second part of the paperprovides such argument by developing Rawls’ remarks on moralpsychology. Taking on board the recent insights of developmentalpsychology, anthropology, and behavioural science, the aim of thepaper is to justify the assumed normative starting point ofpolitical liberalism by showing that our understanding of humancooperation inevitably involves fairness and justice and thereforepresupposes a broadly Rawlsian conception of person.

KeywordsRawls, Quong, political liberalism, moral psychology, moralpersonality

1. The ambition

In the ‘late’ version of his project of justice as

fairness, John Rawls presents us with a type of political

theory that aims to abstain from using comprehensive or

metaphysical beliefs in developing a theory of justice.

Instead, the assumptions he uses as a starting point are said

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to be implicit in “public political culture”1. Confronting the

latest interpretations of political liberalism, the first aim

of the paper is to show that this backing of the starting

assumptions fails, leaving them unfounded or even arbitrary.

Simply put, what Rawls wants to find in a democratic culture

is not there. As a result, the whole project of political

liberalism appears much less plausible than its proponents

imagine it to be.

In the second part of the paper, I claim that the

starting point of political liberalism is not arbitrary, as it

can be supported by additional analysis. I propose a non-

Rawlsian argument to support Rawlsian assumptions of citizens

as reasonable and rational, possessing moral personality. I

argue that a defense of political liberalism should start with

an understanding of the normative nature of human cooperation,

which inevitably involves claims of fairness and justice. When

we understand cooperation along these lines, it goes a long

way towards establishing the crucial role of moral personality

in developing a theory of justice, vindicating Rawls’ assumed

starting point.

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My ambition in this paper is therefore first to show how

the analysis of implicit social values present in Rawls and

maintained by his contemporary supporters does not work, and

then to provide a remedy for it. My argument from moral

psychology should greatly strengthen the overall credibility

of political liberalism, providing a solid ground for the

conception of moral personality that Rawls so crucially

assumes.

2. The values behind political liberalism

Any deliberation about the principles of justice (and

supposedly even about philosophy more generally) has to start

from somewhere – at least that is what John Rawls repeatedly

claims. However, we cannot start this deliberation from

heavyweight comprehensive and metaphysical statements. When it

comes to politics, the stakes are higher and there is a need

for some sort of consensus. Therefore, any good theory of

justice has to set off from shared beliefs of a kind that all

citizens can at least in principle identify with and accept.

When a theory does not heed this advice and starts from some

controversial standpoint, the ensuing state may have its

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legitimacy questioned, as it becomes not respectful enough of

the ‘fact of pluralism’.

Adopting this picture, Rawls undertakes to build a

conception of justice manifesting three important features.2

First, it needs to be political, “worked out for a specific

kind of subject, namely, for political, social, and economic

institutions.”3 This means that its range of application is

limited; it is not concerned with wider moral problems.

Secondly, this conception of justice is presented as a

freestanding view. It can stand alongside different doctrines

and comprehensive worldviews, serving as a ‘module’ and

enabling citizens to harmonize their own private beliefs with

the principles of justice. As freestanding, it “involves, so

far as possible, no wider commitments to any other doctrine.”4

Lastly, the content of freestanding political conception of

justice is “expressed in terms of certain fundamental ideas

seen as implicit in the public political culture of a

democratic society.”5 The substance of this conception of

justice is thus not simply assumed or, what is worse,

controversially stipulated by some sort of metaphysical fiat. It

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is supposed to grow out of a shared understanding of value and

basic political relations in our societies.

As all three conditions above are demanding, it is not

surprising that some commentators expressed strong scepticism

regarding whether Rawls in fact does what he professes to do.

Brian Barry, Samuel Scheffler and Leif Wenar all argue that

Rawls’s Political Liberalism is not freestanding and political – it

is a heavy moral and comprehensive doctrine with strong

Kantian undertones.6 However, in this paper I do not want to

examine to what extent later Rawls remains a Kantian thinker

and whether that damages the credibility of political

liberalism.7 In contrast to a lot of critical literature, I

focus less on the ‘freestanding’ part and more on the

‘implicit in democratic culture’ one, which I consider

crucial. If the basic content of political liberalism is found

to be implicit in public culture, it is a strong consideration

in its favour, going a long way towards granting the other two

conditions (its freestanding and political nature) as well. On

the other hand, if the basic content of political liberalism

is not implicit in public culture (as I claim is not) it makes

political liberalism utterly implausible – unless some other

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source for its basic ideas can be found, which is the topic I

explore later on.

For Rawls, the public culture of liberal democratic

societies is supposed to contain two families of ideas, both

essential for his theory as a whole. First is “the fundamental

idea of society as a scheme of social cooperation.”8

Cooperation understood in this way is guided by publicly

recognized rules and procedures and it involves the ideas of

fairness and reciprocity. Secondly, Rawls assumes that the

public culture of democratic society takes citizens as free

and equal, reasonable and rational, and having the two powers

of moral personality – a sense of justice and a capacity for

adopting a conception of good.9 Taking these two ideas

together, Rawls claims that “the political values of

constitutional democracy … can be worked out using the

fundamental idea of society as a fair system of cooperation

between free and equal citizens as reasonable and rational.”10

The conceptions of person and of social cooperation drive

the entire Rawlsian enterprise. His main question, repeated

numerous times throughout Political Liberalism, is “What is the most

appropriate conception of justice for specifying the fair

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terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free

and equal, and as fully cooperating members of society over a

complete life, from one generation to the next?”11 The starting

point of the Rawlsian conception of justice is therefore pre-

loaded with significant normative content. A picture of

individuals, conceived in specific manner and cooperating in a

certain way, is assumed from the start.

The natural question, then, is what is the status of

these assumptions and how exactly Rawls gets to them. As I

claimed above, I want to disregard the uncharitable hypothesis

that they are simply unacknowledged remnants of comprehensive

Kantianism and ‘political’ liberalism is thus basically a

scam. Yet even if we read these assumptions the way Rawls

wants us to read them, as implicit in democratic culture,

there remains a crucial ambiguity regarding their status. Are

they embedded in actual liberal-democratic societies as ideas

that almost every citizen in fact accepts? Or do they only

present a hypothetical liberal ideal we feel we ought to

approximate? The sources of Rawls’ assumptions remain unclear.

Addressing this issue in his recent powerful presentation

of Rawlsian political liberalism (which may define the face of

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political liberalism for the next decade), Jonathan Quong12

proposed an interpretative dichotomy of internal vs. external

conception of political liberalism that well encapsulates this

problem. When seeking a starting point for political

liberalism, one may search for it ‘outside’ – trying to find

some common ground for consensus within the worldviews held by

real people in contemporary liberal democracies. That seems to

be the more ambitious way. The other strategy is to focus

‘internally’ on coherence and feasibility of the Rawlsian idea

of well-ordered society and to argue that this utopia is

indeed realistic – and that therefore we should try and

introduce at least some of its features into the real life of

political societies.

Quong, in agreement with other critical commentators,13

holds that the external reading of political liberalism boils

down to assessing the putative empirical fact that its

assumptions (the idea of cooperative society with free and

equal, reasonable and rational citizens) correspond with the

traditions and real-life attitudes as we encounter them in our

political societies. In a forceful critique of this claim,

Gerald Doppelt14 asserts that the conception of people as free

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and equal, which constitutes the starting point in Rawls, has

no automatic priority. It is by no means rooted deeper in our

cultures than Christian virtues or capitalist ethics – it is

exactly the other way around. While Christianity stands truly

at the beginning of our culture and civilization somewhere

deep in the Middle-Ages, and capitalism catapulted Europe and

later North America into the world economic dominance

centuries ago, universal freedom and equality were still

viewed as radical and idiosyncratic values at the end of the

19th century. And even in the 20th century there were times when

they seemed to be completely abandoned. That is why they

cannot claim any privileged place as the first and foremost

cultural values of our civilization that are somehow

automatically presupposed when talking about justice.

Even taken a-historically, Rawlsian freedom and equality

are far from established as the principal values endorsed

across the political spectrum. If we look at what people can

really agree on, we get a thoroughly different picture which

moreover radically varies from country to country. In the US

it probably resembles some sort of constitutional consensus on

basic rights and liberties, while Scandinavian countries

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supplement it by a robust measure of social provisions. What

is more, this consensus may rapidly change in time, reflecting

momentary fluctuations of national economy, international

security, immigration situation, and other wholly contingent

factors. Establishing a freestanding political conception

based on what real reasonable citizens can actually agree upon

is therefore a precarious exercise, which would, even when

successful, yield ostensibly non-Rawlsian conclusions.15

Furthermore, establishing the normative starting point of

political liberalism externally, as something citizens

actually believe in, seems to go directly against one

prominent current in Political Liberalism. Rawls insists that

finding the overlapping consensus (understood as a set of

shared beliefs of actual citizens) must not be the first step

in his theory. He wants to find more than a mere modus vivendi;

his goal is ‘stability for the right reasons’. Justice as

fairness is to be developed independently of actual opinions,

which are too readily modified when power relations change.

However, this is not to say that Rawls does not care about the

actual endorsement. Indeed, he hopes that justice as fairness

can, over time, win the respect of all reasonable citizens, so

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they gradually establish it as a part of their respective

comprehensive doctrines.16 But the conception of justice itself

cannot be developed as an overlap of real-life beliefs.

All in all, political liberalism interpreted externally

relies on beliefs about freedom, equality, and moral

personality that should be broadly accepted by citizens as

supremely regulative for a conception of justice. However,

these beliefs cannot be transparently found. Moreover, even

if the citizens of liberal democratic societies did hold the

requisite beliefs, this would not be enough for Rawls, as he

does not want to rely on contingent beliefs when developing

his theory. The actual worldviews are important only in the

second stage, where an already developed theory of justice

aims to provide political stability. Therefore, the starting

assumptions of political liberalism cannot be justified

externally.

In spite of the failure of the external reading of Political

Liberalism, philosophers like Quong remain unmoved. He claims

that the correct (or, at least, the only charitable) reading

of Rawls’ theory is internal, regardless of what certain

passages seem to suggest. Political liberalism need not

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justify itself to the existing constituency of citizens by

searching what sort of consensus is achievable given the

radically divergent political conceptions they hold. Its

method is hypothetico-deductive. It starts from a certain

ideal of society, from citizens as free and equal, from the

doctrine of the burdens of judgment – so the consensus that

the external conception aims to achieve is already

presupposed. The discussion then proceeds only within the

bounds of the liberal democratic tradition and its aim is to

establish the principles of justice and the ideal of well-

ordered society as internally consistent and attractive. What

Quong (and, in this interpretation, Rawls) in the end want is

to present a picture of liberal society as attractive and

legitimate despite far-reaching disagreements in the

conceptions of good life and reasonable comprehensive

doctrines held by its citizens.

This strategy treats the liberal values adopted by Rawls

as given. It claims that as an ‘internal’ conception it works

only within the liberal framework and therefore does not need

to justify and explain its normative starting point. The

possible justifications of values are outsourced to the

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comprehensive doctrines, outside the scope of what all

reasonable liberal citizens are expected to endorse. The far-

reaching foundationalist justifications of liberal values are

even discouraged at the political level, as there is a high

risk that any attempt to justify them this way would

necessarily be at least partly comprehensive and therefore

unsuitable for any conception that aims to be political, not

metaphysical.

However, the claim that the Rawlsian normative starting

point can be taken for granted since the discussion is

internal to liberal theory has one important presupposition:

the Rawlsian values must pass as a commonplace and

unproblematic ground widely shared within the tradition. If

that is not the case, and I will argue that it is not, then

the fact that we view political liberalism as internal to the

wider liberal tradition cannot exempt Rawls from properly

spelling out and justifying his underlying normative

conception of person and society. To put it differently, Rawls

employs what he calls intuitions when stipulating the nature

of human beings as free and equal, possessing moral

personality. If it turned out that his intuitions are really

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his and are not widely shared even within the liberal tradition

itself, then he cannot treat them as undoubted and given. If

he still treats them as given, it can mean one of two things.

(1) He is open to the charge of arbitrariness – a claim that

his theory starts with a normative starting point that is not

justified and therefore inherently problematic.17 (2) He tries

to smuggle into his theory normative assumptions that he is

not completely transparent about, revealing his closeted

Kantianism.18 Either way, if the values Rawls uses prove not to

be implicit in liberal theory, it signals a great problem for

political liberalism.

So what is the normative standpoint Rawls assumes? When

explaining the basic assumptions of his theory in Political

Liberalism, Rawls claims that we “think of citizens as free and

equal persons. The basic idea is that in virtue of their two

moral powers (a capacity for a sense of justice and for a

conception of good) and the powers of reason (of judgment,

thought and inference connected with these powers), persons

are free. Their having these powers to requisite minimum

degree to be fully cooperating members of society makes

persons equal.”19 This is a concise passage mirroring the whole

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several-page argument in §77 (“The Basis of Equality”) of A

Theory of Justice.20 The idea is that the two powers of moral

personality serve as a theoretical anchor of the values of

freedom and equality. These two are, after all, abstract

values with immensely fuzzy boundaries. Therefore, whenever

one is not sure what freedom and equality entail, the strategy

is to fall back to the analysis of the powers of moral

personality to clear out the implications. Rawls indeed

proceeds exactly in this fashion on multiple occasions

throughout his texts.21

Thus, Rawls specifies the values of freedom and equality

with the notion of the two powers of moral personality. These

powers are taken to be binary (or ‘range’) properties. One can

certainly have a more urgent sense of justice or be better at

pursuing a conception of good life, but for Rawls that is

completely irrelevant for the purposes of political justice.

The sense of justice and the possibility to adopt a conception

of good are like the property of being inside unit circle.22

No matter how close the given point is to the centre of the

circle, when it comes to this property, the point either has

it fully or not at all. And, therefore, the citizens

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exhibiting the two powers of moral personality to the

‘requisite minimum degree’ can be viewed as equals – and the

sheer fact that they have them underpins their freedom.

However, the position presented above is a bit more

problematic than Rawls admits. Political freedom and equality

are supposed to be threshold concepts, producing binary

answers based on people exhibiting ‘requisite minimum degrees’

of the relevant properties. Rawls acknowledges that these

binary properties are supervening on more basic properties

that could exist on a broad scale – one can, after all, have a

more or less acute sense of justice. Therefore, Rawls needs

and argument showing that, despite this supervenience, the

threshold properties are somehow primary. Moral personality

can become the basis of equality only if Rawls proves that the

differences in the sense of justice and the capacity to pursue

a conception of good do not matter beyond the threshold.

Disappointingly, Rawls does not have such argument.

Ian Carter has recently proposed an elegant solution to

this problem.23 The basic move, without going into too much

detail, is that democratic states must abstain from evaluating

persons’ varying capacities above the threshold level – the

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capacities of citizens must out of respect remain ‘opaque’.

This evaluative abstinence then results in the necessity to

treat the powers of moral personality as binary properties

even if they do admit of degrees – which makes them excellent

in their role as the basis of equality (all people above the

given threshold are viewed as free and equal).

In any case, the sheer fact that there is a continuous

debate about how Rawlsian moral personality actually works in

specifying freedom and equality calls for caution. For Quong’s

internal interpretation to work, moral personality should be

an unproblematic liberal assumption. But if we are not even

sure how the basic elements of Rawls’ conception of person are

to relate to one another, this approach seems completely

unwarranted. Simply put, we cannot assume as given something

that is in fact deeply questionable.

Furthermore, the Rawlsian moral personality is not only

contestable – it is also quite distinctive within the liberal

tradition, as even the most superficial comparison with other

liberals can prove.24 Take the example of John Stuart Mill, who

was the first influential thinker that consciously referred to

himself as liberal and who had great influence on establishing

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liberalism as an important philosophical doctrine. Both Mill

and Rawls of course believe in freedom, but in strikingly

different ways. While Rawls, as I elaborated above, associates

freedom with the two powers of moral personality, Mill

associates it with what he calls ‘experiments in living.’ For

Mill, we should be free to organize our lives as we please,

because that leads to experiments in living which broaden our

knowledge of what a good life may consist in.25 That profoundly

differs from what Rawls has to say both in content and in

philosophical implications. Mill highlights the creative

element of human beings, brought forward by individual efforts

going against the social current. It is this type of endeavour

that for Mill mostly deserves political protection, as it

moves the society forward or at least leads it to question its

own established worldviews. The conception of freedom that

Rawls adopts has no such drive, the traditional (some would

even say quintessential) liberal focus on individuality is

completely missing. Thus, claiming that Rawls’ notion of

freedom is only a garden-variety liberal conception is clearly

misguided.

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A similar conclusion follows from the comparison of

Rawls’ idea of ‘fair cooperation between free and equal

persons’ with Mill. In On Liberty, it is the so-called 'harm

principle'26 that serves pretty much the same purpose as fair

cooperation in Rawls. Harm principle is the basic regulative

ideal which shapes the role of the state, or, in Mill’s

phrase, it is to “govern absolutely the dealings of society.”27

Yet harm principle is quite distinct from Rawlsian fair

cooperation, both in scope and in ideological background. The

main objects of Mill’s investigation are the limits of state

power and the powers of other people when interfering with the

‘liberty of action’ of individuals. Thus, he is almost

exclusively concerned with the negative liberty in Berlin’s

sense. In contrast, Rawls’ concern for fair cooperation is

broader, positive, and much more focused on collective, mutual

efforts – as opposed to, again, Mill’s traditional liberal

individualism. Put together, Rawls and Mill take profoundly

dissimilar approaches to the basic questions of liberal

political theory.28

If we take both Mill and Rawls to be liberals, then ‘a

question internal to liberalism’ must not just presuppose some

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quite specific normative background (be it harm principle or

moral personality) and simply elaborate it. The form and

justification of the essential liberal values is unclear even

within the liberal theory. Hence, Rawlsian values cannot be

assumed away at the start of the discussion as ‘implicit in

democratic culture’ or, even more narrowly, ‘implicit in

liberal tradition’. They are neither commonplace nor

unproblematic, as I have shown above. When compared to other

liberal conceptions they do stand out – and therefore need some

sort of argument covering them.

The above conclusion is further strengthened by the

manner in which Rawls uses these values during the development

of his theory of justice. The original position and the veil

of ignorance are presented as the devices of representation

designed to ‘embody’ a conception of person as free and equal,

reasonable and rational, possessing moral personality. The two

principles of justice then also embody the specific

conceptions of freedom and equality assumed in advance. The

primary goods hang on Rawls’ conception of person as well.

Hence, at the end of the day, the conception of person as

holder of moral personality has a truly pervasive bearing on

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the shape and content of Rawlsian political liberalism. And

the bigger its role, the greater the need for at least some

sort of justification29 – or else the whole theory becomes

subject to the unappealing pair of options describe above,

either arbitrarily stipulating its starting point or dubiously

smuggling the Kantian comprehensive considerations.

Quong could argue that to assume liberal values at the

beginning does not beg the question with regards to liberal

principles derived at the end. Enough is happening in the

argument to prevent the charge of circularity – general

liberal values are specified into a concrete theory of justice

which is attractive and also stable over time. However, as I

have shown above, these statements are not exactly accurate.

Rawlsian political liberalism starts with a highly specific

and surely not commonplace conception of moral personality,

which is deeply connected to its basic values of freedom and

equality. Without these normative assumptions, Rawls would not

be able to derive his principles of justice.

Of course, not all philosophical work in Rawls or Quong

is done by their normative assumptions. The process of

constructing the original position, deliberation behind the

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veil of ignorance, and other considerations play a very

important part. Nevertheless, for my purposes it is sufficient

to claim that enough of the philosophical work is done by the

normative conceptions of person and social cooperation for

them to require a proper justification. In other words, the

internal reading of Political Liberalism collapses as well. In order

for political liberalism to succeed as a viable theory of

justice, its proponents need to come up with a way to defend

its basic values – preferably without compromising the

political nature of the whole enterprise by reverting into

some form of Kantianism.

To digress a little, political liberals are not the only

ones in need of justifying the fundamental starting point of

their theory. As multiple authors noticed recently,30 even

amongst egalitarians there is ‘a strange neglect of the basis

of equality’. Engaging mostly in the notorious ‘equality of

what?’ debate, there is not much literature about what is

actually the basis of equality, why it is an important value

at all, and from where does it emerge. And even the literature

that exists often stays within the bounds of Rawlsian ‘powers

of moral personality’ picture, not asking the crucial

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question, unanswered by both egalitarians and political

liberals, why we must indeed accept moral personality and place it at the very

heart of liberal political philosophy.

These philosophical developments (or absence thereof)

bear witness to the remarkable and pervasive success of

Rawlsian thinking in certain areas of political philosophy.

When it comes to the details everybody of course has their own

conception, but the big picture is truly monopolized by Rawls.

The framework of values he provided is taken as seminal and we

rarely look beyond. Rawlsian arguments and positions are

notoriously present on both sides of the global justice

debate, not to mention luck egalitarianism vs.

prioritarianism, and so forth. Nevertheless, when it comes to

setting up and justifying his basic values, there simply are

no adequate explanations presented explicitly within his

corpus, as I have shown in this section. We need to look

elsewhere.

3. The nature of social cooperation

To remind, Rawls adopts two families of normative

assumptions: one regarding the conception of person as23

reasonable and rational, possessing moral personality, while

the other concerns the idea of social cooperation as involving

fairness and reciprocity. So far, I argued that these

assumptions are not established in the public political

culture, leaving the whole project of political liberalism

crucially unsupported. Now I undertake to remedy this flaw by

focusing on the Rawlsian account of social cooperation from

the perspective of moral psychology.

My focus on Rawlsian idea of social cooperation is

untypical, as both proponents and critics of political

liberalism focus mostly on the conception of person. This

priority is understandable as it is the conception of person

that is supposed to betray the Kantian tendencies of Rawls.

Also, the original position is designed to represent the

conception of person, so it is this conception that drives the

basic argument forward. Similarly, Quong’s political

liberalism operates chiefly with freedom, equality, and moral

personality.

However, I hold that the immediate focus on the

conception of person in the context of political liberalism is

unfortunate. If the arguments from previous section work, it

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is difficult if not impossible to imagine a successful,

direct, ‘freestanding and political’ justification of a

sophisticated conception of this kind. In contrast, the idea

of social cooperation and the analysis of moral psychology

that accompanies it are much more fruitful. In these fields,

the Rawlsian normative assumptions can be vindicated

relatively straight-forwardly. What is more, the study of

social cooperation and moral psychology can subsequently serve

to justify the Rawlsian conception of person as well. My

argument in this section thus consists in two major parts: In

the first, I try to justify the Rawlsian picture of social

cooperation using the vast amount of relevant scientific

studies conducted in this field in the past 15 years. In the

second, I argue that the conception of person as reasonable

and rational, possessing moral personality, is implied in the

empirically supported picture of social cooperation. All in

all, this argument should provide a backing of Rawlsian

normative assumptions that was found lacking in the previous

section.

Rawls asserts three things about social cooperation: “a)

Cooperation is distinct from merely socially coordinated

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activity. … (It) is guided by publicly recognized rules and

procedures.” “b) Cooperation involves the idea of fair terms

of cooperation: these are terms that each participant may

reasonably accept, provided that everyone else likewise

accepts them.” “c) The idea of social cooperation requires an

idea of each participant’s rational advantage or good.”31 I

take it that the crucial question Rawls tries to answer here

is how we are to understand ourselves as cooperative beings.

The three features spell out the normative undertones of human

self-understanding with regards to social relations. When we

cooperate, we search for fair rules and acknowledge the others

as possessing their own perspective on the good. This is very

important. If the idea of human cooperation is presented as

inevitably involving the notions of fairness, of pursuit of

justice, then a path towards a justification of Rawlsian

conception of political justice may be wide open.

However, it can be argued that Rawls does not solve much

by this exposition of his understanding of social cooperation.

In the last section, I showed how moral personality remains

crucially unjustified, even arbitrary, in the recent popular

interpretations of Political Liberalism. At this point, it is not

26

moral personality and the associated values that are open for

question – but a rather specific, normatively loaded notion of

social cooperation. Rawls starts from the social cooperation

understood as implying a strong drive towards fairness and

gets to a theory of justice … as fairness. The move, taken in

isolation, is clearly question-begging. Rescuing the argument

by a simple undeveloped claim that such an account of

cooperation is implicit in the public culture of democratic

society does not work, as the previous section showed.

Therefore, we are back to the objection claiming that the

Rawlsian starting point is either arbitrary or comprehensively

Kantian (with social cooperation ultimately understood as an

interaction between citizens that are ends in themselves).

To justify the starting point of political liberalism, it

is necessary to press on with the analysis of moral

psychology. If the assertions above, claiming that human

beings necessarily understand their cooperation as involving

fairness, are sufficiently defended, it might get the

subsequent argumentation off the ground. Unfortunately, Rawls

does not develop an argument of this type; he just asserts

that being the case. Nevertheless, I believe that such

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argument can be made and we can thus develop a persuasive

support of the Rawlsian notion of cooperation and the

resulting conception of moral personality. What is needed, to

repeat, is a proof that human beings cannot but understand

their cooperation normatively, as involving fairness and

justice. This result would facilitate the move justifying

moral personality, consequently putting the whole project of

political liberalism on solid ground.

In the field of human cooperation, there are several

points overwhelmingly supported by the empirical research in

developmental and evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and

behavioural science. In what follows, I list these points and

then elicit a philosophical interpretation, arguing that they

point towards a Rawlsian conception of social cooperation.

Firstly, it is well-established that we are a species

that cooperates to an extent that is unprecedented amongst

animals, even including our closest primate relatives.32 Human

infants engage in cooperative activities like helping,

informing, or sharing from as early as their first birthdays,

before they had time to absorb it from adults, suggesting that

cooperative behaviour comes naturally.33 Moreover, the evidence

28

suggests that in general people enjoy cooperating, making it a

natural and instinctive activity.34 We are truly and

wholeheartedly cooperative social animals.

Secondly, humans do not cooperate solely for self-

interested reasons. By now, hundreds of conducted studies

indicate constant deviations from homo economicus model of human

behaviour that are impossible to explain by the imperfections

of self-interested reasoning. The most popular device to show

it is the so-called ultimatum game. In an anonymous one-off

exchange, the researches give one person (the proposer) a

certain amount of money. The proposer is then asked to give

some portion of this money to the second person (the

responder). If the responder accepts, both players take their

respective shares. If the responder refuses, neither player

receives any money. Here, it is clear that the rational

strategy for the proposer is to give the smallest amount

possible, while the rational strategy for the responder is to

accept any non-zero offer. However, proposers across cultures

and backgrounds generally offer substantial portions of the

money (often close or equal to parity), while the responders

frequently reject offers regarded as too small (on aggregate,

29

roughly half of offers of 20% or less get rejected).35 None of

this makes sense unless there are other factors than self-

interest embedded deeply into our understanding of human

cooperation.

The first of the ‘other factors’ embedded into human

cooperation is the fact that human beings think and understand

their cooperation in terms of norms. Normativity is an

essential part of our living world from the earliest moments

of our lives. Children actively seek out ‘how things are done’

and the established social norms help human societies to

create increasingly complex forms of cooperation.36 The norms

specify certain patterns of human behaviour understood as

‘decent’, making some self-interested activities (like low

offers) unacceptable

The most important ‘other factor’, however, is that

humans view their cooperation in terms of fairness and

reciprocity. The sense of fairness is evident in the already

described ultimatum games, but it manifests itself in many

other areas. For example, when very young children cooperate

together on a task, an equal distribution of the booty seems

to be the standard and prevailing response, even if one child

30

ends up controlling it.37 However, nowhere is the drive towards

fairness clearer than in our attitude towards non-cooperators

and other unfair actors. Humans engage in ‘altruistic

punishment’, punishing third parties at personal cost even if

they did not suffer any loss and have nothing to gain. It is

the unfairness itself that seems to provoke a negative

emotional response and become the main driver of the punitive

action. Moreover, in human cooperative scenarios the

punishment is extremely effective, even when it takes a mild

form of verbal criticism, without inducing a direct loss to

the given individual. If human cooperation contains an option

to punish, it becomes very stable, even when the cooperating

group contains a substantial number of people that are not

spontaneously willing to reciprocate favours and cooperate on

fair terms.38

Philosophically, there are several points to take away

from the discussion above. Firstly, the Hobbesian picture of

social cooperation is wrong. When we cooperate, we do pursue

our interests and good, that much is undeniable. However, our

pursuit is always limited by the notions of fairness and

reciprocity that are present both externally, as adopted

31

social norms, and internally, as an attitude that great

majority of humans consistently takes when cooperating. Thus,

the ‘natural’ mode of human interaction is not the war of all

against all but a joint effort sensitive to claims of justice.

This means that the Rawlsian notion of social cooperation

enjoys a robust empirical backing in all three of its central

elements. Firstly, no one really doubts that “an idea of each

participant’s rational advantage or good”39 plays an important

role in human cooperation. People do want to achieve some

advantage for themselves when they cooperate and if they do

not, cooperation quickly breaks down.40 However, the Hobbesian

pursuit of personal gain is importantly constrained by the two

other elements of Rawlsian social cooperation: its reliance on

publicly recognized norms and the underlying idea of fairness,

both of which feature prominently in an overwhelming majority

of empirical studies on the subject. Human communities

inevitably understand their cooperation as containing a moral

level that calls for justice, often manifested in terms of

rules and norms.

Moving to the second part of the argument, the

empirically supported Rawlsian picture of social cooperation

32

presupposes a relatively elaborated conception of person.41 The

question at this point is ‘what must be necessarily true about

human beings if they are to take part in a cooperation that is

subject to demands of fairness and justice’. First of all, if

human cooperation is necessarily normative, then human beings

inevitably employ their moral personality when they cooperate.

Moral personality is a sine qua non condition of human

cooperation understood in this way.

The reasoning behind this assertion is unproblematic and

straight-forward. In so far as humans cooperate under the idea

of fairness, they must possess a sense of justice and a

capacity to adopt a conception of good. The capacity to adopt

and pursue a conception of good is something that drives us to

cooperate in the first place (I need something and I need the

help of others to achieve it), while a sense of justice

ensures that I am capable of perceiving and upholding the

normative aspect of the given cooperative project. To

illustrate, both powers of moral personality are necessarily

presupposed in even the simplest contracts. After all, there

is no need to create a contract if the two parties do not

pursue some good – and there is no point in it if the parties

33

are unable to understand the obligations that follow from it.

All in all, once we understand social cooperation as

normative, we inevitably need to assume that the parties

involved possess moral personality.

The same is true when it comes to other critical features

of Rawlsian conception of person: the reasonableness and the

rationality. The basic model Rawls employs throughout Political

Liberalism consists in the drive towards unlimited personal gain

– the rationality – being limited by the considerations of

fairness and reciprocity – the reasonableness.42 When the

rationality gets expressed, like in the deliberation behind

the veil of ignorance, it is only when it has been

appropriately constrained by the reasonable, built into the

conditions of the original position.

As it turns out, human cooperation generally follows this

pattern. On one level, we do want to maximize our gains.

However, in cooperative settings the other-regarding

considerations always seem to be involved, limiting the

pursuit of the rational by the concern for the reasonable.

Thus, the manner in which we cooperate seems to imply the

picture of rational and reasonable persons that Rawls assumes.

34

I hold that the best way to justify the Rawlsian starting

point of fair social cooperation between reasonable and

rational persons possessing moral personality is not by

claiming that it is implicit in democratic culture, but by it

being implicit in the social cooperation as we understand it.

Human cooperation in general is normatively loaded from the

start and that presupposes a human involvement with justice

and good. No specific cultural ideals are involved at this

point.

If moral personality, reasonableness and rationality, is

deeply entrenched in our understanding of social cooperation,

then Rawls is justified in making it a cornerstone of his

theory of justice. After all, the fact that we are beings that

care about justice and follow our conception of good immensely

changes the requirements of legitimacy for our societies. Now

they face the task of being set up so as to express and

satisfy our yearning for justice and also to settle the rival

cooperative claims. To illustrate this point, there is no

right or wrong way to organize a society of robots. Some ways

are more efficient than others with respect to some possible

goals one might have, but that is all that can be said.

35

However, the situation is completely different when it comes

to human beings. The considerations of justice always creep in

– simply in virtue of the nature of beings that take part in

those societies. Ruling merely with force is not an option for

human societies. Even the most brutal and barbaric military

junta always provides some sort of justification why they need

to be in power and why the brutal things they do are in the

final analysis reasonable. Moreover, every government, even

the most inept one, always presents itself as bringing some

sort of good to the people. Admitting the opposite is

politically unthinkable and equals to an open call for

revolution or abdication. The moral personality of citizens

therefore presents the ultimate framework in which every

political regime must operate. The right and the good for

citizens and political society are the horizon of our

political thinking.

The outcome of the argument above proves to be important

when contrasted with the conclusion of the previous section.

There, I claimed that the political liberalism of Quong and

Rawls is deeply unsatisfactory when it comes to justification

of its starting point. They embedded freedom and equality in

36

the powers of moral personality, yet their justification of

this move by asserting that their conception of person is

internal to liberal tradition collapsed. The claim that

liberalism as a tradition prominently focuses on moral

personality in the Rawlsian sense when developing a conception

of justice is simply untrue. That left their conception of

moral personality hanging in the air, undermining the

plausibility of political liberalism as a whole.

I proposed a different argument, not relying on the

values implicit in liberal societies, but on the necessarily

normative character of human cooperation, implying a certain

conception of person. A sense of justice, a capacity for a

conception of good, reasonableness and rationality are

presupposed when we try to understand the ‘being just’ as an

important mode of existence for human beings. Moral

personality with reasonableness and rationality is therefore

vindicated as the starting point for a construction of a

theory of justice – after all, they are implied by our

primordial interest in fairness of cooperation.

In the broader context of Rawlsian thinking, my argument

does not by itself justify political liberalism as a whole –

37

its aim is much more limited. The justificatory argument is

not complete when it establishes the two powers of moral

personality with reasonableness and rationality as the primary

political characteristics that have to be taken into

consideration when developing a conception of justice. There

is a long road from moral personality to liberal freedom and

equality (and even longer to the two principles of justice).

Rawls does not necessarily recognize it, as he leaves a lot to

be desired when he claims that “in virtue of their two moral

powers (a capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception

of good) … persons are free. Their having these powers to

requisite minimum degree to be fully cooperating members of

society makes persons equal.”43 A fuller argument in §77 of A

Theory of Justice44 is similarly inadequate.

Here, some sort of additional argument is required to

strengthen the Rawlsian position, especially regarding the

justification of the last two pieces of his normative

presuppositions: that we are not only reasonable and rational

persons possessing moral personality that are cooperating

under the idea of fairness, we are also cooperating as free

and equal. The argument from moral psychology cannot vindicate

38

freedom and equality. Even though the egalitarian tendencies

of human beings have been widely noticed and studied at

length,45 our egalitarianism is varied and crucially depends on

culture, context, and age of the studied subjects.46 That means

egalitarianism simply does not enjoy as strong a position as

fairness or reciprocity when it comes to social cooperation.

It is not implicit in human cooperation like moral personality

is. Therefore, it needs different support, more purely

philosophical.

However, the path from moral personality to freedom and

equality is relatively well-trodden. I already quoted Ian

Carter, who aims to get from moral personality to freedom and

equality via respect.47 In a similar vein, Stephen Darwall

argues that once we get to acknowledge that we can make claims

of fairness on one another (which is the basic insight I

developed with regards to social cooperation), we adopt a

‘second-person standpoint’, which ultimately results in our

mutual and reciprocal recognition as free and equal moral

agents.48 The most famous arguments for this conclusion is

developed by Thomas Scanlon. Once we view each other as

reasonable, rational, and susceptible to the claims of

39

fairness, we necessarily ask ‘what do we owe to each other’.49

And the treatment that Scanlon argues for is broadly in line

with the freedom and equality as Rawls imagines them.

The lesson of the philosophical attempts above (for my

purposes here) is that once the powers of moral personality

and reasonableness and rationality are established as the

primary political capacities of human beings, the argument for

political liberalism can go much smoother. Freedom and

equality cease to be some abstract values that resist

specification, as the capacity to adopt a conception of good,

the sense of justice, and reasonableness and rationality can

be used to elaborate and justify them.

4. Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to point out that the values

assumed by political liberalism are in a dire need of

justification – and then provide this justification analysing

the nature of social cooperation. However, I did not present a

full defence of political liberalism. My argument stopped with

the claim that a conception of person based on what Rawls

calls ‘the powers of moral personality’ together with ‘the40

reasonable and the rational’ are deeply and necessarily

relevant in the process of building a political conception of

justice. That is only the first step of a possible exhaustive

justification of political liberalism. I only briefly

commented on the transition from the powers of moral

personality to the core liberal values of freedom and equality

(the second step), not touching on the subsequent construction

of the principles of justice at all (the final step).

Nevertheless, this result is very important. Even though

multiple commentators acknowledged the importance and uneasy

status of moral personality for Rawls’ argument, little has

been done to provide some sort of justification for it. This

paper aims to fill this hole.

41

1 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8–9.2 Ibid., 11–15.3 Ibid., 11.4 Ibid., 13.5 Ibid.6 Brian Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Ethics 105, no. 4 (1995): 874–915; Samuel Scheffler, “The Appeal of Political Liberalism,” Ethics 105, no. 1 (1994): 4–22; Leif Wenar, “Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique,” Ethics 106, no. 1 (1995): 32–62.7 For a defense of Rawls with regards to this particular question, see Sylvia Burrow, “Reasonable Moral Psychology and the Kantian Ace in the Hole,” Social Philosophy Today 17 (2001): 37–55.8 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 250.9 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19.10 Ibid., 126.11 Ibid., 3.12 Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).13 See for example Robert S. Taylor, Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); George Klosko, “Political Constructivism in Rawls’ Political Liberalism,” The American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 (September 1997)..14 Gerald Doppelt, “Is Rawls’ Kantian Liberalism Coherent and Defensible?,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 815–51.15 For a more detailed discussion of these arguments, see Quong, Liberalism without Perfection, chap. 5..16 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 164–172.17 A similar issue is raised against Rawls already in R. M. Hare, “Review: Rawls’ Theory of Justice–I,” Philosophical Quarterly 23, no. 91 (1973): 144–55..18 The line taken by already quoted Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability”; Wenar, “Political Liberalism.”19 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19.20 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised edition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 441–449.21 See for example Ibid., 442., but the same move can be found in other works: in “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (John Rawls, Collected Papers (Harvard University Press, 1999), 312.); “Justice as Fairness: Political, not Metaphysical”;or already quoted Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19..22 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 444.23 Ian Carter, “Respect and the Basis of Equality,” Ethics 121, no. 3 (2011): 538–71.24 Of course, if one picks someone like Dworkin or Nagel for comparison, then Rawls’ take on liberal values may not stand out as too idiosyncratic. But that is only because they, as a group, exercised heavy influence upon each other – which resulted in some important similarities between their respective philosophical projects. 25 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 3..26 Ibid., 13.27 Ibid.

28 For a more general analysis of the distinctiveness of Rawlsian (and contemporaryAmerican) liberalism, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 226–275.29 The importance of a conception of person in Rawls (as well as its uneasy justification) have been noted in the literature for some time. For example, JűrgenHabermas in his famous exchange with Rawls categorically claims that “The decisive issue in the justification of the two highest principles of justice is less the deliberations in the original position than the intuitions and basic concepts that guide the design of the original position itself. Rawls introduces normative contents into the very procedure of justification, above all those ideas he associates with the concept of the moral person: the sense of fairness and the capacity for one's own conception of the good. Thus, the concept of the citizen as a moral person, which also underlies the concept of the fair cooperation of politically autonomous citizens, stands in need of a prior justification.” Jurgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’sPolitical Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 119. Given this need, it is very surprising that none of the proponents of political liberalism has taken upthe challenge to provide such justification. Philosophers like Quong seem to completely ignore the problem. 30 Carter, “Respect and the Basis of Equality”; John Charvet, The Nature and Limits of Human Equality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).31 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 16.32 Michael Tomasello, “The Ultra-Social Animal,” European Journal of Social Psychology 44, no. 3 (April 1, 2014): 187–94.33 Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2009), 3–47.34 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, Reprint edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 38–39. They cite extensive literature in support of this conclusion.35 For the most famous comprehensive study of this phenomenon, see Joseph Henrich et al., “‘Economic Man’ in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15Small-Scale Societies,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 06 (December 2005): 795–815. See also Ernst Fehr and Herbert Gintis, “Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental and Analytical Foundations,” Annual Review of Sociology 33, no.1 (2007): 43–64.36 See for example Marco F. H. Schmidt, Hannes Rakoczy, and Michael Tomasello, “Young Children Attribute Normativity to Novel Actions Without Pedagogy or Normative Language,” Developmental Science 14, no. 3 (2011): 530–39; Krista Casler, “Toddlers View Artifact Function Normatively,” Cognitive Development 24, no. 3 (2009): 240–47.37 Katharina Hamann et al., “Collaboration Encourages Equal Sharing in Children butNot in Chimpanzees,” Nature 476, no. 7360 (2011): 328–31; Alicia P. Melis, Kristin Altrichter, and Michael Tomasello, “Allocation of Resources to Collaborators and Free-Riders in 3-Year-Olds,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 114, no. 2 (February 2013): 364–70.38 For a development of last points and a summary of the most important relevant studies, see Bowles and Gintis, A Cooperative Species, 24–32.39 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 16.40 Bowles and Gintis, A Cooperative Species, 22–24.41 Rawls himself makes a similar point in Rawls, Political Liberalism, 299–304.

42 Ibid., 48–54.43 Ibid., 19.44 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 441–449.45 To give a few random examples: Christopher T. Dawes et al., “Egalitarian Motivesin Humans,” Nature 446, no. 7137 (April 12, 2007): 794–96; Sergey Gavrilets, “On the Evolutionary Origins of the Egalitarian Syndrome,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 35 (August 28, 2012): 14069–74; Martina Wittig, Keith Jensen, andMichael Tomasello, “Five-Year-Olds Understand Fair as Equal in a Mini-Ultimatum Game,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 116, no. 2 (October 2013): -.46 Ernst Fehr, Daniela Rützler, and Matthias Sutter, “The Development of Egalitarianism, Altruism, Spite and Parochialism in Childhood and Adolescence,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, February 28, 2011), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1775782.47 Carter, “Respect and the Basis of Equality.”48 Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).49 Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).