SEEU Review vol. 5 Nr. 2 (pdf) - South East European University

SEEU Review Volume 5, No. 2, 2009
The principles of justice help us to judge what is unjust and offers a
conceptual framework to avoid injustices. Rawls suggests that we must try to
avoid the long-lasting problems of philosophy such as problem of truth and
the dualism between realism and subjectivism for the status of moral and
political values. The alternative can be obtained from the social contract in
order “to achieve a practicable conception of objectivity and justification on
due reflection”. The solution underlies the peaceful compromise through
“public reason”. A political conception of person does not necessarily
involve “questions of philosophical psychology or a metaphysical doctrine
of the nature of the self”. Conflicting differences between political views can
be “moderated” through the “method of avoidance”, so that “social
cooperation on the basis of mutual respect can be manifested” (Rawls, 1999,
395). At this point, no need to say that conflict is tried to be resolved with
the help of a non-conflict theory, since conflict is out of consideration for the
theory of justice and something which public agreement should ignore in
advance.
The principles provide a condition so that we can make same judgments
about the basis of society. For example, Rawls observes that we have certain
judgments about certain questions. We are sure that the religious intolerance
is unjust (Rawls, 1971, 19). However, this sort of “provisional fixed points”,
which any conception of justice is convicted, is not assured in the debatable
questions such as correct distributive shares of wealth. Therefore, we must
move backward and forward and distinguish weak and shared conditions
until we find a proper description of initial situation “that both express
reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered
judgments”. Rawls calls this part of the initial situation “reflective
equilibrium”, in which “at last our principles and judgments coincide” and
“we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of
their derivation”. Reflective equilibrium is open to further revisions and in
this sense not necessarily stable. In addition, Rawls notices that the initial
situation is open to further interpretation. A conception of justice is not
based upon the self-evident premises and the justification of the principles of
justice is provided by the agreement in the original situation of equality.
Justification of the principles originates from the agreement and the
justification of a conception of justice is “matter of the mutual support of
many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view”
(Rawls, 1971, 20-1).
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