INTRODUCTION
In September 1948, Princeton philosophy professor Walter Stace published a controversial article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Man against Darkness.” Describing the task ahead for mid-century moral philosophy, Stace wrote,
What philosophers can do is to show that neither the relativity of morals nor the denial of free will really follows from the grounds which have been supposed to support them. They can also try to discover a genuine basis for morals to replace the religious basis which has disappeared . . . Our ideals and moral ideas have in the past been rooted in religion. But the religious basis of our ideals has been undermined, and the superstructure of ideals is plainly tottering.Footnote 1
A rash of alumni letters to Princeton condemned Stace's article for its implication that traditional theistic arguments for morality no long held up to scrutiny.Footnote 2 One campus chaplain even accused Stace of being in alliance with the Communists.Footnote 3 But Stace saw his own position as motivated by a firm commitment to traditional Western moral values; as people lost faith in God, morality could not be allowed to perish with belief. He repeated his call in 1951: “The task of thought in our time is to replace the lost religious and metaphysical foundation of morals by a secular and naturalistic foundation.”Footnote 4
This call acknowledged the lack of grounding for a set of moral concepts while nonetheless affirming them as worth keeping. To understand why, one might imagine a philosopher supernaturally transported to a seemingly inaccessible mountaintop, then left alone. Awed by the clarity of view from this perspective, he resolves to work backwards, constructing a reliable staircase to enable independent return. His efforts seem reasonable in such a situation, and the narrative's imagery intentionally alludes to the “moral-point-of-view theories” that would blossom in the 1950s.
Indeed, this “staircase story” best illuminates the phenomenon of “secularization” in mid-twentieth-century ethics in the United States. But it sits uncomfortably with two dominant strands of writing about secularization. This is not what Charles Taylor derides as a “subtraction story,” one in which modern thinking is steadily liberated from the extraneous distraction of religion; a history of religious belief is responsible for many of the moral concepts still defended.Footnote 5 Nor is it a story of inadequate substitution, one in which the effort to establish a secular grounding for ethics is regarded as delusional precisely because the initial source of certain moral concepts was religious.Footnote 6 Instead, the embrace of inductive logic in moral reasoning at mid-century enabled a group of American ethicists to flesh out ideas about natural morality that drew upon Protestant Christian traditions for inspiration but did not rely on metaphysical assumptions. Among these men, the one whose ideas would leave the longest legacy was a young John Rawls. Rawls was Walter Stace's doctoral student from 1946 to 1950, and his work in the 1950s and early 1960s can be seen as an answer to Stace's call to construct a replacement foundation for morality. To understand how his thinking developed requires an abandonment of the usual secular and religious entrenchments. David Hollinger has traced how the inclusive, universal vision embraced by American ecumenical Protestantism propelled it even to dissolve itself, in certain respects, in order to reach out to the un-churched and the unbelieving. Hollinger writes, “Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it.”Footnote 7 We might add to that list Rawls's legacy of a universalized moral and political philosophy, grounded in a robust conception of human nature.
Rawls wrote his 1942 undergraduate thesis at Princeton on Christian ethics and considered a career in the Episcopal ministry before leaving for war.Footnote 8 Reception of his thesis has tended either to make direct connections between its arguments and the arguments in A Theory of Justice (1971), or else to conclude from Rawls's 1997 essay “On My Religion” that he lost his faith definitively at the end of World War II.Footnote 9 The first approach elides thirty crucial years, while the second gives too much weight to a distant recollection. The archives tell a subtler story. At least until the mid-1950s, Rawls continued to engage seriously with Christian ethics and to indicate that he remained a religious believer of some sort. But far more interesting than the parlor game of guessing when Rawls retained or discarded various theological propositions is how his writings on Christian ethics and on philosophical metaethics intertwine in one continuous moral project. That project centered on seeing persons as embedded in a community of universal mutual recognition. Concern not to exclude anyone from that vision prompted Rawls to translate it from his youthful Protestant ethics into a secular mode.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Rawls and a group of fellow American philosophers working in the tradition of British analysis developed a “naturalistic” view of ethics, in the sense of one grounded in human nature.Footnote 10 Often the beneficiaries of year-long fellowships at Oxford or Cambridge and deeply engaged in British ethical debates,Footnote 11 they emerged convinced that to successfully refute the emotivist or noncognitivist theories of A. J. Ayer, R. M. Hare, and C. L. Stevenson—roughly that morality boiled down to emotion or personal preference—one had to rebel against G. E. Moore's rejection of “the naturalistic fallacy” and assert that some kind of natural basis, ideally grounded neither on scientific nor on theological claims, could justify morality as a common code. For Rawls and others, Ludwig Wittgenstein's later arguments offered a key resource for normative naturalism that skirted metaphysics. Wittgenstein had argued that concepts could only be understood inductively, through their use in a given frame. His successors on both sides of the Atlantic now employed his methods to argue that a shared concept of morality was embedded in human “forms of life.” The neo-Aristotelian naturalism of the Oxford philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, and the Wittgenstein-influenced ethics of British philosopher Stephen Toulmin and his Austrian student Kurt Baier, are well known, but far less notice has been taken of the American side of the movement.Footnote 12 This is a significant lacuna in the history of ethics; Rawls's community of American ethical theorists identified themselves as engaged in a common project and shaped the direction of the field in America.Footnote 13 Furthermore, close study of their work shows how a subset of them—most notably Rawls, Roderick Firth, and William Frankena—believed that these new arguments could provide an alternative, non-metaphysical yet universal basis for certain insights from Protestant Christian morality, particularly the irreducibility of persons and the crucial role of love.
Rawls anchored his case for universal morality in arguments about recognition of persons. Not acknowledging the existence of other persons indicated delusion, Rawls thought, and the basic recognition of persons entailed certain ways of responding, such as with sympathy and compassion, that encoded the seeds for morality into human life. The emotional aspect of Rawls's views on morality has often been overlooked in favor of construing his theory as grounded on a particularly thin species of Kantian rationality.Footnote 14 But Kant did not become especially important to Rawls's conception of his project until around 1962—by which point his views had already mostly taken shape.Footnote 15 Rawls's papers reveal that he spent much of the 1950s and early 1960s in a detailed investigation of how “natural attitudes” were inextricably linked with “moral feelings,” work that crucially underpinned his writings on justice from 1958 onwards and his arguments in A Theory of Justice.Footnote 16 This effort to render morality as encoded in human nature rather than as an emulation of God aimed to defend morality's universal claim on human beings even despite nonbelief.Footnote 17 Such an effort must be understood as an extension of the ethical motivations that drove Rawls's youthful Protestantism, not as a repudiation.
RAWLS’S EARLY CHRISTIAN ETHICS
To consider Rawls as a case for a different secularization story first requires attention to his early religion. Raised Episcopalian, he recalls being “only conventionally religious until my last two years at Princeton.”Footnote 18 He often skipped mandatory chapel services as a college freshman.Footnote 19 The stirring description of inward conversion at the end of his senior thesis suggests that he may have had such an experience in his junior year.Footnote 20 Perhaps it was sparked by George F. Thomas's class on “Christian Thought to the Reformation.” The combination of that course and one on nineteenth-century philosophy certainly prompted an academic conversion for Rawls in fall 1941: by December, he had belatedly switched his major from Art and Archaeology to Philosophy.Footnote 21
Philosophy and theology were intertwined at Princeton in the early 1940s; a separate Religion Department would not be founded until 1945.Footnote 22 So when Rawls took “Social Philosophy” with Norman Malcolm in spring 1942, Malcolm could focus on the problem of evil and assign texts—including Plato, Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Philip Leon—chiefly in Christian theology.Footnote 23 This reading list was central to the senior honors thesis that Rawls submitted six months later in December 1942, later published as A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.Footnote 24 What is most striking is not that Rawls wrote a Protestant Christian thesis but rather that he used the opportunity to formulate distinctive ethical convictions that would drive his work on morality for decades to come. His key contentions were (1) that taking an ethical attitude meant recognizing persons and the human community within which they were embedded, and (2) that the ultimate aim of such an ethical vision was a redeemed community from which no one was excluded.
In Sin and Faith, Rawls proposed that the central tenet of Christian ethics ought to be the distinction between people and things. “The realm or the character of the personal and the communal is qualitatively distinct from the realm of nature,” he wrote. “By nature we mean what is usually meant by that term, i.e., the expanse of space filled by bodies, all that we see, feel, touch and so forth. As a result of this distinction between the natural and the personal, there are two types of relations, natural and personal.”Footnote 25 Proper Christian ethical relations with other persons—and with God—had to be of the latter type. Otherwise one was committing a category error and treating persons as objects. And what defined a person was the capacity for participation in community.
By “community” Rawls did not mean “society” in the sense of the social contract.Footnote 26 He meant a group knit together by love, what the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner had called “true community.”Footnote 27 Rawls credited Brunner as the theologian to whom he owed the most, praising his “clear and unflinching recognition that the universe is a community of Creator and created.”Footnote 28 Although he used writings by Reinhold Niebuhr and Søren Kierkegaard to elucidate the nature of sin and human alienation from God, Rawls worried that their focus on the individual could obscure the fact that proper relations with God entailed the restoration of community with one's fellow human beings as well. In Rawls's words,
[Election] changes relations both vertically and horizontally, both to God and to men. The man who is elected and restored to sonship before God is not thereby lifted out of the earthly community; he is not abstracted from his fellow men and assumed into heaven. Rather, he is planted more firmly into that earthly community. He has been elected not for his own sake but for the sake of others.Footnote 29
Rather than an individual escape from the world, Rawls argued, “election is a communal process moving towards a communal end” of inclusive, universal salvation for all human persons.
While Rawls's account of conversion ultimately depended upon God, he seems to have believed that humans could hasten the restoration of community.Footnote 30 This assertion is his most marked point of divergence from Brunner. Offering a classic neo-orthodox critique of liberal theology, Brunner stressed that one of the great mistakes of the modern West was to trust in deliverance through human progress when God alone can save.Footnote 31 Rawls, by contrast, believed that human beings could be God's saving agents for one another, as the Elect “help bring the totality of the creation before [God].”Footnote 32
Although he drew upon neo-orthodox thinkers like Niebuhr and Brunner, Rawls's theological outlook was therefore ultimately a liberal Protestant one.Footnote 33 He thought a converted person could contribute to building the Kingdom of God by bringing others into the nexus of loving personal relations between all human beings and God.Footnote 34 Yet his emphasis was on adopting the correct attitude towards other persons, rather than on performing certain righteous acts. As Robert Adams notes, this treatment of Christian ethics as primarily concerned with “a state of mind, a complex of attitudes and motives, rather than a straightforwardly voluntary act or a pattern of action” is a “classically Protestant feature of Rawls's senior thesis,” drawing on a tradition stretching back to Martin Luther.Footnote 35 Nevertheless, the possibility for redemptive human activity hopefully imagined in Rawls's thesis went beyond the Reformation emphasis on “grace alone” to which the neo-orthodox theologians had returned.
RAWLS’S GRADUATE-SCHOOL WORK IN ETHICS
Rawls's experiences in the war made him question many common interpretations of Christian doctrine, but he did not suddenly abandon Christianity, nor did he shed his Protestant ethical perspective.Footnote 36 Over his graduate-school years back at Princeton, however, Rawls began to identify two problems for views of ethics like those he had expounded in Sin and Faith: the appeal to divine authority and the lack of clear criteria for resolving ethical conflicts. In “The Nature of Ethical Thought” (1946) Rawls argued for a “rational foundation of ethical principles” whereby moral authority could “finally be located only in the collective sense of right of free and intelligent men and women.”Footnote 37 Such authority was never truly final, as moral questions remain open for debate. But no other authority could supersede it. Rawls added,
Nor, from a Christian point of view, is allegiance to such an authority impious. It is obvious that every claimant to the divine truth must show its credentials, and to what is it to show them if not to the collective opinion of men judging by the best of their lights? . . . The Revelation and Grace of God is not a private thing which works along humanly defined channels. From its very nature it spreads abroad into every man who will receive it.Footnote 38
Rawls's mention of the Christian perspective was not incidental. He referenced C. H. Dodd and other Protestant writers throughout the paper, and cited at length Lord Acton's argument against papal infallibility. Rawls understood himself to be dissenting from the Roman Catholic understanding of Christian authority. These were the “humanly defined channels” that he rejected. Rawls was making his case against concentrated authority as a Protestant; his argument for allowing the free working of the Holy Spirit through many people was the same one that had led to calls for printing the Bible in the vernacular five hundred years before.
But whereas many Protestants had come to invest final authority in the scriptural text itself, Rawls argued that Christian ethics—like any ethics—would eventually come down to human reasoning. In 1950, Rawls had just submitted his doctoral thesis on a decision procedure for ethics when Paul Ramsey, a major Protestant Christian ethicist also at Princeton, published his textbook Basic Christian Ethics. In his May 1951 review of Ramsey's book in Perspective, “A Princeton Journal of Christian Opinion,” Rawls commented that, for Ramsey, “the principles of Christian ethics stand above that authority which it seems to me is our best authority on matters of right and wrong in daily affairs: namely, the free and uncorked agreement of competent persons whenever it exists.” If this were so, then Rawls expressed his puzzlement as to “how we determine, on the basis of Christian Theology, what the criterion of right action is; and secondly, what can be done to make this criterion more precise and clear once we have established it.”Footnote 39
The standard to which Rawls sought to hold Christian ethics was the same one he had been working to establish for ethics more generally over the late 1940s. His insistence on precision was aimed at defending the legitimacy of cognitivist ethics against proponents of emotivism. As William Frankena remarked in his 1950 survey of “Moral Philosophy at Mid-century,” noncognitive or emotive theory had come to be viewed as the ascendant position in anglophone metaethics, displacing the naturalistic and intuitionist perspectives that had previously held sway.Footnote 40 The emotivist view, most famously propounded by Stevenson, held that moral statements were ultimately expressions of emotion.Footnote 41 Rawls was one among a number of philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic anxious to counter that position. As he insisted in 1951, “the language of moral discussion is the language of argument.” But Rawls knew that emotivists thought this was just how moral language appeared, while in fact such words were mere instruments of emotional persuasion, “things said to get a man into a certain frame of mind.” The heart of the matter was “whether there are ethical principles which are accepted in the way that principles of deductive and inductive, and other types of argument are accepted.”Footnote 42
If there were no such principles then one could no longer argue sincerely about ethics, Rawls thought, not even to show that certain dehumanizing attitudes were beyond the pale. This upshot seemed unacceptable in a postwar, post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima world. Rawls wanted to defend the idea of morality as a universal standard of conduct applicable to all persons. But as he wrote in a fall 1951 lecture to Princeton undergraduates, “The only way to refute the emotive theory, if it is stated carefully, is to show that there are invariantly acceptable ethical criteria: hence reasoning is possible.”Footnote 43 It was in light of this imperative that Rawls demanded that Ramsey define “the criterion of right action” in Christian ethics.
Rawls's use of the term “criteria” is important. He spent a crucial year as a guest graduate student at Cornell in 1947–8, immersed in the first American philosophy department to champion the later ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein.Footnote 44 His emphasis on “criteria” was borrowed from Wittgenstein, as was his proposed mode of investigation: “We shall look at ourselves. We shall ask what are the criteria which we use.”Footnote 45 Rawls's thinking about ethics had been profoundly shaped by a seminar he took at Cornell with the logician Max Black, a former student of Wittgenstein's who defended inductive reasoning as a legitimate method of inquiry. To lionize deduction and discredit inductive logic because its chain of justification ended somewhere, Black argued, was to adopt an unwarranted bias against an essential approach for everyday thinking.Footnote 46 Black's assigned reading included the kindred arguments in Wittgenstein's unpublished Blue Book. Rawls applied this approach to ethics, which he subsequently described as “more analogous to the study of inductive logic than to any other established inquiry.”Footnote 47 The criteria for correct use of moral concepts could best be enumerated by careful observation of human moral life. Such concepts, Rawls thought, could neither be derived directly from self-evident truths (intuitionism) nor reduced to personal proclivities (noncognitivism).
This understanding of ethics made Rawls both interested in and exasperated by Ramsey's book. Some arguments for Christian ethics operate deductively from the premise of divine revelation. As Rawls would point out, however, if one reaches into a box of all holy texts to select an authoritative scripture, one has actually anointed oneself the final authority in ethics.Footnote 48 Such a procedure played into the noncognitivist assertion that ethics is just a persuasive cover for individual preference. But Rawls saw that Ramsey was in fact using general criteria of moral reasoning. Ramsey seemed to think he needed to assert that a religious principle stood above any such reasoning in order to make his ethics legitimately Christian, but Rawls believed the opposite: if Christians wanted to argue that one moral outlook ought to hold sway over all humankind, then they needed to defend cognitive ethics and insist on substantive criteria for moral concepts. Only after demonstrating that the meaning of moral language was fixed to some degree did it make sense to contend that the proper interpretation of moral concepts was the Christian one.
RAWLS’S CHRISTIAN ETHICS AT CORNELL
Rawls taught his own advanced seminar on Christian ethics in spring 1954, as a new assistant professor at Cornell. Sounding a firm Protestant note, he declared, “It seems to me utterly impossible to have anything but a superficial acquaintance with Christian ethics without reading the Bible.”Footnote 49 He devoted five lectures to the Hebrew Scriptures, then the rest to the New Testament. Practically every sentence was buttressed by a scriptural citation, and he appended lists of hundreds of parables sorted into categories. But whereas in his undergraduate thesis he had referenced the Bible naively, during the war Rawls had read the “higher criticism” of the German theologian Adolf von Harnack and his British successor C. H. Dodd.Footnote 50 Rawls now employed their methods, using historical and contextual arguments to assess what might actually have been said, meant, and believed in biblical times. He then defended the interpretative possibilities that he thought best stood up to ethical scrutiny.
For example, he offered an alternative interpretation to the apparent meaning of the “election” or “chosen-ness” of the Jews. In Rawls's view, if this description were simply “a case of national vanity, and a manifestation of pride of race,” then it did not merit ethical attention. “If we can't reconcile ourselves to the doctrine of election we can't reconcile ourselves to the Old Testament and we shall have to reject it as religiously false,” he wrote. But he argued that the Old Testament in fact stood on a “higher doctrine,” according to which “Israel's election is service for all peoples: it is to show Yahweh, & so bring salvation to, all peoples.” Rawls read the Hebrew Scriptures as chronicling the discovery of this purpose; over time, Hebrew beliefs had developed from a view of God as their particular champion into a firmly monotheistic religion, and to Rawls monotheism necessarily implied universal community.Footnote 51
Like many Christian scholars, Rawls presented this story of the widening perspective of Hebrew religion as a providential, teleological one, leading eventually to the cracking open of God's covenant with the Israelites to apply to all people through Christ. And Rawls clearly intended his interpretation of “election” to apply to Christian theology too; as he had insisted since his 1942 senior thesis, “the Elect” were chosen for service to all.Footnote 52 To Rawls, the language of Scripture revealed a vision for right relationships in the context of a whole ethical community, not a recipe for righteous individual success. In his New Testament lectures, the parallel example to “election” was “reward.” Rawls pointed out that Jesus’ use of the word “reward” in his preaching was quite unusual. An ordinary reward could be legitimately claimed. But the heavenly reward described by Jesus was “surely the Visio Dei,” Rawls wrote, and “what sense does it make to claim one is entitled to that?”Footnote 53 According to Rawls's reading of the Gospel, it is not that God distributes some reward in exchange for righteousness; rather, it is “that being ‘righteous’ are [sic] the conditions of sight; that—to follow our picture—even if a man were ‘let’ in the Kingdom (per impossibile) when he wasn't righteous, he wouldn't know it, or he wouldn't find it what he wanted: it wouldn't be reward for him.”Footnote 54 Receiving the “reward” required, in Rawls's view, internal reorientation. Only if one adopted the right ethical stance towards God and other persons could one see and live into the Kingdom of God.
So Rawls's chief contentions about Christian ethics in 1954—that salvation was ultimately a universal communal end, and that righteousness entailed a certain mental attitude towards other persons—had not changed much since 1942. And in November 1956 he restated these core positions in an even more radically inclusive vein. Addressing a Methodist student fellowship on the subject of toleration, Rawls listed some “religious propositions” he held to be “as certain as I am that I am standing here.” Namely
-
1. that if there be a judgment, then it must take the form of exclusion from the destined fruition of the religious life . . .
-
2. that if there be a judgment, and if there be a fruition of the religious life, then no man will be allowed to remain in everlasting alienation from it.
-
3. that if there be a judgment, then it cannot be a principle of it that any man would suffer exclusion from the fruition of the religious life solely because of any belief or practices held in conscience . . .
-
4. that if there be a destined fruition of the religious life then one's participating in it as beatitude depends upon one's understanding of, and capacity and desire for it; and that not one second in time can separate one's coming to understand and desire it from at least a partial participation in the fruition of it . . .Footnote 55
Rawls's vision of the Kingdom of God ultimately embraced everyone, yet was accessed through internal transformation.
Such a view constituted “a religious argument for tolerance,” Rawls thought, because the truth of such propositions “renders pointless the use of force in achieving religious conformity.”Footnote 56 Rawls ended with an argument for the separation of religious associations from the state. His conclusions foreshadow his famous later arguments that religion should remain aloof from the public sphere.Footnote 57 But here he offered justifications from the Church's perspective. The Church harms its own aims by attempting to spread the truth through coercion when “it can only be known and sifted in the common sense of right, in the private life of her own association, and in the still small voice of each of her members.” This, Rawls argued, was where the Holy Spirit did its work. To employ the mechanisms of state power on behalf of a church was “to make the primitive mistake of forgetting that, like a person, the Church can gain the world but lose her soul.”Footnote 58 So Rawls's endorsement of separation of Church and state had an explicitly Protestant Christian rationale in 1956, one which can help explain why he later thought that the “proviso” on religious reasons as public reasons in Political Liberalism ought to be acceptable even to a religious believer. His Protestant skepticism about appeals to authority prompted him to argue for holding Christian ethics to the same standard as any ethical argument offered within a human community.
Yet the lectures Rawls wrote from within the Protestant Christian tradition in the mid-1950s did not explicitly tackle general criteria for ethics. Despite his prior chiding of Ramsey, by 1954 Rawls had acknowledged that Christian ethicists largely ignored metaethics because their preoccupations were practical. Contemporary academic philosophical ethics, conversely, was concerned with the logic of moral argument but had little to say to the “ordinary intelligent layman” about how to live. Rawls regretted this division and mused, “I would expect that philosophical ethics and Christian ethics would in the end fit together somehow.” Unfortunately, he left further investigation of their compatibility to “another time” for which no lecture notes appear.Footnote 59 But an examination of his other writings about moral philosophy in the mid-1950s shows how the two inquiries were intertwined, and how Rawls sought alternative groundings for the person-centered ethics he had first developed as a devout young Christian.
WHAT BASIS FOR MORALITY?
What was to justify ethics in the place of divine example and command? The anglophone ethical scene in the 1950s offered Rawls a series of alternatives. Elizabeth Anscombe, herself a devout Catholic, argued that if modern moral philosophy wished to do without divine warrant, it would have to do without words of categorical moral judgment and obligation such as “right,” “wrong,” “duty,” and “ought.”Footnote 60 Such words implied a judge and lawgiver—the Judeo-Christian God—who lent moral terms their air of requirement. Anscombe suggested that secular moral philosophy return to its pre-Christian roots in Aristotle's Ethics and use words that described perfection or defect in specific virtues.Footnote 61 Such an approach would render moral language more a tool of psychological description than an idiom with normative force, but this approach seemed to her more honest in a secular era.
Other of Anscombe's Oxford colleagues—such as Stephen Toulmin and Philippa Foot—thought that normativity could be derived from the social dimension of morality.Footnote 62 Both Toulmin and Foot saw themselves as building on Wittgenstein's later insights into ordinary-language philosophy, according to which the meanings of words were defined by their uses in an ongoing “form of life,” and the possibility of a “private language” was therefore nonsense. Such arguments could now be marshaled against the emotivists to insist that society set the parameters of what could count as morality. Rawls sympathized with this move and found much to like in Toulmin's exposition of moral argument as rational discourse and in Foot's careful neo-Aristotelian description of the criteria for using moral terms correctly. He worried, however, that they only bumped the contingency of morality back a level, to whatever a society—rather than an individual—decided. If morality were merely social indoctrination, as the Swedish legal philosopher Axel Hägerström argued, why should anyone aware of this fact go on being moral when it proved inconvenient?Footnote 63 Rawls thought that an adequate account of morality should allow the philosopher to retain moral principles in earnest. “An explanation of morality should be compatible with having a morality,” he wrote.Footnote 64
In a pair of unpublished essays on “the concept of morality” written between 1954 and 1958, Rawls made his case for why moral commitments imposed a real sense of bindingness.Footnote 65 In his view, morality was a facet of human beings’ natural perceptive faculties. He wrote, “Morality is part of the forms of reacting to things which shows that we recognize these things as persons and not simply as physical bodies. One could not be systematically amoral and at the same time recognize and act towards persons in ways which are required in view of what they are.” His answer to the questions “Why any morality at all? Why not act as a systematic rational egoist?” was that to eschew morality would be to live in delusion.Footnote 66 “There are persons!” he exclaimed. “To fail to have a morality would run against recognition of this fact.”Footnote 67 And if morality depends upon recognition of a fact, Rawls concluded, “We do not choose our morality, we find that we have it, that it springs from our recognition of others.” Someone who did not feel the tug of moral obligation when confronted with another person had to be considered blind to the other's personhood. “Morality is based on the fact that other persons exist.”
A person, as Rawls defined it, was a complex entity, “one who has wants and interests, who experiences emotions like fear, grief, etc.; and who normally has the natural attitudes we have been discussing; a person is rational, is able to deliberate and decide; is able to state intentions and memories.”Footnote 68 One acknowledged this sort of entity through one's reactions; in Rawls's view, the reaction and the acknowledgment were inseparable. He wrote that he wished to reject one possible interpretation of Wittgenstein: that we might first see the people with whom we interact in a form of life and then choose our attitude towards them, deciding to respond in accordance with “morality” out of prudence. Foot and Toulmin's arguments could be given this gloss. Rawls disagreed. As he wrote, “We do not choose the ultimate principles of our morality. Not to have some natural variant on morality would make one, in a natural use of the word, insane. And this is, in some sense, a justification of morality.”Footnote 69 So morality is discovered rather than chosen. Society may provide the soil that nurtures moral growth, but the potential to respond to other people with appropriate “natural attitudes” was already contained within the seed of each person's nature. Indeed, the capacity for recognition of others was key to one's own personhood; not only did one need to accommodate others in order to live within society, but one was only fully a person in a community of mutual recognition.
So when adults truly teach morality to children—rather than merely compelling obedience—they teach perception. “We lead them to perceive the connection with the thoughts and feelings of other persons,” Rawls wrote. “We teach them perception; and in affection we give them perception.”Footnote 70 The child's natural capacity for compassion, he argued, must be extended and systematized to become a coherent “morality.” While this progression is not automatic, it is normal. Freud, Rawls claimed, had tried and failed to find a rationalistic, egoistic, or hedonistic explanation for compassion. But genuinely other-directed compassion evaded such explanations.Footnote 71 It was instead a fundamental human impulse, constitutive of being a person and perceiving other persons.
TAKING THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW
In describing morality as a matter of accurately perceiving the world of persons, Rawls echoed what he had said in his 1954 class on Christian ethics about seeking an orientation that allowed one to “see” the Kingdom of God and live appropriately in light of that vision. Rawls was one among a number of contemporaries in the 1950s and early 1960s pursuing “moral-point-of-view” (MPV) theories.Footnote 72 Not all of these thinkers were interested in Christian ethics. But whereas some identified the MPV with society's perspective on morality, or else thought that taking the MPV entailed grounding one's ethical arguments on good reasons of certain kinds, Rawls and several other philosophers believed that considering something from the MPV ultimately meant seeing the moral state of affairs as it actually is. The Americans who asserted this—most notably Rawls, Roderick Firth, and William Frankena—shared a background and ongoing interest in Protestant Christian ethics.
Roderick Firth had encountered the Society of Friends during college at Haverford; like the undergraduate Rawls, he plunged into serious religion and serious philosophy simultaneously, and his Quaker philosophy professors encouraged him in both. Having served time in a conscientious-objector work camp, Firth finished his doctorate at Harvard under C. I. Lewis in 1943, then taught at the College of William and Mary and Swarthmore before eventually returning to Harvard.Footnote 73 Firth's published work was chiefly in epistemology, defending a radical empiricist position indebted to the philosophy of Lewis and George Berkeley. Throughout his career, however, Firth taught almost as much in ethics as in epistemology.Footnote 74 And his 1952 article “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer” became an important touchstone for Rawls and his fellow ethical theorists.
Firth described his “ideal-observer” theory of ethics as an “absolutist” and “dispositional” theory, meaning that it held true regardless of the identity of the moral agent yet was concerned with how that agent would be disposed to react in a given set of conditions. In other words, Firth's view of objective morality was not a set of rules to abide by but rather a perspective to inhabit. This approach to ethics required a picture of an “ideal observer,” whose characteristics Firth specified on the basis of common objections as to why certain dispositions fail to meet the moral standard. Thus the ideal observer had to be omniscient with respect to nonethical facts, powerfully imaginative, disinterested, dispassionate, consistent across time, and otherwise normal. The hypothetical reactions of this imagined agent constituted the standard of truth or falsity of ethical statements.Footnote 75
Firth's contemporary Henry Aiken characterized the ideal observer “as an attempt to clarify the doctrine of a disinterested or impartial spectator which, in one form or another, is to be found in the writings of Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Kant.”Footnote 76 But he contended that Firth's theory constructed too deep a gulf between real moral agents and the God-like perspective of morality.Footnote 77 Firth agreed that “any plausible description of an ideal observer will be a partial description of God, if God is conceived to be an infallible moral judge,” but did not see this as a problem.Footnote 78 “If, for example, the Christian conception of God has influenced our conception of an ideal observer, then, if an absolutist dispositional analysis is correct, it has influenced the very meaning of ethical statements,” Firth wrote.Footnote 79 Where Anscombe believed that the historical link between ideas of God and moral terminology discredited the use of such terminology by the nontheist, Firth thought this connection just meant that one needed a God’s-eye view to speak about morals.
Richard Brandt, Firth's Swarthmore colleague, considered the “ideal observer” one of the best new developments in ethics, able to explain why “moral experience is distinctively a union of cognition and emotion.” But in a published debate he tried to convince Firth to replace his absolutist interpretation with a relativist one.Footnote 80 Having conducted his own research into the ethics of the Hopi, a native tribe in the American Southwest, Brandt had become convinced that two ideal observers of different cultural backgrounds could come to different but equally legitimate ethical conclusions even in light of all Firth's constraints.Footnote 81 Firth, however, would not yield on this point; he insisted that the ideal observer constituted a solution to the problem of ethics precisely because any set of ideal observers would have the same ethically significant reactions to the same case.Footnote 82
In an important exchange of letters in November 1955, Rawls told Brandt that he agreed with Firth in this respect. Like Firth, Rawls believed that ethics had to presume the possibility of universal agreement, even though such agreement might never be realized in practice.Footnote 83 As Rawls wrote to Brandt,
What I have always felt about this question is the following: that if we once became convinced that it is the case that different peoples (cultures) have different ethical principles, and that there is no possibility of rational argument for different peoples to convince one another that at least one of them should give up their principles, then I think we would say that in a sense there is no such thing as right & wrong. Or to use a rather special expression, if the explications of different peoples’ moral judgments were incompatible, and if this incompatibility were “final”, so to speak, then we would say there is no such thing as right & wrong. That is, as these concepts are, they are incompatible with this situation's obtaining; so that if we believed it did obtain, our use of moral words would radically change.Footnote 84
Like Firth, Rawls thought that moral terms had to exert the same claims on all people.
This view was consistent with his belief that the very concept of morality was grounded in human nature, specifically the natural capacity to perceive and respond to persons as persons. If a shared human nature was the wellspring of morality, then any project in ethical theory had to aim to include all human beings or else fail at the outset. This deep commitment to universalism runs through all of Rawls's writing in the 1950s; for the same reason, in his talk to the Methodists a year later, he declared his continuing allegiance to universal salvation as the necessary fruition of any morally defensible religious vision. The parallel is hardly surprising, since Rawls's Christian ethics had been grounded since the early 1940s in the imperative to treat every person as a person and establish universal community.
Importantly, however, Rawls did not use his postulation of a universally correct “moral point of view” to argue for enforced moral conformity. Instead, since the blueprint for right treatment of others was embedded in human nature, an approximation of moral truth could only be “known and sifted in the common sense of right,” by appealing to good reasons and general ethical criteria within the human community. Likewise, Firth did not think that the ideal observer, who could only be an imagined and thus contestable figure, served to end moral debate. Instead, Firth was using the ideal observer to express his conviction—shared with Rawls—that morality aimed at an objectively better, higher viewpoint that really did reveal the moral state of affairs more clearly. As their ally Frankena put it, “even ‘ultimate’ moral judgments (principles, etc.) can be justified by the ‘facts’ when they are reviewed from the moral point of view.”Footnote 85 Brandt and Aiken thought that a variety of moral lenses could be valid, while Toulmin and Foot implied that morality served to equip everyone in a society with the same tint of lens in order to minimize conflict. But for Firth, Rawls, and Frankena, what made morality worth studying was that one could truly be more or less correct in one's perception of and reaction to fellow human beings. The aim of moral thinking was to move from blindness to sight.
Of course, since human beings “see through a glass, darkly,” actual agreement on moral questions would be variable and provisional.Footnote 86 But the promise of hypothetical agreement was nonetheless deeply important to these ethical theorists, as important as the promise of the Kingdom of God was to living as a Christian in the imperfect present. Both the “ideal observer” and the “Kingdom of God” offered a perspective that one could attempt to inhabit while making ethical decisions. Neither was ever fully realized, yet “not one second in time can separate one's coming to understand and desire it from at least a partial participation in the fruition of it,” to use Rawls's words about the Kingdom. To adopt these vantage points was to catch a glimpse of the moral, interpersonal world as it truly was, suffused with value. Frankena made the connection between these visions explicit. In his 1966 presidential address to the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, entitled “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” he declared,
As for me and my house, therefore, we will continue to serve the Lord—or, as others may prefer to say, the Ideal Observer. For Tennyson seems to me to be right in a sense (not his own) when he says, “The good, the true, the pure, the just—/ Take the charm ‘Forever’ from them / and they crumble into dust.” Take from them the claim to an eventual agreement of all rational beings and they collapse into mere expressions and tools of feeling, desire, and will.Footnote 87
In other words, absent the promise of a universal ethical vision, one was back in the clutches of the emotive theorists.
CHRISTIAN AND PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS STILL ENTANGLED
Chairman of the University of Michigan's philosophy department from 1947 to 1961, William Frankena was widely respected for his work on ethics and its history.Footnote 88 Raised in the Dutch Reform tradition, he had shifted to the Presbyterian Church after attending Calvin College. But like Firth, who served as clerk of the Cambridge Friends Meeting, he remained a churchgoer. For both philosophers, an interest in the interrelationship between religion and ethics extended into administrative activities. Frankena launched Michigan's Program for the Study of Religion,Footnote 89 while Firth was involved in setting up Harvard's Committee on Degrees in Religion.Footnote 90 Their correspondence often touched on these parallel efforts; when Firth engineered Rawls's coming to Harvard in 1962, for example, he asked Frankena to send a supporting letter on Rawls's behalf and commented that Rawls might “help out in our Philosophy of Religion program. (Jack once planned a career in the ministry).”Footnote 91
Though not a Christian ethicist, Frankena kept abreast of the field. In “Ethical Theory in America since 1930,” the magisterial hundred-page survey he contributed to the 1964 volume Philosophy, he devoted a full chapter to “Religious Ethics and the Existentialists.” Frankena pointed out that theologians were leading the way in applying normative ethics to public affairs and were offering “some of our most serious analyses of moral experience and moral psychology.” Moral philosophers could learn from them on these scores. Furthermore, since so many academic philosophers celebrated the ideal of ethical consensus between thoughtful people, they should not ignore the fact that “there is one ethical theory which has been and still is widely accepted, especially in Judaic-Christian circles, namely, the ethics of love.” Frankena suggested that philosophers attend to “agapism”; perhaps “love” rather than “utility” best complemented considerations of “justice.” Certainly, Frankena commented, “Judeo-Christian conceptions have become a part of our ordinary moral consciousness,” entangled with the Western concept of morality, so “any philosophical attempt to elucidate or reform our moral ways of thinking must take them seriously.”Footnote 92 This was roughly the same point that Firth had made in 1952: the moral point of view was tied up with a religious ethical perspective.
But Frankena thought that Christian ethics also had much to learn from analytic philosophy, as he argued in “Love and Principle in Christian Ethics,” his contribution to Alvin Plantinga's 1964 volume Faith and Philosophy. The thrust of Frankena's argument was similar to Rawls's comment on Ramsey in 1951: Christian ethics had to abide by the same rules as philosophical ethics and should therefore match its rigor. So Frankena sorted contemporary Christian thinkers into a taxonomy of metaethical varieties of “agapism.”Footnote 93 The leading Christian ethicists Frankena cited were all well known to Rawls; he had taken his first undergraduate religion classes with George Thomas; drawn on Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr's writings in his senior honors thesis; reviewed Paul Ramsey's book; and watched Paul Tillich jump to the defense of Rawls's doctoral adviser, Walter Stace, in 1949. Frankena's essay therefore underscores how thoroughly exposed Rawls had been to contemporary currents in mid-century Christian ethics, even though by 1964 Rawls was no longer still writing in the field.
Furthermore, Frankena's contemporaneous writings in Christian and philosophical ethics help to make explicit some of the connections implicit in Rawls's work. For example, Frankena wrote in 1961, “There is a different kind of ‘revelation’ which is sometimes said to be necessary as a basis for morality, namely, the ‘realization’ of other people as persons whose lives have the same ‘inner significance’ that ours have.”Footnote 94 Speaking of the same thing in 1958, he had asserted,
This moral imagination of the lives of others is the one thing needful above all else; perhaps it cannot be taught in any literal sense, but any endeavor of moral education is sadly wanting if it fails to do what can be done to develop it or bring it about. If religion has any direct bearing on moral education, it must be here; James, in fact, calls this “widening of vision” an “increase of religious insight.”Footnote 95
Firth agreed that imagination was a crucial component of correct moral judgment. As he wrote in 1952, “our failure to treat strangers like brothers is in large part a result of our inability to imagine the joys and sorrows of strangers as vividly as those of our siblings. These facts seem to indicate that the ideal observer must be characterized by extraordinary powers of imagination.”Footnote 96 Rawls concurred; in his 1951 article “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” he argued that a competent judge needed the capacity to assess the interests of others by means of “imaginative appreciation,” thereby achieving “sympathetic knowledge” beyond the judge's own experience.Footnote 97
Rawls's standards for a “competent judge” were meant to be attainable, whereas Firth's “ideal observer” was clearly superhuman. But neither picture was actually intended to provoke a yearning for an authoritative moral sage, human or divine. Instead, Rawls and Firth were seeking to goad the ordinary moral agent into considering what she might be blind to in her own judgments. In Rawls's later writings, the thought experiment of the “original position” behind the “veil of ignorance” became this mental spur. By imagining what it would be like to be imaginative—even if in the interest of optimizing one's own lot—one's actual imaginative capabilities might be exercised and expanded.
But why should imagination be regarded as so key to moral thinking? One hint is given by Firth's use of “omnipercipient” as shorthand for an enhanced imaginative capacity. Firth, like Rawls, thought that correct moral judgment was linked to accurate perception—imagination afforded the ability to perceive the reality of other persons’ inner lives. From the “moral point of view” one saw the world of persons as it is, aided by sympathetic imagination as by a faculty of sight. And Firth, Rawls, and Frankena all thought that the possession of at least an embryonic version of this faculty was natural, which is why helping children learn to use it was healthy development, rather than social indoctrination into arbitrary norms. These philosophers embraced what Rawls termed the “natural basis of morality,” and in describing that natural basis both Firth and Rawls grounded their moral theories in the “ethics of love” that Frankena had suggested recovering from Christian ethics. For Firth and for Rawls, it was love within the family that first activated one's imaginative capacity to see other people as full persons.
THE ROLE OF LOVE IN MORAL RECOGNITION
In lectures he delivered in the 1960s, Firth explicitly borrowed Frankena's phrase “agapism” and extended his own idea from 1952 that to take the moral point of view was to see distant others as siblings. The absence of such an attitude, he thought, was the source of utilitarianism's moral failure, as exemplified in the Vietnam War. Agapism offered the restraint on hubris that utilitarianism lacked. In a 1963 lecture Firth urged his philosophy students to consider it as an ethical rather than religious stance, even though he would derive it from “the life and words of Jesus.”Footnote 98 The doctrine of love, Firth wrote, “enjoins us to settle our moral problems by adopting a certain attitude,” that of a brother towards his siblings:
If he is conceived as a normal flesh and blood brother, not a utilitarian calculating machine, there will be a limit to the amount of suffering that he will be able to inflict on them for the sake of what he considers to be their future benefit or the benefit of other brothers.
“I take this to be an obvious fact about human nature,” he added.Footnote 99
In other words, there was nonequivalence between love of humanity as an abstract ideal—such as was arguably embodied in utilitarianism—and the natural sentiment of brotherly love. Firth made clear that agapism entailed taking “love” seriously as an emotion, as something felt that allowed one to see others correctly.Footnote 100 In November 1969, addressing anti-Vietnam War protestors in Harvard's Memorial Church, Firth sharpened the point:
It is just not true, I think, as a matter of psychological fact, that a rational man who loves his brothers would be willing to burn some of them alive in napalm because the available evidence makes it somewhat probable that in ten or twenty or fifty years this evil would be overweighed by a greater good for all.
Feeling the proper horror at making such a calculation was what Firth called “the principle of humility.” “Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said that we must have the humility of the child in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” he opined.Footnote 101 So Firth too, like Rawls in the mid-1950s, identified entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven with the adoption of an ethical outlook modeled in the Gospel.
By the 1960s, Rawls was no longer engaging directly with Christian ethics, unlike Firth and Frankena. But like these fellow “moral-point-of-view” theorists, he too saw the process of learning to adopt a correct moral attitude as undergirded by the model of familial love. In a paper he delivered at a May 1961 conference on moral education and subsequently revised into his 1963 article “The Sense of Justice,” Rawls described his theory of the connection between natural attitudes and moral feelings.Footnote 102 Each implied the other, he argued in 1961, so human nature was inextricably tied up with being moral. Despite acknowledging an aversion to excluding anyone, Rawls consistently held that someone devoid of the natural attitudes that foster moral sensitivity would hardly be human.Footnote 103 In describing how this capacity ordinarily developed, Rawls borrowed much from the child psychologist Jean Piaget, particularly from his 1932 book The Moral Judgment of the Child. Piaget was the premier researcher at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute (a “flagship of child study movements in Europe”), and both he and Rawls were heavily influenced by Rousseau's Emile.Footnote 104 Rawls saw himself as adopting Rousseau's view when he asserted that “the sense of justice is no mere moral conception formed by the understanding alone, but a true sentiment of the heart enlightened by reason, the natural outcome of our primitive affections.”Footnote 105 In other words, justice had a twofold basis in reason and human nature; attachment to normative principles grew out of facts about moral psychology.
Those “facts” took the form of an elaborate three-stage story of child development, adapted from Piaget, in which a child's widening spheres of interaction lead him or her to first feel a sense of moral obligation to parents, then to peers, and finally to social principles. Without such an account of the source of felt obligation to morality, Rawls thought, there would be no basis for expecting people to abide by morality or justice when it was counter to their own immediate interests.Footnote 106 He retained this account in Part III of A Theory of Justice,Footnote 107 where its importance as a source of stability has been appreciated but not its full significance as the solution to the crucial problem of moral motivation in Rawls's decade-long construction of a theory of human nature.Footnote 108 That theory of human nature was grounded in the capacity for love as a “psychological law.”Footnote 109 A young child, Rawls thought, is first prompted to feel genuine love for a parent—rather than just selfish recognition of aligned interests—by seeing that the parent loves him or her without self-interested motives. This discovery that people can be other-regarding inspires the child to reciprocate—extra-rationally—with love for the parent. Thus begins the process of responding to other people with compassion and, eventually, with feelings of moral obligation; it is from family relationships that people first learn the attitude of sympathy which proper morality then extends to all persons.Footnote 110 Rawls thought that the initial leap of love brings the child into the moral world, the world of relations in which people are treated as people rather than as instruments for, obstacles to, or objects of desire. Moral development was about learning to see and respond to this relational reality more fully, a reality Rawls had first affirmed in his undergraduate thesis and continued to affirm in the moral theory on which he would build A Theory of Justice.
THE NATURAL BASIS OF JUSTICE
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rawls began to focus his published work on the topic of justice, but he viewed this inquiry as a direct extension of his work on morality. His moral theory, for example, undergirded his invention of the famous thought experiment of the “original position,” as a remarkable unpublished paper from the mid-1950s demonstrates. In “The Two-Fold Basis of Justice,” Rawls articulated two distinct bases for a just-decision procedure that would subsequently intertwine into the original position. The first way to show that certain principles of justice ought to be accepted, he argued, was to show that they are “principles which persons whose interests are egoistic with respect to one another can accept.” Egoistic individuals could only expect to convince one another to accept principles of equal treatment, unless they could demonstrate the clear benefit to all of doing otherwise. Rawls called this “the conventional basis” of justice.
Yet Rawls also saw another possible basis for the principles of justice, and he focused his essay on this latter option. Alternatively, he continued,
The principles of justice reflect the judgments of one whose aim it would be to care for all interests equally, to pay due attention to them all, and to take them all into account. Any one who feels for the interests of others, indeed any one who recognizes them as persons, and who is at the same time impartial between them, will judge that their interests should be treated equally and differences be allowed only where it is to the advantage of every one's interests alike.
This basis for justice Rawls called “the natural basis,” because he believed it to be anchored in the recognition of other persons, the capacity for which was embedded in human nature. While a group of egoists would still find the resulting principles acceptable, the second basis for justice does not treat this fact as fundamental. Instead, this second basis “simply invokes the thought that morality, and in particular justice, is imbedded in the act of recognizing persons as persons: justice is the reciprocal recognition of persons as persons,” Rawls wrote, explicitly identifying justice as a species of morality.Footnote 111
Rawls's twofold basis of justice can aid interpretation of the “analytic construction,” the prototype of the “original position” that Rawls presented in “Justice as Fairness” in 1958. Since the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls's readers have debated whether the original position ought to be imagined as a genuinely deliberative process or as a thought experiment for a single rational person. The argument of “The Two-Fold Basis of Justice” suggests that this confusion may have its root in Rawls trying to wrap both these procedures up together. Supposed egoists get together to agree on principles, but they are placed behind a veil of ignorance to enforce impartiality. And the basis for their equal standing is taken by Rawls to be that they are all “moral persons,” capable of a sense of justice—of recognizing other people as people.Footnote 112 So while he couched the original position in the language of egoistic actors, Rawls seems to have constructed a model whereby each of the participants would be placed in the position of the impartial, equally sympathetic judge of the second, natural basis for justice.
In other words, justice is what would result if everyone always recognized everyone else's personhood. But rather than hoping for an epidemic of saintliness, Rawls knew such a standard could only be upheld if embedded in institutions. In any specific case, the particular people involved could not be expected to see the situation as reflectively as justice requires. In a passage that might surprise those who criticize Rawls for moral idealism, he mused that he used to think that “it was a weakness of men that they couldn't judge their own case, couldn't be impartial in their own case. But I now think this not only in a sense impossible, but it would be wrong to be impartial in one's own case, especially if it related to our wives & children etc. Here we should be partial.”Footnote 113 Believing as he did that morality grew from the root of partial, familial affection, he could not bemoan this natural attitude. Instead, he argued, moral persons institute impartial procedures of justice so as to leave themselves free to be partial in their own cases without undermining the recognition of persons.
Rawls did not, however, mean by this to accept the “conventional” view of justice, whereby agreed procedures are merely a compromise settlement between egoists. Instead, social institutions were valuable because they enabled people to live coherently in light of their capacity to recognize others. Rawls described the conditions of considered judgment not as artificial but as eliminating anything that might inhibit or distort “free and full play for the natural reactions of recognition.”Footnote 114 As he wrote in “Justice as Reciprocity,” the extended 1958 version of “Justice as Fairness,” justice “is the first moral concept generated when one steps outside the bounds of rational self-interest.”Footnote 115 And as his “psychological construction” made clear, he thought that most people made their first toddling steps beyond that bound in infancy. The capacity for a sense of justice was identical with the capacity to recognize other persons as persons, without which one could hardly function as a person oneself.Footnote 116 Possessing a sense of justice was Rawls's ultimate criterion for inclusion in the original position.Footnote 117 This capacity would enable people to imagine the lives of others and reason about acceptable principles behind the hypothetical veil of ignorance. But even more importantly, in a world in which the veil never actually drops, that capacity to recognize personhood prompted people to accept the idea of common principles mutually binding on all persons. “Only if such acknowledgment is possible can there be true community between persons in their common practices; otherwise their relations will appear to them as founded to some extent on force and circumstance,” Rawls wrote.Footnote 118
The use of the phrase “true community” is striking. Just as in his undergraduate thesis, Rawls was suggesting that people belonged in community with one another, and that the condition for such community was mutual recognition of each another's personhood. In a passage Rawls had cited approvingly in 1942, the theologian Emil Brunner wrote,
Man is man to the exact extent in which he lives in love. The degree of his alienation from love is the degree of his inhumanity. The distinctively human element is not freedom, nor intellectual creative power, nor reason. These are rather the conditions of realization of man's real human existence, which consists in love. They do not contain their own meaning, but their meaning is love, true community.Footnote 119
Rawls explicitly excluded a society of saints from consideration in “Justice as Fairness”; he no longer imagined that every individual could come to love every other, nor did he frame his arguments in theological terms. But in some sense he had not given up his core hope; establishing just institutions offered a way to ensure that everyone was treated as if regarded with a sympathetic gaze without demanding that real people achieve impartial sympathy. And Rawls's vision of true community, built on mutual recognition between persons, still relied on the initial spark of love between parents and children and on the natural tendency to compassion for others. The gradual unlocking of moral perception developed, he thought, from this “natural basis.”
When it came to anchoring his idea that morality consisted of accurately perceiving other persons, Rawls's claims about human nature now served the purpose that claims about God had served in his undergraduate thesis. The intensely personal and all-encompassing nature of God's love in the Christian tradition had given Rawls warrant to speak of a universal community of persons. Now he made a kindred argument by asserting that the attitudes which enabled the sense of justice, the recognition of other persons as persons, were universal aspects of human nature, and that therefore human beings were naturally bound up in a joint moral project. As Rawls wrote in “Justice as Reciprocity,” “The concept of justice is embedded in the thoughts, feelings and actions of real persons; in studying the concept of justice one is studying something abstracted from a certain form of life.”Footnote 120 Despite the modifier “certain,” he meant the human form of life, adding, “The analysis is pointed toward a universal moral idea, for every people may be supposed to have the concept of justice.”Footnote 121 Rather than appealing to a divine, authoritative stamp of personhood located outside the human frame, Rawls now used Wittgenstein's language to argue that shared concepts of personhood, morality, and justice were embedded in the structure of human interaction and could therefore be treated as authoritative and foundational within the human frame.
That frame marked the end of inquiry. In Wittgenstein's words, “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’.”Footnote 122 Rawls had seized on inductive logic as the best analogy for ethics after his graduate student sojourn at Cornell, and he had never taken much interest in deeper metaphysical schemes. Nor did it trouble Rawls if he fell afoul of Moore's “naturalistic fallacy.” As he wrote in 1964, “I accept a naturalistic ethical theory (in Moore's sense); and therefore I hold that, given appropriate definitions, ought-propositions can be derived from is-propositions.”Footnote 123 Morality had seemed to him, since his first forays into Christian ethics, a matter of perception rather than deduction or intuition. “There are persons!” Rawls declared. Seeing one another as persons is simply what human beings do.
CONCLUSION
In his 1997 retrospective essay “On My Religion,” Rawls described his “increasing rejection of many of the main doctrines of Christianity” soon after the end of World War II. Many readers have interpreted the essay as sufficient reason to regard the mature Rawls as secular. But Rawls's chief reason for rejecting these doctrines—their tendency towards narrow exclusivity—is consonant with the universalist tenor of his faith from his undergraduate days. He explicitly stated, “My difficulties were always moral ones, since my fideism remained firm against all worries about the existence of God.”Footnote 124 Read carefully, Rawls's account describes his becoming too moral for orthodox Christianity, not losing faith. His testimony in his 1954 lectures on Christian ethics and his 1956 talk on toleration demonstrate that he retained personal religious convictions after the war, and in a 1993 interview he reported an affinity with “a religious attitude,” even though he no longer considered himself “conventionally religious.”Footnote 125
In the same interview, Rawls characterized his work as having a religious cast: “I think on the whole I have asked . . . what the actual social institutions have to be for society to redeem itself as a society. And this I think of as a quasi-religious question, or indeed it is a religious question.” If there were no possibility of such redemption, Rawls mused, then one couldn't regard nature or society as “good,” and his project seemed pointless.Footnote 126 But Rawls clung to the idea—shared with Rousseau, he thought—that “human nature is such that there is a way of designing institutions so that people can be in a way decent.” Regarding such a thing as possible, Rawls posited, transformed one's view of the world even if it never in fact came about.Footnote 127
So what did “religious” signify for Rawls? Having echoed William James's description of the necessary widening of moral vision as an increase of “religious insight,” Frankena added the caveat that “while it may involve some kind of regeneration on the part of one who has it, it is not clear that it presupposes any belief of a specifically religious or theological nature, e.g., the belief that there is a God or that human beings have immortal souls.”Footnote 128 Rawls does indeed seem to have moved away from creedal beliefs of the kind Frankena lists, yet the belief that one's attitude towards the world should be tinged by hope for a redeemed human community is classically theological, and in line with what Rawls had argued since his undergraduate thesis. This hope, paired with articulation of an ethical vision rather than defense of theological propositions, perhaps conveys what religious faith meant for Rawls, Firth, and Frankena. They were not keen to insist that one must affirm Christian creeds in order to live ethically, yet their efforts in regard to secular ethics, from the “ideal observer” to the “original position,” often read as attempts to build secular justifications for ascending to an ethical vantage point they had first accessed through a religious transformation of the heart.
In recent years, philosophers like Ronald Dworkin and Akeel Bilgrami have argued for what Dworkin called “religion without God,” the capacity to perceive that “inherent, objective value permeates everything” in a way that transcends the natural world yet does not assume a supernatural person at the source.Footnote 129 In their grounding of morality in accurate perception rather than the authority of divine prescription, they recapitulate many of the moves that Rawls and his fellow “moral-point-of-view” theorists made at mid-century. But the differences are important. If value permeates everything, it is perhaps harder to carve out a normative space peculiar to persons. For Rawls, the inductive chain of justifications for morality ended with the deep reality of persons embedded in community.
The grounding of Rawls's theory of morals in interpersonal encounter is part of its specifically Christian legacy. So too is the casting of moral obligation in an ultimately emotional logic. Dworkin argued that God cannot validate moral truths, and Rawls agreed that such dictates had to stand up to human intellectual scrutiny. But Rawls thought that the moral sense had to be awakened by emotional experience. In his original ethical vision, God was at the center of interpersonal community, initiating the love that bound it together. In his later story of moral development, parental love kindled the extra-rational spark of genuine regard for other persons in the child. But in both cases, morality had no purchase except where unselfish love served as the unmoved Mover. Such appeals to the Christian tradition persist; for example, the sense that the secular world has no adequate substitute for God's agape love as a force for moral transformation is at the heart of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.Footnote 130 Jürgen Habermas, meanwhile, speaks of “those moral feelings which only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression,” though he holds out hope for a successful secular translation.Footnote 131
Rawls, Firth, and Frankena brought to their work in philosophical ethics a rich inheritance from Christian ethics: the idea of persons embedded in community, the conviction that love is an important undergirding reality, the language of perception and sight, and the insistence on the universal applicability of the moral perspective. But they also innovated, seeking to ground their ethics in human nature and Wittgensteinian frameworks to make it more widely accessible to nonbelievers. Whether their arguments ultimately succeed is an open question, but they deserve careful scrutiny unfazed by the fact that such moral philosophy disregards the religious/secular dichotomy. The history of ethics in America is inextricably tied to Protestant Christianity, as Bruce Kuklick has made clear for earlier periods. But the case of these ethical theorists shows that the link continued after World War II.Footnote 132 Rawls and his cohort continue to reflect what Hollinger has called “the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment.”Footnote 133
Even if Rawls did not illuminate his era, his persisting influence would be reason enough to reexamine the role of religious thinking in the moral theory that underpins A Theory of Justice. For Rawls, transformation to a correct moral outlook required the taking up of a perspective outside and above oneself in order to perceive the whole world of beloved persons in which one was enmeshed—the Kingdom of God. He never discarded this idea. Indeed, his account of such a shift in perception in the 1954 lectures on Christian ethics offers a stunning resonance with one of the most famous phrases of his magnum opus. Describing the effects of the new moral perspective laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, Rawls wrote, “I like to think of the New Righteousness as the conditions of sight: this sort of a connection: if one becomes ‘pure in heart’ then one will ‘see’ God.”Footnote 134 This phrasing must have echoed in his head across a span of seventeen years, for Rawls concluded A Theory of Justice with a remarkably similar affirmation of the perspective afforded by the original position: “Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.”Footnote 135 Both in the Sermon on the Mount and from the standpoint of the original position, the individual's own personal agenda is replaced with a radically widened perspective on the world of persons. It seems that Rawls had been to the mountaintop.
