1.

To Isaiah Berlin, the idea ‘that all good things must be compatible… and perhaps even entail one another in a systematic fashion [is] perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.’Footnote ² So says pluralism of monism. The claim is meant to apply as much to personal as to political life, and it has led pluralists to argue that monists overlook the inescapably tragic dimension of both. If, when values conflict, we cannot turn to a systematic theory for guidance, then it seems we have no choice but to compromise and, by compromising, diminish what we believe to be good. That, at least, is what comes from negotiation, which is what pluralists recommend as the chief alternative to the application of monist theories of morality or justice. And they do so even though – or rather because – it means embracing a world that is inherently unsystematic, sometimes tragically so.Footnote ³

One might push this point even further. Monists do not merely fail to give the tragedy of morals or politics its due; some can even be accused of treating them frivolously, as if they were like games. Consider John Rawls’ vision of the ‘well-ordered society’. To Rawls: ‘In much the same way that players have the shared end to execute a good and fair play of the game, so the members of a well-ordered society have the common aim of cooperating together to realize their own and another's nature in ways allowed by the principles of justice.’Footnote ⁴ The principles in question are those of Rawls’ theory of justice and, just like the rules of a formal game, they are supposed to be systematically unified. This comes from meeting three requirements. First, the principles have a lexical priority, which means that they are not to be weighed against each other.Footnote ⁵ Second, when the various liberties asserted by the first principle are to be balanced, we may only do so by assessing them as a whole, ‘as one system’. This means that, much as with utility in utilitarianism, there is no sense in which liberty should be sacrificed to the needs of another value; on the contrary, it may be compromised ‘only for the sake of liberty itself’.Footnote ⁶ Finally, the second principle is said to be the product of a lexically ordered and therefore systematic combination of two others: fair equality of opportunity, and a ‘difference principle’ by which inequalities are permitted only when they benefit the people in society who are the worst off.Footnote ⁷ All this means that, just like a sports referee or umpire, no one charged with applying Rawls’ theory should ever be troubled by having to make tragic compromises. For the systematic ordering of its principles will, ostensibly, allow them to keep their hands clean.Footnote ⁸

Yet are we right to define Rawls’ approach as monistic? After all, as he himself came to see, it is relevant to politics alone, and then only in a very specific, ‘reasonable’ sense. Part of what Rawls means by this derives from his famous distinction between ‘comprehensive’ and strictly ‘political’ conceptions. The former is a view of life that, whether monist, pluralist, or something else, tends to be believed as metaphysically true, while the latter is a view of justice that ‘neither asserts nor denies’ the truth of its principles and judgments. Given this agnosticism, political conceptions are understood to be compatible with many different comprehensive views. To which it is often added that since, after all this time, we have yet to achieve any sort of consensus on a comprehensive view, such metaphysical disagreements may very well be insoluble. But while we are unable to reconcile over comprehensive truth, we can still be reasonable and thereby share and uphold a political conception.Footnote ⁹

That said, Rawls recognizes that not all comprehensive views will be compatible with a given political conception.Footnote ¹⁰ Political homes can nevertheless be made for the reasonable ones, which is why he sees his approach as embracing a ‘reasonable pluralism – as opposed to [the metaphysical doctrine of] pluralism as such’.Footnote ¹¹ And yet, as we have seen, those holding comprehensive views are not supposed to inhabit the political as a mere collection of disparate people – on the contrary, they are to be governed by a single, unified system. They may still disagree over how to articulate and apply its principles (Rawls admits that not everyone may accept his own way of doing so, which he calls ‘justice as fairness’), but the point is that such disagreements will be far less divisive than those over, say, morality and, for this reason, they will not threaten well-orderedness.Footnote ¹²

So it is this, the fact that the principles are supposed to fit together in a fully coherent way, constituting a oneness, that makes me feel justified in describing Rawls’ approach as monistic. True, it's only a partial monism, since it is limited to the political, but it's not as if there is no precedent for this sort of thing. Think of Hume, who was downright sceptical about the prospects of formulating a unified moral theory while simultaneously being quite ambitious in his political theory. Or, stepping back, we can note that while Berlin is a pluralist about the practical he is very probably, like Bernard Williams, a monist as regards the natural, for he seems willing to accept that it makes sense for scientists to strive for a unified ‘absolute conception’ of nature.Footnote ¹³

The question of philosophical labels aside, it is clear that Rawls believes that a people can be united politically while remaining fundamentally divided otherwise, much as the players of a game can be said to unite when they agree to conform to the systematically interlocked rules of its rulebook. Now while I also happen to oppose pluralism (to me, the right way lies in between it and monism), I find it astounding that Rawls would compare just politics to the playing of a game. Even more astounding is that, though Rawls appears to be using ‘game’ merely for analogy, the reality, as I will argue, is that justice as he conceives of it is a game.

2.

Why do we consider games frivolous? The simple reason is that, except for those who, say, play professionally, games normally stand apart from our serious, practical concerns. Practical life is (mostly) serious because its values, which form a whole, just matter to us in that way.Footnote ¹⁴ And one reason they do so is that the whole cannot be considered unified, since fulfilling practical values often requires contending with disorder. Partly this is because, as Samuel Todes once put it, ‘our experience is porous to the blind, dark, and worldless forces that we try to domesticate by bringing them into our world so as to make this world habitable and endurable.’Footnote ¹⁵ And partly it is because, as pluralists claim, any ordering of that world will always be limited by our inability to systematize our values. Hence, once again, Berlin: ‘The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.’Footnote ¹⁶

So we can see why, in order to play a game, we need to step out of – some would say ‘leap from’ – the practical.Footnote ¹⁷ Games stand apart, that is, because they are independent from practical life as a whole, and because, at least when it comes to formal games, they are fundamentally ordered in a way that the practical is not. Of course the degree of this apartness varies; games in antiquity, for example, were viewed as much less autonomous activities. The ancient Greeks never affirmed anything like the division between competitive sport and practical life that we, or at least most of us, do today.Footnote ¹⁸ In fact some of them virtually collapsed the two altogether. It is because Homer saw war as much like athletics that he used the term ‘grievous’ to refer to both battles and sports.Footnote ¹⁹ And while Plato obviously preferred philosophical over military struggles, he also seems to have thought of at least the former as a kind of game.Footnote ²⁰ Not that everyone can play it; still, everyone should spend their lives playing ‘the noblest possible games’ since, as Plato has his Athenian Stranger declare,

Most ancient Greeks surely did not go this far, however, which is why we may assume that they were aware of how game playing is an activity that must be to some degree circumscribed, forming an ‘island’ of fun amidst the seriousness of the practical. Indeed, there seems to be something virtually primordial about the idea; playgrounds, after all, are almost invariably marked off.Footnote ²²

Getting a grasp of precisely how games stand apart from the practical can be tricky, however. While it is true that games are inherently unproductive, property may still change hands between players. So we can expect gamblers, at least, to complain that Johan Huizinga goes too far when he suggests that games can serve no material interest.Footnote ²³ Still, to play a game is not per se to create wealth of any kind, because while some people may certainly play for a living, whatever remuneration they receive is best understood as coming from outside of the game. I base this on a fundamental distinction: between the ends that are internal to a game, on the one hand, and those which, being situated in practical life, are external to it, on the other. This accounts for why, even though games are inherently unserious, we can still choose to take them more or less seriously. Think of ice hockey. Those who play it professionally have good reasons to be sober about it, since it serves as a source of both income and recognition. We might say something similar about its fans – at least in a country like Canada, where the game has long claimed a place as an important pastime, such that a great deal of national pride has become wrapped up in it. But while values such as earning a living, gaining recognition, and upholding national pastimes can all be associated with ice hockey, thereby making it serious by connecting it to practical life, they all nevertheless remain external to the game. Because the only ends one needs to fulfil actually to play it are those such as scoring goals, making saves, and so on. These, then, are internal, since they can be affirmed for no other reason than that they make playing the game possible. And that is precisely why our attitude towards them can be playful rather than serious.Footnote ²⁴

Kurt Riezler evidently sees what is going on here. As he writes, when it comes to playing (for fun),

Such playing, in other words, is different from the serious activities of practical life. The latter reflect concerns that are parts of practical life as a whole, whereas to play is to stand, to a degree, apart from that whole. This division is reinforced by the fact that unlike with, say, the need to work, players are supposed to be wholly free to enter the game − to take the leap − or not. Indeed the freedom of players to choose to play is essential to one sense (the contractualist) of the idea of fair play: if people agree to play a game, then they can be said to have chosen to impose its rules on themselves and so they should respect those rules.Footnote ²⁶ All of which is to say that the more players play not simply because of a ‘love of the game’ (‘amateur’, it's worth noting, comes from the Latin amare, ‘to love’), but because they are driven by values external to it, those which are situated in practical life – indeed the more those values are seen to influence the game in any way – then the more people will worry that the spirit of the game has been undermined. And the less fun will it be to play it.

The distinction between games and practical life also depends, I have claimed, upon the degree of formality: the more formal the game, the sharper the distinction. Think of a man who is willing to do no more than informally ‘play around’ with a woman. We say that he does not have serious intentions towards her since he is excited by ‘the chase’ and hopes only ‘to score’, not to form a genuine relationship. He wants ‘to attract her without caring to possess her in the stricter sense’, as the author of ‘The Seducer's Diary’ puts it.Footnote ²⁷ True, he sees her body as an object which could satisfy his sexual urges and so he is to this limited extent serious about her, but he nevertheless remains distant from her as a person. Once his desires have been satisfied he wishes to go no further; she is to have no connection with the rest of his life.

The playing of a formal game (ice hockey, chess, and so on) stands even more starkly apart from the practical and consists of behaviour that can be considered even less serious. Often, this playing is said to take place within a wholly independent order, ‘a little cosmos of its own’.Footnote ²⁸ Whereas the practical dimension as a whole is, as pluralists claim, unsystematizable, formal games are governed by what John Searle has called ‘constitutive rules’ and such rules, Searle tells us, ‘come in systems’.Footnote ²⁹ Among other things this means that, as we have noted, they do not contradict each other; if they did then it would become exceedingly difficult to play the game. And yet there are many systematically unified practices in our practical lives that we do not consider games: think of a recipe for making dinner, or of the procedures that you must follow when applying for a professional post. However, these things are not done to fulfil some strictly internal end – on the contrary, their basic point is the achievement of something (a meal, a job) that is useful to us in our practical lives. And so we take them seriously, since they are directly connected to those lives, serving as extensions of them. Not so the ends that are internal to a game, and this is precisely why we can choose to ‘take a break’ and play it.

3.

Thus, games are independent, to a degree, from practical life, since they (i) embody strictly internal ends, those which are affirmed for nothing other than the sake of the game. Furthermore, (ii) formal games, being governed by systematic rules, are ordered, whereas practical life, as a whole, is not. Not that I mean for these two to serve as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for some analytic definition of ‘game’. I agree with Wittgenstein that the concept is simply not definable in this way.Footnote ³⁰ Still, enough has been said about it that we should be ready for the comparison with Rawls’ conception of justice. Taking the conditions in reverse order, I begin by noting how, in the first footnote to a very early paper, Rawls tells us that he conceives of social practices as systematic: ‘I use the word “practice” throughout as a sort of technical term meaning any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defences, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure. As examples one may think of games and rituals, trials and parliaments.’Footnote ³¹ Rawls even goes on to illustrate his understanding of the nature of social practices by drawing parallels with the behaviour of those who play baseball.Footnote ³² Evidently, he believes that such practices are governed by constitutive rules, something that he states explicitly in A Theory of Justice when he describes institutions as ‘a set of constitutive conventions. Just as the rules of games do, they specify certain activities and define certain actions.’Footnote ³³ Rawls is thus clearly an exponent of what Hubert L. Dreyfus has called ‘theoretical holism’, in which human practices can be spelled out in a theory, ‘the systematic interrelation of distinguishable elements’, precisely because they express unified belief systems.Footnote ³⁴

Whence Rawls’ faith in the project of constructing a theory of justice. Imagine coming upon a group of people in a park who are playing a game you have not seen before. You ask about its rules but they say that they have never really formulated them. So you offer to do so yourself, and the result leads you to propose reforms, reforms which, after having been tested by the players, you then reformulate – moving back and forth between practice and theory in this way until you settle upon a complete and systematic rulebook. Now this is precisely how political theorists are supposed to carry out the task that Rawls calls ‘political constructivism’: they are to interpret ‘the great game of politics’ in a way that achieves ‘reflective equilibrium’ around a systematic set of principles of justice.Footnote ³⁵

Rawls also conceives of the ordering of these principles as stable in much the same way that the rules of formal games are stable. When he describes his ideal society as well-ordered, he means three things: that everyone accepts its principles; that its basic structure satisfies these principles; and that people generally comply with them in practice.Footnote ³⁶ All three, of course, also apply to games and their players. There must be a consensus about the rules; the set-up of the game must satisfy those rules; and the players must actually comply with them as they play (i.e. they should be neither cheats nor spoil-sports). Moreover, just as a ‘publicly recognized conception of justice establishes a shared point of view from which citizens’ claims on society can be adjudicated’,Footnote ³⁷ so may players appeal to a common rulebook − through the neutral referee applying it − in order to determine how to play. Only when it comes to justice, that referee will tend to be found sitting on the bench of a country's Supreme Court.Footnote ³⁸

The well-ordered society, moreover, is ‘a system that is in equilibrium’, by which Rawls means that it can be considered stable ‘whenever departures from it, caused say by external disturbances, call into play forces within the system that tend to bring it back to this equilibrium state.’Footnote ³⁹ This, too, is just like a game. One of the reasons Rawls loved baseball so much is that he believed its rules are in equilibrium:

So when something happens to upset the balance, there needs to be compensation. Imagine some youths are playing street hockey while wearing in-line skates. It begins to rain, making skating dangerous, so they remove their skates and continue the game while wearing sneakers. In this way, they uphold the basic principles of the game while maintaining its equilibrium. The well-ordered society is supposed to react to disturbances in a similar fashion. Say there is a terrorist bombing and more attacks are likely. In response, the State strives to increase security while respecting civil liberties as much as possible. In this way, the society's stability depends upon its capacity to return to equilibrium. And notice the assumption here: that the challenges to that equilibrium are in no sense considered opportunities for progress, for bringing the society to a new and better state overall by virtue of transformations arising from the disturbances. There appears to be nothing fundamental to be learned about justice from dealing with them; we are, rather, to be guided by ‘non-ideal theory’, which is itself able to present a ‘reasonably clear picture of what is just’ because it relies upon the already-developed ideal theory for direction.Footnote ⁴¹ Rawls’ approach, then, is that of a ‘conservative’ system rather than a ‘dissipative’ or genuinely complex one; the latter dissipates into the environment around it and so may end up transforming its structures instead of maintaining them and simply returning to the old equilibrium.Footnote ⁴² We see the very same process with games. While there are times when players may have to do such things as alter their equipment in order to keep playing, such changes are minimal in that they respect the game's system of rules, which remains fixed (at least during play).

Evidently, fundamental conflict, the kind that could undermine and transform a system's order, is, just as with a game, excluded from Rawls’ ideal society, his ‘realistic utopia’.Footnote ⁴³ But this makes me think of the dystopia in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where to live is, as one character describes, ‘to play the game’, a game that, its Controller boasts, constitutes ‘the stablest equilibrium in history’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, much as Huxley's world is said to have a ‘Centre’ that stands apart from the ‘Savage Reservations’ around it,Footnote ⁴⁵ Rawls’ ‘political’ society stands apart from the various cultures of everyday practical life, those which express comprehensive doctrines. True, in A Theory of Justice Rawls says only that the principles governing the former may not be relevant to the latter, since they are concerned with ‘the basic structure of society’,

By the time of Political Liberalism, however, Rawls is clear that his principles are strictly ‘political’ and so are to be contrasted with those of comprehensive doctrines. For they are

One might object that this says only that the principles of justice are conceptually distinct from those of everyday practical life. To be independent in the way that the rules of a game are, these principles must uphold ends which, to recall our first condition, are strictly internal: one must be able to endorse them for no other reason than what we might describe as a ‘love of justice’. However, Rawls himself tells us that the hazards arising from ‘our sentiment of justice’ are ‘on a par with the hazards of love’,Footnote ⁴⁸ a claim which, following his ‘political, not metaphysical’ turn, we should interpret as invoking none other than the amateur player's love of the game.

So justice, as Rawls has come to conceive of it, is capable of standing alone, hence of being neither intrinsically nor instrumentally linked to practical life. He makes clear that there is no intrinsic link when he specifies that a political conception is a ‘freestanding view’ which is independent of practical life's comprehensive doctrines and so is something that can be ‘expounded apart from, or without reference to, any such wider background’.Footnote ⁴⁹ It works ‘entirely within [its] domain and does not rely on anything outside it’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As for an instrumental link, Rawls rules this out when he asserts that a political conception is more than just a modus vivendi, more than some ‘social consensus founded on self- or group interests, or on the outcome of political bargaining’.Footnote ⁵¹ Because justice must be affirmed ‘for its own sake’Footnote ⁵² and, for this reason, it is just like the internal ends of a game.

As for involvement by citizens in the politics which respects justice as so conceived, Rawls distinguishes between how they may come to do so, which he says must be entirely voluntary, and how they and all other citizens enter and leave the society as a whole, which for theoretical purposes he limits to the wholly non-voluntary paths of birth and death.Footnote ⁵³ To Rawls, ‘there is no political obligation, strictly speaking, for citizens generally’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Or, as we might wish to put it here: they don't have to play if they don't want to.

So it is no surprise that Rawls appeals to the principles of fair play to explain why those who participate in politics must respect his conception of justice as well as comply with the other requirements of any special role they play in the polity. In the past, Rawls went much further, invoking fair play as the reason why everyone should obey the law, but he has since come to anchor this obligation in the ‘natural duty of justice’ instead.Footnote ⁵⁵ He has concluded that our political duties must be limited to cases of wholly voluntary consent, noting that ‘we acquire obligations by promising and by tacit understandings, and even when we join a game, namely, the obligations to play by the rules and to be a good sport’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is why he asserts that, when it comes to respecting justice as fairness, as long as the institutions are just and practitioners have voluntarily chosen to participate in them, then they should do their fair share as defined by the conception of justice.Footnote ⁵⁷ So while he does say that a legal system based upon the conception will be distinct from other associations such as games because of ‘its comprehensive scope and its regulative powers’,Footnote ⁵⁸ the difference is ultimately one of degree rather than kind. Think of it this way: even if we vastly increased the number and types of possible penalties in ice hockey, as well as replaced the penalty box with jail, this would certainly raise the stakes but, at the end of the day, it would remain a game.

Perhaps, then, Rawls and his followers will concede that his well-ordered ‘political’ society is a kind of game. They take it very seriously, of course, but then that is because they are not playing; rather, they are formulating or defending its rules – which, incidentally, is why they may consider its impact upon the world outside it. As Rawls writes:

That is how Rawlsians reckon with the consequences of their game of justice for ends which are external to it. And yet it cannot even be considered on par with what are sometimes called ‘serious games’, those war games, video games, and simulations that are played primarily for purposes, not least educational, that lie outside them.Footnote ⁶⁰ Since the ends of Rawlsian justice are internal, ordinary citizens, as we have seen, are supposed instead to affirm them for their own sakes.

Moreover, they are (somehow) supposed to do so even when play has had to stop because an issue has arisen over the application of the rules. At such times, Rawls would have citizens engage in ‘public reason’, which is a form of deliberation said to be exemplified by none other than the Supreme Court justice.Footnote ⁶¹ In a sense, then, they are to become their own referees. And if they ask why, Rawls’ answer would surely be, ‘For the sake of justice,’ which also happens to be the answer that we should expect to receive if we asked why he formulated and defended his theory in the first place. And if we followed this with ‘Why justice?’ then the answer would yet again surely be, ‘For its own sake.’

All of which leads me to conclude that we should conceive of Rawlsian justice as a form of what Susan Sontag has called pure or naïve camp, for it simply does not know itself to be unserious.Footnote ⁶² It does not recognize how, whereas a game is a game, politics is a fundamentally serious, because practical, activity, one that cannot be well-ordered because it takes place in the inherently disunified world of human affairs, one from which the threat of tragic moral loss simply cannot be eliminated.

4.

But so what? How would adopting Rawls’ theory, or one like it, be harmful to political practice? Surely this is the important question. My answer is that it can be said to have this effect in two ways: one with respect to those who participate directly in politics, and the other as it relates to those who do no more than follow it.

Regarding the practitioners, treating politics as if it were a game encourages them to engage in competitive, and so adversarial, behaviour. True, not all games are competitive, but most are, competition being virtually their raison d’être, not to mention a large source of the fun. And if those involved in politics are faced with a conflict and they see themselves as players in a game, then they certainly will compete. This means that they will view each other as not merely ‘opponents’ but also ‘adversaries’: when the basic objective is to defeat a competitor, then one can only win if the other loses. The main problem here, as I see it, is that this makes it virtually impossible for those involved to respond to their conflict by engaging in conversation, which is an extremely fragile mode of dialogue that aims to realize and develop the common good. Those who would converse over conflicting values do so because they hope to transform them in a reconciliatory way, to devise a solution to the conflict that genuinely benefits all parties. If there is the slightest rigidity in thought, however – if we take the ‘hard line’ because we are on the defensive, and we are defensive because we sense that we are facing an adversary − then it becomes exceedingly difficult for us to undergo the sometimes radical changes that make reconciliation possible.Footnote ⁶³

Rigidity also derives from a commitment to a previously formulated system of rules, since this significantly limits what may be transformed. That limitation is another reason why the citizens who would respect Rawls’ theory are almost certain to become adversaries when they conflict. Hence the irony in how Ronald Dworkin, another systematic theorist, chose to begin one of his books: he calls for shared common ground in a set of political principles that will counter what he, along with many others, has come to see as the alarmingly belligerent nature of contemporary U.S. politics. To Dworkin, Americans are ‘no longer partners in self-government; our politics are rather a form of war’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Dworkin is not, like Rawls, a monist only with regards to politics. While he agrees that ‘political values are finally unitary, not plural’, his monism also encompasses morality, indeed all of the practical.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless he, too, advocates a political vision that is based on two systematically interlocked principles. And just as with Rawls’ public reason, Dworkin shares in the belief that we require a framework of principles for real argument to be possible. But notice what is meant by this: ‘I mean “argument”,’ Dworkin writes, ‘in the old-fashioned sense in which people who share some common ground in very basic political principles debate about which concrete politics better reflect these shared principles.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Now while this certainly is one of the old-fashioned senses of the term (parties advance their reasons, ‘score points’ on each other, and hope to win the debate), there is also another sense: argument as what is exchanged between the interlocutors of a conversation. It also requires that there be things held in common; but they are best understood as transformable, value-expressing practices rather than as grounding principles.Footnote ⁶⁷ And surely it is more of this kind of argument that we need if we're concerned about an overly adversarial politics. Dworkin, however, seems to have room only for competitive debate, which is why, when faced with a combative citizenry, he can do no more than insist that ‘we need to find ways not merely to struggle against one another about these issues, as if politics were contact sports.’Footnote ⁶⁸ As if politics as non-contact sports were acceptable.

So we may assume that, just as with Rawls’ justice as fairness, Dworkin's ‘partnership democracy’ is going to be a highly adversarial affair.Footnote ⁶⁹ Both theorists’ ideal citizens are indeed partners, but only in the sense of those who compete within the same game. Their competition, moreover, takes two main forms. The first is associated with those who practice politics as members of competing parties or interest groups. And the second arises when such competitions have broken down and there are disagreements over what Rawls calls the basic structure of society. It seems to me that, at such times, it is Dworkin who has the more realistic sense of what may take place. Just as when a game must be suspended because questions have arisen over the application of its rules, Dworkin would have the more articulate citizens take on a role comparable to that of a team captain and plead their case before the justices of the Supreme Court, the referees. One thinks of Dworkin's many interventions in the New York Review of Books as an example. By contrast, Rawls would have citizens somehow switch altogether from competition to cooperation and engage in public reason; otherwise put, they are to stop playing and start refereeing.Footnote ⁷⁰ That there is something schizophrenic about this ‘dualism’Footnote ⁷¹ should be obvious. What's less clear is why Rawls considers it plausible. But if we follow Dworkin there are at least two reasons why we should expect that the pleading he recommends will go on in the adversarial spirit of before. First, the tendency of lawyers to advocate positions in the language of rights encourages their conflict to be the viewed as a ‘clash of rights’ and this is simply too abstract and adversarial to allow for real conversation.Footnote ⁷² And second, because that is simply how it is done: no self-respecting lawyer today ever knowingly pleads in a way that might serve the interests of the opposing side.

Furthermore, we can also assume that, at least on occasion, what is done will be – and I say this without exaggeration – immoral. For there is something about systematically rule-based contexts that encourages those within them to act in morally questionable ways – as long, that is, as they comply with the rules. Arthur Isak Applbaum has put the point as follows:

Applbaum, however, fails to see that this points to a problem with the very idea of conceiving of these professions as games; indeed, he even goes on to construct an (albeit highly restrictive) argument based on fair play that justifies certain immoral but rule-respecting behaviours in public and professional life.Footnote ⁷⁴

I want to turn now to how treating politics as a game can have a detrimental effect on those who follow it. To begin, we need to distinguish between spectators, on the one hand, and the members of an audience, on the other. Spectators are individuals who are independent of, fundamentally untouched by, whatever they are watching, since they treat it as no more than a source of entertainment, as a spectacle. An audience, by contrast, is a communal entity, since its members are concerned with how what's transpiring may affect their common good. Instead of allowing themselves to get ‘carried away’ and appreciate events purely aesthetically, then, audience members engage critically, practically, as listening interpreters. And this means that, just as with the interlocutors in a conversation, they may have an edifying, transforming experience.Footnote ⁷⁵

Justice as fairness, however, would make a spectacle of politics. For one thing, just as modern sports spectators are separate from the players they watch,Footnote ⁷⁶ in Rawls’ conception ordinary citizens stand apart from those who participate in politics. For another, as with all contests, the competitiveness of justice as fairness lends it great entertainment value. It is surely not just the ‘members of an orchestra, or players on a team, or even both teams in a game, [who] should take pleasure…in a good performance, or in a good play of the game, one that they will want to remember.’Footnote ⁷⁷ The joys of spectatorship are also encouraged by the ‘distance’ of citizens from the political arena, because it allows them to keep from feeling affected in a deep way. To be so affected they would have to engage as the members of an audience instead, and for this it is necessary to emphasize how, while not directly involved, they nevertheless still are so indirectly. For example, we might point to the ways in which their conversations about politics deep within civil society can influence the State's agenda. Rawls, however, would have citizens keep their ‘personal deliberations and reflections about political questions’ ensconced within associations, such as churches and universities, that are to make no contribution whatsoever to public discourse about ‘constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.’Footnote ⁷⁸ (Unless, presumably, one happens to be a professor publishing in defence of political liberalism.)

It is worth mentioning that citizens as audience members may still find aspects of politics entertaining, not least because attempts at political conversation, whether theirs or politicians’, will often break down and so will have to make way for negotiation, which is adversarial and not merely oppositional. Nor should we overlook the necessarily competitive nature of elections. That said, these citizens’ critical attitudes should keep them from getting carried away into ‘the aesthetic’. It will do so, however, only if they manage to avoid the ‘horse race coverage’ of so much contemporary political journalism, whose unrelenting focus on strategy, polls, scandals, and other forms of infotainment has ensured that politics as spectacle virtually rules the day.Footnote ⁷⁹ Regardless, the point that I wish to make here is simply that adopting justice as fairness, or any other such theory, will serve only to further entrench that rule.

Treating politics as a game can also affect citizens by sapping what Rawls would call the ‘strength’Footnote ⁸⁰ of their sense of justice, thus undermining a major source of his regime's stability. Justice as fairness, in other words, subverts itself. Riezler's statement above about how play stands apart from our ordinary practical concerns suggests why: when objects are disconnected from practical life then we may still care for them, of course, but no more so than we care for mere games. Sometimes, it goes without saying, game-playing can elicit real passion, but this will always be qualitatively different from the truly deep-seated sense of commitment that we feel towards whatever is important to us in our practical lives. This makes sense since, as Dreyfus has pointed out, ‘in so far as games work by temporarily capturing our imaginations in limited domains, they cannot simulate serious commitments in the real world.’Footnote ⁸¹ One reason for this inability is that, as we have seen, when values are contained within a unity such as a systematic set of rules they will appear to be sheltered from risk, since there can be no fundamental conflict between them. And just as overprotective parenting undermines the child, when there is no danger that we might have to get our hands dirty by compromising our values then our sense of commitment to them gets weakened. In fact, as Kierkegaard long ago suggested, a loss of commitment is the fate of all spectators, all those whom he identifies as members of ‘the public’:

Rawls should expect nothing less from the citizens who follow his ‘political’ politics as if they were watching a game.Footnote ⁸³