Dualism, Incentives and the Demands of Justice

Despite the criticisms of Rawlsian justice that I highlighted in Chapter 3, there is a good deal of Rawls’s account of justice that I think civic liberalism ought to take on board. Indeed, in this chapter I shall defend Rawls against some recent critiques and argue that Rawls’s account of the principles that apply to individuals in A Theory of Justice can be usefully applied to the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. I defend Rawls not for the purposes of salvaging his principled defence of justice. Rather I am to show that dualism, the position that maintains that different principles apply to institutions and individuals, is a more viable approach than monism. And once we consider the reasons for this, one can make a compelling case for shifting from a principle-oriented account of justice towards a virtue-oriented account. Furthermore, by addressing Rawls’s earlier position we see why we must reject the ‘state-centric’ conception of justice envisioned by Rawls’s political conception of justice. So I defend Rawls in the hope that I can convince proponents of his theory that they need to appropriate a virtue-oriented account of justice (one that is at least partially comprehensive) if they hope to salvage Rawls’s account of justice from the critique launched by monists like G. A. Cohen. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.