The Justification of Civil Disobedience

John Kilcullen Macquarie University

In fact, I don't think Rawls is a Utilitarian. I think he is really a sort of intuitionist, or rather, another sort of intuitionist. An intuitionist says that certain moral principles are just self-evident, axiomatic; if you reflect, you will see that some things are right or good, other things wrong or bad. We might wish that we could prove the truth of all our moral principles; but proof requires premisses, and there doesn't seem to be any way of proving moral principles from premisses which do not include moral principles. So we may be able to prove, or argue for, some of our moral views, but only on the basis of others that we hold without being able to prove them...

Another moral intuition guiding Rawls's construction of the Original Position is that people should not get more simply because of some 'accident of birth': There is an objection against any system that 'permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents... distributive shares [in such a system] are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary [therefore objectionable] from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune' (A Theory of Justice, p.74).

It is because he thinks it unfair that people should enjoy a better life just because of a win in the natural lottery that Rawls postulated that people in the Original Position are ignorant of their natural advantages and disadvantages. By postulating this ignorance, and also super-caution, Rawls guarantees that the people in the Original Position will not allow any inequality that can't be justified by improving the position of the worst-off. He does not postulate any sort of egalitarianism on the part of people in the Original Position - only self-interest, caution, and ignorance: this is enough to ensure that the principles they adopt will satisfy the intuition Rawls is guided by in Really Original Position, of prima facie egalitarianism.

There are other intuitions which guide Rawls in the construction of the Original Position. I think you could reasonably classify Rawls as a small -l liberal. He believes in something like J.S. Mill's principle of liberty, and in the traditional liberal ideas of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. These guide him in the construction of the Veil of Ignorance. See 'The Justification of Civil Disobedience', p. 242: 'Finally, they do not know their own particular interests and preferences, or the system of ends which they wish to advance: they do not know their conception of the good'.

To make any choice at all they need some conception of the good: so in Theory of Justice Rawls says that people in the Original Position have a 'thin' conception of the good, (See index, 'Good, thin theory of') - consisting in a list of what he calls primary goods, what others might call universally useful goods, things (like material wealth) that are likely to be useful in furthering one's ends whatever they are. So 'they do not know in their preferences... the system of ends which they wish to advance', but they know that they have ends, and that whatever their ends are they will prefer having more of the universally useful goods to having less.