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- [00:02]
A
Time is valuable. That's why Lowe's blueprint takeoffs turn blueprints into quotes faster. Bring us your plans and we'll generate itemized material lists to make quoting easier so you can get back to Building Plus. At the Lowes Pro desk, you get access to thousands of building materials not sold in store. And when your order's ready, we'll deliver everything to the job site. Improving is easy at Lowe's. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcast Podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the New Books in Philosophy podcast, part of the New Books Network. My name is Blaine Neufeld. I'm a professor of philosophy who specializes in political and moral theory and I'm an interviewer at New Books in Philosophy along with Carrie Figdor and Sarah Tyson. I should mention that this is my first interview for New Books in Philosophy. I'm taking over from Professor Robert Talese, who was a co host here for over a decade. My thanks to Bob, along with Carrie and Sarah, for inviting me to join this exciting community. But enough about me. Today we are discussing a recent book by Gina Schouten, professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. The book is called the Anatomy of Justice and is from Oxford University Press. The Anatomy of Justice offers a new approach to theorizing about liberal egalitarian justice and respond to some important criticisms of liberal egalitarianism from the left. So. Hi Gina.
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C
Hi Blaine.
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B
Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. So let's start by getting to know a little bit about you. Perhaps you could say a few things about who you are, where you're from, your background, and how you became interested in philosophy. And maybe you could also situate your scholarly work overall, not just the book, within the broader landscape of contemporary political philosophy.
- [02:59]
C
Sure, Blaine, thanks so much for having me. I'm really pleased to get to have this conversation with you. So I grew up in a working class suburb of Indianapolis. That was at that time while I was in public schools there struggling to accommodate a lot of newly arrived Spanish speaking kids in the classrooms. And I had a formative experience in high school. I had a wonderful high school Spanish teacher who set up a program which had me and my classmates sort of in the more advanced classes at the high school level, regularly going to visit elementary school classrooms to work with the younger English language learners there. And I loved that work. So when I was persuaded to go to college, I decided that I would take classes that would sort of enable me to return to that work, but better equipped to do it well. So I decided I would major in Spanish and social work. That plan fell apart even as I was sort of still working through the details. I went to college at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. And right off the bat, my social work classes were my very least favorite. I was wanting to think and learn about how to support kids who seemed to constrained in such an unfair way. But I was distracted away from thinking about sort of strategies for helping them. I was distracted instead by thinking about big questions, about the constraints themselves and the unfairness involved in the constraints. Meanwhile, unrelatedly, just for fun, I took an introductory philosophy class and then I took an ethics class. And I just loved them. And I think that even then I loved my philosophy classes for the same reason that I love philosophy so much now, and that is for its sort of democracy. So it struck me that you really didn't need any special equipment. You didn't need to be the fastest thinker in the room. In fact, as many of us tell our students now, sometimes that can be a liability. You didn't need to retain a lot of facts. It seemed to me then that you really just had to care enough about the questions to think about them very, very carefully. And that's not to minimize it. It's not easy to do that. And the skills for doing that well are really hard. 1. But it felt to me at the time like what differentiated people was just how long they had been practicing those skills. And so it sort of came to me like ready made with a growth mindset, sort of like in that context. And I thought that that was a feature of the discipline. And looking back, I think it's really to the credit of my early teachers that that's what philosophy seemed like to me. So I was loving those classes. I was hating my social work classes, which I still regret to some degree. But nothing in my life up to that point had really disposed me to consider the possibility of academia as a career option. And so as eventually my teachers kind of put that thought in my mind and I started to feel a little bit compelled by it, I had to let go of this sort of other direction that I thought I wanted to pursue and I really wanted to want to pursue. And that was a kind of clear career path. A life that was like sort of straightforwardly spent helping people who had it rough and where I would sort of go back to a place where I had roots. And I think because that's what I had set out to do and that's what I wanted to do, all of the fuss and the uncertainty of becoming an academic philosopher felt to me like a self indulgence. And that's stuck with me to some degree. So I want to be clear. I'm not saying that I think it's self indulgent work. The people who do it are by and large not self indulgent. But I think because of my sort of the way I came to it, it felt that way to me. So I had accepted a really generous financial aid package to go to college at this regional public university. And then I left the state. I eventually took a job in this place that often feels like a foreign country. So I've sort of felt like maybe I made a kind of bad choice because of the different path that I set out to take. So when I was in high school, some of my teachers had told me that I should go into a helping profession. And I think that's why the social work path seems so inviting to me early on. And one kind of way I tried to think about it is to realize how much my college teachers in philosophy had helped me in those early days and so challenged myself to try to think about this job as a helping profession. And then sort of noticed that's how a lot of people are doing this job. So that's kind of the orientation that I took now, I think because I was moving in a different direction from anything I'd experienced until then. And because I was thinking about issues of social disadvantage and social support in ways that were really different from those that were typical in my community of origin. A lot of my focus in social and political philosophy has fallen on questions about navigating political disagreement, especially in places where our political disagreement grows from these deeper divides in terms of our fundamental ethical commitments and the kinds of things, the kind of convictions that are the basis on which we chart courses for our lives. So after finishing college at Ball State, and I did a very brief time teaching kindergarten in Colorado, I went on and I did my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, writing a dissertation on gender justice and political legitimacy. My advisor was Claudia Card. And so my primary research focused on gender and political legitimacy, but I also gained an interest at that time in educational justice. I'm sort of working a little bit with Harry Brighouse. And still now I'm really interested in what principles constrain our use of politics to pursue egalitarian social justice, given that in a democracy, we should think that other people's disagreement with us about our social aims matters morally to how we're permitted to try to bring them about. And gender and education are these two places in which our disagreements seem very profoundly to obstruct progress toward justice. And gender norms and failing public schools were sort of two of the main systems that I'd seen failing ever since my days as an aspiring social worker. So that's kind of what drew me into those areas in particular. So gender, education and social equality became sort of the places within which I most wanted to explore the implications of political disagreement. So when I finished my PhD, I took a job at Illinois State University. I worked there from 2013 to 2016, and then in 2016, I took my job at Harvard.
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B
And.
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C
And I think that those early interests seeded all the way back at Ball State and Indiana in not justice, but what happens when we disagree about justice. And in thinking about ways to make philosophy and philosophy teaching helpful, I think those have come along with me.
- [10:32]
B
Well, thanks very much for that background. That was really interesting. So let's turn to your recent book, the Anatomy of Justice. In the Anatomy of Justice, you argue that a reorientation in liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice is needed. Could you describe what you take contemporary liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice to look like and why it's in need of this reorientation?
- [11:01]
C
Yeah, that's exactly right. So the book argues for a reorientation to liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice. And in particular, I argue for my reorientation on grounds that it does three things for us. So it first, supports compelling, satisfying resolutions to long standing disputes and difficulties internal to egalitarianism. Second, it equips liberal egalitarianism to provide better guidance for responding to injustice. So it helps us do better non ideal theory. And third, it underwrites compelling defenses of liberalism against feminist critics. So first, what do I take the orthodox approach to be? So on that approach. On the orthodox approach, a theory of liberal egalitarian justice comprises a set of normative principles to guide the design and the workings of social institutions. And normative principles purport to tell us what we should do for some specified set of circumstances. So, for example, famously John Rawls normative principles of justice tell us that in in relatively favorable circumstances, when citizens are generally motivated to act rightly, justice directs us to arrange basic political institutions so that working together, the institutions protect basic liberties, ensure equal opportunities in competitions for any advantageous social positions, and ensure that any advantages that are attached to social positions work to the benefit of those who are least well off within the institutional scheme. And if they can't do that, then we, we don't have any particularly advantageous social positions. So I argue that we should instead think of theory's most important product not as those normative principles, but as evaluative discernment, that is, as a personification of the achievements or ideals in virtue of realizing which a society can be more rather than less just. And among the ideals that matter to liberal egalitarians are civic relationships of a certain character and fair distributions of social goods. So those are the kind of ideals that we might think we realize by following certain normative principles. But let's instead just focus for now on the ideals, so that reorientation has substantive implications for our thinking about justice. But so far, the redirection is just methodological. I'm just proposing that those of us thinking about justice should take a longer look at the values that underpin our normative principles and try to discern the relative moral importance of those values. So try to order the values and then get clearer on the reasons they generate before we turn to the work of deriving normative principles. But the redirection of our attention is only part of the reorientation that I want to propose. So my proposal in whole is for that schematic picture that I just described in harness with a substantive way of filling it out. So a partial set of liberal egalitarian values or things that matter and a ranking of the moral importance of those things. And I argue that the combination of the schema and the values, that is the combination, is what I call the anatomy of justice. I argue that it constitutes an appealing approach to theorizing liberal egalitarian justice for those sort of three reasons I flagged at the outset. It helps us resolve difficulties internal to theorizing liberal egalitarianism. It helps us do non ideal theory. It helps make our theory give us guidance for here and now, and it helps answer feminist criticism of liberalism.
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B
I just follow up with a quick question about whether you see any necessary role for principles within this different account that you're putting forward.
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C
Yeah, I think we'll ultimately probably want the principles for different domains. So, you know, later when in the book I think about this debate over the subject matter of justice, I do think we'll want to derive particular sets of normative principles for different subject matters. I don't do that in the book, partly because I want to think about what the anatomy can do even before we derive any principles and sort of interestingly think that we do get some guidance. It does some real critical and normative work for us applied to issues like, like gender equality and education and distributive justice, even before we get to the point of saying, okay, let's try to use the anatomy as an inference base to derive a set of principles for individual behavior or for political institutions in this kind of circumstance or in circumstances like ours. And I think we can also just use the anatomy to think about how fine grained should be the circumstantial specification for which we derive normative principles to begin with.
- [16:08]
B
Okay, that's very interesting and helpful, so thanks for that. So let's turn to the political liberal aspect of your view. So a version of political liberalism is affirmed in the Anatomy of Justice. And this account draws upon, but differs in some important respects from the version of political liberalism most famously advanced by John Rawls. I was wondering if you could outline the distinctive version of political liberalism that you endorse, its relation to this ideal of mutual respect, which plays such an important role in your discussion, and the way or ways in which it differs from say, the standard Rawlsian version of political liberalism.
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C
Yeah, so. So the first thing I think is the one that I've, I've already sort of led with. So it's just the reorientation from above. So I, I think we should kind of focus on the evaluative considerations more and that that gets us these really helpful resources for non Ideal theory. And that's. And that's kind of one of the main things that I want to show in the book. But that's not really to contradict Rawls's approach or Rawls's formulation of political liberalism, just to look at a different thing and sort of argue for the utility of looking at a different thing. Beyond that, I really go back and forth. So there are days when I am reading something in Rawls, and I think, you know, there's really a lot of textual support here for what I'm doing in Rawls, in Political Liberalism or the idea of Public Reason revisited. And other days, I think, yeah, the thing that I'm doing really is a pretty different way of putting the pieces together. And I think that kind of makes sense. You know, Rawls isn't totally in agreement with himself over the course of his work, but I almost never want that to be what the conversation is about. So I don't want the usefulness of what I'm trying to do in the book to rely on any claim to having delivered an interpretation of Rawls. So to sort of try to clarify where I move away from Rawls to do that sort of honestly and openly, but also to acknowledge it's difficult to do that precisely because Rawls is himself always fully in agreement with. With the. Among the various things that he says. One of the main things, a place where I sort of start to move away, I think, and you foreshadowed this in your question, Blaine, is that I find this value of mutual respect at the theoretical foundation of the whole enterprise. So I think this ideal of mutual respect is the reason that I owe it to my political opponents that I be thinking about what considerations can serve as reasons for them to begin with. And again, sometimes I think, well, that's basically Rawls's view, too. But then in the next step for me, is because that's the value that tells us that we have to take care of each other with respect to our own sort of moral and evaluative commitments. That's also the value that should anchor all of our interpretive questions about what it means to take care with respect to that disagreement, too. So maybe most significantly, I think mutual respect is what issues substantive demands of legitimacy because it sets the parameters for what's even eligible to be a political value, or to sort of translate it back into Rawls was eligible to be a reasonable conception of justice, and Rawls has something like this, too. So I think there's a respectable reading on which you get protection for the basic liberties as a component of any reasonable conception of justice, because any society which fails to secure those protections is not a society whose institutional structure realizes mutual respect. But, and here's maybe the clearest departure, I want to show that if mutual respect really does operate in this way, then we get many more substantive demands of legitimacy than Rawls generally seems to have countenanced. So in general, I think we get a quite stringent conception of gender equality as a substantive demand of liberal legitimacy, a quite stringent conception of racial equality, and a quite stringent conception of distributive equality. And then the political liberalism that I develop and make a case for finds an important kind of significance for egalitarian considerations of justice that are not among those stringent requirements of mutual respect. So I think, I think about cases where an egalitarian, a sort of a hardcore egalitarian would say, sure, we can live on terms of respect with other citizens consistent with that distributive inequality. That kind of. Imagine a relatively minor distributive inequality that doesn't really implicate mutual respect. A certain kind of egalitarian will say, yeah, but that inequality is still just unfair. It's not the highest normative priority precisely because it doesn't impede our living together on terms of mutual respect, but it's still unfair and we have some reason to remediate it. I think that's right. But in political liberalism, it's not clear how to make sense of a preference for this very egalitarian conception of justice over other reasonable conceptions of justice. And one of the things that I try to do is sort of like, stay within the spirit of political liberalism in the book, but show how we can make sense space for that kind of a preference.
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B
Wow, there was a lot packed into that answer. And I'm going to try to do some unpacking by bringing out some of the things, some of the elements of that account that you just described. But let me just begin by first of all, just asking, just kind of understand the project and the role of mutual respect. What you seem to be doing with regard to legitimacy is similar to the kinds of criticisms that, say, socialist theorists have made of liberalism, that the liberals just aren't thinking through the full implications of their commitment, that in fact, if you really are committed to equal freedom for all, that's going to have a lot more. That's going to have a much more radically egalitarian outcome than most liberal theorists. Historically, I'm not necessarily talking about Rawls here, but historically have been been willing to recognize. And something similar seems to be structurally similar, seems to be going on with what you're doing in terms of mutual respect and legitimacy is that Rawls is committed to mutual respect, treating citizens as free and equal, and he has this interesting account of political legitimacy. But what you seem to be arguing is that, in fact, the account is much more egalitarian, much more radical than Rawls himself seems to acknowledge. At least acknowledge in most places. Is that a correct description of what you're doing in the book?
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C
Yeah, I think that's right. The only thing I would say is I'm not that invested on making it a kind of internal critique of Rawls. So if it turns out that that foundational commitment is, like, you know, he has a more minimal version of civic respect than the sort of robust one that I'm working with, I wouldn't die on that hill. What I would want to try to do is show that to get a lot of the sort of extensional implications of the theory that, you know, people across the political spectrum want, we actually should be working this. With this more robust conception of mutual respect. So I think what you said is. Is exactly right with this light wrinkle that I. I sort of would probably move away from. From trying to formulate it as a kind of internal critique of Rawlsian liberalism or even any kind of, like, traditional liberalism, and just argue for it. Sort of like, actually, this is just the value that we should think of being at the heart of liberalism.
- [24:07]
B
Okay, great. That's very helpful. So what the book is doing is saying, here's this ideal of relations of mutual respect among free and equal citizens, and it resembles. It draws upon Rawls. But you're not really. The concern of the book is not whether or not Rawls, if we could resurrect him, would agree with you or not. I mean, that's not the nature of the project. It's just that Rawls work is a useful resource to draw upon, irrespective of whether or not ultimately the ghost of Rawls, so to speak, would recognize his views in what you've written.
- [24:44]
C
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Although there are times, you know, I want to be arguing to people who are Rawlsian. And so there are moments where I think, ooh, this is gonna be a kind of tough conclusion for some Rawlsians to swallow. So let me kind of provide a buttressing argument that shows that actually it's pretty well aligned with something that Rawls does. So, you know, there is a lot of Rawls in the book, but not really because I'm trying to do internal critiques so much as I'm trying to talk to a fairly wide audience, including left liberals, and so find some support from particular argumentative moves that Rawls has made that have not in general invited a lot of resistance from liberal egalitarians.
- [25:34]
B
Okay, great. So now I want to explore a bit more of the some of the things you just said about distributive equality versus the demands of legitimacy that you mentioned in your earlier answer. So one ongoing dispute amongst liberal egalitarian theorists, one that has been going on for at least 25 years, since Elizabeth Anderson's famous article what's the Point of Equality? But arguably has been implicit in a lot of disagreements between political philosophers for a much longer period of time, is a dispute between what are generally known as relational egalitarians and distributive egalitarians. And with respect to distributive egalitarians, at least in contemporary philosophical discourse, they're generally lumped into the category the camp known as luck egalitarians, although that is in fact a term that Anderson himself came up with. But they seem to have adopted it or they've endorsed it at least by and large. Can you describe for us what this dispute is, what it's about, and why you think you, in a true Hegelian fashion, resolve it in the Anatomy of Justice?
- [26:39]
C
Yeah, thanks. So first, just to characterize the dispute. So I think on the there are lots of people formulate this disagreement in different ways. For me, I think the simplest and most accurate formulation is that it's a disagreement about what kind of inequality is non instrumentally bad. So for relational egalitarians, the answer is relational inequality. So it's non instrumentally bad when people don't stand as equals. So Elizabeth Anderson says that the proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is to end oppression, a relationship of inequality. The proper positive aim is to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality. Now, for distributive egalitarians, the answer includes distributive inequality. It's not instrumentally bad for some people to be worse off than others, at least when the inequality doesn't trace back to some choice or preference on the part of the disadvantaged party for which we can rightly hold them responsible. So I think the big tent, the biggest tent, is just distributive inequality is the thing that's non instrumentally bad. Now there's a kind of important asymmetry between the relational egalitarians and the distributive egalitarians, which is that on canonical formulations at least, relational egalitarianism claims that its kind of equality is sufficient for egalitarian justice. It's a sort of master theory. Once we get relational equality, we will have realized egalitarian justice, whereas distributive egalitarians don't claim that. So distributive egalitarians will say distributive inequality is non instrumentally bad. But for all I'm saying, relational inequality might also be non instrumentally bad. Whereas for many, at least, a part of the theory of relational egalitarianism says that mere distributive inequality is unobjectionable on grounds of egalitarian justice. So distributed egalitarians forward their thesis and that's it. Relational egalitarians forward their thesis and contradict the distributive egalitarian thesis. So sometimes I write that the anatomy makes space for a principled sort of plausible resolution to that, to the debate between the relational and distributive egalitarians. In one way that can be a little misleading because precisely in its pluralism, the anatomy is contradicting what some relational egalitarians take to be a central tenet of their view, namely that relational equality is the only kind that matters. But here's the way in which I think the anatomy of justice does comprise a principled pluralist response or pluralist resolution of this debate. It accommodates to me what's just a sensible view, that relational and distributive inequality are both non instrumentally bad. Relational and distributive equality both matter in their own right.
- [29:37]
B
So I'm going to push back just a tiny bit on what you just said. Couldn't a relational egalitarian say, well, we recognize that distributive inequality is bad for its own sake, but that's not a political matter. I mean, that's a case of cosmic injustice. I might think it's unjust that I'm an atrocious hockey player compared to Wayne Gretzky, right? So that's. Or Sallaleri, I'm not sure how you pronounce his name, is upset at Mozart for Mozart's great talent, even though he's a wastrel. And so couldn't the relational egalitarians say, look, we don't deny that in some sense that's unjust, that's a cosmic injustice that some people are More talented than others, say, in these ways. But that's not what political philosophy should be focused on. Political philosophy should be focused on relating to one another as equal citizens. So I saw that they deny the injustice of distributive inequality. They just think that that's a separate kind of domain from the political domain.
- [30:44]
C
Yeah, I don't find that very compelling, as I'm sure you anticipated. I mean, part of it is that distributive inequalities are socially produced. And that's sometimes when we're invited to think about Mozart and Salieri, you know, we're sort of like put in the frame of thinking about these are immutable facts. And insofar as that's true, you know, maybe there's this like, that's a matter of cosmic justice. And what we're interested in is social justice. But that's not true of, you know, the kinds of distributive inequalities that are produced by capitalist markets. So I think, you know, there might be some things that are, you know, mere cosmic injustice. But I don't find that to be a plausible description of the kinds of distributive injustices that I would want an account of justice to condemn. Now if Mozart and Salieri's unequal talent is because, you know, so now we're thinking of a counterfactual scenario. You know, one of them didn't have expansive opportunities and they sort of. They grew up having the same ambitions, but one of them was like, not given opportunities to develop their skills. And the other was that I think again, we would stop thinking that that's a cosmic injustice and start thinking that it's a social injustice. And I just think that relationships and distributions are like that. They're social injustices, not cosmic injustices.
- [32:15]
B
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you for that. So I now want to move to the last few chapters of the book where you sort of respond to some criticisms of liberal egalitarianism, criticisms from the left. So in the final two chapters, you address thinkers who argue that liberal egalitarianism just isn't up to task. And you focus in particular on some recent criticisms pressed by Sally Haslinger. The first criticism has to do with liberal egalitarianism's focus on the state. Or as you correctly point out, what liberal egalitarians actually focus on is something a bit broader than the state. It's what Rawls calls the basic structure of society. Sort of a set of institutions that work together to determine citizens life chances and so forth. And these critics of liberal egalitarianism, they hold that this ignores an important domain of justice, namely the domain of culture, or sometimes referred to as ethos. So can you say a few things more about this criticism and your response to it?
- [33:20]
C
Yeah. So I sometimes think it's helpful to start with this, this mundane observation that when you look at a certain way, it sounds like a challenge to the kind of theorizing that I'm doing in the book and plain to the kind that you do in your work too. So here's the observation. Social injustice isn't caused only by unjust laws. It's also caused by social norms and patterns of behavior and all these other informal social practices that are referred to as culture or ethos. So that observation is, is sometimes taken to support an objection to liberal theorizing. And that's because influential liberals focus their theories of justice on sort of a formal structure, so sometimes described as focusing on formal political institutions. But even if not that, it's true that the basic structure does sort of exclude culture and ethos. And I think the anatomy of justice helps to illuminate the ways in which liberal justice can impugn culture and actually can give us really good guidance with respect to how moral agents should act alone and together to try to reform culture and these other so to mold these other kinds of informal aspects of our social fabric. And so in doing that, I think the anatomy deflates this long standing and ongoing debate about the subject matter of justice, because it shows that liberal justice can fruitfully guide us with respect to all of these aspects of our society, including culture ethos, even if it retains an institutional focus for normative principles. So one upshot of this that I want to really focus on is just that liberals and their critics don't have to litigate this long standing debate about the subject matter of justice in order to engage fruitfully across this difference on substantive questions of justice. So in a way, it's supposed to be like, you know, we can just talk about gender justice and we can just talk about educational justice. The fact that liberals have this whole intramural thing about the subject matter of justice doesn't really have to obstruct progress in those domains. So that's one of the big takeaways that I'm pushing toward. So the interlocutors for the chapter are, as you foreshadowed, G.A. cohen and Sally Haslinger, who criticize Rawls or liberalism, or as Haslinger puts it, the mainstream for its focus on the state as the primary subject matter of justice or sort of, if we want to sort of translate it to have a more accurate foil, the basic structure as the subject matter of justice, where the basic structure is bigger than just the state. And the chapter uses the anatomy to defend liberalism against the criticism. But I kind of just take on board for the sake of argument, Haslinger's own characterization of the restriction as being just like justice is about principles of justice are about the state. And this is not because I think we should think of that as a subject matter of justice. I just think the kinds of extensional complaints that people have about a structure oriented or a state oriented theory of justice can be defused even if we sort of spot them the premise that really liberalism focuses on this very narrow thing. So two challenges, challenges that I distinguish in the chapter. The first is to liberalism's diagnostic adequacy. So does liberalism's focus on the state as a subject of justice prevent it from impugning ideological culture in plausible ways? So that's where we're asking, do we get a sort of plausible extension of the theory with respect to the critical work it can do? And the second is to liberalism's what I call rectificatory adequacy. So does liberalism's focus on the state state render it impotent to prescribe plausible rectification for ideological culture? So does it actually sort of stop giving us normative resources because it focuses on the state? And I basically argue for a negative answer to both questions. No, it doesn't have the limitations that are being attributed to it. And I try to show that basic structural theories of justice or theories that focus even just on the state can issue powerful and illuminating guidance with respect to culture, even if they maintain that focus on formal institutions. So that doesn't mean I want to be careful. I'm not trying to argue that the question of the subject matter of justice is irrelevant. I actually think it's interesting and important. I just don't think that it implicates these extensional adequacy challenges that critics are on about. So, you know, Haslinger talks a lot about residential segregation and educational racial segregation after Brown versus Board of Education, as if having sort of like prescribed legal integration of schools kind of state focused or basic structure focused theory can't do any more critical work with respect to persistent social segregation and educational segregation. And so I sort of try to take that example and other examples, like some of Cohen's examples, and show what even a state focused and a basic structural focus theory can still do. Not Just with respect to prescribing political remediation, which hasn't been exhausted, of course, in the case of racialized education segregation or housing segregation, but also in terms of thinking about culture reform. And again, that's because we have this evaluative specification. And of course, culture can lessen the extent to which our society realizes values.
- [39:08]
B
And.
- [39:09]
C
And then there's just the separate case of like, okay, so what kind of normative principles should we derive from the evaluative specifications specifically for the way we act on culture? And they might not be the same normative principles as we derive for the sake of guiding institutional design, but that doesn't mean that the inference base runs out of power at the point that the normative principles stop applying to something. So I tried to sort of show how the anatomy can provide direct guidance that's not necessarily directed through the normative principles of justice us.
- [39:41]
B
So that was really helpful. But I was wondering maybe if, to sort of illuminate the view that you outline in the book, in this chapter, if we could perhaps focus on a particular form of injustice that might not seem amenable to rectification within the basic or being addressed within the basic structure. So let's just. You can choose a different one if you want. But to pick an example from Jerry Cohen, he argues that, well, one problem with Rawls's view is that it doesn't condemn people who insist on high, high wages for. For them to use their rare talents. So I'll go back to Wayne Gretzky again. You know, he's a uniquely innately talented. We'll say for the sake of the example hockey player, he wants millions of dollars far in excess of what would actually motivate him to play hockey, but he insists on it. And this seems to offend against justice because he didn't do anything to deserve these talents or. And to the extent they've been cultivated, they've been cultivated by society through social cooperation. And Cohen argues, well, there's nothing that Rawls can really say or a liberal more generally can say to condemn this free choice by someone who's very talented like that, to insist on such a high level degree of compensation and that this is a problem for liberal accounts of justice with our institutional focus. So I'm just using this as an example, but just to kind of illuminate or give, concretize the way in which you discuss this criticism. I think that might be helpful to our listeners.
- [41:22]
C
Yeah, that's a great example, Blaine, thanks. So, I mean, what I would say is Suppose, and I don't in the book argue for basic structuralism. What I argue is that it doesn't matter as much with respect to precisely those kinds of examples as we might think. And here's the reason. So suppose I start with the anatomy of justice as my sort of like picture of the things that matter that we might in our society realize. We might realize distributive fairness, we might realize mutual respect. And the anatomy of justice says you should realize both those things, but when you have trade off cases, you should always prioritize mutual respect. And then someone comes along and says, okay, but what does this tell you about what our Constitution should look like? Or whether we should have, you know, property owning democracy or market socialism? And so we might derive a particular set of principles that are just for answering those questions. And then later we can say, okay, does it also apply to Wayne Gretzky's market maximizing in this case? And one thing you might notice, so again in the book I'm like, well, maybe it does apply. I don't like going to argue that you have to be a basic structuralist. But one thing you might notice is when we apply these normative principles derived from the anatomy, when we apply these normative principles to institutions, they just generate deontic requirements. They say, your institutions are just not going to be just if they don't realize egalitarianism, so understood. And even the people who argue against basic structuralism don't want those normative principles to generate direct deontic requirements for individuals. So if, if someone, not Wayne Gretzky, because in your case, he's a pretty egregious case, but if someone does makes a choice about where they're going to work, that doesn't optimize the position of the least advantaged. And the difference principle applies deontic requirements to individuals, then we don't need to know anything else they've done wrong. Whereas in fact, even somebody like Cohen is going to say, no, it's not quite that easy because people have a personal prerogative. And what I would is say, okay, well then don't we just effectively have two different sets of normative principles? And yet if we want to know what's wrong with what Wayne Gretzky is doing, we don't have to go through the normative principles that were generated for institutions because those principles have an inference base in the evaluative specification that is the anatomy of justice. And we can just see, okay, so Wayne Gretzky is doing something that lessens the extent to which our social arrangement realizes egalitarian fairness. And maybe we need a set of principles that says when it's permissible for us to do that versus when it's impermissible. And the case you described, it seems clearly impermissible because the costs of him not making things worse for him are so minor. It's not like, can you live with your children or do you have to move to the other side? He could just accept a lower salary and still have a perfectly decent life. So that's one thing. Also, the principles tell the institutions to act in ways on Gretzky's behavior to make him less of a market maximizer. And I think we haven't really thought fully through all of the ways that an institutional design can create a certain kind of ethos. And so we can critique. We can say it's unjust that the institutional design isn't acting aggressively enough to kind of discourage the market maximizing that people are doing. But even if we just want to directly condemn the behavior, we can go to the sort of the inference base that tells us what are the principles that institutions should follow. They says, well, they should make it the case that society realizes justice as much as institutions can do. So when we look to individual behavior, how much do individuals have to do to make it the case that society realizes the value of justice? And so those are questions that we can ask with this evaluative specification. And then the question of whether are. Are the normative principles that we derive for these two subject matters the same normative principles? To me, that question just looks less important in terms of thinking about the extensional adequacy of the theory. It's important for other reasons. It's interesting, but I don't think, you know, it's a matter of whether we can, you know, can we say enough about the way that individuals wrongly contribute to pernicious gender norms or racial segregation or distributive inequality? We can say an awful lot that once we have a good specification of the values that matter for how well our society realizes justice.
- [46:05]
B
That was great. And I find what you just said extremely compelling. So let's go to the last chapter of the book where you address some further criticisms of liberal egalitarianism. These criticisms focus on its method of justification. That is how liberal egalitarians generally think think normative claims should be justified. Haslanger, in particular, has criticized the method of reflective equilibrium. And this is the approach to thinking about justice and other topics made famous in Rawls's book, A theory of justice. Could you outline this criticism and your response to it? That is your defense of reflective equilibrium in this final chapter?
- [46:44]
C
Yeah, so I'll start with a really rough characterization of the objection. So I think roughly but kind of illuminatingly, the complaint about reflective of equilibrium is that it's elitist, It's a sort of top down approach. There are these philosophers imposing theoretical implications from on high. And that's in contrast with bottom up approaches which allegedly are more democratic and more deferential to actual claims advanced by oppressed people. Now this characterization of reflective equilibrium pits the mainstream, as Haslinger puts it, pits analytic normative political philosophy against the activists. So they're characterized as embracing vastly different methodologies for thinking about justice. And the mainstream philosopher ignores the activist's insights or subordinates them to the methods of the seminar room. And Haslinger works out this objection with Rawls as her primary target. It and so the last chapter of the book argues that reflective equilibrium isn't flawed in the way Haslinger and others claim that it's flawed. And roughly I do that by showing that it's not top down in the way that I just described. And in fact the methodology of reflective equilibrium is being deployed in the critics own arguments against reflective equilibrium. So first, what is reflective equilibrium basically just has us trying to iron out inconsistencies among our considered moral judgments at different levels of abstractness. So judgments about particular instances or cases like this kind of phenomenon is an injustice, judgments about the principles that we think systematize those particular instances of injustice. And then judgments about even more abstract sort of theoretical considerations that we think think bare on whether we should accept particular principles or particular verdicts about injustice. And we revise the judgments across these levels where we need to to achieve a coherence that's anchored on the judgments about which we have most reason to be highly confident. So that characterization is just a gloss on the way Norm Daniels explains the process. So basically reflective equilibrium tells us treat your most reliable considered convictions as provisional fixed points and work to bring the moral convictions at all levels of generality into coherence. And then some theory or some theoretical commitment is justified in part because it's a part of the best fit equilibrium across those levels. And importantly, we have to do this together in conversation with other people, ideally with people who have really different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to moral discernment. Because you know, even something like, like what deserves to be treated as a provisional fixed point. Where should our credences be highest? Where should we be self doubting those kinds of questions are, we'll do better at recognizing when we're being sort of like doing motivated reasoning if we're talking to people whose interests lie in a different place. So we want a reflective equilibrium that is gained in broad conversation. Now, Haslinger argues basically that reflective equilibrium is a theoretical commitment that is ill fit for progressive or radical politics. And that's because it generates theories that are inadequate for addressing ideology, sexist ideology, racist ideology, because reflective equilibrium can't underpin adequately contextualized social critique and it can't give uptake to the wisdom of social movements. So the first thing to say is that even in rejecting reflective equilibrium, she's using reflective equilibrium and that description that I just gave. So she's asking us to overturn a methodological commitment to reflective equilibrium on the grounds that we need to overturn it in order to iron out an incompatibility between that methodology and a provisional fixed point about which we should be more confident, namely, that theory should condemn sex, sexist and racist ideology. So that just is reflective equilibrium. So already I think we get a hint that this methodology is really broader than her characterization of it because she's sort of using it to challenge it. And there's something a little fishy there. So that's one thing. But then the other thing, the more important thing, is to argue that she's wrong, that there's an incompatibility here to be ironed out in the first place. Place. So reflective equilibrium isn't ill fit for radical politics because it doesn't require the kind of abstraction and a priority that Haslinger claims it aspires to. So drawing on the anatomy of justice, I try to argue that the methodology can supply context responsive guidance and can incorporate insights from social movements. And that Hasslinger case, for the contrary conclusion, owes to mischaracterizing the methodology. So how does she mischaracterize it? So she calls reflective equilibrium a relatively a priori process. And I think we need to be more careful with that designation and what it means. So after all, remember when I characterized reflective equilibrium a minute ago, one type of provisional fixed point comprises our judgments about particular cases. So an example I often use is these are the kinds of judgments that we have when we think, well, that's clearly unjust. Upon learning that job applicants with white sounding names are significantly likelier to get a callback for a job than job applicants with African American sounding names. So we were reading about these resume studies and we're seeing, oh wow, this is just sort of straightforward Racial discrimination. And we think, well, you know, assuming the empirics are right, that's just a clear injustice. And then we might test a theory by saying, would it render the verdict that that's an injustice? Would it give us guidance with respect to what we should do about injustice? So that judgment that. Well, that's clearly unjust, that judgment is hardly a priori. But it figures into our reflective equilibrium on equal footing with considered judgments about principles and theory. So the main insight that I try to press in this chapter is that reflective equilibrium doesn't aim to generate a theory that's a priori. In that way. We do want theory that doesn't depend for its justification on the empirical facts being just as they are. So black job applicants are apparently discriminated against. Against. That's what we see in this empirical research. Our theory should guide our response to that fact. But our theory shouldn't stop being justified as theory once we do respond to that fact, hopefully once we make it no longer true. So theory is meant to be independent of the facts in the sense that it's robust to some degree against changes in the empirical facts. And that aspiration will have significance for how we take test theory. But it doesn't rule out testing the theory. For instance, testing an account of equal opportunity by asking, how would this theory guide us in the face of the kinds of findings that these resume studies present us with, or in the face of the kinds of claims that we're hearing from social movements that are salient right now? Nothing in reflective equilibrium excludes that. It's just a question of wanting our theory to be robust against changes in the empirical fact, facts. And so it's sort of in that sense that I say, really done. Well, reflective equilibrium is not in a position of opposition to a methodology coming from empiricists or social critics or social movements. All of that is data. And we're all going to have to think about where our priors should be with respect to different kinds of normative evidence. But none of that is excluded from reflective equilibrium.
- [55:15]
B
Wow. Thanks for that superb explanation and defense of reflective equilibrium. Well, Gina, we've taken up a lot of your time. You've provided us with an excellent overview of the anatomy of justice. So I just want to conclude with one final question for you. So what's next? What's your next project? What are you working on now or will soon be working on?
- [55:36]
C
Thanks. Well, okay, so there are some little things, kind of continuations of ongoing projects that I could mention. So I'm working on a a co authored book about equal educational opportunity. And this is for the History and Philosophy of Education series from University of Chicago Press. And I really enjoyed this and my co author is Leah Gordon, a historian at Brandeis. And it's just been a lot of fun to learn from Leah as we write this book together. So that's one thing. Another kind of ongoing thing is, and I know this is kind of inspired by an exchange that we had, Blaine. And in a symposium on the anatomy of justice and analysis, I'm working on a paper trying to sort of further work out this possibility that the moral truth or the truth about justice could have some evaluative significance in political liberalism, even as it's quite clearly prohibited any role in justifying political action. But thinking a little bit more big picture, I'd say a couple of things. So one is in the next chapter of my career, I really want to grow my skills for sort of effectively talking to a wider audience, including an audience that spans the ideological divisions that I'm kind of interested in philosophically when I think about political liberalism. So one project is just to learn how to do this new thing of talking to a wider audience that I think I've been trying to do for a while, but maybe that I need to more systematically tool out for. So that's kind of one goal. And then ultimately I want to use that to write and think about the value of home and rootedness in moral and political lives. I think we on the political left, and we sort of left liberal political philosophers tend to really valorize mobility and open so geographic and social unmooring as a kind of either it's just neutral or maybe it's actually a positive good. And on the other hand, attachment to place is of secondary importance or maybe even politically suspect. And I do think, you know, attachment to place can underwrite exclusion and parochialism and reactionary politics. But I also just personally experience my own physical and social distance from my roots as costly in ways that I suspect I kind of have a hunch that are not specific to me and that I'd like to make better sense of. So you can tell this is more of an inkling. It's like a project in its infancy, if that. But some of what I think will come of it will be really comfortable as an extension of questions that are familiar to me, even if I don't yet have answers to them. So. So, for example, what are the implications for social justice when parents raising kids in certain parts of the country know that their kids are extremely likely to move away for professional opportunities. In fact, that some kinds of success and security even require that they do that. But I think also part of what's driving me here is not just the political, but the ethical. And this will be more a kind of new territory for me. So what actually is the value of rootedness and home, and what are the full array of things that we miss out on when we lack it? So trying to think from there about what kinds of concerns we should have when our social arrangement clusters opportunity geographically. That's kind of my next big set of questions.
- [59:10]
B
Wonderful. So thanks again, Gina, for speaking with us about your important recent book, the Anatomy of Justice, and also giving us a brief glimpse of what to look forward to in the future.
- [59:22]
C
Thanks, Lane. This has been so fun.