Cohen vs. Rawls on the relevance of sociological and psychological facts to principles of justice

What is it about?

G. A. Cohen claimed that by asking what principles the parties to an 'original position' would adopt, Rawls confused principles of conviction (which identify the content of values such as justice) with rules of social regulation (which we adopt in view of their expected consequences), allowing various social facts and non-justice values to determine what we take justice to be. Cohen's objection was that this procedure builds unrecognized compromise into our principles of justice. This paper denies that Rawls's thought experiment has these objectionable consequences. The paper identifies the different facts upon which Rawls's difference principle depends, arguing that in most cases its fact-sensitivity amounts to nothing more than innocent limitation of generality. The problem is that Rawls required that principles be stable given motivation by reciprocity. Having the disposition to return benefits even without hope of future reward is obviously a good thing, but reciprocity can also involve tit for tat, and the desire for revenge. If principles depend on facts of psychology that are unfortunate from the point of view of justice, it would be important for the way we relate to one another here and now for us to recognize the traits in question as regrettable, even if they cannot (presently) be changed. Revising principles downwards in order to achieve stability threatens to make such recognition impossible. Thus we need to be able to argue that reciprocity is an inherent aspect of justice, not simply a de facto limit that makes true justice infeasible. That's plausible, if we think of justice as fundamentally relational, though a full defense of the position would require that we specify which aspects of justice are and are not conditional on reciprocity.

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Why is it important?

The paper connects the debate on 'ideal theory' with the question of the moral status of motivation by reciprocity.