RetRIevINg RaWLs foR RacIaL justIce? ( 179 )So, in a kind of metaphysical— rather than the more familiar
sociological— class reductionism, a crucial conceptual distinction is being
erased by Shelby, in that a moral wrong uncontroversially exemplifying the
violation of equal personhood is being assimilated to what is a moral wrong
only by the standards of a particular variant of liberalism. As Robert Taylor
points out:
Even classical- liberal supporters of what Rawls calls the “system of natural liberty”
[libertarianism] would regard the disadvantages wrought by past and present discrimi-
natory behavior as great injustices because they are the result of violations of formal
[equality of opportunity], a principle that (unlike substantive [equality of opportunity/
FEO]) classical liberals themselves accept.^82In fact, one way of bringing out the oddness of Shelby’s position (and, for
that matter, Taylor’s) is by seeing what it does to the identities of Rawls’s
two principles: BL → (FEO → DP). The lexical priority of BL represents
the moral priority of personhood, whether in the original full- blooded
Kantian sense of “comprehensive liberalism” or the somewhat more ane-
mic version of “political liberalism.” Racism is a violation of BL. As such,
we want a principle of rectificatory justice that acknowledges the moral
primacy of BL, the rights and freedoms of persons, the heart of liberal-
ism. To try to transform FEO, a norm of justice lexically subordinate to BL,
into a principle putatively correcting for violations of BL is to force it into a
role it was never meant to play.^83 The goal of FEO is to make opportunities
fair by the standards of left- liberalism; the goal of BL is to safeguard basic
liberties. Corrections for violations of BL should reflect its lexical priority
and the morally more fundamental nature of violations of personhood. By
making corrective racial justice depend on left- liberal assumptions, Shelby
mislocates the basic wrongness of racial injustice, which violates principles
shared by all (decent) liberals.
Moreover, on a closing note, the desideratum for such policies should be
to make assumptions as “weak” (uncontroversial) as possible, and to seek
to attract as broad a basis of political support as possible. The tradition-
ally center- right United States is not going to get on board with a program
that rests on moral claims accepted only by left- liberals. An approach such
as mine, which derives racially rectificatory principles directly from viola-
tions of rights of non- interference, is, I would suggest, both morally supe-
rior (in targeting the actual wrong involved rather than hoping to reach an
extensionally equivalent victim population through indirect means) and
politically more attractive (in not excluding in advance a large proportion
of potential supporters, who would endorse racial justice but reject social
democracy).^84