Notes to pages 161–162 ( 235 )
justifying color- blindness, whereas our own society requires sensitivity to race- based
injustices.
- See chapters 3, 4, and 8 of my book with Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination
(Malden, MA: Polity, 2007). My claim there is that we need to run a different thought-
experiment custom- designed for generating principles of non- ideal theory rather than try-
ing to turn principles of ideal theory to the remedying of non- ideal problems.
- Tommie Shelby, “Race and Social Justice: Rawlsian Considerations,” Fordham Law Review
72, no. 5 (April 2004): Symposium: Rawls and the Law: 1697– 1714.
- For Shelby’s reply to my original journal article, see Shelby, “Racial Realities and Corrective
Justice: A Reply to Charles Mills,” Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 2 (2013): 145– 62.
Since I hope to answer Shelby’s reply in a future essay, I have not made any major changes
to this reprinted version, assuming it would be more helpful for readers interested in our
exchange to be able to read substantially the same article he is seeking to rebut in his reply
rather than a dramatically modified version.
- As for Anderson’s objections: my belief is that the problems she identifies can be addressed
by my revision of the orthodox thought- experiment, but for reasons of space I will not
pursue this here. It is possible that Anderson might be sympathetic to my modifications
but view them as so transforming the Rawlsian apparatus that it ceases to be Rawlsian,
even in a scare- quotes sense, so that in effect my own position should be categorized as
rejecting Rawls.
- One referee, though not the other two, found this opening section of the paper (“the pau-
city of attention to the issue of racism in mainstream [Rawlsian] political philosophy”)
“quite misplaced.” His argument is that since “principles for rectification of injustice both
depend on an already worked out theory of justice and, second, are part of a different set
of principles that have to be fine tuned to particular societies and hence at a different level
of abstraction from the principles contained in justice as fairness,” I would have to show
that “inattention to (non- ideal) conditions of racism in society distorts the principles pro-
duced by the theory” for such inattention to be criticized as problematic. Otherwise— if
the (ideal- theory) principles are merely incomplete rather than defective— my critique
is unjustified. But my response would be that the only way we can find out whether the
ideal- theory principles can indeed guide us in constructing the pertinent non- ideal- the-
ory principles (for rectificatory racial justice) is for this to be demonstrated, and the point
of the opening section is to document how little effort has been made in the profession to
do so. Surely forty years is long enough— especially in a society to whose creation racism
has been central— for there to be a significant body of work by now showing how one
derives principles of rectificatory racial justice (a “pressing and urgent matter” [Rawls,
Theory of Justice, p. 8] if ever there was one) from the ideal- theory principles! That was,
after all, Rawls’s own rationale for prioritizing ideal theory in the first place, that in “no
other way” can “a deeper understanding” of non- ideal questions like “compensatory jus-
tice” be gained (Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 8). So I don’t see this opening section as beg-
ging the question, as the referee asserts (a “non- starter” as an argument, in his opinion,
since I have not proven that Rawls’s principles cannot be so applied). All I am trying to
show at this stage is that they have not (for the most part) been so applied, that this (almost
complete) silence is a problem, and— as with the parallel feminist claim— that the natural
explanation is the profession’s dominant demography.
- Rawls, Theory of Justice.
- Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. x.
- Freeman, Rawls, pp. xvi, xvii, x.
- Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1976; orig ed. 1975); George M. Fredrickson, White
Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship
in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Anthony Marx,
Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
