Notes to pages 164–170 ( 237 )
racial justice prescriptions from Rawls but to make a case for what our appropriate moral
perspective should be on the black ghetto poor’s “deviant” behavior and attitudes (crime,
refusal to work in legitimate jobs, contempt for authority). So though moral issues are
involved, remediation of the injustice of the “basic structure” is not the real theme. I would
also claim that the central ideas he is using are not really distinctively Rawlsian but rather
generic liberal concepts and principles.
- See Rawls, Theory of Justice; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, exp. ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996; orig. ed. 1993); John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed.
Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
- Shelby, “Race and Social Justice.”
- Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle,”
Fordham Law Review 72, no. 5 (April 2004): 1643– 75.
- Shelby, “Race and Social Justice,” pp. 1710– 11.
- Shelby, “Race and Social Justice,” p. 1711. The Rawls passage cited is from Theory, p. 63.
- Shelby, “Race and Social Justice,” pp. 1711– 12.
- They are not mentioned in the list on p. 11 of Theory and not formally included until a
1975 essay.
- Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 17, 129– 30.
- John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. xxviii.
- One of the anonymous Oxford referees suggested to me that this didn’t follow, since
“the validity of Shelby’s claim that Theory’s principles can be used to deal directly with
race is independent of Rawls’s beliefs about what his principles could or could not do—
for it is possible that Rawls’s beliefs about what his principles could or could not do are
mistaken.” Similarly, the referee was dubious about the relevance of my later criticism of
Shelby (in the “FEO as lexically subordinate” section) that “he [Shelby] is not entitled” to
extrapolate FEO “beyond what Rawls himself intended,” since, the referee argues, “once
published, the principle is open to anyone’s interpretation.” However, my reply in both
cases would be that such usage of FEO is ruled out a priori by Rawls’s explicit stipulation
at the beginning of Theory, and subsequently throughout the text, that these are principles
for a well- ordered society (which excludes a racist society) and that they are principles of
distributive (not compensatory) justice. This is why I believe, as I claim later, that Shelby
is making a category mistake.
- Rawls, Political Liberalism (1996), p. liii.
- Rawls, Justice as Fairness.
- Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 64– 65.
- Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 66.
- The same referee cited in note 7, above, misread me here as imputing to Rawls a “hesi-
tation” about condemning racism, and also of insinuating, quite unfairly to Rawls, “that
there is something unsaid or hidden” in these passages. But this is a misinterpretation.
As I emphasize myself, Rawls condemns racism unequivocally from the start; I meant a
“hesitation” to specify what rectificatory racial justice would require. The point I was mak-
ing, contra Shelby, was that if Rawls thought his ideal- theory principles (here FEO) were
the appropriate ones to use to deal with racial injustice, he would just have said so. The fact
that he didn’t, and refers to “a special form” of the DP instead, shows that he believed other
principles were necessary (the point the referee himself makes in the quote I cite from his
review in note 7).
- Thanks to Derrick Darby for reminding me of this phrase (though Darby himself does not
necessarily endorse my judgment here).
- Thomas Nagel, “Rawls and Liberalism,” in Freeman, ed., Cambridge Companion to Rawls,
p. 84n3.
- Freeman, Rawls, p. 90.
- The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson, rev. Hugh
Tredennick (New York: Penguin Classics, 1976), book V. However, as noted in an earlier
chapter, Samuel Fleischacker has argued that in Aristotle himself neither concept really
corresponds to our own contemporary version, since the idea of entitlement to a certain
distribution of property and rights merely by virtue of being human is a modern one, first
