( 168 ) Black Rights/White Wrongsor (c) although different principles of justice are required to deal with race,
they are not “altogether” different, since they can (somehow) be derived
from ideal- theory principles. Shelby’s use of FEO commits him to endors-
ing (a),^41 whereas I think Rawls (rightly or wrongly) actually believed (c).
But if the first interpretation were correct, surely the natural thing for Rawls
to have done at this point would have been to continue (as I just said in [a] ),
“However, this appearance is misleading, because ...” He does not do this,
despite the fact that he is reporting a response to the book that obviously
troubles him. If Shelby is right, and all that is needed is the extrapolation of
FEO to take race into account, why does Rawls himself not just say so? It
is hardly plausible to hypothesize that this obvious move, were it implicit
in his theory, did not occur to him. The far more plausible interpretation is
that for him, FEO could not be applied in this way.
Further evidence for this reading can be found in Rawls’s concession, in
his introduction to the 1996 paperback edition of Political Liberalism that
changes over time in the content of “public reason” are necessary:
Social changes over generations also give rise to new groups with different political
problems. Views raising new questions related to ethnicity, gender, and race are obvious
examples, and the political conceptions that result from these views will debate the current
conceptions [my emphases].^42Again, the natural reading is that race and ethnicity do indeed raise new
and different political and normative questions, which is why they are to be
contrasted to and seen as in contestation with the “current conceptions.” If
Shelby were right, this would have been the obvious place for Rawls to say
that in fact the principles he outlined a quarter- century earlier could readily
be extrapolated to handle these questions, so that the “newness” was only
a matter of the particular groups now being included in the scope of the
principles, not the content of the conceptions themselves. But he does not
say this; he leaves the issue hanging and moves on.
Finally, the clincher, I would claim, is that in Justice as Fairness,^43 his
last book, where Rawls is trying to produce the definitive summary of the
essentials of his view, he returns again to the issue of race and gender.
We have seen that the two principles of justice apply to citizens as identified by their
indexes of primary goods. It is natural to ask: Why are distinctions of race and gender
not explicitly included among the three contingencies noted earlier (§16)? [In this ear-
lier section, Rawls had listed “three kinds of contingencies” that affect “inequalities in
citizens’ life- prospects”: social class, native endowments and opportunities to develop
them, good or ill fortune.]... The answer is that we are mainly concerned with ideal
theory: the account of the well- ordered society of justice as fairness.^44http://www.ebook3000.com