MATTHEW SCHERERdiscernment, we find in Rawls’s prose the passive voice, demonstrative sentences, myriad
simple formulations, and the careful arrangement of subsections. Abjuring the fine, rare,
challenging, creative, and counterintuitive in language (and concept), such prose has the
cumulative effect of accentuating the propriety of its author’s conclusions, which, the
author insists, carry ‘‘their full force’’ in themselves, and whose force depends only upon
the author’s ‘‘simplifying devices’’ to clear the obscurity that might impede it. Rawls
claims for his prose, then, what Aristotle identified as the power of the best ‘‘arguments
suitable to the case,’’ and he disavows both the role his character plays in shading these
arguments and the role the emotional responses produced in the reader play in condition-
ing his or her reactions to the argument. It is the very lack of apparent audacity in his
argumentation, however, that allows these disavowed modes of persuasion to find their
way into a reading of his text, producing its subtle and distinctive powers of fascination.
The manner in which Rawls disqualifies moral perfectionism from playing a role in
his own theory provides an excellent example of how his character functions to produce
conviction. In Rawls’s taxonomy, perfectionism is a subclass of the larger group of teleo-
logical doctrines, which include utilitarianisms and communitarianisms (of Aristotelian
or other stripe), against which Rawls distinguishes deontological theories, including his
own. Rawls argues against perfectionism at the point where he distinguishes theories of
the right from theories of the good and declares the primacy of the former. This argument
has touched off decades of intramural controversy among Anglo-American political theo-
rists: it is of paramount importance, then, for Rawls to establish that the capacity for a
‘‘sense of justice,’’ or one’s ‘‘liability’’ to suffer guilt in the face of principles, conceived as
an inherently human capacity, is a more appropriate basis for moral worth than any of
the excellences that a doctrine of perfectionism asks one to achieve. The position Rawls
takes is not striking in itself: it is merely a modest reformulation of the argument, familiar
from Kantian moral philosophy, that one’s rational nature constitutes one as a moral
agent and qualifies one for moral consideration. What is interesting, however, is how he
takes it.
Although there are well-tried arguments for taking the capacity to reason to be the
sole basis for moral consideration, when Rawls works his way down to brass tacks, the
character conjured by his prose carries more weight than his arguments strictly conceived.
At a decisive moment in ‘‘The Sense of Justice,’’ Rawls demurs on the level of proposi-
tional argument, writing that he ‘‘cannot discuss here the propriety of this [competing,
perfectionist] assumption,’’ and offering in place of such a discussion his assessment that
‘‘it suffices to say’’ what he needs to say.^39 Rawls tends to refer potential points of conten-
tion to arguments developed elsewhere, allowing the larger edifice’s coherence to bear the
burden of proof for its individual points. At this moment in ‘‘The Sense of Justice,’’
however, rather than being referred to a larger project, an argument for selecting the
capacity for reason over the contending bases for moral consideration is deferred indefi-
nitely. How is this gesture made plausible?
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