The Nature of Political Theory

132 The Nature of Political Theory

upon intuitive or naturalistic moral beliefs. For Walzer’s (or David Miller’s) pluralist
account, Rawls’ idea of primary goods does not fit with the idea of different spheres.
Both Rawls and Barry, for Walzer, are insufficiently aware and sensitive to the diversity
of particularistic goods. Walzer clearly sees no universal external rational foundations
for ethics or the good life. John Rawls’ ‘original position’, Ronald Dworkin’s ‘insurance
game’ or Bruce Ackerman’s ‘perfect technology of justice’, and the like, cannot redeem
the world by abstract theory, since they are all suspect procedures from the start. We
do not need external theoretical foundations for a practical life, rather we draw upon
the complex and diverse interpretations within spheres or form of life.^25 However,
for Walzer’s critics, there is altogether too much relativity of meanings within his
spheres. There also seems no clear way of criticizing or objecting to certain social
structures, such as a caste system. Although Walzer denies it, he seems to undermine
the possibility for social criticism. His theory also seems to be in immanent danger of
becoming a descriptive sociology of spheres.

Conclusion

The bulk of the justice debate (outlined in this chapter) has been situated within
a broad analytical frame of argument, whose roots lie within earlier ordinary lan-
guage and essential contestability argument. Virtually all the above arguments would
claim to be rigorously philosophical, in a self-conscious analytical mode (understood
as rigorous and finely-honed attention to language, logic, and concepts, combined
with moral seriousness). However, from the 1970s, the essential contestability and
ordinary language forms of argument were subtly remodulated within broader norm-
ative justificatory accounts. With the normative restored to pre-eminence, essential
contestability theory and conceptual analysis became the background ‘philosoph-
ical rigour’ component within justificatory arguments. Linguistically-based essential
contestability argument already contained the belief that there must be, within polit-
ical and moral concepts, some core element, some commonly accepted ‘exemplar’
or family resemblance, which allows debates to become intelligible and meaningful.
Without this core, arguments would collapse into relativism and incommensurability.
If this latter dimension of the concept is emphasized, then, it follows that one key
element of any conceptual analysismustentail finding and detailing the contents of
this core component. Consequently, what one finds in most theories of justice (or
equality) is the distinction between the conception of justice or equality and concepts
of justice or equality. Further, one also stumbles on the claim that that there are
deep consensual universalist, if very thin, intuitions about morality and justice, to
which theories of justice refer or approximate. In addition, there is the contention
that reason (or reasonableness) itself contains potentially deep normative resources
and implicit logical entailments. ‘Reasonable’ essentially entails ‘followable by all’.
Justice can thus be defined as treating like cases alike, which is seen as synonym-
ous with reason and universalizability. Justice is therefore seen to be premised upon
the reasonable, widely shared intuitions and values, which can be developed and