Bleached Foundations 135the nature of liberalism, the argument about justice looks in immanent danger, once
again, of collapsing into an essential contestability debate.
Like ordinary language and essential contestability, the foundations of justice the-
ory are still vehemently anti-metaphysical, although, in my reading, they simply
replace a comprehensive with an immanent metaphysics. There is also an impli-
cit and resonant acknowledgement of the importance of empirical political science,
although the justificatory arguments have moved well beyond the ‘second order’
position of earlier conceptualist theory. For Rawls, ‘justice should be so far as pos-
sible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines’ (Rawls in
Strong (ed.) 1992: 95). Justice isnotmetaphysical, although it is, nonetheless, deeply
and immanently founded. There is also an underlying confidence in the univer-
sality of reason and philosophical method. The term ‘constructivism’ often arises
here, especially in neo-Kantian thinkers. In essence, it is a form of foundational
self-recovery kit. Constructivism implies, in the words of one recent neo-Kantian
writer, that one reasons ‘with all possible solidity fromavailablebeginnings, using
available and followable methods to reach attainable and sustainable conclusions for
relevant audiences’ (O’Neill 1996: 63). Constructivism does not simply invent, it
rather builds—virtually hermeneutically—upon what is present in reason. Reason
coordinates in the sense of providing a negative internal authority. It must allow for a
variety of agents—all human agents in fact—and be able to guide action and discrim-
inate between categories. In other words, reason must be truly universal—implying
‘holding for all cases’. This notion of reason is neither purely formalistic nor ideal-
ized. It apparently neither assumes any metaphysical conceptions of persons, reason
or action, nor roots itself in any particular communities. Yet, for its proponents,
although abstract, this conception of reason still begins with the ‘gritty realities of
human life’ (O’Neill 1996: 61). It tries to draw out, from the principles embodied
in the ordinary processes of reasoning, a normative pattern. The end result may be
abstract, but it is not an idealized view of what ought to be. It is rather based on an
existing practical reason attainable by all.
In conclusion, for its votaries, the foundations of twentieth-century justice theory
remain both secure and of universal import. However, as most proponents would
admit, they are also minimalist or bleached foundations, usually premised on a
very abstracted notion of reason. Thus, in a number of thinkers we find rationality,
reason, or reasonableness taking on an extra heavy immanent foundational load,
as in the writings of Rawls, Gauthier, O’Neill, Barry, Okin, Scanlon, or Gewirth,
amongst many others. In fact, some variation of immanent foundational universal
reason, or instrumental rationality, standardly fills the void left by the apparent
demise of comprehensive metaphysics. However, it is worth noting here that the
notion of reason is itself deeply contested, even between, for example, Gauthier’s
‘instrumentalist’ rational choice conception, the utilitarian consequentialist and neo-
Kantian impartialist conceptions. In sum, one can describe the bulk of the theories
of justice developed in the last three decades of the twentieth century as embodying
a bleached immanent foundational minimalism. It is this position which generated
a wave of renewed criticism from the 1980s.