In his preface, Robert S. Taylor proclaims that this book “has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment.” He aims to show that the most promising version of John Rawls's political theory, contrary to Rawls's interpretation of his own work, presents that theory as part of a comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Taylor pursues this ambitious goal in three steps, each of which corresponds to a part of the book: 1) He articulates general affinities between Rawls's political theory and Kant's normative theory; 2) he interprets and develops Rawlsian political theory as a subdomain of Kantian normative theory; and 3) he attempts to show that Rawls's alternative understanding of his political theory is inadequate.
The second part of Reconstructing Rawls, where Taylor presents his positive view, is the longest and by far the most significant. It is of considerable interest even apart from the book's challenge to Rawls. Perhaps most creative is a Kantian conception of the person involving three stages of progressively more concrete forms of autonomy. The first, familiar from Kant, is the will's “independence … from alien causes” and “self-legislative capacity” (pp. 64–66). The second stage is “creative self-authorship” when forming a conception of the good and pursuing a plan of life, such as setting personal goals and meeting norms of deliberative rationality (pp. 66–69). The third is self-realization in the style of John Stuart Mill, namely, the full development of valuable capacities (pp. 69–72). Taylor uses these forms of autonomy to build increasingly concrete claims about the good, by analogy to Rawls's four-stage sequence for building increasingly concrete claims about justice; at each stage, the results of construction at previous stages are provisionally fixed and used to guide deliberation (pp. 90–100). Taylor hypothesizes—plausibly but speculatively, as he acknowledges—that actual human moral development follows this sequence in reverse order (pp. 100–103).
Taylor deploys these creative ideas to bolster and develop Rawlsian claims. Particularly noteworthy is Taylor's plausible use of Rawls's conception of the person to support the revisionist claim that political liberty takes priority over civil liberty (pp. 130–44) and the nonrevisionist claim that civil liberty takes priority over economic goods (pp. 164–70). I also commend his use of Rawls's Aristotelian Principle in conjunction with his conception of the person to support the priority of opportunities over other economic goods (pp. 175–81).
The creativity and interest of Taylor's positive proposals are, unfortunately, not matched by full appreciation of the motivations underlying Rawls's position. Taylor repeatedly overstates the significance of outcomes in Rawls's theory, and this undermines both his criticisms of Rawls and the compatibility of his positive project with Rawls's motivations. For example, Taylor sees Rawls's difference principle as luck-egalitarian in spirit, as “an attempt to compensate for certain unchosen and consequently undeserved natural inequalities” (p. 193). But for Rawls, distributive principles constitute the fellow–citizen relationship, and outcomes are significant only insofar as citizens' understandings of expected outcomes partly define this relationship. The function of a conception of justice is to enunciate social conditions where reasonableness (sincere cooperation with others) congrues with rationality (formulating a conception of the good and executing a plan of life in light of that conception). This explains the centrality, at all stages of Rawls's career, of a conception's stability: This congruence problem arises in each successive generation, and so only a stable conception of distributive justice fulfills its function with success.
At various points, Taylor fails to appreciate how deeply this orientation figures in Rawls's thinking. Taylor worries, for example, that Rawls's case for the priority of the equal liberties fails to rule out trading off political liberties for economic goods “even with the attendant reduction in social stability” (p. 129; Taylor's emphasis). But given the function of justice, this problem cannot arise. Rawls's principles are in the service of stable cooperation, and so are never to be satisfied at the expense of stability as he understands it. The only claims that can defeat stability even in principle are pretheoretical convictions about fairness.
Similarly, Taylor dismisses Rawls's stability-based argument for the difference principle as “by its nature a secondary defense” whose “plausibility hinges entirely on that of the primary defense” in terms of reciprocity (p. 225 n; Taylor's emphasis). Taylor is correct that an argument from stability is incomplete unless supplemented with claims about reciprocity. But this does not show that such arguments are secondary, since the same is true of arguments from reciprocity until these are supplemented with claims about stability. Unlike reciprocity arguments, stability arguments include empirical claims about what citizens characteristically experience as reciprocal and, hence, characteristically perpetuate from one generation to the next.
Relatedly, Taylor often accuses Rawls of a mistake he calls the “inference fallacy” (pp. 129, 154, 157, 159, 163), a label unfortunately combining vagueness with redundancy. This mistake is to infer the lexical priority of a consideration from its great instrumental import. The attribution of this mistake underlies the putative inability of Rawls's view to vindicate the normative priority of the right over the good, which is in turn crucial for motivating a more Kantian reconstruction of justice as fairness.
Taylor attributes this mistake to Rawls because he sees lexical priority of one principle to another as tantamount to claiming that it is “infinitely worse” (p. 144) to sacrifice satisfaction of the first for the sake of the second. But this is misleading, given Rawls's understanding of the function of justice. To reconcile citizens' reasonableness with their rationality, a conception of distributive justice must be simple enough for them to understand, and must deploy a currency public enough to accurately assess. Only within constraints like these does a principle take lexical priority over another; there is no independent characterization of some outcomes as worse than others, much less infinitely worse. Rawls relies instead on the claim that over generations, given human limits, departure from the lexical priorities he posits inhibits publicity or stability more than it enhances reciprocity. (The sheer number of attributions of this fallacy calls into question its fidelity to Rawls's reasoning. But Taylor is nothing if not confident, characterizing Rawls's defenses of the difference principle as a “cascade of failures” [p. 215]. This irreverence is tolerable, conjoined as it is with clear admiration for Rawls's work, but no doubt some will react negatively.)
The third part of the book is an attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of Rawls's later views. Taylor's conclusion is plausible, but the argument here is largely unpersuasive, and once again the culprit is a failure to appreciate Rawls's stability and publicity requirements. Much of the third part consists in articulating partially comprehensive doctrines taken from contemporary American political culture (such as “bourgeois competitive-individualism” [p. 254] and “romantic liberalism” [p. 270], and arguing that there are no public grounds sufficient to bring advocates of these positions into an overlapping consensus on justice as fairness.
While there is considerable interest in the doctrines Taylor identifies, his argument does not sufficiently engage Rawls's motivations. Overlapping consensus is not common ground among presently existing doctrines. If overlapping consensus on justice as fairness is possible, future citizens who grow up with justice as fairness will adopt doctrines they see as compatible for the right reasons with that conception. To the extent that the doctrines Taylor surveys manifestly contradict justice as fairness, Rawls's needed claim is that they will tend to lose adherents the closer society comes to realizing justice as fairness. This is an empirical claim, and may be false, but surveying contemporary views provides at best partial and indirect evidence against it.
Taylor displays considerable insight into Rawls's theory, and his Kantian reconstruction of justice as fairness is novel and significant. But whatever its merits, the view does not satisfy Rawls's ambition of enunciating social conditions in which citizens experience the exercise of rationality as congruent with sincere cooperation. Taylor's reconstruction of justice as fairness thus departs much more from Rawls's motivations than he acknowledges. His proposals are of great interest, worthy of discussion in competition with Rawls's. Adjudicating that competition requires more resources, however, than are provided in this volume.
