When Justice fails

It is often a conceptual error, perhaps even a fallacy of sorts, to think that philosophy moves history. The idea that we can manage away social and economic inequalities in the coming age of oil shortages is idealistic in the extreme. It may be that social and economic inequalities cannot be "arranged" away. In that case we go to a different place. Our society is here, on account of its failure to produce substantial guarantees of basic human rights, opportunities, and powers under a scheme of distributive justice, no longer to be called or thought of as "well-ordered". It is dysfunctional.

It is not necessarily a shortcoming of Rawls' theory that it should so rapidly become out of tune with a society set within the coming oil shortages. It is a testament to the fact that Rawls' theory, for all of its defects, articulates a kind of middle class space of security in which our civil institutions have operated. Without that safety net in the society, terrible divisions may arise. The division between the haves and have nots will here grow out of the bounds of a reasonable theory of distributive justice. What happens then? Rawls statements about the order of societies in his Law of Peoples may shed some classificatory light upon the kind of society that may emerge in what may be a catastrophe scenario.

In the Law of Peoples, Rawls writes, "I propose 5 types of domestic societies. The first is reasonable liberal peoples; the second, decent peoples....third, outlaw states and fourth, societies burdened by unfavorable conditions....finally, fifth, we have societies that are benevolent absolutisms: they honor human rights; but, because their members are denied a meaningful role in making political decisions, they are not well-ordered." (LP, p. 4)

To be clear, the society of reasonable liberal peoples need not be entirely free of substantial inequalities in income and opportunities. Walking down Wall Street at the height of the Internet Bubble one could still see homeless under cardboard boxes. The question here is whether the basic structure of society is stable. The basic structure for Rawls is rather robust and, therefore, in order to maintain it, the background culture needs also to be reasonably stable. The basic structure includes: