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B. Outputs
When all is said and done, theories of justice are supposed to offer guidance to
flesh and blood decision-makers. There is an implicitly directive nature to moral and
political theorizing. But the way accounts direct real-time political action could
hardly be different. At one extreme is the self-effacing consequentialist, whose
guidance may be quite indirect. Henry Sidgwick famously suggested that it is
probably best, from a utilitarian point of view, that most people are not utilitarians.
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Since it makes no fundamental demands on the citizen’s mental life,
consequentialism may prefer a political community of committed Kantians or
Aristotelians. How it expects citizens to deliberate about collective arrangements is
up for grabs. Citizens should hold whatever political beliefs – and reason about them
in whatever way – that optimizes privileged outcomes. To a certain extent they must
be deluded about the grounds of their own right actions. This view divorces the truth
about justice from its practice in a morally counterintuitive way. This is not yet an
objection, but only an observation about a common misgiving.
At the other end of the spectrum are Kantian-inspired conceptions of justice.
Trumpeting the value of publicity, they deny that there should be any difference
between principles of regulation and principles of appraisal. No compromises are
made between what is workable and true, what is stable and justified. The liberal
view alleges, often without empirical credentials, that its principles will pass a variety
of motivational and cognitive desiderata. Justice as fairness, for example, claims to
offer principles that are workable in public policy deliberation. To be sure, Rawls
spends much of the third part of his treatise articulating a moral psychology meant
to show us how the principles of justice might be stable – even self-perpetuating. His
argument invokes more than philosophical analysis, but a necessarily untested
32
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913).;
Henry Sidgwick and Marcus George Singer, Essays on Ethics and Method (Oxford ; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
Convention