9 - The Stability or Fragility of Justice

Summary

Rawls assesses conceptions of justice in terms of how stable a society governed by them would be. I describe how Rawls presents this view of stability differently in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. I then argue that G.A. Cohen’s objections to this view largely fail insofar as we grant Rawls the claim that the task of principles of justice is to provide fair terms of cooperation. But I then develop an objection to this claim by drawing on Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s treatment of the circumstances of justice. These circumstances are more capacious than Rawls allows. Nonetheless, contra Cohen, we can retain one of the key insights of Rawls’s project, which is that justice is fundamentally about realizing a certain kind of relationship rather than realizing a particular distribution of goods. I sketch a Kantian conception of the relevant relationship and consider the role stability plays in it.