Thread by @BMStudebaker

A short🧵on Rawls:

For Rawls, democratic equality requires something like his principle of distributive justice. But to ‘select among’ principles, we need to ‘take the idea’ ‘of citizens as free and equal’ ‘seriously’...

The principles which do this are ‘those that would be selected by the citizens themselves when fairly represented as free and equal'
They are not necessarily the principles that Rawls himself prefers. This means that Rawls is not politically committed to the principles he prefers

It also means that a great deal hinges on what counts as "fairly represented as free and equal"

This is a series of abstractions that sound nice but can themselves be understood in many different ways, both alone & together

Rawlsianism invites you to get heavily absorbed with defining these terms. Justice, fairness, representation, freedom, equality

This moves you into a series of linguistic fights that take you further and further from real politics

These are fights you aren't equipped to win

You aren't equipped to win these fights because, in practice, contemporary political philosophy is itself a kind of culture industry. The conceptualizations of the terms that tend to prevail are the ones that receive institutional support, from markets, unis, NGOs

And the more you try to win these fights, the more you find yourself arguing in academic journals with other academics. You stop talking to ordinary people, and so your understandings of these terms become steadily more estranged from ordinary usage

This has been the practical effect of Rawlsianism - to create an impression among political philosophers that they are doing politics when they have actually been depoliticized

It's very, very quietist