DISQUS

Another great post! And very interesting to me because I am writing my senior thesis on this very topic.

My total baseless conjecture is that Rawls's students and some colleagues, who were far to Rawls's left politically, slowly drew him further left toward a more euro-style social democrat point of view.

Very interesting post. First, I think Rawls actually moved even further to the left than social democracy. By the time he published Justice as Fairness, Rawls say justice as fairness is a competitor to "capitalism." I don't have the book on me so I can't give you the page number, but he seriously says something as direct as that: capitalism is inconsistent with justice as fairness, including the capitalisms of social democratic countries. The only social schemes consistent with justice as fairness are market socialism and a "property-owning democracy," though I've never been able to figure out what the latter means.

Second, I'm not convinced that Rawls was actually the model of intellectual humility. I don't doubt he was a humble and excellent man in many respects, but it seems that he found it very psychologically difficult to deal with criticism of his work (he admits as much in one of the rare interviews he gave in his life) and perhaps even discouraged such criticism among his students. At least, this is what I've heard from two of his students who I know.

It is not necessarily the case that Tomasi's conclusions follow. Everything hinges on whether neutrality of aim or neutrality of effect is adopted. To recap, neutrality of aim says that the state should not do anything that intentionally promotes comprehensive doctrines. Neutrality of effect says that the state should not do anything that promotes one comprehensive doctrine over another, intentional or not. Rawls endorses only neutrality of aim rather than neutrality of effect. Thus if Rawls is correct, he may be able to resist Tomasi's conclusions, as Tomasi's argument hinges on political liberals adopting neutrality effect.

Tomasi's argument is more fruitfully read as "If political liberals adopt neutrality of effect, what would follow?"