Rawls’s Justification Model for Ethics: What Exactly Justifies the Model?

This article is a defense of John Rawls against recent criticism, ironically my own, though it is also a critique insofar as it addresses a problem that Rawls never does. The original charges were that Rawls’s decision procedure for ethics does not justify his own moral principles, especially those making up his liberal conception of justice, and that the underlying problem may well keep the decision procedure from justifying any moral principles whatsoever, or at least any normatively useful ones. These difficulties are manifested in the work of Rawls as the dogmatism of championing a distinctive conception of justice, a liberal one as he himself calls it, through a justification model that comes across as too objective to permit such a bias and too universal to support any substantive conclusions at all. The solution contemplated here is to position the decision procedure as a justification model responsive to moral progress, and thereby equally open to all moral input, thus removing the inconsistency between the inherent universalism of the design and the distinctive character of the outcome, including the moral principles Rawls himself recommends, so long as they are consistent with moral progress.