A Study On The Stability In Rawls’ Theory Of Justice

As the term is generally used in discourse about politics, stability plays animportant role in political philosophy rather than moral philosophy. In order to span thisflaw, Rawls emphasizes the stability for the right reasons. According to Rawls, whenyou talk about the concept of justice, you are not merely to come up with a theory ofjustice; you also have to point out how the theory that you are establishing can generateits own support, why the society based on the theory will continue to endure indefinitely.In other words, stability argument contains moral stability and social stability.Rawls’ moral stability argument aims to show that citizens, growing up in a justand well-ordered sociey, can be motivated to have a normally effective desire that act asprinciples of justice. There are two problems to deal with here. First, given naturalhuman propensities, how do people come to care about justice to begin with? Andsecond, why should they care about it sufficiently so that they have reason tosubordinate pursuit of their ends to requirements of justice?As to the first problem, appealing to his own psychological laws of developmentpsychology, Rawls maintains that children growing up in a society that waswell-ordered according to two principles of justice would come to have a sense ofjustice that incorporated them.As to the second problem, Rawls formally defines a person’s good as thesuccessful implementation of a rational plan. But owing to the multiple aims andcommitments that people care about, there exits conflicts among people in using natural resources and social resources. Principles of justice, by contrast, as a consquence of thecondition of finality, are regulative, the desire to act upon them is satisfied only to theextent that it is likewise regulative with respect to other desires. But what warrantsmaking the capacity for justice supremely regulative of all people’s pursuits?Conjoining the publicity, the Aristotelian principle and humanistic hypothesis, we canidentify the fundamental arguments for this question.Firstly, publicity plays an indispensable part in the theory of justice as fairness.Fairness itself denotes that mutual acknowledgement of principles which forms the realimportant of the language of social contract Rawls has used to articulate his conceptionof justice. Stability obtains when the public recognition of principles’ realization by thesocial system tends to bring about the corresponding sense of justice.Secondly, the Aristotelian principle says basically that we desire to exercise ourhigher capacities and want to engage in complex and demanding activities, whichcalling on a larger repertoire of more intricate and subtle discrimination, for their ownsake so long as they are within our reach. Rawls’ main contention is that, assuming theAristotelian principle characterizes human nature，then a plan of life is rational for aperson only if it takes this principle into account. The capacity for a sense of justice,which involves an ability to understand, apply, and act on and from requirements ofjustice, is among our higher capacities. This capacity admits of complex developmentand refinement. Consequently, it’s rational for each to develop it as part of our plan oflife. Finally, Rawls adopts Kant’s position, that persons are, by their nature, free, equaland rational beings. The nature of free, equal and rational beings is their moralpersonality which is in effect the capacities including a capacity for a sense of justice aswell as a capacity for a conception of the good. So, the desire to act in ways that expressone’s nature as a free, equal and rational being is practically speaking the same desire asthe desire to act upon principles of justice acceptable from an original position ofequality.Rawls’ social stability is raised to test the feasibility of a just and well-orderedsociety of justice as fairness. Facing the fact of reasonable pluralism, it is unrealistic toexpect that citizens in a well-ordered society will all agree on the intrinic good of justice.As a result, Rawls transforms the justice as fairness which is a part of a comprehensivemoral doctrine into a political conception. Only in this way, can the various kinds ofreasonable comprehensive doctrines have a consensus. This accounts for Rawls’development of the idea of overlapping consensus and public reason central to politicalliberalism.While Rawls present the idea of overlapping consensus entirely as a response tothe question of how a modern constitutional democratic society could be stable giventhe fact of reasonable pluralism. The idea of public reason, as a norm of politicaljustification, answers the question of how Rawls derives a norm of political conductfrom a clam about how democratic institutions could, ideally, be stable in the right way.There exists injustice inevitably in any kind of regime. As a special case of the constitutional democratic society, the Civil Disobedience plays a great role inmaintaining the stability of the constitutional democratic society. Through the CivilDisobedience, Rawls confirms that the constitutional democratic society based on thejustice as fairness which acts as a political conception of justice can endure indefinitely.