A Study On Rawls' Theory Of Equality From The Perspective Of Marx's Theory Of Equality

In the 17 th and 18 th centuries,due to the victory of the western bourgeois revolution and with the development of society,people's political rights were maintained when the feudal aristocratic hierarchy was gradually destroyed,but the inequality in the distribution of wealth was increasingly prominent.The contradiction between freedom and equality advocated by the revolutionary was gradually revealed,and the concept of equal value had more economic meaning.How to distribute wealth and interests fairly has become a practical problem put forward in the times.How to decide between individual freedom and economic equality has become an important part of Western Political Philosophy in the past 100 years.John Rawls intends to take his idea of justice as fairness to reconcile the contradiction between freedom and equality.His core idea is: The basic goods of society,including freedom and opportunity,income and wealth,and self-esteem,must be equally distributed,unless the unequal distribution will benefit everyone.The turning point in Rawls' exposition is to show that in order to achieve equal treatment of people,it is necessary to eliminate those inequalities that damage some people,when not all aspects of equality can be guaranteed.In short,if a certain form of inequality can guarantee the interests of all people,can benefit the social inequality of individual talent,or can assure some people's initial share,it can be accepted and allowed.Otherwise,this inequality is not allowed,if it encroaches on some people's fair share.Rawls decides whether an inequality is allowed or not based on the sacrifice or guarantee of the least beneficiary's interests in society.But according to this principle,there may be the conflicts between all kinds of allocated goods.Therefore,Rawls divides the general idea into three parts,and then sorts them according to the principle of “lexical order”,giving systematic guidance between conflicts that can't be provided by intuitionism:in line with the corresponding sequence,equality of fundamental freedoms should take precedence over equality of opportunities,equality of opportunities should take precedence over equality of economic resources,and the former should not be sacrificed in order to promote the latter.It is true that there is a widely-recognized basis on the priority assumption and demand of equal distribution of civil and politicalrights.Rawls' equality claim is characterized by the fact that,in addition to the basic requirements of equal distribution of freedom and opportunity,he pays special attention to the fair distribution of economic resources,such as income and wealth,of the least benefited or the most disadvantaged in the society,which is obviously demonstrated in his “difference principle ”,Rawls called his own concept of equality democratic equality.To sum up,Rawls advocated the principle of justice to guide the distribution of rights and obligations in the basic social system.The core of this principle should be equality.He believed that justice always means equality,inequality should and can be eliminated.It is said that Rawls put equality on the agenda of political philosophy.He made egalitarianism a moral stand accepted and acquiesced by almost all the people.He ended the dominance of utilitarian teleology over the whole western practical philosophy,including political philosophy,legal philosophy and moral philosophy in a century and a half.Robert Nozick,Rawls' critic,showed respect for Rawls and deemed that Rawls integrated many enlightening ideas into a delicate and charming whole and political philosophers must either work within the theoretical framework of Rawls or explain the reasons for not doing so.On the basis of criticizing the current social arrangement,Rawls expounds the goal of “realistic Utopia”.Accordingly,Karl Marx,another great philosopher,deeply criticized the real society and thought that compared with the current society,the world can be different and better.As far as Marx is concerned,although he did not launch a detailed academic discussion on equality,he did keep to the value of equality,when expounding different theories,such as laboring,human and social issues.He discussed fully on the equality of rights at different historical levels in the primary and advanced stages of capitalism and communism,and made the dialectical analysis of the paradox of equality based on the logic of capital in modern times,has elucidated rich and profound equality thoughts with unique inspiration and transcendence.As for issues of the equality in the society,Marx's theory focuses on the domain of ownership;The theme of Rawls' theory is the basic structure of society.Marx is the critic outside the system and Rawls is the reformer inside the system.Marx regards equality as the result of the historical process and Rawls presupposes equality as the premise of theoretical construction.Marx's theory of equality is a revolutionarytransformation of the former concept of equality,especially that of the bourgeoisie,which provides ideological guidance for the working class to oppose the false equality of capitalism and pursue the true equality of communism;Rawls' theory is the ideological source of promoting the welfare policy of western countries,striving for the rights of the least beneficiaries and realizing social equity and justice.When Rawls' theory of equality is analyzed deeply from the perspective of Marx's theory of equality,the connotation of equality theory presented by the two is different.Compared with Rawls' theory of equality of which the limitation is inherent in capitalist value system,the superiority and transcendence of Marx's theory of equality are obvious.Equality is required in a harmonious society,and the rich and profound contents of the theories advocated by the two are of great significance for us to understand,think about and deal with the practical problems of socialist equality construction,such as the gap between the rich and the poor,distribution justice and so on.Meanwhile,the theoretical approach of this paper also provides and enriches the perspective of understanding and demonstrating the superiority of Marx's equality theory.According to the context of empiricism in the history of philosophy,this paper explores the theoretical origin of Rawls' equality thought.In the second chapter,the elements of the general equality theory are analyzed by using the method of analysis,and in the fourth and the sixth chapter,the elements of Rawls' and Marx's theories of equality are analyzed,according to the analysis framework of the five elements,including subject,environment,system,restriction and standard,showing the logical composition and movement of the two equality theories,and then in the fifth and seventh chapters,Rawls' and Marx's theories of equality are respectively put into the real history,and the theoretical logic is restored in the history to complete the reappearance of historical reality.The eighth chapter makes a comparative study of Rawls' and Marx's theories of equality under the analysis framework of the general elements of equality theory,and then shows the characteristics,the transcendence of Marx's equality theory and the limitation of Rawls' equality theory.