The quest for recognition and the demands of social justice: a defense of Rawls' liberalism

The question that this text aims to evaluate is the extent to which two objections addressed against liberalism create difficulties for the Rawlsian version of this theory. The first objection says that the parties responsible for choosing the principles of justice are too individualistic and that their practical reasoning is largely instrumental. The second asserts that the Rawlsian method of justifying justice through principles undermines the priority of his Kantian formalism by assuming a substantive commitment to a particular conception of the good. These two criticisms support the more general claim that liberal theories do not adequately capture the demands of social justice. Nonetheless, I defend the thesis that these objections fail at least in relation to Rawls' liberalism since they seem to be based on a misunderstanding of his proposal. With regard to the first objection, I try to show that Honneth and Anderson (2005) seem to be mistaken in the reconstruction of Rawls' ideal of person insofar as they disregard the development of the idea of moral personality in his theory. With regard to the second, I seek to argue that Honneth's (1991) objection may be a problem for liberalism but not for that defended by Rawls.