Congruence and the Good of Justice

Abstract

One of Rawls's guiding aims in the development and revision of his work has been to show how a well-ordered society of justice as fairness is realistically possible. Rawls thinks establishing the feasibility, or “stability,” of a conception of justice is essential to its justification. My aim is to discuss the role and import of Rawls's stability argument. To do so, I will concentrate primarily on the second part of Rawls's discussion of stability in Theory of Justice , the argument for the “congruence of the right and the good.” This argument particularly exhibits Rawls's indebtedness to Kant in the justification of his view. After discussing the purpose of congruence (in Sections I and II), I outline in detail what the argument is (III and IV), emphasizing the role of the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness. Then in Section V, I discuss how problems with the Kantian congruence argument led Rawls to political liberalism. STABILITY AND CONGRUENCE: OUTLINE OF ISSUES Rawls’s congruence argument has been widely neglected in discussions of his work. Reasons for this neglect are several. First there is sheer exhaustion. The congruence argument begins in Part III of Theory of Justice ( TJ ), is developed for over 200 pages, and culminates (in Section 86) at the end of a very long book. Second, there is Rawls’s uncharacteristic lack of clarity in setting out the congruence argument: it is interrupted and intertwined with other arguments Rawls simultaneously develops. Finally, there is the feeling among some of Rawls’s main commentators that the argument is a failure.