Allen W. Wood on A Theory of Justice

“John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed everything. It showed not only that ethical theory could be treated with analytical sophistication and applied to issues of vital social concern but also that Kantian ideas were indispensable to doing this in the right way. Rawls’s thought never stagnated, however. He continued reflecting on how the Kantian liberal tradition can best be articulated in the late twentieth century.”

“Rawls’s interpretation of Kant himself as a “constructivist” in moral theory has been very influential in the way Kant has been interpreted by his sympathizers and categorized by his critics. Dissenting from this, I regard the term “Kantian constructivism in ethics” as an oxymoron, whose interest ought to lie exclusively in its shock value. Kant might be accurately described as a ‘constructivist’ in the philosophy of mathematics, but he is no constructivist in ethics. When understood as an interpretive claim about Kantian ethics, “Kantian constructivism” gets Kant’s entire conception of ethical theory, as well as his conception of autonomy and his position in metaethics (or the metaphysics of value), basically wrong.”

“John Rawls is well known for contrasting Kantian with utilitarian ethics by claiming that utilitarianism does not take seriously enough the differences between persons (Rawls, TJ 27). This way of looking at the contrast makes Kantian ethics appear “individualistic” by comparison with utilitarianism, though this is highly misleading. A better way to look at the contrast is to point out that Kantian ethics places a higher priority on human community – it values the conditions of rational cooperation among persons, and their sharing of common ends, more than it does the aggregate welfare of individuals considered in isolation. Hence, the point that Kantian ethics really has in mind in taking seriously the differences between persons is that this is necessary in order to develop a conception of ethical norms based on a true idea of human community (instead of reducing the common deliberation of different people to the deliberation of a single individual agent).”