DISCUSSION NOTEBEYOND A STRICTLY POLITICAL LIBERALISM?
CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ABBEYBY AKIRA INOUEJOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHYDISCUSSION NOTE | MARCH 2008
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JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY | DISCUSSION NOTEBEYOND A STRICTLY POLITICAL LIBERALISM? CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ABBEY
Akira Inoue

Beyond a Strictly Political Liberalism?
Critical Response to Abbey*Akira InoueIN HER RECENT ARTICLE “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism?” Ruth Abbey attempts to show that, despite his best efforts,
John Rawls’ political liberalism ultimately fails to accommodate
feminist concerns for injustices that occur within the family.1 She suggeststhat if we are to address injustices of the familial kind, liberalism must beconceived in comprehensive, not political, terms. This paper argues thatAbbey is mistaken in these claims, for a strictly political liberalism canaccommodate feminist concerns so long as political liberalism is understood in accordance with Rawls’ accounts of the private/public distinctionand political autonomy.
Abbey’s argument is quite simple: if liberalism is to confront injustices within the family, it must be conceived (at least partly) in comprehensive terms. In support of this claim, she argues that genuine autonomy
cannot be assured if justice as fairness is strictly political. More precisely,
she examines whether a sufficient degree of autonomy can be exercised by
women in the domestic sphere under the principles of political justice, and,in noting that it cannot, concludes that political justice will not ensure thatwomen bear basic rights and freedoms.
A problem with this contention appears almost immediately: Abbey
dismisses Rawls’ public/private (and political/non-political) distinction.
What Abbey is doing for her purposes is to show how no domestic domainor sphere is immune from the principles of justice.2 But elsewhere she notes
that, for Rawls, a “domain” or a “sphere of life” is not “something alreadygiven apart from political conceptions of justice . . . but rather is simply theresult, or upshot, of how the principles of political justice are applied,directly to the basic structure and indirectly to the associations within it.”3
In other words, Rawls’ liberalism does not regard the public and privatespheres (or the political and non-political domains) as “two separate,disconnected spaces, each governed solely by its own distinct principles.”4
True, in the scheme of political liberalism, the principles of justice are not*Very special thanks must go to Jensen Sass, who offered valuable suggestions andcomments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted to Bob Goodin, Masakazu Matsumoto and Toshiko Shibata for improving this paper. Research for this paper
was supported by the JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research.

Ruth Abbey, “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism? Justice as Fairness, Gender,and Families,” Political Theory 35, no. 1 (2007): 5-28.
2Ibid., pp. 6-7, 15, 19, 20-21.
3John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in The Laws of Peoples (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 161; and his Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed.
Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 166.
See also Abbey, “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism,” pp. 17-18.
4Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p. 160; and his Justice as Fairness, p. 166.
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JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY | DISCUSSION NOTEBEYOND A STRICTLY POLITICAL LIBERALISM? CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ABBEY
Akira Inoue

directly applicable to the internal life of families; this may leave room forsome families to be organized according to a traditional division of labor.5
But this does not mean that whatever happens in the sphere of private life
should be immune from political justice. So long as women are not treatedas free and equal in the so-called domestic sphere, justice as fairness
pushes their conditions in a direction of gender equality.
But this begs the question of what exactly is required for persons tobe free and equal members of society under political justice. Rawls argues
that justice as fairness views citizens as free and equal persons, insofar as
they are capable of engaging in social cooperation to maintain an enduring
and well-ordered society, and insofar as they are capable of leading acomplete life in that society. The former depends on a person’s capacity
for a sense of justice, which entails “the capacity to understand, to apply,and to act from . . . the principles of political justice that specify the fairterms of social cooperation.” The latter ability is related to a person’s“capacity to have, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception ofgood.”6 People are thus regarded as equal only if they have to a requisite
minimum degree the moral power to engage in social cooperation, andthey are regarded as free only if they have the moral power to have aconception of good, which normally involves their having deep commitments to communities and associations. The possession of the two
moral powers, Rawls believes, is a necessary condition for people to beregarded as free and equal citizens. This condition must be reflected
through the application of the principles of justice as fairness – in particular, the first principle of justice7 – to the basic structure of society
which, among other things, includes the family. This is why equal basic
rights must be protected as inalienable and indefeasible within the family.
Unlike many other feminist liberals, Abbey rightly acknowledges that“Rawls is applying his first principle of justice directly to the family.”8
Indeed, she admits that neither communities nor associations are permitted to violate the basic rights of women (and children) under politicaljustice, since those rights are secured by the first principle of justice. But
Abbey suggests that Rawls’ argument must extend beyond a strictly political liberalism if women are to enjoy genuine autonomy in the domestic
sphere. To support this claim, she notes that the political conception ofjustice allows for “some traditional gendered division of labor withinfamilies . . . provided it is fully voluntary and does not result from or lead toRawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p. 161. Of course, Rawls argues underwhat conditions the division in question is permitted. See my discussion below.
6Rawls, Justice as Fairness, pp. 18-19. See also John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 19.
7
The first principle of political justice is: “Each person has the same indefeasible claim toa fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with thesame scheme of liberties for all.” Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p. 42; and his Political Liberalism,
p. 5.
8Abbey, “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism?” p. 18.
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JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY | DISCUSSION NOTEBEYOND A STRICTLY POLITICAL LIBERALISM? CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ABBEY
Akira Inoue

injustice.”9 Abbey thinks that Rawls’ argument for the voluntariness ofaccepting the division of labor stands in tension with his argument for theprotection of women as bearers of basic rights and freedoms only at thelevel of political liberalism. She thus concludes that Rawls cannot help
advocating a comprehensive liberalism in terms of full autonomy.
Since Abbey understands women’s autonomy in the domestic spherein terms of whether they voluntarily accept a certain form of family, we
should consider what Rawls means by (full) voluntariness. While Rawls
admits that the determination of voluntary action is a difficult undertaking,he contends that voluntariness should be understood in terms of reasonableness: whether an action is voluntary or not falls back upon whether theaction is taken under conditions of a fair kind.10 The implication of this isthat voluntariness does not depend on whether a person’s choice is predetermined by uncontrollable factors, genetic or environmental. In describing the nature of non-public reason, Rawls actually argues that thevoluntary acceptance of certain comprehensive views is not entirely freefrom prior commitments and attachments to them, rather, “regarded aswithin our political competence specified by basic constitutional rights andliberties.”11 Note that such rights and liberties are exactly those guaranteedby the first principle of justice as it appears in political liberalism. So if
voluntariness implies more than this, then it should be understood not in
the sense of reasonableness, but in a more robust sense than Rawls could
support.
As I see it, Abbey tends to interpret autonomy, and so voluntariness,in just such a robust sense.12 In arguing against Rawls’ analogical comparison of the family with other associations, for instance, she suggests asimilarity between family membership and membership in society: “ourfirst membership of families is not a consensual act.”13 She continues:[a]t a more distant level, even individuals who may be determined to estrange
themselves from their biological families carry with them the genetic constitution
and propensities toward certain illnesses and so on that derive from membership ofRawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” p. 161, emphasis added.
Ibid., p. 162 n. 68.
11Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 222.
12Abbey observes that Rawls’ conception of autonomy is close to what Marilyn Friedman calls a content-neutral conception of autonomy. And she claims, “this is still a formof autonomy that should operate in the domestic sphere, and as such it pushes justice as
fairness beyond the bounds of a strictly political doctrine.” Abbey, “Back toward aComprehensive Liberalism?” p. 22. But this criticism of Rawls’ project in terms ofautonomy is strange, since full autonomy in political liberalism can be seen as a content-neutral form of autonomy, which requires agents only to possess certain autonomy-competencies and external conditions to foster such competencies, not to act consistently with a comprehensive value of autonomy. For the notion of content-neutralautonomy, see Marilyn Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2003), pp. 19-25, 189-92. See also Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 77-81.
13Abbey, “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism?” p. 13.
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JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY | DISCUSSION NOTEBEYOND A STRICTLY POLITICAL LIBERALISM? CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ABBEY
Akira Inouea particular biological family. So, entry to one’s family of origin is never voluntary
for children, and escaping completely either one’s family of origin or a family one
has chosen is not always possible for adults.14

This shows that by voluntariness Abbey means something far more thanhaving the sense of reasonableness; on her argument, making the surrounding conditions fair is not enough for a person’s action to be voluntary.
This may be the primary reason for her supporting a philosophical andthus (at least partly) comprehensive view of autonomy.
Would such a view of autonomy be plausible for the sake of diffusing
the feminist concerns for familial injustices in liberalism? Probably not,because this robust view would compel us to face a plethora of troublesome issues concerning voluntariness, not in the least the question of how
it is possible to act in a way that is not at some level socially or geneticallydetermined. While this undertaking might not be completely hopeless, it
seems unnecessary if our primary objective is to incorporate the equalityof women in the family into liberalism. What is needed is, I believe, toincrease justice as fairness for women in all domains, and that is precisely
the effect of Rawls’ political account of liberalism. Given that his accountfrees us from the traditional view that the private sphere is exempted frompolitical justice, Rawls’ theory promotes gender equality within the familysuch that all women are protected from any violation of their basic rights
and freedoms.
Some feminist liberals may view Rawlsian measures as insufficient tosurmount the deeply entrenched barriers to gender equality. 15 Indeed,
there can be no denying the fact that the barriers to gender equality standtall. But before we turn our attention to developing a more comprehensive
or radical project, it is worth noting two points. First, the extent to which
gender equality is actually promoted under justice as fairness is ultimately
an empirical issue: we are not in a position to determine whether the barriers to gender equality would actually be overcome in Rawls’ well-orderedsociety. Second, and more important, Rawls’ justice-as-fairness constraints(imposed by the first principle of political justice upon all forms of family)
are so stringent that most of the injustices about which many feminists areconcerned could not persist. And this is what Abbey espouses as a virtueof Rawls’ liberalism: “it is hard to see how a belief in a gender hierarchy
mandated by nature could survive the requirement that one’s spouse befree to divorce; have equal opportunities in the labor market; be free tovote; enjoy the liberty of conscience; be regarded as a free, equal, andindependent citizen; and so on.”16
Ibid., p. 14.
See, for example, Susan Moller Okin, “Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender,” Ethics
105, no. 3 (1994): 23-43, pp. 35-37; S. A. Lloyd, “Situation a Feminist Criticism of John
Rawls’ Political Liberalism,” Loyola LA Law Review 28 (1995): 1319-44, pp. 1332-33; andMartha C. Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed.
Samuel Freeman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 504-6.
16
See Abbey, “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism?” p. 19.
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JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY | DISCUSSION NOTEBEYOND A STRICTLY POLITICAL LIBERALISM? CRITICAL RESPONSE TO ABBEY
Akira Inoue

So my conclusion is that, were Abbey not beholden to the twodogmas as regards the familial justice – the domain-based understandingof the public/private (and political/non-political) distinction and ametaphysical view of autonomy – then she would surely support a strictly
political liberalism.
Akira Inoue
Advanced Social and International Studies
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
University of Tokyo
akichan@m7.gyao.ne.jp5