Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science

by adminPolitical Theory

Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science

Language: English

Pages: 264

ISBN: 0268023719

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science, Paul Clements develops a new, morally grounded model of political and social analysis as a critique of and improvement on both neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. What if practical reason is based not only on interests and ideas of the good, as these theories have it, but also on principles and sentiments of right? The answer, Clements argues, requires a radical reorientation of social science from the idea of interests to the idea of social justice.

According to Clements, systematic weaknesses in neoclassical economics and rational choice theory are due to their limited model of choice. According to such theories in the utilitarian tradition, all our practical decisions aim to maximize the satisfaction of our interests. These neo-utilitarian approaches focus on how we promote our interests, but Clements argues, our ideas of right, cognitively represented in principles, contribute independently and no less fundamentally to our practical decisions.
 
The most significant challenge to utilitarianism in the last half century is found in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, in which Rawls builds on Kant's concept of practical reason. Clements extends Rawls's moral theory and his critique of utilitarianism by arguing for social analysis based on the Kantian and Rawlsian model of choice. To illustrate the explanatory power of his model, he presents three detailed case studies: a program analysis of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, a political economy analysis of the causes of poverty in the Indian state of Bihar, and a problem-based analysis of the ethics and politics of climate change. He concludes by exploring the broad implications of social analysis grounded in a concept of social justice.
 
“Paul Clements’s Rawlsian Political Analysis mounts an important intervention into the philosophy of the social sciences, challenging the tired fact/value, empirical/normative binaries that continue to impoverish social analysis. His insistence that social analysis must engage both facts and norms, the empirical and the normative, the good and the right, interest and principle—and that empirical social scientists must engage constructively on questions of autonomy and social justice—is noble and ultimately essential if social science is to justify its place in the years to come.” —Fonna Forman-Barzilai, University of California, San Diego

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These agencies should aim to maximize their impacts subject to their resource constraints (and without violating ethical prohibitions). Rawlsian analysis adds a second spectrum of impacts to those a neoutilitarian program analysis would recognize. While neoutilitarians measure and count up gains such as in income, health, and security, Rawlsian analysts also take account of changes in principles in favor of autonomy and social justice, such as when members of a previously excluded group are.

But the demands of production and reproduction impose constraints on the range of value principles that a society can sustain overall. A counterculture that is not engaged in the mainstream productive scheme must nevertheless find a way to subsist from it. But even within the productive scheme, maintaining a trait as an object of esteem is an ongoing task. Since the definition of such traits is constantly in flux, and the supply of cultural esteem, although highly elastic, is limited, Honneth.

Difference principle, part of Rawls’s second principle of justice, which states that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage.40 Since all members of this ideal society benefit from one another’s natural endowments and economic accomplishments, citizens are likely to gain a sense of civic friendship and social solidarity.41 Rawls’s and Friedman’s programs both require the protection of the basic liberties—conscience,.

Spent from $1.71 to $2.62 to get a dollar of benefits to participants, while infrastructure programs spent $1.38.51 It appears that a dollar of subsidy leads to about a dollar of additional consumption by Grameen Bank borrowers. When we consider, in addition, the Bank’s declining subsidy and expanding client base, it appears that economic returns from subsidies to the Bank have been significantly greater than the subsidies themselves. Taking into account noneconomic as well as economic impacts,.

10 killed], Arwal [April 19, 1986; 23 killed], Kansara [July 8, 1986; 11 killed], and Darmia [October 10, 1986; 11 killed]. Roughly one caste-cum-class carnage has been perpetrated here every four months over the last nine years.”50 Thakur states that there were twice as many fatalities from caste conflicts in Bihar in the 1990s as in the 1980s,51 and in 1999, Human Rights Watch made Bihar a centerpiece of its major report on India’s caste violence. In a state with a population of one hundred.

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