Rawls and Perfectionism

Abstract An important and influential feature of John Rawls’s vision of liberalism is its anti-perfectionism. Anti-perfectionist liberalism holds that the state should not seek to promote any particular ideal of the good life or human flourishing. This is in contrast to perfectionism, which holds that it is permissible and perhaps even required for the state to seek to promote sound ideals of the good life through laws and policies such as public funding of the arts. In this chapter, the author first charts the anti-perfectionist strand within Rawls’s liberalism across A Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, and Justice as Fairness. The author then critically examines the main reasons Rawls gives for rejecting perfectionism—namely, that it jeopardizes individual liberty, that claims about the good life are controversial within modern pluralistic societies, and that a perfectionist state is analogous in some sense to a religious state. Suitably sophisticated forms of perfectionism—those in which a perfectionist principle is constrained by principles of freedom and equality and public justification—can, the author contends, overcome Rawls’s objections.