Boyer

Is an Open Society a Just Society?:Popper and Rawls1

ALAIN BOYERUniversité de Paris IV (Sorbonne), France

A caste system, for example, tends to divide society into separatebiological populations, while an open society encourages the widestgenetic diversity.

John Rawls2

A Theory of Justice, § 17, p. 107

[S]ocial change can be arrested only by a rigid caste system.

Karl PopperThe Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I, chapter 6, § VI

ABSTRACT In this paper the author addresses the problem: Are KarlPopper’s and John Rawls’s liberal philosophies contradictory orcomplementary? He argues that Rawlsian methodology is ratherPopperian, and in some respects Popper’s political philosophy is close to thatof Rawls. Unlike Rawls, Popper’s incursion into moral philosophy is notequivalent to a systematic theory, but both philosophers were concerned withequalitarianism, democracy, justice, and personalism. They share a concernfor the idea of a plan of life. Rawls is somewhat naïve on the innocuousnessof the institutions of a just society; but he is concerned with the promotion of‘democracy of owners’, not a Welfare Leviathan. Popper was more sensitiveto Hayekian arguments against ‘constructivism’. In Rawls’s theory, libertyis ‘lexically’ prior to social justice: this is a strong affirmation of liberalism.The young Popper was a liberal social democrat. Still, even the later Popperwas not a libertarian; his so-called ‘negative utilitarianism’ has something todo with the intuitive appeal of Rawls’s ‘difference principle’.

INTRODUCTION

There is only one piece of textual evidence that Karl Popper read A Theory ofJustice3 (TJ), and only one that John Rawls read The Open Society (OS).4 Myproblem is: Are these liberal political philosophies contradictory orcomplementary? My answer is that they are more or less complementary. This

Learning for Democracy, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005 7

has some consequences for the status of liberalism vis à vis its traditionalcriticisms, from communitarianism to republicanism. I would argue thatRawlsian methodology is rather Popperian, and also that in some respectsPopper’s moral and political philosophy can be interpreted as more or lessclose to that of Rawls, with some restrictions. But it is necessarily lessRawlsian than Rawlsians could wish, because it is more general.

First, the process of reflexive equilibrium, that Rawls borrowed fromNelson Goodman (1955),5 can be shown to have been anticipated by Popper(1979[1932]). Rawls methodology is neither foundationalist nor akin to any‘analytic meta-philosophy’, but is a substantial, fallibilist and evenfalsificationist one, the empirical basis being replaced by our intuitive,normative, basic judgements (‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong’ –Lincoln quoted by Rawls, 2001, § 10, p. 29). Rawls’s criticism of utilitarianismis also ‘methodologically individualist’ and ‘personalist’.

Second, Popper’s incursion into moral philosophy is dominated by theproblem of freedom versus totalitarianism, and by his criticism of the‘philosophies of history’, problems not touched on by Rawls who regardedthem, perhaps wrongly, as already behind us. (Rawlsians should readPopper.) But they were both greatly concerned with the idea ofequalitarianism, justice, and personalism. They shared a concern for the ideaof a ‘plan of life’, with perhaps an important difference.

Third, Popper’s thesis of ‘the ambivalence of institutions’ is remarkable.Wasn’t Rawls a bit naïve about the innocuousness of the coercive institutions of a‘just society’ (in his sense of the term)? Perhaps not so much, as he was quiteconcerned about the necessity of a ‘sense of justice’ (see what Popper would call‘traditions’), and by the promotion not of a Welfare Leviathan but of a ‘democracyof owners’. Clearly, Popper was more sensitive than Rawls to Hayekian argumentsagainst ‘constructivism’ and state bureaucracy. Still, note that in Rawls’s theoryequal liberty is ‘lexically’ prior to social justice, and that this is a strong affirmationof liberalism. The young Popper was a liberal social democrat of sorts. But eventhe later Popper was not a libertarian, and his so-called ‘negative utilitarianism’ hassomething to do with the intuitive appeal of the ‘difference principle’. As aregulative ideal, that principle is not anti-Popperian in spirit.

JUSTIFICATION

This question seems to oppose Popper and Rawls: Is not the former famous(or infamous) for having proposed that we should eliminate the obsession withjustification? Guess as imaginatively as you can, and criticize your guessesthrough the analysis of their deductive consequences! Accept provisionally, asa good candidate to truth, what resists your best criticism (see, also, Miller,1994). Do not try to make your guesses inaccessible to criticism by searchingfor a so-called foundation of them. Justificationism is a dream, and a deceitfulone, a kind of religious quest for the absolute, for security and infallibility. Letit be so. Anyway, Rawls seems much more concerned with justification (TJ, §

8 Is an Open Society a Just Society?

87, ‘Concluding remarks on justification’, and also TJ, § 4). But if we read TJcarefully, we find that his conception is quite fallibilist: his reference being notPopper, but Quine. And it would be difficult to classify Quine as a‘foundationalist’ and an ‘infallibilist’. His epistemology is more classicallyempiricist, behaviouristic, naturalist and less realistic than Popper’s, for sure,but he was a staunch revisionist, even in logic (in principle). He even acceptedwhat he called ‘Popper’s negative methodology’, in relation to Hempel’sparadox (Quine, 1990, chapter 1, § 5, pp. 12-13).

Let me now quote a few sentences from TJ concerning justification: ‘Thequestion of justification is settled by working out a problem of deliberation’,‘Moral theory is Socratic’, ‘There is a definite if limited class of facts againstwhich conjectured principles can be checked, namely, our consideredjudgments in reflective equilibrium’, ‘Justification is argument addressed tothose who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds. Itpresumes a clash of views’. The similarities with Popper appear to me to bemore important than one would have thought. Do not quarrel about words!

Now, let me remind you how high a value Popper attached to impartiality.(The more or less Rawlsian philosopher, Brian Barry, had chosen a quotationfrom OS as the motto of his book Justice as Impartiality, 1995). And theconstruction of a procedure of justification of the principles of justice, accordingto Rawls, aims to produce impartiality as a result of the conditions of an idealmoral discussion, without presuming that the individuals in the original position,who have to prefer a theory of justice to others, are themselves of a perfectimpartial mind: objectivity, so to speak, is not a personal, but an institutionalaffair, as it was according to Popper (‘the institutional theory of objectivity and ofprogress’ – OS, II, chapter 23; 1961[1957], § 32).

Rawls’s argument is as follows: As opposed to average utilitarianism,classical utilitarianism is not a decent principle of (individual) rationality, sowhy on earth should I care about the global welfare of society? In the verypeculiar situation of uncertainty that is represented by the ‘original position’,beneath the veil of ignorance (an impartiality producing device), averageutilitarianism has to be contested by sophisticated arguments, in favour of anot very popular principle of rationality, the maximim principle, so we shouldprefer Rawls’s principles to average utilitarianism. But, classical utilitarianismis in a much worse position: it is a non-starter. Being ‘pious’ with thephilosophical tradition, Rawls thought one cannot attribute to Bentham orSidgwick the crazy idea that it would be rational for a normal person, with a‘limited altruism’, to choose a society that maximizes the net balance of globalwelfare. That shows, as Rawls argued, that the classical utilitarian theorists’way of justifying their principle, as opposed to John Harsanyi’s, could notpossibly have been some sort of original position, but rather the Humean andSmithian idea of an altruist impartial spectator, in love or in sympathy withthe whole (‘conflation of persons into one’– TJ, § 30). Like Popper, Rawls hadnothing against love per se, but he rightly thought – again, like Popper – that


universal love is not to be demanded of individuals, and also that it cannotreplace critical deliberation, and compromises (OS, II, chapter 24, § III).Popper’s remarks on love and other passions, in chapter 24 of OS, II, have notbeen sufficiently acknowledged.

Incidentally, let me remark that Harsanyi was an opponent both of Rawlsand of Popper, and his achievements in expected utility theory and in welfaretheory are not insignificant, if only because he achieves a systematic view(including morals in decision theory – a thesis that Rawls himself eventuallyabandoned). Anyway, John Watkins once argued that Harsanyi was a ‘friendof Modus Ponens’, while Popperians (except in pure maths) are rather ‘ModusTollens’s friends’. I would propose that Rawls, compared to Harsanyi, was a‘Modus Tollens’s friend’ of sorts: he definitely rejected the idea that we haveaccess to a realm of axiomatic self-evident moral truths from which one candeduce all the true consequences of the principles. The human situation issimply not like that. For example, we have to introduce the (Humean) idea ofthe ‘circumstances of justice’ in our reasoning in the ‘original position’(something semi a priori, belonging perhaps to the Popperian ‘situationalanalysis’), as well as some anthropological or economical theory that has stoodup to tests: but these theories are conjectural, even if corroborated (theimportance, for instance, of incentives in economic life), and could bereplaced. Our conception of justice can therefore change. And we have to testour principles against our considered judgements.

Popper himself made the analogy, pointing out the difference:

The rational and imaginative analysis of the consequences of a moraltheory has a certain analogy in scientific method. For in science, too, wedo not accept an abstract theory because it is convincing in itself; werather decide to accept or reject it after we have investigated thoseconcrete and practical consequences which can be more directly testedby experiment. But there is a fundamental difference. In the case of ascientific theory, our decision depends upon the results of experiments.If these confirm the theory, we may accept it until we find a better one.If they contradict the theory, we reject it. But in the case of a moraltheory, we can only confront its consequences with our conscience. Andwhile the verdict of experiments does not depend upon ourselves, theverdict of our conscience does.

(Ibid., p. 233)

TRUTH

The first sentence of the first section of A Theory of Justice reads:

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems ofthought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected orrevised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficientand well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.


Rawls’s target is utilitarianism, as is shown unambiguously by thefollowing sentences, which are about the moral impossibility of the‘sacrifices’ imposed on a few, in the name of the spurious fact that they couldbe ‘outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many’. More onthis later. Let me remark that this objection to utilitarianism is similar to theone made by Popper with regard to Platonism (collectivism), as JeremyShearmur aptly remarked, following a suggestion by Popper (Shearmur,1996). Anyway, it seems clear that such a conception of truth does not departfrom Popper’s, even if it departs a bit from Quine’s, who was more of apragmatist, and that it is quite anti-relativist. Truth, like justice, has a‘lexical’ priority over all other epistemological qualities: no amount ofsimplicity or mathematical elegance could compensate for falsehood.6 Inpolitics, then, justice should be our main aim, as truth is in knowledge(according to Popperians). Popper himself suggested the same analogybetween truth and ‘rightness’ in an (insufficiently) famous addendum to OS(II, addendum 1, ‘Facts, standards, and truth’).

INTUITION

During the 1960s, intuition acquired a rather bad reputation in ethics. In1967, Philippa Foot wrote the following: ‘He would be a brave man who wouldassert, like Ross in the middle thirties, that “every ethical system admitsintuition at some point”’ (Foot, 1967, p. 2). In 1971, Rawls claimed to be justsuch a brave man; after discussing Ross, he wrote: ‘Any ethical view is boundto rely on intuition to some degree at many points’ (TJ, § 2, p. 7). Intuition isnecessary for testing moral principles, but also for building the ‘intuitivenotion’ of an ‘objective’ original position. Note that in arguing that point,Rawls quoted Henri Poincaré (in French): ‘Il nous faut une faculté qui nousfasse voir le but de loin, et, cette faculté, c’est l’intuition’ (Poincaré,1970[1905], p. 36).7

In Objective Knowledge, in a chapter written in 1967, Popper describesquite nicely Brouwer‘s philosophy of intuitionism, and he ends his discussionwith a critical view of intuition in general:

Everything is welcome as a source of inspiration, including ‘intuition’,especially if it suggests new problems to us. But nothing is secure […]‘Intuition’ […] is largely the product of our cultural development, and ofour efforts in discursive thinking.

There is a give-and-take between construction, criticism, ‘intuition’, andeven tradition …

(Popper, 1979[1972], pp. 134-5, 137)

This last sentence must strike a serious reader of TJ as quasi Rawlsian(reflexive equilibrium). Rawls did not claim that intuition is per se infallibleand that it is sufficient for erecting theories: each ‘well considered judgement’


is presented as a conjecture about our (educated) ‘sense of justice’, and thereader has to check by himself, so to speak, whether he agrees, after criticaldeliberation, with those conjectures proposed by the author. One has tomeditate with him, in a Cartesian way. Rawls’s main aim was to produce abetter (approximate) theory of social justice than utilitarianism(s), thanperfectionism (a word already used by Popper in OS, I, chapter 9), and alsobetter than libertarianism (‘the system of natural liberty’), in exhibiting thediverse ways in which those conceptions are contradicted by at least one of ourmoral well-considered ‘fixed points’. In the other direction, the argument hegave against intuitionism (in ethics) is not that it would be a ‘teleological’theory (Ross’s theory is not), but that it leads us astray when we have tochoose, or when we prefer one institution rather than another: intuitionismdenies that one can find a ‘priority rule’ in the domain of distributive justice.

Rawls’s challenge, then, was to build a non-utilitarian theory that is able togive us reasons to prefer, after public deliberation, the better reform we havebeen able, fallibly, to imagine. The theory of justice would claim to be, inPopperian terms, at least one part of a methodology of ‘piecemeal socialengineering’, which can only be used as a trial and error method. (Rawls,unfortunately, preferred in general to stay at the level of the ‘ideal theory’.) Weare confronted with social problems and we need regulative ideas to guide ourway (presumably, a ‘third way’ – see Tom Settle, 1976). In the methodology ofempirical sciences, it is necessary to have a real sense of the ‘intuitivejudgements’ of the best scientists, and a provisional consensus on statementsdescribing empirical intuitions (in a Kantian sense) is necessary to stop theinfinite regress of ‘Fries’s trilemma’ (Popper, 1959, chapter 5). But nothingstops even a seemingly unassailable empirical statement from being rationallyexamined in its contention to be absolutely true, if one has a good criticalargument against it. The same is true in morals. Of course, we are not readyto abandon some very basic judgements: Auschwitz is bad, as surely as theCartesian Cogito is true (I cannot doubt that I exist): but even the Cogito canbe rationally discussed, not really about its truth but about its status, itsconsequences, etc. And Rawls showed that things are more difficult with otherjudgements, for example about (excessive) wealth. Why are we against it? Isit a manifestation of envy? This deserves critical scrutiny.

THE QUESTION OF THE ‘LINGUISTIC TURN’

There is no question that Popper was an opponent of the so-called ‘linguisticphilosophy’, once founded on the ‘linguistic turn’ (Wittgenstein, Schlick). Iwould dare to suggest that Popper’s polemic against Wittgenstein’s followers,little different in spirit from that of Russell, was much too polemical (as werehis views on Hegel), and that partly explains the surprisingly low level ofconsideration for Popper’s achievements in academic philosophy. Rawls wasof a different persuasion. But he was also reacting against ‘linguisticphilosophy’ in ethics and political philosophy, and in this I can only remark


that he eventually won. Most of the current discussions in moral and politicalphilosophy are now about questions of things (‘substantial’), not of words.Rawls’s conception of definition is quite nominalistic, like that of Popper.There is nothing essentialist about Rawls’s questioning. Let me quote asignificant assertion:

The analysis of moral concepts and the a priori, however traditionallyunderstood, is too slender a basis. […] Note […] the extraordinarydeepening of our understanding of the meaning and justification ofstatements in logic and mathematics made possible by developmentssince Frege and Cantor. A knowledge of the fundamental structures oflogic and set theory has transformed the philosophy of these subjects ina way that conceptual analysis and linguistic investigations never could.One has only to observe the effect of the division of theories into thosewhich are decidable and complete, undecidable yet complete, and neithercomplete nor decidable.

(TJ, § 9, pp. 51-2]

This is Popperian in spirit, and I would imagine that a Popperian such asDavid Miller would be rather happy with it. Rawls then applied that analogyto ‘moral conceptions’. For those who continue to regard Rawls’s theory as‘purely procedural’ and as a formal ‘conceptual analysis’, note this: ‘I wish thento stress the central place of the study of our substantive moral conceptions’(TJ, § 9, p. 45). (Incidentally, I would argue that Apel’s and Habermas’stheories are more ‘formal’ than those of Rawls and Popper.)

Rawls could nevertheless appear to be more ‘positivist’ than Popper was(that is, not much). For the latter, the demarcation criterion was not at all ameaning criterion: if a falsifiable theory has non-falsifiable consequences,these cannot be meaningless (on the other hand, verifiable statements haveonly verifiable consequences, but verificationism is patently false); in whichcase, some metaphysical statements, particularly some ‘all-and-somestatements’, are meaningful metaphysical statements, neither analytical norempirical (John Watkins), like the principle of determinism, or its negation.And the regulative role of metaphysics is quite important for Popper(‘metaphysical programmes of research’). Rawls seemed to be of a morepositivistic mind, because he famously claimed that his theory was only‘political, not metaphysical’ (Rawls, 1999, chapter 18, ‘Justice as fairness:political, not metaphysical’). (But for Popper, too, methodology is in principlenot logically linked with any metaphysical thesis.)

Anyway, some people read only the titles of the papers: in fact, Rawls didnot claim that metaphysics is meaningless or without any interest, andcertainly not that ‘politics’ should be morally neutral(!), but that some of themost important metaphysical issues, like materialism versus spiritualism,atheism versus theism, determinism versus indeterminism, are not relevantfor the setting up of a moral consensus in a pluralistic (open) society. Themetaphysical debates are legitimate, but they are not to be confused with those


about the principles of a well-ordered society, on which we should strive for‘an overlapping consensus’. The problematic but attractive idea proposed byRawls is that an ‘ideal of the person’ (or of the citizen) can be commonly heldbetween people with very different metaphysical and religious backgrounds(‘tolerance’, ‘fact of pluralism’). This seems to me to be true, even if it needscareful examination. In France we speak of ‘laïcité’. The state should beneutral on religious matters but not on basic moral questions (equality of menand women, possibility of ‘apostasy’). But, for example, a realistic cumindeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics (Popper) has nothing todo with the principles of morality that everyone should accept and assume thatothers will accept and conform to.

Popper correctly argued that traditions (or ‘social norms’), in addition tolaws, are necessary if the social world is to avoid chaos; they constitute anetwork of mutual expectations which permit anticipations and action(Popper, 1972[1963], chapter 4). But a metaphysics of what there is, deeply,in the world, is independent of that social network. Kant would perhaps nothave accepted this, if we note the extent to which his theories of liberty and ofa moral character are linked with his non-neutral ‘transcendental idealism’(see Boyer, 2001a). (Incidentally, neither Popper nor Rawls, despite theircommon admiration for Kant, found the latter particularly appealing.) Ofcourse, Popper would have agreed with Rawls: in an open society,metaphysical, epistemological and complex moral debates are among themain sources of vitality in a society. But each metaphysical thesis is legitimate,and none of them has to be included in the principles of liberalism which aresupposed to be consistent. See Popper’s too short but important ‘theory ofliberal discussion’ in Conjectures and Refutations (1972[1963], chapter 17, §IV), or his paper ‘The myth of the framework’ (Popper, 1994, chapter 2). Evenwhat appears to be consensual can be discussed (see Boyer, 1995). Theremust, however, be an agreement about the rejection of (unnecessary) violence,and a general and definite preference for peaceful and rational modes ofdealing with conflict in a democracy (public and open critical discussions,rules, compromise – ‘from swords to words’).

INDIVIDUALISM

The moral commitment in Popper’s Open Society is overwhelming. Hischaracterizations of humanitarianism, equality, justice and cosmopolitanismshould be given serious consideration. As in Rawls, the most important conceptis that of a person, free, equal to others, and inseparable from his or her rights.

One of the methodological cum moral points of the OS is ‘individualism’ or‘personalism’. From a methodological point of view, the idea is not, as JosephAgassi pointed out in an important paper (1960), to deny ‘existence’ to every kindof collective (including social systems of rules, institutions), but to deny that anynon-individual entity (history, state, nation, class, society) has any psychologicalcharacteristics of its own, such as views, interests, ends, preferences, rationality.


Methodological individualism is different from psychologism and pure ‘atomism’.It is, rather, a criticism of the collectivist fallacy, which consists in transferringindividual properties to collectives. Usually, that fallacy takes the form ofattributing to collectives a rational ‘behaviour’: if it is rational for individuals to do(to prefer) X, it is rational for a collective to do (to prefer) X. According to Rawls,utilitarianism is responsible for such a holistic fallacy. It transfers to the whole anacceptable principle of individual rationality, namely, the principle according towhich I should impartially sacrifice a minor part of my life (say, a limb, or a weekof holidays) for the sake of my overall welfare: not to do so is to give into a kind ofweakness of the will. But to treat society as an individual, able to ‘sacrifice’ a partof itself for the sake of the whole, is not to be ‘individualistic’ – it is immoral.Rawls concluded, as have Popperians, that ‘utilitarianism is not individualistic’(TJ, § 6, p. 29).

Like Popper, Rawls refused to conflate ‘individualism’ and ‘egoism’:Popper proposed to oppose the first to ‘collectivism’ and the second to‘altruism’. This clarification helped to reveal the existence of two otherimportant possibilities: ‘collectivist egoism’ (tribalism), and ‘individualisticaltruism’ (humanitarianism) (OS, I, chapter 6, p. 100).

SUFFERING

Were Popper and Rawls so greatly anti-utilitarian that they could simply beclassifiable as ‘moral Kantians’ (and therefore ‘anti-consequentialists’), as itseems they both wished to be regarded? Admittedly, they were both Kantianin their acceptance of the primacy of the idea of a person, to which rights areattributed, and which are not to be subject to bargaining. The very notion ofthe equal dignity of every human person, and the connected idea that oneshould never treat any person merely as a means to an end but always as anend in him- or herself, are typical ‘basic moral statements’ for both of them(Rawls, 1999, p. 167). But I would stress that their Kantianism is not pure.They were both much more concerned than Kant was with the problem of thepractical consequences of our acts and of our rules, in particular in terms ofempirical happiness – as are utilitarians, of course.

Let us say that ‘all of our conjectures should be true’ is some sort of anepistemological ideal. Popper never said that falsehood was a regulative ideal!Truth is. But the human (or Humean) situation is such that one cannotdefinitely establish (non-trivial) universal factual truths. Even were it true,scientists would still never be in a position to say: ‘The quest is ended!’ Andthat is a logical truth. Our sole method is to try to find contradictions in oursystem of expectations, and to do our best to eliminate them, in the hope ofapproaching nearer to the truth. This is also true of moral matters. Nobodyshould, from non-religious premises, come to the conclusion that ‘everybodyis happy’ is not a desirable state. But apart from a formal definition – such as,the completion of our (undetermined and changing) ‘plan of life’ (see later) –nobody is able to give an uncontroversial characterization of happiness, as


Kant noted. But the situation is not the same with unhappiness: the idea ofsuffering is easier to grasp than that of happiness. There is, as Popper said, anasymmetry. The existence of a moral consensus on the badness of Auschwitzis not, of course, in itself a controversial issue. Who could seriously imaginethat this moral fact is open to discussion? Charles Larmore would rightly saythat there are limits to our moral fallibilility (1987), whereas Popper wouldhave talked of (ultimate) ‘decisions’ of our conscience.

It seems to me that what has been called (somewhat mistakenly) Popper’s‘negative utilitarianism’ is not very different in intention from Rawls’sdifference principle: the intuition that governs that famous and controversialprinciple is nothing other than the idea that the moral point of view is not onethat takes account of all sorts of happiness, but is one centred on the ‘worst off’(that is, those experiencing the greatest difficulties in life). Popper’s criticismof utilitarianism seems to anticipate that of Rawls:

the Utilitarian formula ‘Maximize pleasure’ […] assumes, in principle, acontinuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain asnegative degrees of pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, paincannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man’s pain byanother man’s pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatestnumber, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount ofavoidable suffering for all; and, further, that unavoidable suffering –such as hunger in times of an unavoidable shortage of food – should bedistributed as equally as possible.

(OS, I, chapter 9, note 2).

And the following sentence seems to be more Rawlsian than utilitarian orNozickian:

a systematic fight against definite wrongs, against concrete injustices orexploitation, and avoidable suffering such as poverty or unemployment,is a very different thing from the attempt to realize a distant idealblueprint of society.

(Popper, 1961[1957], § 24, p. 91)

This relates to the next section of this article.

THE NOTION OF A PLAN OF LIFE

The notion of a plan of life is not unimportant in Rawls’s theory, as Popper,interested by the Lockean problem of personal identity, noted. Rawls borrowedthe notion from Josiah Royce: ‘an individual says who he is by describing hispurposes and causes, what he intends to do in his life’ (TJ, § 63, p. 408). Theplan determines someone’s conception of the good, and its rationality (to desireto be honest and to be rich by corrupt means is rather inconsistent). In the end,‘someone is happy when his plans are going well, his more important aspirationsbeing fulfilled, and he feels sure that his good fortune will endure’ (ibid., p. 409).(‘He feels sure’ is surely too strong). Anyway,


We must not imagine that a rational plan is a detailed blueprint for actionstretching over the whole course of life. It consists of a hierarchy ofplans, the more specific subplans being filled in at the appropriate time[…] Revisions and changes at the lower levels do not usually reverberatethrough the entire structure.

(Ibid., pp. 410, 411)

This point seems to have something to do with Duhem’s problem and theso-called ‘revision of beliefs’.

The notion occupies a strategic place in Rawls’s approach, if only because ithelps to understand in a psychologically plausible way the idea of a conceptionof what is good for a person, and because it clarifies the idea according to whichthe principles of justice forbid the completion of some plans of life. It has also todo with the (Aristotelian, Humboldtian and Millian) idea that to (try to) behappy is to (try to) realize one’s best dispositions, as one guesses they are.Institutions must encourage individuals (even the worst off) to formulate forthemselves a realistic plan of life (with regard to family, work, culture, sports,friends, possibly political activity), and not to be desperate about its (limited)propensity to be actualized (‘fair equality of chances’). Not to have any planwould be to lose one’s sense of self-respect, the most important of the ‘primarygoods’, and then give way to depression, self-abasement and, perhaps, suicide.The future should be open for all, as Popper would have it, not, or not only, in acosmological sense (‘the open universe’) but in a political liberal sense (cf. IsaiahBerlin). This is, basically, the memorable idea of an ‘open society’. An opensociety is the only positive way to approach that egalitarian situation, because itencourages the plurality and the inventiveness of different and complementary(but not unjust) plans of life, as in an orchestra, a Rawlsian analogy (TJ, § 79, and2001, § 21, p. 3) that Popper could not but have loved.

The American moral philosopher Charles Larmore has fiercely, and in asubtle manner, criticized the very notion of a plan of life (Larmore, 2004, pp.251-8). In a nutshell, his criticism is that, according to Rawls, a plan of life,even if our idea of it is ‘revisable’, is something fixed, something that one hasto ‘discover’, something given. According to Larmore, Rawls’s ‘plan of life’presupposes that a person’s good (the supposed object of a plan of life) issomething fixed, awaiting discovery, something that one can contemplate as akind of theory, as if one could see one’s life as a whole. But, Larmorecontinues, one cannot be ‘impartial’ about it as if we were outside ourselvesand not anchored in the present. He insists on the unpredictability of eventsthat unexpectedly and radically change one’s way of life (falling in love, likeJulien Sorel; having children, even if desired): ‘La vie qui serait la meilleurepour (l’individu) n’est pas encore définie, et c’est à mesure qu’il vit qu’elle vase définir.’ That is, in English: ‘The life that would be the best for the individualis not yet determined, and it will come to be determined only as he lives.’8

This seems to be an excellent argument, which also goes against the Sartreanidea of a (unique) ‘project’, for instance Baudelaire’s project (Sartre’s Flaubert is


much more complex, perhaps too complex). But I would propose that one couldperhaps reform the notion, without rejecting it completely. What I mentionedabout the absence of any plan of life for some very poor and unlucky peopleseems to me to indicate a prima facie plausibility of the notion. The pleasantand insistent ideas of children (‘I wish to be a fireman!’) show that there issomething deeply human in this capacity to project oneself into the future, evenif life will frustrate and betray most, but not all, of one’s projects. For example,Rawls and Popper became important philosophers, and Popper claimed to be a‘happy philosopher’. In contrast, some life plans are really bad (to live the life ofan SS officer, to be rich because one has exploited slaves). There is somethinglike an idea of ‘myself’ that includes an anticipation of what I should now like tobe, and this (vague) idea of myself is not entirely unstable: the ‘conversions’ inlife are rarely momentous events (recall St Paul, Augustine).

As was shown by Michael Bratman, the ideas of plan and subplan are veryuseful in a theory of action and intention (Bratman, 1987). ‘The plan of life’seems to be a very thick notion in comparison with the more modest idea ofmomentary plan(s), but this indicates that the idea of a plan of life has to bedeveloped. At every moment, each person will have a certain idea of himselfand his current projects; but although this idea will change, at any givenmoment the plan will not be entirely novel: I can recognize (as my own)choices I made in the past, some of which I now reject as bad. Self-criticism,problem-solving and disappointed expectations are the central tenets ofPopper’s anthropology. He would be the last philosopher to deny theimportance of unintended events, including some effects of one’s own actions.

I would argue for a Popperian pluralistic and dynamic view of the idea ofa plan of life, one that could perhaps deal with some of Larmore’s criticisms.Not only is our view of our plan of life revisable, as though it were an objectivetheory, but one can also treat it as such by, for example, discussing animportant personal decision with a close friend. The question has to do, asSartre would have said, with the choice of what kind of person you wish to be.One could argue that a plan of life is itself provisional and subject to changeand radical criticism (incidentally, something that often produces its ownanxiety).9 (And of course, it is only at the end of the life that one can ask tooneself if one has had a good life, as Solon argued against Cresus.) This seemsto be akin to what Popper argued in The Self and Its Brain:

In his in many ways very important book A Theory of Justice, John Rawlsintroduced the idea of a plan of life […] to characterize the purposes oraims which make of a man ‘a conscious, unified moral person’. I suggestthat this idea of a man-made World 3 plan of life may be somewhatmodified: it is not the unity of one unified and perhaps unchanging planof life which is needed to establish the unity of the self, but rather the factthat there is, behind every action taken, a plan, a set of expectations (orof theories), aims and preferences, which may develop and mature, andwhich at times, though infrequently, may even change radically, for


example under the impact of a new theoretical insight. It is thisdeveloping plan which – following Rawls – gives unity to the person, andwhich largely determines our moral character. […] It is the possession ofsuch a (changing) plan, or set of theories and preferences, which make ustranscend ourselves – that is to say, transcend our instinctive desires andinclinations (‘Neigungen’, as Kant called them).

The most widespread aim in such a plan of life is the personal task ofproviding for oneself and for one’s dependants. It may be described asthe most democratic of aims: remove it, and you make life meaninglessfor many. This does not mean there is no need for a Welfare State to helpthose who do not succeed in this. But even more important is that theWelfare State should not create unreasonable or insurmountabledifficulties for those who try to make this most natural and democratic oftasks a major part of their aims in life.

There is much heroism in human life: actions which are rational, butundertaken for aims which clash with our fears, our instincts for safetyand security.

(Popper and Eccles, 1977, § 42, pp. 145-6).

The idea of ‘a set of expectations, aims and preferences, which may developand mature’ seems to me to be preferable to the idea of a rather static, uniqueplan of life, determining the conception of the good for one person. In thatchapter, Popper argued that what is unique about humankind is our ability toproduce theories about ourselves as individuals, to be self-conscious, andparticularly to be aware of our death. He contrasted pure ‘programmes’ inanimals with the human capacity – thanks to the (social) language (World 3) –to add to our (plastic) programmed behaviours ‘plans’ that permit us totranscend ourselves, to dominate our basic instincts and to produce images ofourselves, though not necessarily exact ones (‘Man is a story-teller’, hefrequently said). In the Popperian world, where reasons can have a non-epiphenomenal causal role, events, discoveries and deliberations can changeyour (vague) plan of life, so that the ‘best life’ you aim to live is neverdetermined in advance, as Larmore argues against Rawls. But one has to havesome representation of the dynamic unity of a self (we ‘learn to be a self’, ibid.,§ 31, a self which is a process, a fire), such that even the others, relatives, judgesor historians, can more or less ‘understand’ (Verstehen) a person throughouthis entire life. Not all persons are real multiple selves (Elster, 1986).

A political analogy could be of some interest here: all ‘social engineering’is ‘the construction of social institutions according to plan’ (Popper,1961[1957], § 22, p. 73). Popper accepted the Hayekian idea, implicit in apassage of René Descartes quoted by both of them, that most of theinstitutions are ‘the result of the action of men but not of their design’(Ferguson, quoted by Hayek, 1967, chapter 6). But some institutions can bedesigned according to a plan of our own making (Hayek did not like that


concession to ‘constructivism’). And in that case, ‘the difference betweenUtopian and piecemeal social engineering turns out, in practice, to be adifference not so much in scale and scope as in caution and preparedness forunavoidable surprises’ (Popper, 1961[1957], § 21, p. 69).

A ‘plan of life’ could be a complex and varying set of problems, desires,expectations, values and rules (restraining the scope of the possible ends andmeans): some plans can be dogmatic (‘neurotic’) (Popper, 1972[1963], chapter1, § VI); some more critical (rational), and those are the ones that can progress.Nothing would be static in a Popperian concept of a plan of life. (I amconvinced that Rawls was more a ‘piecemeal’ reformer than a Utopian holist;but, contrary to Popper, he did not offer us a real methodology of reformism.)

The advice Popper gave to young scientists and philosophers couldperhaps be generalized:

to meet a problem, to see its beauty and to fall in love with it […] even ifyou do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, theexistence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficultproblem children for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to theend of your days.

(Popper, 1983, Preface [1956])

THE FRIEND AND THE FOE

Popper stresses the fact that emotions are important, but their role should becontrolled by reason: ‘Our “natural reaction” will be to divide mankind into thefriend and the foe’ (OS, II, chapter 24, p. 235).

This important insight seems to me not only directed particularly againstMarxists and nationalists, but also against Carl Schmitt’s ideas. And eventhough Rawls does not quote that important but controversial thinker (whoeventually became a Nazi), he was equally concerned with the idea of a societyas a system of competitive co-operation for mutual advantage, and not as adomain of pure conflict (war, class struggle, zero-sum games). This is directlylinked with the strong equalitarianism of both thinkers. Rawls’sequalitarianism is well known, but Popper’s was just as strong:

The adoption of an anti-equalitarian attitude in political life, i.e. in the fieldof problems concerned with the power of man over man, is just what Ishould call criminal. For it offers a justification of the attitude that differentcategories of people have different rights; that the master has the right toenslave the slave; that some men have the right to use others as their tools.

(OS, II, chapter 24, p. 236)

LIBERTY AND THE STATE

Clearly, with regard to political matters, Popper’s ideas evolved after 1945. InThe Open Society and Its Enemies he was a liberal social democrat of sorts(see Shearmur, 1996, and Hacohen, 2000). But in the 1950s he became more


conservative. This evolution is no doubt connected with Friedrich von Hayek’sinfluence, but that is not really a philosophical point. This evolution has to doalso with a progressive awareness of the problem of bureaucracy in themodern welfare states. From a Greek understanding of ‘democracy’ (orRoman ‘Res Publica’), it follows that one criterion of a democracy, as opposedto a ‘tyranny’, is the fact that magistrates have ‘to be accountable’: a negativepost hoc control (possibly reinforced by an a priori control). And the bigproblem with bureaucracy, as understood by Max Weber (according toPopper), is the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of the open control ofbureaucrats. This matter is quite serious, and it seems not to have been takensufficiently seriously by Rawls. But let us take a look at some underestimateddicta from the two philosophers.

First, even the mature Popper was not a libertarian:

There are ideological worshippers of the so-called ‘free market’ (towhich we naturally owe a great deal) who think that […] legislationlimiting market freedom is a dangerous step down the road to serfdom.

But that […] is ideological nonsense. Forty-six years ago in the firstedition of The Open Society and its Enemies, I have already shown that afree market can exist only within a legal order created and guaranteed bythe state.

(Popper, 1999, chapter 9: All life is problem solving [1991], p. 101)

The allusion to the famous book by Hayek is intriguing. It should not beunderstood as a rejection of Hayek’s main ideas. In 1992 Popper declaredthat his own OS took ‘a far smaller part than the books of my late friendFriedrich von Hayek, for example […] The Road to Serfdom’ in ‘underminingMarxism and the Soviet Empire’ (Popper, 1999, p. 155). In other words,Popper thought that the excellent Hayekian criticism of the planning ideologydoes not imply that any ‘legislation’ limiting market processes would be bad,for this would also be an ideology. The reference to OS seems to be to thefollowing passage:

Liberalism and state-interference are not opposed to each other. On thecontrary, any kind of freedom is clearly impossible unless it is guaranteedby the state […] the important and difficult question of the limitations offreedom cannot be solved by a cut and dried formula. And the fact thatthere will always be borderline cases must be welcomed, for without thestimulus of political problems and political struggles of this kind, thecitizen’s readiness to fight for their freedom would soon disappear, andwith it, their freedom. (Viewed in this light, the alleged clash betweenfreedom and security, that is, a security guaranteed by the state, turns outto be a chimera. For there is no freedom if is not secured by the state; andconversely, only a state which is controlled by the free citizens can offerthem any reasonable security at all.)

(OS, I, chapter 6, § VI, p. 111)


Incidentally, it should be remarked that Popper held more or less thesame view as Rawls about what one can now call ‘republicanism’: it would bequasi totalitarian to argue that the only good life is the ‘political life’ (‘civichumanism’), but it is quite important that the free citizens give someimportance to the control of their leaders and to the defence of justinstitutions (‘classical republicanism’) (Rawls, 1993, V, § 7). Aboutrepublicans, I would simply add that they adopt the same definition of libertythat Hayek (1960) did, but without mentioning him, and that this definition(‘not to be dominated’) comes from the Greeks, as Popper had also argued,and not only from the Romans, as the republicans claim.10 (Popper andRawls belong to the classical republican tradition that emerged with theAthenians.)

Many philosophers have sought an answer to the question: ‘What is theorigin of political obligation?’ Popper proposed to change the question to:‘What do we demand from a state?’ That seems to me to be rather similar toRawls’s question: ‘What should be the principles of the basic institutions ofsociety?’ But Popper never said that the state was unnecessary, only that itwas a ‘necessary evil’ – a reaction against Hegelianism. But he also laid downtwo important principles: (1) the Liberal Razor – the state’s powers should notbe multiplied beyond necessity; (2) the moral necessity of the state (a thesiswhich seems not to be entirely in harmony with the idea of ‘necessary evil’):

Those […] who think that every person should have a right to live, andthat every person should have a legal claim to be protected against thepower of the strong, will agree that we need a state that protects therights of all.

(Popper, 1972[1963], p. 350)11

This thesis of a limited but ‘protectionist’ state is substantial, and Rawlscould have accepted it.

JUSTICE

What do humanitarians call ‘justice’? Popper proposed the following:(a) an equal distribution of the burden of citizenship, i.e. of those

limitations of freedom which are necessary in social life; (b) equal treatmentof the citizens before the law, provided, of course, that (c) the laws showneither favour nor disfavour towards individual citizens or groups or classes;(d) impartiality of the courts of justice; and (e) an equal share in theadvantages (and not only in the burden) which membership of the state mayoffer to its citizens.

(OS, I, Chapter 6, § 1, p. 89)

A few pages later, Popper claimed that justice was ‘the impartial weighingof the contesting claims of the individuals’ (ibid., p. 106). In my opinion, notmuch can be said from a Rawlsian point of view against such a nicelyformulated statement (to be considered not as a verbal definition, but still as


a proposal about what should be our concern), and in which each word isimportant. The same holds true of this surprisingly similar sentence by Rawls:

Justice means essentially the elimination of arbitrary distinctions and theestablishment within the structure of a practice of a proper share,balance or equilibrium between competing claims.

(Rawls, 1999, p. 191)

Even the difference between the rational and the reasonable, so importantfor Rawls,12 had been anticipated by Popper: to be rational is to act accordingto one’s own analysis of the situation, to find a tentative solution that fits theproblem as seen by the agent (‘rationality principle’). The idea is morallyneutral. Besides, the ‘attitude of reasonableness’ is a moral one:

It is an attitude which tries as far as possible to transfer to the field ofopinions in general the two rules of every legal proceeding: first, that oneshould always hear both sides, and secondly, that one does not make agood judge if one is a party to the case.

(Popper, 1972[1963], p. 356)

It would take too long to compare in a systematic manner thesecharacterizations of justice with Rawls’s principles, which are more precise.Nothing is said, for instance, about a possible hierarchy of principles, which isthe most original contribution of Rawls’s TJ. But it seems to me that thenotions articulated clearly by Popper are sound, and could belong to theRawlsian ‘overlapping consensus’.

My contention is only that Popper would not have introduced thedifference principle in the common necessary postulates of a liberal society:discussions on desert, on the level of intervention of the state, on property, etc.are to be left to the normal political debate, his favourite system being abipartite one. If one regards (a bit mistakenly) Rawls as the chief advocate ofthe welfare state, and Hayek as one of his best critics, it could seem thatPopper is, in the end, more favourable to Hayek. His criticism of bureaucracyhas no equivalent in Rawls, except perhaps in one or two sentences. But Rawlswas certainly less concerned than Popper was by the problem of theinefficiency of bureaucracy, and of the possible unexpected effects ofseemingly ‘just’ laws.

WELFARE STATE AND LIBERALISM

One thing has not been sufficiently appreciated. Admittedly, in TJ, Rawlsseems somewhat unaware of the unintended consequences of human action,and specifically those of an important intervention of the state in the marketprocess. Rawls is perhaps insufficiently aware of the most important fact,called by Popper ‘the ambivalence of the institutions’ (Popper, 1972[1963],chapter 4). But both thinkers are very clear about the necessary role ofinstitutions, or ‘practices’ (Rawls), and that is another point they share.


Popper explained that only traditions can make the link between concretepersons and abstract institutions (ibid.), and one can remark that Rawlsinsisted on the great importance of the fact that persons in ‘just’ institutionsshould develop a moral sense of justice, for the institutions to be stable.

Anyway, with arguments not so different from Popper’s well-balancedcriticism of ‘paternalism’, Rawls later made it plain (2001, IV) that his ownideal was no more an omnipotent welfare state. But he criticized it with a moreequalitarian oriented idea that a welfare state is compatible with inequalitiescriticizable thanks to the difference principle (I regard the principles of justiceas critical regulative principles): inequalities that do nothing for the worse off,and leave these people at the mercy of the almighty paternalistic state. Anomnipotent even if benevolent welfare state does not ensure the capacity for allto develop a sense of responsibility and self-respect. In view of the fact that apure, free (laissez-faire) market and a planned economy are both clearly unjust,Rawls declares that the only positions that are defensible are ‘liberal socialism’(inspired by a suggestion from Mill13) and, his favourite, the ‘democracy ofowners’ (with a large distribution of private property over the whole society andan extension of deliberative democracy). Unfortunately, he is very brief aboutthat prospect, but I do not think Popper would have objected that it was, assuch, a bad, or a Utopian idea. The way towards that kind of society should notof course be authoritarian, but ‘piecemeal’ and made possible by incentives.The main idea, already expressed by Popper, is that an excessive concentrationof property is a danger for democracy itself.

Both philosophers are democrat political liberals, and they bothanticipated a liberal answer to the so-called ‘communitarian’ criticism of‘abstract’ liberalism: Popper in his theory of the abstract society (OS, I, chapter10) and of the possibility and necessity of free subgroups in an open society,and Rawls with his idea that a pluralistic society is not a community, with aunique common good for all, but ‘a social union of social unions’ (Rawls, TJ, §79). Rawls borrowed the idea of ‘social union’ from Wilhelm von Humboldt(incidentally, one of the best liberals for Mill as well as for Popper and Hayek).Is it not then surprising that a communitarian such as Charles Taylor thinkshe has discovered an anti-liberal argument when he uses Humboldt as aromantic (Taylor, 1989, pp. 414 and 458)? There is something wrong with hiscriticism of liberalism, as if this view was a pure ‘atomism’: neither Rawls norPopper would accept the idea of the non-social character of man or would saythat an individual is completely determined independently of his socialsituation (a point Popper condemned as ‘psychologistic’ in Mill’sepistemological writings, but which cannot be found in On Liberty).

In an open society, debates between Rawlsians, Nozickians, and others areto be expected, and that is a political ‘good’. Popper’s theory of an open societyasserts the minimum set of principles that have to be accepted in liberalsocieties, just as Popperian meta-philosophy (critical discussion) is minimaland the best meta-philosophy, even for anti-Popperians. Rawls’s theory of


justice is less neutral (in particular, the difference principle). An open societyis not necessarily a Rawlsian perfectly ‘just’ one, but a Rawlsian just societywould be, necessarily, an open society.

CORRESPONDENCE

Prof. Alain Boyer, Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne), UFR de Philosophie, Paris,France. Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1 Let me thank David Miller for having read my article and suggesting manyimprovements. Part of the article was given as a lecture at Philosophy: Problems,Aims, Responsibilities, a conference, organized by David Miller, to mark the 10thanniversary of the death of Karl Popper, University of Warwick, UK, 16-18September 2004.

2 Harvard edition (1971a), § 17. Rawls referred in a footnote to TheodosiusDobzhansky (1962).

3 In Popper and Eccles (1977, p. 145) where he writes about the notion of a ‘plan oflife’.

4 About an even more secondary point (the relations between Glaucon’s theory inthe Republic and the Sophists): in Rawls’s Collected Papers (1999) and ‘Justiceas reciprocity’ (1971b, p. 204n), The Open Society and its Enemies, pp. 112-18(American edition, 1950), is quoted. (In my article, page references to OS willrefer to the 1966[1945] edition.) One can remark that Plato’s city is not a modelof justice for Rawls, any more than it was for Popper. They both reject the ‘noblelie’ (TJ, § 69), the philosopher king and the authoritative holism of the ‘greatestof all philosophers’ (Popper). But Rawls insists more on the relevance of someaspects of Aristotle than Popper did in an interesting but rather unfair chapter ofOS (chapter 11). Anyway, I find it strange that Rawls did not quote Popper moreoften. Perhaps he judged OS and The Poverty of Historicism to be too polemical.

5 The concept was used by Goodman for dealing with ‘inductive logic’. Popperiansthink, of course, that no equilibrium can possibly be found in this area. See Miller(1994).

6 Note that a lexical ordering cannot be represented by a real-valued continuousutility-function.

7 ‘We need a faculty which makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is thisfaculty.’

8 Thanks to Charles Larmore for translating this sentence of his from French intoEnglish! Also, for commenting on his own position to help me improve myformulation of it.

9 If (provisional) plans of life could not change radically, one would have to bemuch more pessimistic about the idea that punishment can at least sometimesreform someone.

10 See Boyer (2001b).11 This is a ‘republican’ point.12 A rational Hobbesian cannot deduce the necessity of a fair distributive justice;

that is what Rawls concluded from what he regarded as David Gauthier’s failure(Rawls, 1993, II, § 1). Rawls’s problem was to find an acceptable interpretationof the words ‘arbitrary distinctions’ and ‘proper balance’ (TJ, § 1).


13 Mill offered a liberal and Darwinian argument in favour of self-managed firms:the workers would be more favourable to the firm, the wages less high, etc.Eventually, in a market system, they would win. Rawls remarked that this hadnot been the case. This is a problem for sociologists (considering Mill’s conjectureas a ‘zero model’, in the Popperian sense).

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