Abstract
Victoria Costa’s goal in this book is to identify the implications of John Rawls’ political theory for education (broadly conceived to include upbringing). There are two components to that task. First, focusing on education as a private good for its recipients, one must explore the various ways in which educational institutions can contribute to or detract from the realization of Rawls’ vision of distributive justice as articulated through his two principles of justice. Chapter 4 (on the family) provides Costa’s primary analysis of this issue, while Chapter 8 addresses some of the particular ways in which cultural diversity complicates the pursuit of Rawlsian distributive justice. (Chapter 6 also concerns distributive justice, but its focus is rather different: here Costa asks whether a society that satisfied Rawls’ two principles would thereby adequately protect its members against domination, as that concept is understood by neo-republicans such as Philip Pettit, and she briefly considers what distinctive role Rawlsian educational institutions might play in reducing domination.)
The second component of Costa’s self-appointed task, as suggested by the middle term of the book’s title, is to investigate the types of citizens that a Rawlsian society requires and to identify the role, if any, that education must play in producing such citizens. Chapter 5 offers Costa’s core argument on this point – namely, that schools have an indispensable role in cultivating the Rawlsian virtues of ‘reasonability’, at least under non-ideal conditions – while Chapter 7 asks whether schools should also aim to instill patriotism.
The quality of Costa’s analysis and argumentation is consistently very high, and there are several passages in the book that I found especially rewarding. Here are three examples. First, in responding to Susan Okin’s concern that families are often both sites and schools of injustice, Costa makes deft use of her important observation that Rawlsian justice is a property of the set of institutions that constitutes the basic structure of society but not of any one of those institutions viewed in isolation. Given that different conceptions of the good life often imply very different visions of the family, Rawlsian societies should strive to accommodate a wide variety of family arrangements by counterbalancing any unwanted (distributive and character-forming) effects elsewhere in the basic structure, especially through schools. Second, Costa argues persuasively both that Rawls’ concept of a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ should not be confused with the concept of a culture and that Rawls implicitly assumes cultural monism as the background for the reasonable pluralism of comprehensive doctrines that his theory is designed to accommodate. As many post-Rawlsian theorists have amply demonstrated, it is no simple matter to add cultural diversity to Rawls’ framework. Third, Costa shrewdly observes that the real-world necessity of deliberate educational efforts to shape civic character is not called into question by Rawls’ contention that a fully just society will be self-sustaining (in the sense that people who live their lives under just political institutions will reliably acquire the values and dispositions that lead them to support those institutions). Indeed, she notes, living under unjust (or even imperfectly just) institutions threatens to have decidedly negative effects on one’s character unless education is purposefully used to counteract these dangers.
The central weakness of this book is its lack of ambition. By this I mean in part to criticize the book’s stated purpose. Costa sets out to tell us which educational institutions and practices we should support if we are Rawlsians. She does not argue from first principles: she interprets and applies but rarely defends the Rawlsian political theory from which she is arguing (although it seems clear that she broadly subscribes to its tenets). Some readers may therefore react to Costa’s conclusions with the proverbial ‘so what?’ However, as Costa observes, many people have found Rawls’ theory of justice to be compelling (in its broad outlines, at least, if not in all its details); these people should be interested to learn about the educational implications of the theory. And, as Costa also briefly notes, one productive way to evaluate a general political theory is to derive its implications for a particular policy domain and assess the plausibility and appeal of those implications. (Rawls himself would presumably have been sympathetic to this rationale for Costa’s book because it conforms to his conception of the quest for ‘reflective equilibrium’ between our considered judgments at different levels of generality.)
But there is another, perhaps more important, sense in which this book lacks ambition. Costa devotes a very large percentage of a strikingly short (128-page) text to summarizing and interpreting other people’s work. Rather than presupposing some knowledge of Rawls and/or contenting herself with a rudimentary précis of his arguments, Costa is determined to provide a detailed and rigorous review of the general political theory whose educational implications she seeks to identify. Chapters 2 and 3 (almost a quarter of the book) are entirely dedicated to recapping Rawls’ approach, arguments, and conclusions, and most of the subsequent chapters also contain significant doses of (occasionally repetitive) summary and exegesis of Rawls. Besides which, Costa dedicates considerable space to describing some relevant positions held by a few influential post-Rawlsian political theorists: Okin on the family, Pettit on non-domination, Callan and Galston on patriotism, and Kymlicka and Waldron on cultural membership. All of these exegetical passages are well executed, but they leave precious little time for Costa to develop and defend her own claims about the educational upshots of Rawls’ political theory. Chapters 4, 5, 7, and 8 all end with disappointingly brief and sketchy statements of and arguments for Costa’s views. (Something similar happens near the end of Chapter 3; having spent a good deal of time summarizing Rawls’ accounts of stability and reasonable moral psychology, Costa offers a plausible but rather cursory defense of his position against a powerful objection.) Given that Costa demonstrates herself to be eminently capable of rigorously sustained analysis and argumentation, it is unfortunate that she did not choose to focus more of her energies on articulating her own most distinctive contributions, anticipating objections to these, and showing how such objections might be addressed. Most of Costa’s chapters left me hungry for more, eager to see the author recognize the complexity of the issue at hand and to engage critically with the relevant scholarly debates still being conducted by theorists beyond the handful of extremely well-known writers whose work Costa describes at some length.