Justice, Agency, and The Good: A Sartrean Approach to the Rawlsian Problem of Stability

In this thesis, I adopt a Sartrean perspective to criticise and reformulate Rawls’s response to
the problem of stability. For Rawls, a conception of justice must be stable; that is, persons
should be able to abide by the just organisation of social institutions. To achieve this aim within
his framework, Rawls claims that persons can include justice within their conception of the
good, defined in terms of a rational plan of life. In particular, Rawls argues that affirming
justice within one’s life plan expresses one’s status as a unified self, secures the conditions for
purposive agency, and enables the pursuit of one’s major desires and interests. The culmination
of these claims is the congruence argument: the Rawlsian conception of justice achieves
stability because the shared sense of justice and the individual pursuit of a good life are
congruent.
I criticise Rawls on three points. First, I contend that Rawls’s position on rationality
conflicts with his account of the unity of the self. Second, I demonstrate that Rawls commits
to rationalistic voluntarism through his notion of life-planning. In contrast, I propound a
Sartrean account of a non-localised, practical form of agency. Third, I argue that Rawls
mischaracterises goodness; specifically, I show that a person’s good cannot consist in their life
plan since the process of life-planning is an extension of what the agent already takes to be
good. Subsequently, I provide an alternative version of the congruence argument divided
between, (i), a reflective endorsement of the Rawlsian society correlative to a particular self
conception and, (ii), the inclusion of justice within a fundamental project as a way of integrating
and structuring one’s other projects. In doing so, I offer a novel approach to exploring the issue
of congruence via Sartre’s existential phenomenology.