Morality and playing by society’s rules

Many modern readers of ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ take Rawls to hold that the moral justification of an action defined and regulated by a practice must depend somehow on the moral justification of that practice itself. Michael Thompson, for instance, invites us to read Rawls’ paper as implying a ‘transfer principle’, whereby the justification of a practice somehow transfers to all those actions that fall under it. Thompson then criticises Rawls for failing to state this transfer principle explicitly and defend it. Kieran Setiya, persuaded by Thompson’s criticism, offers a further diagnosis: Rawls’ thinking is sullied by a confusion between so-called ‘normative’ and ‘motivating’ reasons. I push back against these recent critics of Rawls’ landmark paper, showing how the reading on which they rest is flawed. In fact, Rawls’ paper points to a radically different idea: certain social practices should be seen to furnish the members of a society with a common, publicly recognised framework for the moral justification of action whether or not these practices themselves can be justified in moral terms. This approach to the moral justification of actions underwritten by practices turns out to be attractive in its own right; it also makes better sense of Rawls’ text.