Anderson and Rawls

I think that Anderson’s ideas about committed action and rational collective identity have a lot in common with Rawls’ original position, and I’ll try to explain why in this post.

However, at first (at least to me), these two concepts seemed to be almost at odds with each other. Anderson seems to be saying that, much of the time, an individual can determine how he should act by considering what the group/s he identifies with suggests should be done. “Each would ask, not ‘What should I do?’, but rather ‘What should we do?’” (28), Anderson writes. In contrast, Rawls’ original position seems to be about deciding what the group should do by focusing on what it is rational for each individual to do. In Anderson’s model, the group informs the individual. In Rawls’, each individual informs the group.    

But, the collective identity/committed action and the original position have one key thing in common: In both the committed action scheme and the original position, if some act is not rational for even one member of the group, then that act is not done. Obviously in the original position, this holds true, because no individual can be coerced into making an agreement if they do not agree. And, when one buys into Anderson’s collective identity, the same rule holds because “Only the reasons that we can share are reasons on which people who identify as ‘we’ can accept as a ground for their action” (29).

Furthermore, I think that Rawls would agree with the following statement by Anderson, that “To achieve most of the functionings constitutive of a person’s wellbeing, and most of the larger projects worth pursuing, requires cooperation with others” (32), which is indicative of the fact that they both have some similar goals. Near the end of the article, when Anderson says that “a universal commitment to act from [the collective identity] perspective would secure the conditions for everyone being able to achieve an identity and agency as individuals” (37), she seems to be making an appeal to the same kind of background fairness conditions that Rawls thinks society cannot function without.

It could be interesting to discuss how similar these two thinkers are in some of the rest of their ideas, and/or where their differences lie.