John Rawls and Sense of Justice

Rawls argues that the sense of justice is necessary for the stability and maintenance of a well-ordered society. For this purpose, he tried to develop a moral psychology in order to understand how people acquire the sense of justice and other moral feelings. Although Rawls was strictly Kantian in his moral and political philosophy in his earlier period, and adopted a cognitive moral development stage approach such as Piaget and Kohlberg, he stands very close to Aristotelian and communitarian view on the sense of justice. According to Rawls, justice is not a mere individual emotion, but a corporate and social feeling. He claims that when institutions are fair, the people involved in these institutions also improve the sense of justice and this feeling is reflected in the society as a whole. The aim of this study is to identify the philosophical, theoretical and psychological foundations of Rawls' views on the sense of justice and moral sentiment. For this purpose, we will try to explore his similarity and difference with Aristotle and Kant and his affinity with the moral development stage approach like Piaget and Kohlberg in terms of psychological studies. Rawls's theory is based on a tripartite moral development stage approach, including the morality of authority, morality of association and morality of principles. We suggest that this approach is both more defensible, and that with such an approach it is possible to achieve more successful results in moral education. One of the main conclusions we have reached from the ideas of moral development of thinkers such as Aristotle, Rawls and Kohlberg is that morality of association and certain experience is one of the necessary conditions in moral education. Any moral education that is not based on such an experience is doomed to fail.

Keywords

Sense of Justice, Moral Psychology, John Rawls, Kohlberg, Aristoteles