ABSTRACT
Democratic majorities in Congress, and the "teaching moment” created by Sonia Sotomayor's ascendancy, Ricci v. DeStefano's resonance and Gates's arrest, the President should find useful an analysis of racial policy and justice in light of the work of John Rawls. This chapter provides a brief overview of Rawls's theory of justice. It shows that with a little political courage, and the economic crisis notwithstanding, the President and Congress could easily find the resources for reparations as defined. Rawls begins Theory by rejecting classical utilitarianism and embracing Immanuel Kant's moral imperative to treat the individual person as an end in himself, not as a means to collective ends. For Rawls, classical utilitarianism is "incompatible with the conception of social cooperation among equals for mutual advantage”; Accordingly, Robert Paul Wolff explains, Rawls's way out of the impasse between utilitarianism and intuitionism is the adoption of a contractual model of authority, specifically a refinement of classical social contract theory.
