A teoria da justiça como equidade e as ações afirmativas

Abstract

John Rawls conceives society as a cooperation system. To govern this system, he developed the theory of justice as fairness (JAF). His theory, from its emergence in the early 1970s to the present, has been commonly associated with public policies called affirmative action (AFs). Despite this association, there are two relevant situations that deserve analysis and lead us to our research problem: Rawls never wrote directly about affirmative action, despite the large extent of his work; and there are arguments supporting the incompatibility between the JAF and the AFs. In view of that, this paper deals with the following problem: is there incompatibility between the theory of justice as fairness and affirmative action? Our hypotheses are: (i) that affirmative action is not provided for in the JAF and, in general, cannot be simply derived from that theory; and (ii) that, despite this, there is no incompatibility between the JAF and the AFs. The broader objective of this paper, besides the specific objective of responding to the research problem, will be to demonstrate that there is no room for simplistic associations between the JAF and the AFs, as there are relevant arguments that must be faced by those who wish to study the subject - either to defend the AFs or not - especially those arguments concerning Rawls's distinction between ideal theory and non-ideal theory. In the first chapter, basic concepts will be presented for the general understanding of the theory of justice as fairness. In the second chapter, after exposing the concept and taxonomy of affirmative action, some of Rawls's arguments that found JAF's two principles of justice will be analyzed in order to verify if such arguments present any incompatibility with affirmative action. Next, an analysis of the validity of some objections made by Robert Taylor in the paper Rawlsian Affirmative Action will be done, where Taylor argues that certain categories of affirmative action are incompatible with the JAF in the scenarios of ideal theory and non-ideal theory. Ultimately, conclusions will be drawn, in the sense that: (i) affirmative action is not foreseen in the JAF and cannot be simply derived from it; (ii) that the arguments of possible incompatibility analyzed here are invalid; and (iii) that, apart from the existence of other arguments not studied here, such public policies are not incompatible with the theory of justice as fairness.