I don’t think Rawls’s work is useless or meaningless. Indentifying regularities in human moral intuitions and applying our reasoning to them to clarify or formalize is a worthwhile enterprise. It can help us avoid moral regret, spot injustice and resolve contradictions. But you can’t justify the whole edifice rationally. There isn’t any evidence to update on beyond the intuitions we already have. You start with your moral intuitions, you don’t adopt all of them as a result of evidence. There is no rationalist procedure for adjudicating disputes between people with different intuitions because there isn’t any other evidence to tilt the scale.
I don’t think Rawls’s work is useless or meaningless. Indentifying regularities in human moral intuitions and applying our reasoning to them to clarify or formalize is a worthwhile enterprise. It can help us avoid moral regret, spot injustice and resolve contradictions. But you can’t justify the whole edifice rationally. There isn’t any evidence to update on beyond the intuitions we already have. You start with your moral intuitions, you don’t adopt all of them as a result of evidence. There is no rationalist procedure for adjudicating disputes between people with different intuitions because there isn’t any other evidence to tilt the scale.