Current mood:	Overly ambitious
Current music:	The chorus of voices in my head

Rawls: Why You Should Care
John Rawls, late professor of philosophy at Harvard, published A Theory of Justice, his most famous work, in 1971. If you haven't heard of it, that's fine: most Anglo-American academic philosophy deals with matters far removed from what most folks would associate with the word "philosophy," e.g., if your name would still be your name if everything else about you were different, the relationship between a single proposition of a scientific theory and its whole, whether or not there really is such a thing as consciousness, et cetera. Maybe the last one doesn't seem outlandish to people acquainted with popular accounts of neuroscience, but there is in general a rather formal, arid, and quasi-scientific (but not pseudo-scientific) quality to a lot of so-called analytic philosophy. It is writing for specialists in topics that might turn into sciences, rather than something a lay person could understand as the pursuit of wisdom.

This applies to Rawls' presentation and style in A Theory of Justice. Despite the grandeur of the word "justice," there's little here to stir the blood or inspire hope, except for this passage near the very beginning of the work:

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole connect override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society, the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.

from Chapter 1, "Justice as Fairness," Section 1, "The Role of Justice."

And then it's pretty much straight down hill from there. By the next page, he's made a distinction between the concept of justice—no arbitrary distinctions between persons in rights, duties, and adjudicating between conflicting claims—and the differing conceptions of justice—differing notions of what "no arbitrary distinctions" actually means. If that isn't bad enough, he then goes on to define principles of justice as being the precepts of a particular conception of justice.

That's OK—you can scream now. In fact, do it again; you'll feel better. Now take a deep breath, because I'm going to start up again—but this time, there's something worth it at the end . . . 

What matters here are the specific principles of justice. The concept of justice as Rawls defines it is almost completely empty. A proponent of a genocidal regime could make the claim that torture and death for a specific ethnic group is not an arbitrary distinction at all, and that death for members of that group is the principle of justice that expresses the particular conception of justice for that regime (BTW, this is my example, not Rawls') Rawls himself writes that the "distinction between the concept and various conceptions of justice settles no important questions. It simply helps to identify the role of the principles of social justice." It is the principles of justice that provide the framework or precepts for the actual institutions and laws of a society.

So far, so formal. How then to decide on the principles of justice for a society? Going back to that stirring opening passage, it should be obvious that Rawls is no relativist; his principles of justice should be universal. But given the analytic tradition (or straightjacket, if you prefer) in which he's operating, there will be no appeals to common humanity, note of historical disasters, or anything that brings in some concept of moral good in his presentation. This point—or rather absence, since Rawls touches only briefly on what he will not consider—ought to give some pause. Rawls wants to detach his construction of the just from any notion of goodness. At the same time, his goal is to construct principles of justice that accord to each person rights that the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. The inviolate individual is going to be result—indeed, a side effect—of a rational construction of principles of justice.

Under what conditions could one develop principles of justice that would not be subject to controversy and appeal to reason alone? Rawls outlines the following thought experiment:

1. imagine members of a community to-be freely coming together as equals to determine regulatory principles that allow them to pursue their own interests. Given Rawls' previous terminology, they will be determining the principles of justice, i.e., specific principles that allocate rights, duties, and advantages, for their community. Rawls calls this stipulation of the thought experiment justice as fairness, i.e., the principles of justice are decided among free and equal parties.


2. none of the members of the community to-be know what their allocation of assets—however assets may be defined—will be in the community. Neither do they know the extent of their physical, intellectual, or emotional strengths or weaknesses. On top of this, Rawls stipulates that they do not know what their own sense of the good might be, or that they have a sense of the well-being of society (even though he goes on to note that this does not make them purely self-interested, merely that they are disinterested in the total welfare of the community to-be.) We can consider them as being disembodied brains in vats (my metaphor, not Rawls'), their intellects limited to calculations of possible individual advantage. Rawls calls this stipulation of the thought experiment the veil of ignorance.

A crude way of expressing the stipulation of justice as fairness might be to say that all the parties deciding on the principles are currently equals just looking out for number one. Similarly, a crude way of expressing the stipulation of the veil of ignorance might be to say that Rawls is asking each of the parties deciding on the principles, "Do you feel lucky today? Well, do ya, punk?"

Given all that, what principles of justice does Rawls claim would be the result of such an imaginary assembly? He comes up with just two:

...the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society. These principles rule out justifying institutions on the ground that the hardships of some are offset by a greater good in the aggregate. It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper. But there is no injustice in the greater benfits earned by a few provided that the situation of persons not so fortunate is thereby improved.

Chapter 1, "Justice as Fairness," Section 3, "The Main Idea of the Theory." Emphasis mine.

The bastard has done nothing less than squared the circle of problems of political thought—deduced principles that provide for the well-being and self-determination of every individual from a narrow definition of self-interest and without the concepts of the good or the well-being of the community. Yes, the prose is absolutely arid, but it is a stunning intellectual accomplishment. You should be flat on your ass with your jaw hanging open.

BUT . . . 

The deduction of the first principle is straightforward. Any party to the community to-be enjoys parity in the decision making with the other parties, and would like to at least maintain that parity once the community is made actual. While any party would like to enjoy an advantage—since by definition, they are out to maximize their interests—the best they could get the other parties to agree to would be equality.

The deduction of the second principle is not so straightforward. Why wouldn't inequality be allowed in the less restrictive case that it does not reduce anyone else's current standard of living or benefits? It's understandable that no other parties would want to sign on to precept that allowed another's advantage to injure them, but why wouldn't they settle for a precept that allowed for greater opportunities to prosper? By Rawls' second principle, I have to insure that everyone else benefits; surely it's a less stringent condition to simply make sure that no one is disadvantaged.

Here is Rawls' sketch of the derivation of both principles:

The intuitive idea is that since everyone's well-being depends upon a scheme of cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life, the division of advantages should be such as to draw forth the willing cooperation of everyone taking part in it, including those less well situated. The two principles mentioned seem to be a fair basis on which those better endowed, or more fortunate in their social position, neither of which we can be said to deserve, could expect the willing cooperation of others when some workable scheme is a necessary condition of the welfare of all. Once we decide to look for a conception of justice that prevents the use of the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance as counters in a quest for political and economic advantage, we are led to these principles.

again, Chapter 1, "Justice as Fairness," Section 3, "The Main Idea of the Theory." Emphasis mine.

The passage in bold in the quote above seems to assume a great deal that is not in the stipulation of justice as fairness or the stipulation of the veil of ignorance:

1. It assumes that any community instantiated would have a complex division of labor.


2. It assumes that the parties to the agreement understand that the division of labor enables the creation of an overall surplus.


3. Third, it assumes that none of the parties to the agreement are susceptible to commodity fetishism, properly understood, i.e., whatever is used to mediate the transactions in the instantiated community is understood only as a means of facilitating the division of labor, and not a source of value in and of itself.

But let's say that somehow this is all unproblematic. Does it still get us to the second principle as Rawls puts it? I don't think so. I believe that in addition to these extra assumptions, to get to the second principle, either all parties must have some notion of "socially necessary labor time," i.e., that the average productive hour, not any individual productive hour, is the determinant of total product, or that all parties have at least this notion of social welfare: that increasing inequality is an ill.

Now it may be that if some party P comes up with an innovation that increases the total product of the community and the whole of the increase goes to P then the other parties in the community may be said to suffer because in relative terms their percentage of total product has decreased.

All this aside, as I wrote previously, I don't object to Rawls' second principle as it stands; I just don't see how he gets it given the conditions of justice as fairness and the veil of ignorance. Maybe there is some complex derivation of the second principle. But what he's attempted is astonishing:

• Even if the second principle requires some extra postulates, it's would still be a stunning derivation, not only for the parismoniousness of the premises, but for breaking the wall between considerations of a rational character and those of a moral character. You're not supposed to derive an "ought" from an "is"—and yet he may have done it.


• Liberty and equality are supposed to be at odds with each other. Yet Rawls' two principles, whatever is required for their derivation, suggest they are interdependent.


• The veil of ignorance is an abstract, atemporal way of capturing the vicissitudes of fortune that we are in fact subject to as we go through our lives. Given that at any moment we may be dealt a blow by the unswerving punctuality of chance, what do we, as rational agents, want to propose to our fellow citizens, also as rational agents, to mitigate all our potential misfortunes?

In the end, you should care because what have been traditionally considered insoluble dilemmas, e.g., the tradeoff between liberty and equality, the gap between fact and value, may be soluble, and that means many so-called realistic stances towards social problems are nothing but unquestioned prejudices. Now we need to go out and do something about it.

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