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12 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:50 PM
Could someone explain how Rawls's veil of ignorance justifies the kind of society he supports? (To be clear I have an SEP-level understanding and wouldn't be surprised to be misunderstanding him.)
It seems to fail at every step individually:
- At best, the support of people in the OP provides necessary but probably insufficient conditions for justice, unless he refutes all the other proposed conditions involving whatever rights, desert, etc.
- And really the conditions of the OP are actively contrary to good decision-making, e.g. you don't know your particular conception of the good (??) or that they're essentially self-interested. . .
- There's no reason to think, generally, that people disagree with John Rawls only because of their social position or psychological quirks
- There's no reason to think, specifically, that people would have the literally infinite risk aversion required to support the maximin principle.
- Even given everything, the best social setup could easily be optimized for the long-term (in consideration of future people) in a way that makes it very different (e.g. harsher for the poor living today) from the kind of egalitarian society I understand Rawls to support.
More concretely:
(A) I imagine that if Aristotle were under a thin veil of ignorance, he would just say "Well if I turn out to be born a slave then I will deserve it"; it's unfair and not very convincing to say that people would just agree with a long list of your specific ideas if not for their personal advantages.
(B) If you won the lottery and I demanded that you sell your ticket to me for $100 on the grounds that you would have, hypothetically, agreed to do this yesterday (before you know that it was a winner), you don't have to do this; the hypothetical situation doesn't actually bear on reality in this way.
Another frame is that his argument involves a bunch of provisions that seem designed to avoid common counterarguments but are otherwise arbitrary (utility monsters, utilitarianism, etc).
My objection is the dualism implied by the whole idea. There's no consciousness that can have such a veil - every actual thinking/wanting person is ALREADY embodied and embedded in a specific context.
I'm all in favor of empathy and including terms for other people's satisfaction in my own utility calculations, but that particular justification never worked for me.
I had also for a long time trouble believing that Rawls' theory centered around "OP -> maximin" could get the traction it has. For what it's worth:
A. IMHO, the OP remains a great intuition pump for 'what is just'. 'Imagine, instead of optimizing for your own personal good, you optimized for that of everyone.' I don't see anything misguided in that idea; it is an interesting way to say: Let's find rules that reflect the interest of everyone, instead of only that of a ruling elite or so. Arguably, we could just say the latter more directly, but the veil may be making the idea somewhat more tangible, or memorable.
B. Rawls is not the inventor of the OP. Harsanyi has introduced the idea earlier, though Rawls seems to have failed to attribute it to Harsanyi.
C. Harsanyi, in his 1975 paper Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory uses rather strong words when he explains that claiming the OP led to the maximin is a rather appalling idea. The short paper is soothing for any Rawls-skeptic; I heavily recommend it (happy to send a copy if sb is stuck at the paywall).
Here are some responses to Rawls from my debate files:
A2 Rawls
- Ahistorical
- Violates property rights
- Does not account for past injustices eg slavery, just asks what kind of society would you design from scratch. Thus not a useful guide for action in our fucked world.
- Acontextual
- Veil of ignorance removes contextual understanding, which makes it impossible to assess different states of the world. Eg from the original position, Rawls prohibits me from using my gender to inform my understanding of gender in different states of the world
- Identity is not arbitrary! It is always contingent, yes, but morality is concerned with the interactions of real people, who have capacities, attitudes, and preferences. There are reasons for these things that are located in individual experiences and contexts, so they are not arbitrary.
- But even if they were the result of pure chance, it’s unclear that these coincidences are the legitimate subject of moral scrutiny. I *am* a white man - I can’t change that. They need to explain why morality should be pretend otherwise. Only after conditioning on our particular context can we begin to reason morally.
- The one place Rawls is interested in context is bad: he says the principle should only be applied within a society: but this precludes action on global poverty.
- Rejects economic growth: the current generation is the one that is worst-off; saving now for future growth necessarily comes at the cost of foregone consumption, which hurts the current generation.
1. It’s pretty much a complete guide to action? Maybe there are decisions where it is silent, but that’s true of like every ethical theory like this (“but util doesn’t care about X!”). I don’t think the burden is on him to incorporate all the other concepts that we typically associate with justice. At very least not a problem for “justifying the kind of society he supports”
2. Like the two responses to this are either “Rawls tells you the true conception of the good, ignore the other ones” or “just allow for other-regarding preferences and proceed as usual” and either seems workable
3. Sure
4. Agree in general that Rawls does not account for different risk preferences but infinite risk aversion isn’t necessary for most practical decisions
5. Agree Rawls doesn’t usually account for future. But you could just use veil of ignorance over all future and current people, which collapses this argument into a specific case of “maximin is stupid because it doesn’t let us make the worst-off people epsilon worse-off in exchange for arbitrary benefits to others”
I think (B) is getting at a fundamental problem
Quick Take: People should not say the word "cruxy" when already there exists the word "crucial." | Twitter
Crucial sometimes just means "important" but has a primary meaning of "decisive" or "pivotal" (it also derives from the word "crux"). This is what's meant by a "crucial battle" or "crucial role" or "crucial game (in a tournament)" and so on.
So if Alice and Bob agree that Alice will work hard on her upcoming exam, but only Bob thinks that she will fail her exam—because he thinks that she will study the wrong topics (h/t @Saul Munn)—then they might have this conversation:
Bob: You'll fail
Alice: I won't, because I'll study hard.
Bob: That's not crucial to our disagreement.
Using the word 'cruxy' encourages people to use the mental model of what the cruxes in the conversation happen to be. Encouraging the use of effective mental models is a useful task for language.
"Crucial to our disagreement" is 8 syllables to "cruxy"'s 2.
"Dispositive" is quite American, but has a more similar meaning to "cruxy" than plain "crucial". "Conclusive" or "decisive" are also in the neighbourhood, though these are both feel like they're about something more objective and less about what decides the issue relative to the speaker's map.
I agree people shouldn’t use the word cruxy. But I think they should instead just directly say whether a consideration is a crux for them. I.e. whether a proposition, if false, would change their mind.
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