Transcription
The American philosopher John Rawls was one of the most influential political thinkers for the late 20th century. Born in 1921 and died in 2002, he's responsible for a renaissance in political philosophy.
A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus, was published in 1971 and is a philosophy of what a just and fair society would look like. Before Rawls, the dominant political philosophy for at least the previous 100 years had been utilitarianism. There were and are many different forms of utilitarianism, but they all have their foundations in a simple premise: the greatest good for the greatest number.
In political philosophy, this translates into something like: a just society organizes its institutions, norms, and laws so as to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. Imagine you're a civil servant. You're tasked with mapping a bus route through several villages. By which principles do you map the route so that it can pick up the greatest number? This is the utilitarian approach.
The critics of utilitarianism saw a problem: it seems to justify certain actions that most perceive of intuitively as unethical. Imagine a society where ten persons are held in slavery. The slaves are unhappy, but there's an increase in happiness for the remaining ninety percent. In this instance, the greatest good for the greatest number seems to justify slavery. Or imagine a surgeon with another doctor dying on the operating table. The dying doctor needs a new heart, and the surgeon remembers that there's a homeless man outside. The dying doctor is surely going to do more for others if he saved them than the homeless man. So the surgeon goes, sedates the homeless man, and kills him. Again, utilitarianism seems to justify this.
Rawls thought that no one had accounted for this problem adequately. The problem with utilitarianism is one of rights. Certain rights just shouldn't be violated no matter the benefit to others. For example, every village might have a right to be served on a bus route, even if one of the villages is tiny and the route becomes less efficient, not picking up the maximum amount of people overall. Rawls rights that we have an intuition that individuals have an inviolability founded on justice, or as some say, on natural rights, which even the welfare of everyone else cannot override. Rawls thought that philosophers had failed to account for this problem and that it needed to be included in a theory of what the model society should look like.
The question politically is how we organize what Rawls calls the basic structure of society. How should institutions, laws, economic practices, and rights be organized? If we could start fresh, the question is: what is justice? What is fairness? If we accept that these things are in some way important, what is it exactly that they mean? He writes that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, and that laws and institutions must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.
He takes inspiration from the social contract tradition of Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They imagined what people would be like in a state of nature and how a society would come into fruition when they came together to cooperate. Rawls argues we should partake in a similar thought experiment, what he calls an original position. What's chosen in the original position is the principles that free and rational persons, concerned to further their own interests, would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.
Importantly, in the original position, we decide what the basic structure of society should look like from behind what Rawls calls a veil of ignorance. He writes that among the actual features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strengths, and the like. "I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities." The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. In other words, the only way to theorize a just society is if we imagine that we don't know what place we take in it. In this sense, it's like dividing a cake: when you know you'll be the last person to choose the slice, you'll make sure the sizes are fair. Under the veil of ignorance, a person can't choose low taxes because they're rich or high taxes because they're poor. So how would you choose?
There's an element Rawls here that could be described as liberal reason or liberal rationality. He assumes that individuals in the original position will be rational individualists, that they would choose in a way that rationally benefits them the most. And rational here discounts gambling and looks to maximize gain in a mutually disinterested way. Critics have complained that this presumes individualistic values, but Rawls argues that even if you're more charitable than most or less materialistic, which you wouldn't know at this point anyway under the veil of ignorance, you would still choose to give whatever you rationally maximized away. And so, out of all the alternatives, this principle would be chosen in the original position.
Rawls discusses a number of political or moral propositions that might be considered from behind a veil of ignorance. He starts with utilitarianism, but in addition to the problems we've seen, there's another reason utilitarianism is unlikely to be chosen. Imagine two societies of 100 people. In one society, 60% have a million dollars between them; the other 40% has $10 between them. In the second society, 50% have $400,000 between them, and the other half $600,000. They both have pretty much the same amount of money, but it's spread in different ways. Utilitarianism, though, favors the first society because it has $10 more. But this seems ridiculous to us. Surely everyone would choose the second society. It seems unlikely, Rawls writes, "the persons who view themselves as equals would agree to a principle which may require lesser life prospects for some simply for the sake of a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by others." For these reasons, Rawls dismisses utilitarianism.
He moves on to libertarianism. What if we conceive of the basic structure as something approximating liberal free markets and unlimited property rights? If this were the case, we'd enter into society with two assets: natural talents and the assets bestowed on us at birth (inheritance, family wealth, education from parents and their peers, etc.), which we benefit from by accident or good fortune. And it's for this second reason that he rejects libertarianism. He writes that "intuitively the most obvious injustice of the system of natural Liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view it hardly seems just nor efficient." The person A from a rich background makes the most of his natural talents because their parents can afford education, while person B cannot.
Traditionally, liberals have corrected for this through fair equality of opportunity. Rawls says that those with similar abilities and skills should have similar life chances. More specifically, assuming that there's a distribution of natural assets, those who are at the same level of talent and ability and have the same willingness to use them should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system. But what about those talents and abilities? We also come to have them by accident and good fortune, not fairness and justice. Is it fair, just that Sam is born good at mathematics and Sally born without legs, or Jane with natural charisma and Tom with debilitating shyness? Furthermore, in the original position, we don't know what our natural talents are going to be.
We come then to equality of outcome. If we don't earn our family fortune or natural assets, then is it only just to share in the fruits of society equally? Rawls considers this position but concludes that it wouldn't encourage harder work, reward better musicians, say, or innovators. Some people might simply want to work harder because they like work, while others are content with living a simpler life.
Rawls proposes an alternative: the difference principle. If we are reasoning from behind the veil of ignorance, and we'd like more of life's what Rawls calls primary goods (rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth), then we would choose a system that made everyone better off, even if there are inequalities despite it being chance that we earn our natural abilities and so they have nothing to do with fairness. Yet, is it fair to use those natural abilities to the advantage of ourselves and everyone else in society? He writes that "the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society." It's the difference principle, also referred to as "maximin" (maximize the minimum prospects), that leads Rawls to his formulation of the two principles of justice as fairness.
The principles are in lexical order, that is, that the first should always be prioritized over the second. They are:
First, each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which is compatible with a similar scheme of basic liberties for all.
Second, social and economic inequalities set to be arranged so that they are both (a) the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
The two principles, though, might generally be summed up like this: He writes, "All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone's advantage."
For Rawls, each part of justice as fairness grows out of this fundamental observation. First, you need basic liberties, he says: political liberty, the right to vote and to be eligible for public office, together with freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of the person along with the right to hold personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the rule of law. But then you need to be able to fully realize these basic liberties, make sure positions are open to all, and that each has the possibility of fully realizing their capabilities. Discrimination must be prohibited, education provided for those that cannot access it. This is the only way those basic liberties are protected. Similarly, Rawls argues that in choosing an economic system, we would adopt a maximin strategy, that's maximizing the minimum possible position that we take. And so we then choose the difference principle. We choose the maximin strategy, he argues, because of the seriousness of the unrepeatable choice in front of us. We don't know the probabilities of ending up rich or poor, an elite or a discriminated against minority. And the maximin principle guarantees the minimum rights and livelihood to partake in a productive society.
It's important to understand, though, that for Rawls, the difference principle is not a statement about taxation or public or private ownership of property, although it does inevitably lead to those questions later on. It's simply about the basic structure of institutions: that they should be organized in a way that makes the least advantaged better off, and that inequalities are justified only if the least advantaged are better off by them.
While Rawls has been hugely influential, he has many critics too. A frequent criticism has been that he is risk-averse, that not everyone would play it safe in the original position, and some would gamble for a more utilitarian society if the inequalities weren't too wide. But he's also been praised for combining liberal, individualist, and egalitarian socialist values. His model of fairness could be applied to a libertarian socialist society and a capitalist one, although Rawls himself favored something like the former, or a property-owning democracy where everyone not only had the rights to own property but really did had a hand in the means of production. Ultimately, the two principles reflect that we are both social creatures and individualistic ones, and I think this is one of A Theory of Justice's most important contributions to political thought. The two principles are a product of the idea that there are parts of an individual that social life and politics wouldn't be possible without, that then must be inviolable and which we wouldn't bargain away even for the sake of a richer society, that we would only come to sign the social contract if it made us all better off.
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