Paragraph Summaries
- Rawls was reacting against Utilitarianism. Seeking the highest satisfaction of the greatest number seems sensible, but has strange consequences. For example, executing an innocent person to please a mob can raise total utility. Rawls disliked that utilitarianism didn’t protect individuals.
- Rawls’ alternate theory is that we can make a fair procedure. Anything resulting from a fair procedure is just.
- Rawls has us choose our position in life using a procedure called the veil of ignorance. An example of this is having one child cut a cake, and another choose how to distribute it. The child cutting will want to make things as fair as possible, since they don’t know which slice they will get.
- In Rawls’ thought experiment, we will start from something called the “original position”. We will know we will be placed into a society, and we choose how that society will be structured. But we don’t know which position we’ll occupy, so we’ll want to avoid gross unfairness.
- Rawls believed everyone needed a minimum of certain primary goods, such as rights, power, income, wealth, etc.
Since most of those are external to humans, they must be provided by someone else. So, Rawls’ theory is redistributionist.
Analysis
I’m not sure you need to fully understand the ideas discussed to solve this passage, but a bit of background may be helpful.
Utilitarianism: the doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.
(Source: Oxford Dictionary)
Utilitarianism can be quite useful in limited versions, and utterly insane in maximal versions. For instance, if there is a policy that would make one person a tiny bit less happy, but make millions of others significantly more happy, it seems silly not to do it.
But let’s take another case. There is a sad person, living their life. Day to day, they are barely contributing any happiness to the world. Meanwhile, there is a happy person who needs an organ transplant. When they are healthy they contribute a great deal of happiness to the world. If they die, this will be lost.
An extreme version of utilitarianism would say we should butcher the sad person for their organs, and use them to save multiple happy people who need transplants. The sad person won’t miss life very much, and they’ll be preserving the happiness of many people who contribute a large number of “utils” to the world.
Lovely, right? If you google “Existential comics Jeremy Bentham” you should be able to find a funny comic on this theme. (I may have directly gotten the organ example from that comic….). Here’s a web link: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/60
Obviously, no one wants to be an innocent person butchered for their organs. So, Rawls’ idea is that we can prevent this kind of horror by having everyone decide in advance what society will look like – without knowing their role.
Rawls’ thought experiment
The key thing about Rawls’ idea is that it’s not a practical proposal. Instead, he’s having us imagine we are designing a new world, and then joining it. Here’s how it goes:
- We are told to make a new world, and make it as fair or unfair as we like.
- We will then have to join this new world.
- But, we don’t know which social class we will be part of.
Therefore, our interest is to make the world as fair as possible. If we made a world with a miserable underclass, we run the risk of being part of that underclass once we join the world.
Obviously, this isn’t a practical proposal. We can’t become disembodied spirits, design a new world, and then join it at random. There is merely a thought experiment.
Much like Utilitarianism, a weak version of this theory seems sensible. There are some injustices which contribute basically nothing to society, but cause great misery to those suffering the injustice. Rawls’ veil of ignorance would surely eliminate these. I doubt anyone would design a slave society if there was a chance they would be born into it as a slave.
But, the author points out a downside with the extreme version of Rawls’ idea: it is redistributionist. How you feel about this likely depends on your political views, but depending on how risk averse people are when making a world, Rawls’ vision might result in full communism and total equality.
Societies that have tried to implement this full equality have tended to stagnate. People lack incentive to get ahead, because their efforts will be redistributed to others. And therefore people don’t move society forward.
This isn’t in the passage, but another problem is that a world produced by the veil of ignorance might have no idiots, but also no Einsteins. The possibility of an Einstein in the world (someone much smarter than the rest) necessarily implies that some people would be much stupider than others. If people create a world of full equality, it might result in a society simply unable to do some of the things our greatest minds have done in the past.
Also, remember: Rawls’ thought experiment is not real. It’s just a thought experiment. We can’t create a new society out of nothing. The idea is simply this: “How would you create a society if you knew you were going to live in it but you didn’t know who you would be.”
Want a free Reading Comp lesson?
Get a free sample of the Reading Comprehension Mastery Seminar. Learn tips for solving RC questions
Leave a Reply