« Assorted links | Main | The real estate bubble, local government style »
Why I am not a Rawlsian
The Difference Principle is not so much excessively risk-averse as excessively jerry-rigged. OK, we can't aggregate as utilitarians but then we resort to some notion of primary goods with intersubjective validity. OK, the size of the worst-off group is itself endogenous to the contractarian process. But just how big is that group supposed to be? Can it be 99 percent of society? OK, people behind the veil don't know their particular identities, but just how "thin" is their knowledge supposed to be? And must their choices be purely self-interested? All these criticisms are well-known. You might try to shore up Rawls on any one of these points but the entire apparatus is simply too wobbly.
The bottom line is that you can't get lexical orderings out of a moral theory unless you build them in upfront. And without lexical orderings, well, Rawls, like many illustrious minds before him, does not succeed in sidestepping the dirty mess of aggregation. The critical moral question is how we should compare the interests of some people to others in a real world setting; don't expect to find an easy way out of that one.
Rawls's Principle of Equal Liberty is if anything on weaker ground than the Difference Principle. Equal Liberty? Who says? At what margin? At what cost? Lexicality can't plug all the leaks in this shaky boat, and no it can't save Robert Nozick either.
The biggest problem is simply why the imaginary agreement behind the veil of ignorance should have moral force. Now I like preferences as much as the next guy, but imaginary preferences take me only so far. That is just one piece of information in a much broader comparison of plural values. I'm not even sure that imaginary preferences should override the very real preferences of very real people in very particular situations. Why should they? "Fairness" is just one value of many.
I read Rawls as a very very smart and intellectually honest guy, determined to resurrect Kant, avoid the aggregative problems of consequentialism, and move at least one step beyond Sidgwick. He knew how hard it was to even attempt such a success and he makes all the requisite moves to get us there, albeit without, in the final analysis, squaring the circle.
Matt Yglesias adds commentary; he notes, correctly, that for the current Left Rawls doesn't offer such an inspiring vision. I'll put it this way: if you have to work that hard to establish "Sweden is great," you should be spending more money on plane tickets.
Just to clarify, there are at least three Rawls doctrines: "Justice as Fairness," TJ, and Political Liberalism. I like the first one best, but won't cast my lot with any of the three. At the end of the day I come away thinking that it is Sidgwick (and maybe Kierkegaard?) who is the central moral theorist of the last two centuries.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 1, 2008 at 06:20 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Tyler, you really should refrain from blogging before your morning coffee and rely solely on caffeine to wake up, not contrarian wacky ideas.
The sense of "unfairness" has been behind the worst happenings in 20th century history, from marxism ("We were/are/will be exploited as a class") to nazism ("We were betrayed in 1918 and before that denied a nation of our own. Id iz nod fair.")and WWII, via local genocides ("Them Tutsis and Belgians exploited us", etc) and to tens if not hundreds of millions of premature deaths, as well as to broken lives too numerous to mention. So, really, I am not even prepared to look at the argument whether "fairness" is an adequate concept. I just know that the price of widespread perceived unfairness is far too high and I want never to have to face the consequences of it again.
Posted by: Henri Tournyol du Clos at Mar 1, 2008 8:24:13 AM
Rawls resurrected political philosophy, which was seen as being a bit dead before TJ. Nozick responded to Rawls with some really flawed argumentation which he never really bothered to defend. I think lumping the two together is a huge mistake.
The problem, surely, is that Rawls' project was to try to make sense and a coherent framework from of our moral intuitions. The trouble is there is just no reason that should be possible. If you believe in evolution, it's perfectly understandable that we have contradictory moral intuitions and there's no reason we should be able to explain why we ought to be just.
"The biggest problem is simply why the imaginary agreement behind the veil of ignorance should have moral force."
I agree.
Posted by: Finnsense at Mar 1, 2008 9:04:47 AM
Rawls made one very valuable contribution: the veil of ignorance. This is
more than just metaphor. It is a clearer way of understanding Kantian uni-
versalizability. If everyone had to choose institutions "position blind,"
rational people should make the same choices.
However, behind the veil of ignorance, there should be no such thing as
risk averseness. If you are position blind, you have no idea what your
risk prefrerence will be once you enter the real world (on the otgher side
of the veil). So the Difference Principle is not legitimate.
To the contrary, the veil of ignorance reasoning justifies pure rule util-
itarianism. Rational people should all choose to live in a world with
Pareto optimal institutions.
Posted by: john goodman at Mar 1, 2008 9:16:28 AM
For all those who claim Nozick's arguments are worthless, largely because they're supported by poorly justified assumptions, then Rawls's arguments suffer from just the same problem. That's Tyler's point. Some philosophers, such as David Schmidtz, have pointed out recently that Nozick assumed no more than Rawls did.
The most trenchant criticism of Rawls comes from Jonathan Haidt's work. Throw Mark Hauser in there too. What these two have demonstrated is that Hume was closer to the truth than Kant was: our moral justifications, our moral reasoning, is really just a post-hoc rationalization for an emotionally. Have you read that Korsgaard? Of course, Tyler's point about Sweden brings this into focus. Why spend all that labor proving something you already felt was right anyway? If you want Sweden's policies, then argue for those. But please, elaborate post-hoc rationalizations will only win you tenure.
Speaking of which. Some have argued that Rawls resurrected the subject of political philosophy when it was dead. This observation can be explained by larger social forces. The truth of the matter is that Rawls and Nozick came to academia at time when more students than ever were enrolling. The times were flush. And they were there to reap the rewards. With all that money floating around, a lot of subjects were going to be resurrected; some, even invented.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Mar 1, 2008 9:17:04 AM
Please read Parfit's newest book, Climbing the Mountain. Parfit is as left in political philosophy you can get. However, he writes the following in Climbing the Mountain:
Rawls’s Formula: Everyone ought to follow the principles that it
would be rational in self-interested terms for everyone to choose,
if everyone had to make this choice without knowing any
particular facts about themselves or their circumstances.
This version of contractualism, Rawls claims, provides an argument
against all forms of utilitarianism. That is not true. Nor does
Rawlsian Contractualism support acceptable non-utilitarian principles.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Mar 1, 2008 9:24:05 AM
What bugs me about Rawlsians is that say they care about the least-well-off, but neglect, even oppose, the many simple policy reforms that would do so much help them, such as school vouchers, abolishing occupational licensing, abolishing the FDA, freer trade, freer immigration. Rawlsians fall flat in their understanding of how the world works. OK, let's table debate over the welfare state. But otherwise Rawlsians should be much more in favor of Smith's natural liberty, but they aren't. They don't understand that Smithian liberty is a bulwark of equity.
That's why it's hard to believe that the Left really knows itself.
I've lately criticized Paul Krugman along these lines:
http://www.econjournalwatch.org/pdf/KleinBarlettCharacterIssuesJanuary2008.pdf
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Mar 1, 2008 9:36:47 AM
"For all those who claim Nozick's arguments are worthless, largely because they're supported by poorly justified assumptions, then Rawls's arguments suffer from just the same problem."
I think there's a difference. Rawls was popular because he seemed to have made a compelling case that he'd come up with a new way of thinking about justice that did better at capturing our intuitions than those before him. Nozick's project was premeditated (an attack on Rawls) and its premises were so obviously false that the whole thing was a waste of time. Neither philosopher helped us discover distributive justice but Rawls was the better philosopher by far.
"What bugs me about Rawlsians"
Know many Rawlsians do you? Most true Rawlsians (and there are very few) don't get that involved in policy debates.
Posted by: Finnsense at Mar 1, 2008 10:16:15 AM
am I wrong, or does the difference principle also treat the number of individuals as constant, thus sidestepping a very important problem of aggregation?
Posted by: josh at Mar 1, 2008 10:21:18 AM
There have been several experiments attempting to create a "behind the veil" situation to see what people actually would choose. If I recall correctly, they do not choose "socialism", e.g. strong redistribution. I don't know how rigorous those studies were, though.
Posted by: Cliff at Mar 1, 2008 10:40:38 AM
I assume you could say much more about each of these topics (though I've not ever seen you do so). So, I'll assume you know that, as presented, your take on each of these issues is, at least, deeply controversial. There is a large literature on each of these points and very few people who understand this literature accept the simple version given here as right, even if they accept a more advanced version. I point this out not for Tyler, but for those who have not seriously studied Rawls so that they don't think that the very thin, card-board observations given here are sufficient to engage Rawls- all of these points are dealt with (to my mind completely satisfactorily) in the literature, often by Rawls himself, or show a misunderstanding of his project. So please, don't read these thin criticisms and think you know more than enough to start thinking about where you should think some more.
Posted by: Matt at Mar 1, 2008 10:50:19 AM
Matt, the consensus is that the TJ project failed; even Rawls himself moved away from it. TJ of course still has had a major influence, most of all legitimizing justice-based thinking. All the points I cite are very familiar ones. But there is not some secret defense of TJ lurking around out there, known only to the true experts. It's well known that you can only get out of a contractarian process what you put into it. The real problem is that TJ has so many things wrong with it -- from an "is this actually correct" perspective -- that it is hard to know where to start.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Mar 1, 2008 11:11:11 AM
To echo something that's been said before.
For what I think is an excellent roundup of the criticism of Rawls, take a look at Derek Parfit's Climbing the Mountain (warning: big file), chapter 11 on contractualism. I think that it is fairly devastating on net, even if each of the criticisms is well known.
And I agree with Tyler that I think Sidgwick is probably the greatest moral philosopher in the past 200 years.
Posted by: javier at Mar 1, 2008 11:27:52 AM
Tyler- As I said, these points are all debated and there is no consensus on them. I assume (as I said) that you know these are over-simplified- that's fine for a blog. It would be unreasonable for you to write a long series of academic papers here. But many people who read this blog are not familiar with Rawls and shouldn't come away thinking the project is as week as you make it look here- it isn't. Some of the ways you present the criticisms, as well, are unfair. Take your last one here. Of course you get out of the contractarian position what's built in to it (in some sense) but that's true for all positions. The question is whether there's a defense for what's built in to it. They way you present the issue it looks as if there is not. But that's not right- there's arguments for all the parts and they _are not_ just that otherwise you get utilitarianism. Now, those arguments don't convince everyone. That's clear. But it's not just question-begging as you make it look here.
Even the question of how TJ "failed" is a complicated one. Rawls consistently thought it gave _the correct_ account of the _content_ of justice. The move to Political Liberalism is not about the content of justice at all but about stability almost entirely.
You'll notice that I didn't say that the points you cite are not familiar ones- I'm quite familiar with them myself- my point was only that they are not at all generally taken to be decisive (anyone who says otherwise is deluded or lying- there's great contention on all of them) and that people should not assume from the quick post here that these points are not contentious. (Many of them are addressed at great length in the Cambridge Companion to Rawls and Samuel Freeman's excellent book _Rawls_, from Routledge, both of which I recommend highly.)
Posted by: Matt at Mar 1, 2008 11:30:55 AM
Matt, please give a coherent defense as to how Rawls's argument in TJ does not lead to choosing a principle calling for maximizing the highest average expected utility.
Rawls's own defense of this problem is weak and all those papers by Joshua Cohen and Samuel Freeman will not help you. By appealing to self-respect, they're grasping at straws. If you're a liberal egalitarian or prioritarian then you have to appeal to your intuitions and not this contractual apparatus Rawls adduces.
Again, see Parfit.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Mar 1, 2008 11:54:30 AM
As a legal scholar, my problem with 'justice as fairness' is that it is a completely empty and meaningless vessell just waiting to hold whatever ex ante moral values you already happen to have; it does no real heavy lifting by itself
another problem with rawls is that the 'veil of ignorance' is totally impossible to implement in practice, so rawls's project is just another in a long line of ideas that can be filed unde the title, intellectal masterbation
Posted by: enrique at Mar 1, 2008 12:12:42 PM
Tyler, Rawls was a philosopher; you are looking for an ideologue. Please read what he had to say about the relation between Justice as Fairness and the issues of the day. He says that people who derive their views from something like Justice as Fairness are "not to be trusted." The quotation below is from an interview he gave to some students at Harvard.
Harvard Review of Philosophy: When you look at current events, in general, do you think of them with the A Theory of Justice framework in mind?
John Rawls: Not really. Well, like anyone else, I react to current events and present problems in a certain way. I'm sure that my view must affect in some manner how I see them, but I don't just ask what justice as fairness would say. That would be limiting. I don't see a political conception of justice as something that will tell me what to think. It's a great mistake to think of it as a device that will give you answers, that will deliver the answers to all sorts of questions when you want them. That is one reason I am reluctant to answer questions about specific political topics. It suggests the wrong idea: that we could have some theoretical way of doing that, which is usually not so at all. I think of justice as fairness as trying to answer certain specific though basic questions. Its scope is limited. In any case, a reasonable view is important but it doesn't begin to be enough by itself. Judgment, informed opinion, due consideration, and much, much else are required. Usually if a question interests me, I may form an opinion on its merits. That's probably the best thing to do, and then see whether the opinion is reasonable, and what other people think. Except for special cases, I wouldn't ask whether the opinion fits with A Theory of Justice. Besides, it would be a mistake to apply one's principles all the time. You need to examine things apart from them, else you risk becoming an ideologue. People who have opinions on everything derived from their so-called principles are not to be trusted."
Posted by: Deberio at Mar 1, 2008 12:19:25 PM
Actually, I think you can be a true Rawlsian in a consistent fashion, if you're willing to reject contemporary liberalism in favor of Catholicism.
After all, why don't all the potential babies that would be born in the absence of contraception an abortion count as part of the social contract behind the veil of ignorance?
Posted by: Keith at Mar 1, 2008 1:54:49 PM
Now, in fairness to Rawls, if one politely ignores the glaring question of exactly who counts as part of the social contract, you really can get a wide variety of political beliefs from the Rawlsian construct, depending on your beliefs about actual empirical relationships.
Fir example, there was a mighty, one that Steve Landsburg discusses in Fair Play, that took the Rawlsian construct seriously.
First, the paper inferred the actual risk aversion that people generally show. The paper then assumed that we could observe everybody's level of ability. From that, using the Rawlsian framework, showed that the optimal contract involved a very generous welfare state that supported (I recall) 20% of the population.
Then the paper assumed that we couldn't observe people's ability. Then, we had to make sure that the high ability people wouldn't have an incentive to fake being low ability and go on the dole. In that case, the optimal Rawlsian contract generated a tiny welfare state, that supported only .6% of the population.
So the relationship between Rawls and actual policy changes quite a bit, depending on your beliefs about the facts of the world. That's perfectly fine, of course. Political philosophy isn't supposed to provide a list of answers to actual policy questions. It provides a framework.
And if we're polite enough to ignore that big hairy mole on the face of Rawlsian theory, we do get a framework.
Posted by: Keith at Mar 1, 2008 2:09:05 PM
"Fir example, there was a mighty" should be
"For example, there was a mighty fine paper"
Posted by: Keith at Mar 1, 2008 2:42:17 PM
"Know many Rawlsians do you? Most true Rawlsians (and there are very few) don't get that involved in policy debates."
As a public administration grad student, I can say that Rawls informs the policy views of at least a few PA professors I know (I'm not inferring based on my own interpretation, they claim to be Rawlsians). Maybe they are not true Rawlsians in the sense described, but they certainly use their understanding of Rawls theory of justice to inform their views of good governance.
Posted by: G.Ira at Mar 1, 2008 3:32:54 PM
Rue- of course intuitions play a role in Rawls's view- no one in their right might says otherwise, since they are an essential part of reflective equalibrium. Because such things cannot be settled in blog comments I'll simply retort that I've read my Parfit and don't find him at all convincing, that his account depends on swallowing a lot more controversial metaphysics than seems wise, and that his view, while influential, is hardly widely accepted. If anything he seems to me like David Lewis, a person who would have been a better philosopher if he were a bit less clever- both are so clever that they are constantly able to add more and more epicycles to their theories, defending them from attack, but making them all the more less plausible. So, an appeal to Parfit carries no weight with me since I think he's certainly wrong.
Posted by: Matt at Mar 1, 2008 4:25:00 PM
Daniel Klein writes--
[Rawlsians] neglect, even oppose, the many simple policy reforms that would do so much help them, such as school vouchers, abolishing occupational licensing, abolishing the FDA, freer trade, freer immigration.
The devil's in the details, and I don't have much confidence, that these measures would improve the lot of the well off anyway. Libertarians are fond of touting the law of unintended consequences when it's to argue against 'the gummint', but it always seems to slip their mind when talking about abolishing 'the gummint'.
Posted by: MostlyAPragmatist at Mar 1, 2008 5:41:37 PM
What bugs me about Rawlsians is that say they care about the least-well-off, but neglect, even oppose, the many simple policy reforms that would do so much help them, such as school vouchers, abolishing occupational licensing, abolishing the FDA, freer trade, freer immigration. Rawlsians fall flat in their understanding of how the world works.
What nonsense. So what bugs you about Rawlsians is that their policy preferences tend to be different than yours? Do you ever, ever, think that your ideas just might possibly not be as perfect and flawless as you imagine; that maybe your understanding of the world might be - like that of most fierce libertarians - a bit lacking itself?
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Mar 1, 2008 5:46:38 PM
It should be noted that Rawls was neither a socialist nor a welfare state theorist, as virtually all the comments here claim. He explicitly rejects both positions, in fact.
As Matt has expressed, these issues are much more complicated than are being presented here. I don't agree with Rawls on a number of points, but arguing against him is not such quick work.
For example, Tyler notes that Rawls rejects the interpersonal comparisons of utility so necessary for any aggregation procedure, but accepts primary social goods. But these are of a different nature: Primary social goods are supposed to be those things that enable one to follow their conception of the good. So, basic rights, health, food, etc. These aren't things that are supposed to be interpersonally compared - they are the necessary pre-conditions for someone to be able to have choices in their life. One could presents arguments against this, but not for the reasons that Tyler implies.
In addition, the size of the worst-off population is irrelevant to the analysis that Rawls offers. The point of focusing on the worst off is those are precisely the people that get the short end of the stick in society, and are the least likely to accept the rules that are set up. We focus on them precisely because the Original Position is supposed to provide a method of justification for the basic rules of society. The Difference Principle is supposed to embody the idea that society is set up as a system of cooperation between free and equal persons. Thus, the worst off are meant to be political equals to the best off, and so we care about them more than people do in straight average utility calculations. The folks at the bottom in average utility have a lot to complain about, and have an interest in redoing the deal. The folks at the bottom in a society whose basic rules are structured by the two principles of justice (of which the Difference principle is only one half of one) are supposed to be in a position where they see society's inequality as justifiably fair.
Of course, Tyler's claim that the critical moral question to deal with is about how to balance interests in a real world setting is just begging the question: Rawls' project is explicitly ideal theory, and Tyler is trying to make him talk about non-ideal theory. That's the same as saying that the marginal revolution is a big waste of time because people don't actually think at the margins when they're at the grocery store. Neither claim seems very reasonable. Lots of economic theory talks about what perfectly rational people would do, and we all know that we're not as rational as the theory demands. Rawls is trying to see what rational and reasonable people would do, where rational is as we understand it in the economic sense, and reasonable is roughly as Locke had it - that we care about other people, and aren't willing to take small gains at the expense of large costs for others.
I happily concede that there is much to argue over with Rawls, but he was a very smart and gifted philosopher - these quick criticisms are things he thought of and had responses for. I also think that Rawls has some problems, but these are not them.
Posted by: Ryan at Mar 1, 2008 5:49:37 PM
"It should be noted that Rawls was neither a socialist nor a welfare state theorist, as virtually all the comments here claim. He explicitly rejects both positions, in fact"
did you read this
"John Rawls, anti-capitalist
This is from his correspondence:
The large open market including all of Europe is aim of the large banks and the capitalist business class whose main goal is simply larger profit. The idea of economic growth, with no specific end in sight, fits this class perfectly. If they speak about distribution, it is most always in terms of trickle down. The long-term result of this — which we already have in the United States — is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind. I can’t believe that is what you want.
So you see that I am not happy about globalization as the banks and business class are pushing it. I accept Mill’s idea of the stationary state as described by him in Bk. IV, Ch. 6 of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). (I am adding a footnote in §15 to say this, in case the reader hadn’t noticed it). I am under no illusion that its time will ever come – certainly not soon – but it is possible, and hence it has a place in what I call the idea of realistic utopia. "
For more see CrookedTimber. The real question is how much this should cause us to downgrade his moral philosophy. I say "a lot." I used to think there was some deep argument of consilience behind "maximin," but now I am ready to classify it as a simple mistake, akin to a person who doesn't understand what drove the flow of traffic across the Berlin Wall in one direction and not the other. "
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 18, 2006 at 07:25 AM in
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/03/john_rawls_on_e.html
Posted by: karl at Mar 1, 2008 6:49:21 PM
I've always been a big fan of Rawls, but unfortunately, he always seems to be tremendously misunderstood. I think one of his great contributions to political philosophy is to think of justice as the result of a process. If we can all agree on the validity of the process, then, whatever the result, we should agree that the outcome is a just society.
Rawls' TJ has always reminded me of the simple game we played as children when given cake for desert. You cut. I choose. Most times, we can all agree that this outcome is the fair outcome. If we could find a similar way to compare different values in political philosophy, that would be a major breakthrough. Rawls's entire project, the OP, the VOI, etc., is an attempt to get to that game.
One final thing, I think that people truly misunderstand the "risk averse" nature of agents behind the VOI. I don't think Rawls is stating that the agents are risk averse; rather, he is positing that they have no knowledge of the probabilities for their ultimate position in a society. Without knowledge of the probabilities, then rational agents must use the Maximin theory. The veil of ignorance does get thinner as the project progresses, but I think that ignorance of probabilities is important for Rawls's attempt at constructing a mental mechanism for determining Justice.
In other words, it is not the size of the worst off that is important. We could know that behind the VOI. What we couldn't know is what our probability for ending up in the worst off class would be.
Posted by: Kilroy at Mar 1, 2008 7:17:09 PM
Karl,
Have you read the Mill that Rawls is referencing? Rawls isn't saying that economic production and growth it bad at all. He's just saying that average growth for growth's sake doesn't guarantee any kind of happy outcome for anyone. Namely, if it's all going to just a few people, then it doesn't do any good. Rawls is not against inequality as such, but approaches inequality as something that has to be justified to the person with the short end of the stick. Part of the Mill that he's talking about tries to distinguish between the method of economic allocation of resources to promote growth, and the method of distribution of the products of that growth. The claim that Rawls is arguing against is that they cannot be separated out to some extent. So let the capitalists efficiently allocate capital, but then it is another question on how to distribute the gains. Rawls isn't a laissez-faire capitalist, but he isn't a welfare theorist or a socialist either. He's interested in a property-owning democracy. And he's interested in people as citizens who can exercise their two moral powers, and is much less interested in them as consumers. In no way, however, does he have a "leveling down" sort of theory. I agree he may give up some economic growth for the sake of more political freedoms for more people, but that's not a position that says that economic growth doesn't matter.
Posted by: Ryan at Mar 1, 2008 8:12:08 PM
A long-winded and irrelevant attack on Rawls here.
Posted by: TGGP at Mar 1, 2008 11:13:17 PM
My reading of Rawls is that he wanted to establish some justification for the state refusing to tolerate rampant inequality. There really shouldn't be any problems with accepting the 'justice as fairness' line. The key problem that many of the left have with him (although my gut feeling agrees with him), is the presumption that a liberal democratic state premised on market lines is the most natural and effective way to achieve this.
Posted by: Kris at Mar 2, 2008 7:16:29 PM
Another point I would make in support of your point of view is that no one can perform the behind-a-veil mental exercise Rawls is premised on until they have reached a certain age and socioeconomic status, in which case they already know what their life circumstances are and are going to be; thus, it is illusory to believe that the answer anyone derives from that thought experiment is in any sense independent of the thinker's pre-existing circumstances and objectives. For example, Rawls himself, a tenured academic at elite, liberal institution in a wealthy and in many ways dominant nation, with negligible involvement in the for-profit / risk taking world, comes up with a purported first principle that bears an uncanny congruence to the major circumstances and decisions of his own life....
Posted by: mt57 at Mar 4, 2008 11:49:08 AM
Has anyone other than (the other) Matt actually read Rawls? To echo comments made by (the other) Matt, much of the criticism of Rawls here reflects a complete misunderstanding of the details of his views and of his aims in developing justice as fairness.
To wit:
A. Rue writes: "[1] Matt, please give a coherent defense as to how Rawls's argument in TJ does not lead to choosing a principle calling for maximizing the highest average expected utility ... Rawls's own defense of this problem is weak and all those papers by Joshua Cohen and Samuel Freeman will not help you. [2] By appealing to self-respect, they're grasping at straws. [3] If you're a liberal egalitarian or prioritarian then you have to appeal to your intuitions and not this contractual apparatus Rawls adduces."
What's the argument for 2? Is it meant to be 3? 3 is confused. This is because our intuitions -- what Rawls calls our "considered judgments" -- are not separate from the "contractual apparatus" embodied in the Original Position. Rawls was explicit about the fact that what he was doing was providing a theory that would account for the considered judgments of justice endemic to "the public political culture of a democratic society." This is why one cannot fault Rawls for constructing the OP so that its results reflect certain intuitions about justice. One misreads Rawls is one foists on him the aim of providing arguments against utilitarianism (or libertarianism). Rawls said he was articulating an alternative to utilitarianism that was superior in its ability to capture our considered judgments, not one that was superior tout court. This is the light in which we charitably read Rawls's own answer to 1. Seen in this light, Rawls's response certainly isn't, pace Rue's implication, incoherent.
Now, one can certainly argue against Rawls's method of developing a theory of justice, one influenced by his reflective-equilibrium view of moral epistemology. The sorts of criticisms raised above would have to follow in the wake of such arguments, in order to be fair arguments against Rawls.
B. Daniel writes: "What bugs me about Rawlsians is that say they care about the least-well-off, but neglect, even oppose, the many simple policy reforms that would do so much help them, such as school vouchers, abolishing occupational licensing, abolishing the FDA, freer trade, freer immigration. Rawlsians fall flat in their understanding of how the world works."
This reflects a serious misunderstanding of Rawls's work. Rawls's theory of justice is aimed at the basic structure of society, and, therefore, at a level way above that at which considerations of the kinds of policies Daniel mentions would even arise. Seriously, Daniel, with all due respect, have you read Rawls very carefully?
C. Remarkably, Tyler evinces a misunderstanding of the same magnitude when he writes: "the consensus is that the TJ project failed; even Rawls himself moved away from it."
Again, as (the other) Matt mentioned, the kinds of criticisms Tyler raises have nothing whatsoever to do with Rawls's later appraisal of the success of TJ. Rawls's dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that accepting justice as fairness as articulated in TJ required committing to a particular "comprehensive doctrine," namely, Kant's autonomy-centered view of persons.
Posted by: A Different Matt at Mar 6, 2008 7:40:28 PM
Posted by: 燈光音響 at May 23, 2008 11:23:34 PM
