I'm going to talk today about John Rawls, who lived from 1921 to 2002.
Some people ask me, why am I lecturing on John Rawls?
The reason is, although, as you'll see, I don't agree with very much of what Rawls had
Among American philosophers, he's by far the most influential figure.
Most analytic philosophers regard Rawls as the greatest ethical and political theorist of the 20th century,
which, as I sometimes remind myself, we're no longer in.
Rawls attended college in Princeton, where his main professor was Norman Malcolm, the
famous student of Wittgenstein. After graduation, he taught at Cornell University, where Malcolm
and Max Black were the main, led the department and he, after a short time at MIT, he went
to Harvard where he remained for the rest of his career. He was well known among philosophers
in the 1950s and 60s. He wrote a very influential paper called Two Concepts of Rules that came
The Theory of Justice was published in 1971 and became known to a much wider public.
In fact, one could say, like Laurie Byron, he awoke to find himself famous.
That book became a best seller. It sold in its various editions over 400,000 copies,
which is extremely unusual for a philosophy book. After the publication of that book,
Rawls continued his work publishing other books. Most important of his later books was
One came out in 1993 called Political Liberalism. He had one in 1998 where he applied his theory
to how relations between societies is called the Law of Peoples. He had various other works
such as Justice as Fairness, a Restatement. There was a volume of his collected papers.
and then he had after lectures, notes that were published by his students, his lecture notes, lectures on the history of ethics and recently Samuel Freeman, one of his students, has edited his lectures on the history of political philosophy.
As you see, all of his books were in the area of ethics and political philosophy.
Now, I think to get a perspective on Rawls, I think it's useful to begin by considering
what he was reacting against at the time he started writing philosophy.
The most influential ethical theory was utilitarianism.
This I talked about a little bit, or more than a little bit, in my previous talks.
You remember, the utilitarians hold that what determines what's good is what maximizes happiness
or utility.
Various utilitarians have different ways of characterizing happiness or utility, but the
The aim in utilitarianism is to maximize utility. There are variations where instead of saying try to maximize total utility, maximize average utility, but the basic idea in all kinds of utilitarianism is maximizing utility.
Now what is wrong with this view?
One point that Rawls stressed very much, here he was following all sorts of other writers,
is that there are counter examples that show that utilitarianism doesn't agree with our
ordinary moral judgments of what's right or wrong or good or bad. No doubt most of you
are familiar with cases of this kind. For example, this is one of the most frequently
cited cases, supposing there is a town in which there is a mob who is enraged against
threatening to lynch various people. Now the sheriff can appease this mob and get them to stop by hanging an innocent man, somehow it turns out to be the case and we can make it the case as we're stipulating the case and we can say whatever we like, that if the sheriff executes this innocent man, then the mob will go away and they won't kill various people.
and various other people. So killing this innocent man will stop the mob from killing all these other people.
According to the utilitarian system, it would seem like the sheriff should kill the innocent man,
because if he does so, utility will go up since all these people that the mob would have killed will still be alive,
And we can assume that positive utility will be higher if they're alive than if they were killed.
So the utilitarian seems to have to say, you should kill the innocent man.
Now, utilitarians have tried to get around that by just saying, well, there are various side effects that could happen that would make us say,
It wouldn't be a good idea what if this would set a bad precedent or maybe it would come
out later and people would get upset about it.
As Philippa Foote used to say, the utilitarians have to play side effects for whatever they're
worth and you can come up with various kinds of complications in the case, but it works.
It's hard for the utilitarian to reconcile his theory with our ordinary moral judgment.
Even if he's able in some cases to do so, still there are other cases where the utilitarian
if he comes up with the right answer seems to be getting it for the wrong reason.
Let me just give one instance of that.
Richard Posner, who's a utilitarian judge and lawyer, in a book claimed that the reason
you can say that rape is wrong from a utilitarian standpoint is that it's very likely that the
victim of the rape will lose more in utility than the rapist will gain. Now, even if this
This is right, this seems like not the right reason for condemning rape.
It seems like it isn't just that the balance of utility comes out that it's against doing
it.
It's the wrong thing to do and we shouldn't take account the rapist's benefit from his
act at all.
Well, as you see, there are serious problems with utilitarianism.
Rawls had a very good way, and this I think is one of the best things in Rawls' work,
of stating the key problem of utilitarianism, which he said, utilitarianism doesn't take
seriously the distinction between persons.
just considers people just as vessels holding units of utility and then it
asks how can we maximize utility so you can on this view you can do something to
one person can sacrifice one person if doing so will increase the total utility
R.M. Hare, Richard Hare, at Oxford, who was a very important 20th century moral theorist and leading defender of utilitarianism, replied to Rawls and others who raised this objection.
He said, no, it isn't right that utilitarianism doesn't take seriously distinction between persons.
Reply, it isn't, he's right that there isn't equality in utilitarianism, but it isn't each
person that's being considered equally, it's each unit of utility, whatever that is, that's
considered equally, and so it can work out just in these cases that considering each
Each unit equally works out that one person has to be sacrificed for the general good.
So Rawls' criticism is entirely on target.
Rawls himself first thought he could break out of this problem.
This is in his essay that I mentioned before, Two Concepts and Rules.
He thought we could have a two-stage style of utilitarianism that might get out of this problem, where you would try, instead of asking what maximizes utility, you would say what general practices maximize utility, what social institutions are such that if we institute them, will maximize utility.
rather than trying to maximize utility for the individual case. This is of course
very similar to variant of rural utilitarianism I mentioned in the lecture
on John Stuart Mill yesterday, but there are problems with this also. One of the
One of the problems is it doesn't seem to be a rationale offhand for coming up with maximizing the utility of the best practice.
The utilitarian at least had a case for saying we should try to do what promotes the greatest happiness overall.
It does seem that if something has the greatest happiness, promotes the greatest happiness after all, that's the reason to do it.
but why should we do something suppose something just promote is greatest
utility of any possible practice why would that be a reason to support
particular acts that that theory dictates we would have a reason for
setting up the practices but on a particular action why wouldn't we if
If we're utilitarians, just try to do what the best action is rather than what is dictated by the acting in accord with the practices we've set up.
So it seems like you can't come up with very easily a rationale in the particular case for following what this two-level system of utility dictate.
So Rawls then said, well, can we come up with a non-utilitarian way of trying to settle moral and political questions?
And he had this idea, he said, sometimes if we can't agree on the proper moral theory,
maybe we can have better success not by trying to come up directly with the best theory,
See if we can come up with a fair procedure for deciding what the best theory is, what we should do.
He mentioned a case of this kind. Supposing, say, you have a cake, you have to cut this cake to serve it to two children, you have two children.
Now you know, if however you cut the cake, the one who got the slightly smaller size
will start complaining.
You can try to cut them as close to equal as you can, but still somebody is going to
start complaining.
So what can you do about this?
Well, one thing you can do is you ask one of the children to cut the cake and then you
How You Can Use a Procedure to Solve Your Distributional Problem
So his friend said, if I had been doing the cutting, I would have picked the smaller piece.
Sadowski said, well, what are you complaining about then?
So what Rawls said then, and this is one of the key ideas here in justice,
We should try to come up with a situation, a fair initial situation, then ask what would
people in that situation choose? What principles of justice would they choose? Before I explain
the situation, I should say what it is people are supposed to be choosing. They're not
not choosing particular distributions, they're not deciding how much you're going to get
or how much I'm going to get.
What people are supposed to be picking in this initial situation, which Rawls calls
the original position, is they're deciding on the basic structure of society, the key
Social Institution, what will be determining the institutions, say, what will be determining
how resources are distributed, what rights and liberties people have, and so on.
Say, they'll be deciding matters such as, do we have a capitalist system, a socialist
system, what rights do people have, and so on.
So Rawls thought that what sort of, how can we get a fairer situation for people to make
this decision?
And he thought that one thing we want to do is eliminate biases.
We want to get a situation where we won't have biased results.
So we eliminate various items of information that people might have that could affect this
decision process.
What we want to get is a decision process where people are, each person is acting in
his or her own self-interest in this original position, but the results won't be contaminated
by Bias of Various Kinds, one, this elimination, this way of eliminating various items, he
calls this the veil of ignorance, that's V-I-L not V-A-L-E.
E. I should say Rawls, although in general he's a very dull writer, he had a gift for
certain phrases that stay in one's mind like the original position, the veil of ignorance,
the difference principle. He's a bit like Hegel in this respect. Hegel was an extremely
bad writer but occasionally comes up with some very striking phrase. So Rawls had the
What does Rawls want to eliminate? First of all, in the original position, no one knows anything about his own personal characteristics.
You don't know anything about your abilities, what talents you have, anything along that kind.
Also, you don't know what your conception of the good is.
By conception of the good, Rawls has in mind something like a moral or religious outlook on things.
Say, we have various moral theories, say Aristotelian theory telling us how to lead a good life, utilitarian theory.
We eliminate all of those, so people don't know what their conception of the good is.
They do know, however, all the best facts and theories established by social science.
They don't know how they themselves would do in various social orders.
They do know, say, various general facts. Supposing it turns out that people respond to economic incentives, it makes a difference, say, to how much you work.
If you know you're going to make a lot of money, you would work much harder if you can keep all or most of what you earn
would if the resources were distributed at absolutely equal people would be
aware of this fact if this had been well established by social science but they
wouldn't know what their own abilities were so Rawls's idea here is that if we
have people bargaining in their self-interest they're trying to agree
on the procedures for the basic structure of society, the correct key social institutions and this process of agreement is not marked by any biases of the kind I've mentioned, people don't know their abilities, they don't know their conception of the good.
When the result will be a fair procedure and we would then accept what the results of this
original position are in so we can know what the basic institution society should be.
I think this idea has quite a few problems in it, so before I go to what Rawls comes
is up with what he thinks people will arrive at in the original position.
I think there are some problems with the original position itself.
I think there's certainly something to Rawls' idea that people can be influenced by biases
In certain cases, in a loose, popular sense, we would say certain procedures are unfair.
Let's take this example. Supposing Michael Jordan is my neighbor, there's a boundary dispute over our houses.
Michael Jordan says to me, well, instead of having to waste time paying lawyers going to court, why don't we just settle this with a one-on-one basketball game?
Now, I don't think I would come out very well if I were to accept this proposal, so I think
here we can see what Rawls has in mind that, say, he's thinking that if people knew what
their abilities were, then in the situation he's imagining, they would try to select whatever
and the thought that institutions that in which they would be better off and so the result
wouldn't be one that we could say is fair in the sense of not giving undue advantage
to particular people.
However, there's a, the next step that I think leads to big trouble.
When we're trying to decide what the right thing to do is, it seems absurd to say we
shouldn't take account of our own view of what is good.
Supposing, say, you find convincing an Aristotelian account of how we should lead our lives, then
You would think that's the very basis for trying to decide how the basic structure of society should be formulated.
Isn't it absurd to say that people shouldn't take account of their own best considered moral views when they're trying to decide what the basic structure of society should be?
Rawls would say, well but people, and we'll see this comes out very much in his later work,
political liberalism, he'd say, well people will disagree on this and we're trying to reach an
agreement, but that is no doubt the case, but it hardly seems an appropriate way of proceeding to
say people should disregard their own views on morality just so they could come up with an
and Agreement. Why, how could, just what you're supposed to take account of in deciding questions
like that are what you think is good. Supposing, though, we put this aside, we say, all right,
let's accept the original position the way Rawls constitutes it. There's a further problem
is, Rawls has eliminated certain sources of bias, but why would we say that what self-interested
people decide on in this situation is the moral or the correct moral view of what the
basic structure should be. Morality is in self-interest or at least arguably different
concepts. So why is self-interest with these extra features tacked on? Why is self-interested
bargaining the proper way of arriving at the correct moral theory? Someone could just say
and Ronald Dworkin was one who raised this objection. So what if people in the original
position arrive at such and such conclusions? Why should we care about the original position
at all? And I don't think Rawls really has a good answer for that. He just said, well,
this is the way we establish a fair procedure, and then he goes on from there. We will see
later though, he does have some supplementary, some other arguments on, aside from the original
position itself, defending the views he comes up with, defending the conclusion, he comes
up with certain conclusions from the original position, he has further arguments trying
to show that those conclusions accord with our ordinary considered moral judgments. So,
What is it that he thinks that people in the original position will agree to?
Well, he says people will agree to two basic principles.
The first is much less controversial than the second, the second one at least, part
of the second one that's aroused nearly all the major critical discussion.
The first of these is one of equal basic liberties.
He has in mind here a fairly standard list, such as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech,
if it's a right to vote, if he's assuming it's a democrat, we're going to have some sort of democratic political system.
There's a standard list of rights and he thinks people will want to have
is sort of the maximum of liberty, giving equal liberty to everyone.
There's a conspicuous absence on this list of liberty.
People don't have property rights.
So he's starting off with the assumption that people don't have property rights.
If people did have property rights, that would mean there wouldn't be any real room for
the kinds of equalitarian measures he favors.
We'll be seeing what these are in a couple of minutes.
Why does he exclude property rights from the initial list of the basic liberties?
Well, here this gets to the heart of how Rawls sees the question he's asking, the question
of how we decide on the basic social institution.
He said, and here he's rather Misesian, he said, social cooperation, people getting together
benefits everyone. Say, if you imagine trying to produce everything for yourself, we wouldn't get very far. Everyone benefits from social cooperation.
So the purpose of trying to come up with the basic rules is to establish how we distribute the gains from social cooperation.
So we can't come up with initial property rights because just what we're trying to answer is
How are these gains to be distributed among people?
Here, without explicitly bringing in property rights, there's an objection.
This one was raised by Robert Nozick, whom I'll be talking about in the next lecture.
Nozick said, well, if we're concerned with the benefits of social cooperation, we shouldn't
take the total amount of things people produce as subject to redistribution.
We should just take the subject to redistribution, subject to decision about what to do, just
The increase from what they produce by cooperating from what they would produce by not cooperating.
Now first it doesn't seem like very much of an objection because you remember people just couldn't produce very much just if they were by themselves.
But, you know, as it goes on, we could imagine not just people cooperating in one particular group,
Groups, a group of people getting together, trying to cooperate, but they could have,
we could imagine other groups also, so all that they should be subject to distribution
is how much more is available because of this group, the ones they decide to be in, than
would be for any other groups, it's just the difference between the top group and the next
The best analysis of the theory of justice is in Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia
in Section 2 of Chapter 7. That's, as I say, by far the best account and it's very much
influenced the way I look at Rawls. So this, though, is why Rawls doesn't put in property
rights, because he thinks everything is up for distribution. So people have a set of
Basic Liberties. That's the first principle. Then there's the second principle. This has
two parts. The first one is the less controversial part, that all positions of importance should
be open to all on the basis of equality of opportunity. Everyone, or most people, like
Equality of Opportunity. It's never very clearly specified what's involved in the
concept, what that would entail. So I'll just pass that one by because it's the
second part of the Difference Principle. It's the heart of the controversy and
the second part of the Difference Principle is that all inequalities have
to be to the advantage of the least well-off social group. So we have then
There are two principles, there's the principle of equal liberties, and there's a second principle, the difference principle, which has two parts, equal opportunity, and this principle of all inequalities have to be the advantage of the least well-off group.
The principles are related in a way that Rawls calls lexical priority, actually used longer term I think for his lexicographical priority, but lexical priority is better and easier to spell.
So, what this means is that the principles are ordered in this way.
The first principle must be fulfilled before the other two, before the other principle.
And this says you can't, say, interfere with people's basic liberties to promote more equality
of opportunity or redistribution under the second part of the difference principle.
This one has priority, just like, say, in a dictionary, suppose you say the letter A
is lexically prior to B. All the words beginning with A come before all the words beginning
with B. So, similarly, any matter that fulfills basic liberties comes before anything dealing
with equal opportunity. Similarly, equality of opportunity is lexically prior to the other
Another Part of the Difference Principle. Now, now we can get to the fun part, which
is the second part of the Difference Principle and the various problems with it. Rawls thinks
that equality is really the fallback position. What he's thinking, what we're talking about
Rothbard's distribution of what he calls primary social goods.
This would include not only wealth, but honors, anything that really people need, certain
basic goods, people need in order to live or to live well, such as we need a certain
amount of social bases of self-respect, we need money, we need resources of various kinds,
so these basic social goods, we're asking how they should be distributed, we're starting
from a point of equality, then he thinks that though people in the original position, remember
they know various facts and theories, well-established theories of social science, if it turns out
is very likely the case that inequalities will benefit the least well-off social group, then
we should allow those inequalities. Supposing that we allow, say, doctors to earn larger
incomes than average, then it's likely that the poor people will get better care than
And they would if doctors had to labor for very low wages. So Rawls thinks we should
take account of fats like that and inequalities that benefited the least well-off group would
be allowed. By the least well-off group, Rawls means something like, he varies what he says
I'm not going to talk about this in different editions of Theory of Justice, but it means something like, say, the lower one-third of income earners in society.
So inequalities are allowed to the extent they benefit this group.
Why does Rawls think that people in the original position would choose that part of the difference principle?
Well, he says, we have a case, however, remember each of the people in the original position
is choosing from the point of view of self-interest.
So he thinks that people would reason in this way, they would say it would be really bad
if I didn't, if I went below a minimum of certain, these primary social goods, supposing
When people chose, say, a system where you would get the average of all possible positions,
we would just, it's kind of a utilitarian solution, we would say, imagine the various
incomes people might make on your different system, and you would pick the one that would
give you the highest average.
So he said, well, if you chose that way, then if you came, it might come out that you wouldn't
get very much, then it would be much worse to say, to find yourself in a very bad position
without very much of the primary, or anything of the primary goods, than you would gain
from getting a high position, a higher position than you would under his system.
So he says this is a case of choice under uncertainty.
We don't know, because remember people in the original position, lack any information
about not only about what their abilities are, but what the outcomes of various social
systems are.
They lack this information, so they can't calculate the odds that they're going to be
in various positions.
I can't say, well, it's likely, say, with 50% probability that I'll end up above average
in income, or 25% probability I'll be in the lower group.
I can't make such calculations, I'm in a situation of uncertainty.
So Rawls appeals to certain views of certain game theories, which says if we're deciding
under uncertainty, we should act in a way that maximizes the worst possible outcome.
Instead of saying what we should do is to maximize our expectation of the best outcome,
we should choose what maximizes our chances in the worst situation.
This is called the Maximin Principle.
There are various disputes that I'm not competent to go into, so whether this is correct to
count according to game theory of what people should choose.
It's interesting in the distinction he makes between choosing under uncertainty where you
don't know anything about the probabilities and choosing under risk where you can calculate
odds.
This is derived from the famous book by Frank Knight, The Risk, Uncertainty and Profit.
You see Rawls, after he graduated with philosophy, spent a good deal of time studying economics.
Economics, he went to graduate courses in economics, the neoclassical kind, he's very familiar with economic theory, and Knight in particular had a great deal of influence on him.
In fact, according to one biography by Thomas Pogge, he says that Rawls said that he got
the basic idea of deciding on justice through this kind of conversational procedure from
an essay by Knight in his book Ethics of Competition.
I was glad to read this because I claimed in another essay that one of Rawls' arguments
on supporting his views on that people don't deserve their natural abilities also came from
9th. So I always like to get, find arguments or views that confirm my own views. So I was
glad to see that. So again, Raul said people will choose the difference principle because
Here again there are a number of problems aside from this question whether Rawls is right about game theory.
One, again raised by Nozick, is why is it that people are supposed to choose what the social, according to what will benefit the least well-off social group?
Why wouldn't they, going on the same basis as Rawls does, where people are concerned about their position,
they're concerned that they're not going to, they might not wind up with very, not very much in the way of primary goods,
so they'll be in a very bad state of affairs if they don't follow the maximum principle.
Why wouldn't they say we have to maximize the position of the worst-off individual, not just the worst-off group?
So we would pick, say, someone who's very, very depressed, and say, how could we maximize that person's position?
That seems like you would mandate much more redistribution of wealth than you would under
the principle Rawls wants.
I should have mentioned earlier one clarification about what Rawls means by worst-off group.
It means that you're choosing between various systems and you say, would the worst-off group
group say in one system be better or worse off in the worst off group in another system.
You aren't saying let's take this one set of people who are the worst off in this system
and say how can that group be made better off because obviously the way you do that
is just give them all the money, give them everything that would make them best off.
What you're doing is comparing worst-off groups among the various options.
But to return to the problem of you, one is, why do we pick groups rather than individuals?
Then the second problem is, let's suppose we had a situation like this, let's just say
Say there are two groups. Now, suppose in each of these groups, in each of these situations,
the worst off group gets five, five, we're just taking arbitrary units. In one, the best
Best-off group gets 10, the better-off group gets 8.
So which one would we favor according to Rawls?
Well, it seems like the one we should favor is the first one, I mean, sort of, without
regard to Rawls, but it seems like the first one's better because the lower group is no
worse off in the first one than the second one, and the other people are better off.
The top group is better off. It was a standard Pareto principle in economics. If something is to the benefit of one person and doesn't make anyone worse off, then that's a good reason to adopt that measure, it seems.
Although there's also a problem with the Pareto criteria, that part, it does seem plausible that if somebody's better off and nobody's worse off, then that gives you a good reason for that measure.
measure, but remember what Rawls is concerned with is justifications of deviating from equality.
He thinks that equality is the real starting point, the fallback position. So this one,
the eight and five is closer to equality, so it would seem like a Rawlsian would have
So we have to say this one is better contrary to what we would ordinarily think.
Now Rawls could get around this by what is called the staggered difference principle.
This says we try to make things as well off as possible for the least well off group.
Then if we've done that, we try to make things as well as possible for the next group and
so on.
If we apply the staggered difference principle, this one would be, we would pick this one rather than this one because we've made things as well as possible for the lowest group, then this one makes things better off for the next group than this one, so we should pick this one.
But Rawls doesn't really, it's not really clear whether Rawls accepts this staggered principle, but there'd be a problem for him if he does, because remember, he's saying to the lower group, we should, you should accept some inequality because this is to your advantage.
He's saying equality is the basic position, but surely you can't refuse this kind of inequality
because you're better off under this than having pure equality.
The inequalities are to the eventual least well-off group.
Now, but if you try this with a staggered principle, the least well-off group isn't
is better off because this group gets more than this group, so he wouldn't have a good
argument to give to the lower-off, the worst-off group, that they should accept this, so someone
who was an egalitarian would have a tough time justifying the staggered difference principle,
but if he rejected that, then he seemed like he would have to take this very counterintuitive
We haven't even begun to give the problems of the difference principle.
Another one is that under the, there's sort of a misleading aspect of the difference principle.
If we think why would someone support the difference principle, not just ask why do
people in the Rawlsian original position support what we ask, we're not in the original position,
We're considering Rawls' system. Why should we accept what Rawls has come up with? Well, one moral view many people have, they'll say, well, supposing someone's very poor or someone is very sick, not, say, imagine someone who's severely handicapped, can't really provide for himself, we might have a feeling that person
should be helped in some way. I don't myself think that this justifies coercion of other people, but we certainly might very well have the intuition people of that kind should be helped, so I think that kind of feeling influences people to think, well maybe Rawls is right that the lower-off group should be made as well-off as possible, but what's
What's leading about this is that these really badly off people aren't even included in the initial situation because remember what Rawls is talking about is how we divide the benefits of social cooperation.
So, if people are really badly off and not able to contribute to social gains at all,
say they're net people who drains on production, they would be people that if they weren't
in the group at all, the gains from social cooperation would be higher.
From a self-interested point of view, the people self-interested, they wouldn't be
be included in the initial bargaining situation at all.
So it's only when Rawls is talking about a lower group, he doesn't have in mind people
who are really severely badly off.
He does think those people should be aided in some way, but this comes in only at a later
stage of his system, when we're trying to come up with the basic structure of society,
are concerned only with people who were contributing to gains from cooperation.
This point, incidentally, was made by G.A. Cohen, Jerry Cohen, who was a Marxist political
philosopher, my favorite Marxist, he's a very good philosopher.
I think it's a quite good point, he didn't intend it as one.
He thinks Rawls isn't egalitarian enough. He doesn't intend it at all to defend the market position, but it's, I think, a very good point showing that at least the support one might intuitively have for Rawls' difference principle really rests on an illusion.
So, oh, one further problem, I guess this will be with the difference between what Rawls constitutes or states it, is this, supposing, say,
again, let's assume we're sympathetic to egalitarianism, we want equal distribution, we're only willing to modify this to help the poor.
So, supposing, say, if there were some enormous inequality, we'll have some enormous inequality,
the worst off group will be held slightly.
Supposing we had this situation, let's see, let's do it this way, okay.
On this one, Rawlsian would have to say this distribution is better because the worst-off
group is slightly better-off than it is in this one.
But remember, the Rawlsian is egalitarian, so this one is enormously more unequal than
this one.
The Rawlsian would have to say, this one is better, it's the one we should adopt, even
though it's a very inegalitarian one.
Of course, I have no objection to that, but it seems like a Rawlsian should, so what the
problem here is that the Rawlsian seems to be resting everything on making things better
are off for the worst off group he's forgetting all about, or most of all about, of what motivates
his position in the first place in egalitarianism.
So as you can see, I don't think Rawls' arguments for the difference principle are too convincing.
and he's not, he hasn't really come up with a plausible reason for thinking that people
in the initial situation, original position, even if you take that as an acceptable starting
point, which I don't think you should, would come up with what he wants.
This, but as I mentioned, in addition to asking why, what would people in the original position
Pick. Rawls supports his views in this way. He said, well, what he wants to do is take
the results of his theory and then test them against our ordinary moral judgments. And
then he said, we think about how the theory matches our ordinary judgments and we try
to balance the two and come up with adjustments. And what we come up with, this process is
called reflective equilibrium, depending on what we include in reflective equilibrium.
There are differences between wide and narrow reflective equilibrium, but I'm not going
to reflect on those differences further.
But anyway, the process is that we say is the result of theory, one that accords with
our moral judgments.
Now, Rawls thinks, he supports his view that it does in this way, he said, well, suppose
somebody says, I don't like your system because shouldn't people with great abilities be able
to benefit from them fully, regardless of how the Lieswaugh Group is doing?
To return to Michael Jordan, if he's a phenomenally gifted basketball player, why shouldn't he
be able to benefit from that?
Why would he have to limit his income to help people who are less talented than he is?
So Rawls replied that we don't deserve our natural abilities.
We don't have our, say, if Jordan has these athletic abilities, he didn't acquire them
because of certain morally good deeds he did.
It was just that he happened to be born with extraordinary talents, or if he wasn't born
with them, he somehow acquired them.
It wasn't due to that, it wasn't that he did anything morally praiseworthy, he just wound up talented in a certain way.
Isn't this really just a matter of luck that he has all this special talent?
Why should he, how can he then say, look, you can't take income away from me just to satisfy this difference principle,
Because I deserve to benefit from my abilities to the full extent possible.
Rawls says he doesn't morally deserve his abilities.
These are just part, he just got this through the natural lottery.
And similarly, according to Rawls, luck goes even further.
Well, it's not the reason he was able when he was playing basketball to earn such extremely high income.
It wasn't just that he was extremely talented.
It was that people, being talented at basketball was something that was very much in demand.
Suppose you imagine someone with his abilities in some other field, like say someone was
the greatest checker player of his time.
No one could compare to this person's checker player.
That person wouldn't be earning much money because there isn't much demand for skilled
checker players.
So Rawls said, isn't it just a matter of luck that some people happen to have talents that coincide with people's preferences in the market, so they get very big incomes, whereas other people might be very talented and they don't get very much.
So, he then, so what he says is, we can't then appeal, say, people deserve, you deserve
your natural assets, so this, we shouldn't use this feeling, intuition that people have,
you should get what you deserve to make us reject the results of his theory.
This view is not only seems to be confused, but has very dangerous consequences.
One is, first there's in saying that we don't deserve our assets, I think there's kind
of a bit of verbal trickery going on.
If you say in ordinary language, you don't deserve something, it has a sense that you
should have that taken away from you.
If I say, you don't deserve to win, that suggests there's something wrong with your winning.
If we can't do anything about it, you really shouldn't have won.
This is a bad thing.
But even Rawls doesn't claim that.
All that he's claimed is that it isn't due to your moral merit that's in a superior position.
But that doesn't have the implication at all that there's anything wrong with your being
in benefiting from that position.
As Nozick puts it, you can be entitled to something even if you don't deserve it because
because of your moral merit.
Then there's a further problem.
This is what I think is where the real danger of Rawls' position comes in.
What happens if you agree with Rawls that people don't deserve their natural assets?
Let's move from that to thinking that the natural assets are up to the collective, up to the
people in the original position to allocate as they decide.
We're taking people's talents and abilities and saying, how can these be arranged so that
the least well-off benefit?
So you get to benefit from your own abilities, only if doing so will help the least well-off
group.
But isn't this really kind of a form of slavery, it's saying your own abilities don't belong
to you?
What, after all, is left of the person if you take away his talents and abilities?
and taking the basic characteristics of the person and making them a collective asset.
Some defenders of Rawls have said, no, no, he isn't doing that because, remember, there's
the principle of liberty, you would have a right to free choice of occupation under that
and that has a lexical priority to the difference principle, but I don't think this gets around
from the point, because you could still have, say, tell someone, you don't have to work,
but if you do, say, then you have to produce in this way, the way that will benefit the
least well-off group, as Nozick said, you can imagine a situation where you put a harness
on a horse and you say you don't force the horse to move, but if it does move, it has
The Theory of Money and Credit
You might have a so-called head tax, which would be something like this.
You say, how, supposing someone would benefit the least well-off group a great deal if he
worked as a doctor but he doesn't like, or he's a doctorate, rather paint pictures.
And you say, suppose he's not very good as a painter, he just likes painting.
So he would benefit the least well-off group if he were a doctor, but he doesn't want to.
So could we have a system of taxation that would make it very hard for him to be a painter
because he could have benefited the least well-off group by being a doctor?
We can see very easily how trying to apply the Difference Principle can drastically curtail
people's liberties and really what Rawls has done is make, turn us all into collective,
make us all at the disposition of the collect to be really, although remember his basic
criticism of utilitarianism were, I think he was right, is utilitarianism doesn't take
seriously the distinction between person, he himself isn't really taking seriously
the distinction between persons here.
One point I should mention also, some people, you might have thought of this, I'm sure many of you have thought of this yourself,
you might be tempted to respond to Raoul's point that we didn't do anything to deserve our abilities by saying,
well, even if someone is born with a great many talents, doesn't he have to work hard to develop them?
Say, the great athlete doesn't just say, imagine, Michael Jordan doesn't just go out on the
basketball court and discover he's very good at shooting basketball.
He spent years developing his talent, so you can probably guess how Rawls would respond
to that.
He said, well, supposing some people are very hardworking, they're very persistent, they're
The Theory of Money and Credit
I want to mention what I think is a very good argument made by David Schmitz in his book, Elements of Justice.
Remember, I mentioned Schmitz before in one of my lectures.
I criticized an argument he had against hypothetical consent, hypothetical arguments, but here's one where I think he's right.
Yes, he was a very good philosopher. In fact, one could even say, when you're out of Schmitz,
you're out of gear. So, what Schmitz does is to challenge Rawls's claim that we don't
deserve our natural abilities. He said, we do deserve our abilities because what Rawls
is assuming is that for us to say we don't deserve something, sort of has to go all the
way down, as it were. Why don't we say we deserve to benefit from our abilities if we
We make good use of what we have. Why do we have to say we not only have to deserve what
we do with our abilities, we have to deserve our abilities also? You're imagining the starting
point is enough. It is enough to say we're starting here now. We're very productive.
We work hard so we deserve what we get. It has to be the initial properties we have. We have to deserve those. Also, why should we make that move that Rawls wants? If we don't do that, we can just say, sort of in ordinary, as we very often would in ordinary language, someone who's worked hard deserves what he's made of his talents.
So Schmitt says it's more plausible to look desert in that way than what Rawls does.
Now, in his book, Political Liberalism, which came out in 1993, Rawls comes up with a slightly
different rationale for his difference principle in the other parts of his system.
He doesn't change his conclusions at all but he modifies the reasons we should adopt them.
Here he stresses very much the fact that his system is intended to apply to modern democratic
states like the United States.
He says here we have a situation where there's a great deal of conflict among people in their
Conceptions of the Good. Remember, conception of good is your basic philosophical outlook.
For example, we see in the U.S., there are some people who were very opposed to abortion. They
say abortion is murder. Other people say, no, this isn't right. The woman has the right to choose.
Some people have religious views that are very different from others. Some people have strong
among egalitarian intuitions, they say. It's unfair that some people earn more than others.
Other people don't have these views. How are we going to settle these disputes? How are
we going to arrive at a policy that we can all reasonably accept? So Rawls once, especially
What he has in mind, he was, besides being a philosopher, he was very interested in history, taught, I think, courses, sometimes joint courses with David Donald, who was an American historian, he studied various historical periods quite a bit.
He was very much influenced by the situation in what happened in Europe, remember the Thirty Years War, 1618, 1648, where there were devastating conflicts because of clashes in religion.
So he asked how can we have a society in which there's some sort of consensus in which people can agree on the basic structure,
So he said, well, what we want to assume is supposing there are people with different conceptions of the good, but we all want to reach agreement with everyone else who is willing to reach agreement.
People in the sense of what he calls reasonable, not just rational in the sense of being able to see how best to meet their own goals, but reasonable in the sense of wanting to achieve agreement with others.
Then he said, what would we do? We have these different conceptions of the good, so what would we do?
He said it wouldn't be reasonable for, say, someone with a particular conception of the
good to use as an argument something that was peculiar to his view of the good.
It wouldn't show respect for people with competing conceptions of the good to use such an argument.
I think, for example, someone said that abortion should be prohibited because of various verses
in the Bible go against it, in this person's opinion.
This wouldn't show respect to people in the society who don't accept the Bible.
So what Rawls says is that we have to appeal to things that could be reasons for everyone
to accept.
He calls this kind of process where we limit our use of conception of the good and just
appeal to reasons that everyone could accept, calls this public reason.
He isn't saying that everyone will always agree on all measures, it's just that though
Each person is using reasons that other people recognize as reasons.
They are, it isn't, in his view, we don't want a situation, say, where, let's suppose
a majority of people come to accept the anti-abortion view based on religious grounds, that those
people just pass the measures they want and force them on the recalcitrant minority.
He says this wouldn't be showing respect for those with other conceptions of the good.
So what we do according to him is we limit ourselves to public reason.
And what happens if we do that, then it turns out we get exactly the same principles as
we did the first time.
Everybody now, using public reason, accepts the principles of Rawls' system, so the story is different, the ending is always the same.
Now, Rawls suggests that, then you have a problem.
Well, supposing you have a particular conception of the good, and the conclusions you come
up with from that conception of the good differ with what Rawls' system says you, when you
apply public reason, says you should favor, then what Rawls suggests is that within your
If you have a different conception of the good, you'll find, you'll come up with aspects of that that tell you what to do when other people have different conceptions of the good.
You'll say, well, I'm a utilitarian, but what do I do when other people aren't utilitarians?
Then the answer will be to, again to use public reason.
So you have each conception of the good will have reasons to accept the Rawlsian system. Rawls calls this overlapping consensus.
There is a slight problem here. He doesn't show that from any of the standard conceptions of the good, that people will do have,
it will follow from any standard conceptions of the good, that people faced with disagreement will support the Rawlsian system.
System, that would only, it's, he's just taking what should be a conclusion of a very
difficult argument as a premise, so he hasn't shown there's going to be any consents of
the kind he wants at all.
Even he could show that there are still big problems with his, with his system.
Why should we attach, supposing we do find ourselves as we do in a situation where people
Why shouldn't we just say, well, then we just try to come to some arrangement with these people and do the best we can to get our own views accepted?
Say, if we're libertarians, we say, well, we have non-libertarian people.
Why should we just try to convince them that they should adopt the views we think are right
and meanwhile just live sort of as best we can with the other people?
Why should we try to get a system where we all agree in the way Rawls suggests on the
common set of reasons?
Well, Rawls says if we do that, if we pursue what he calls a modus vivendi where we don't
The Society will lack stability, but it's not clear why that's a property that we want to have.
By stability, he seems to be just stipulating that a society where people have a sort of agreement he wants,
He hasn't given us any reason to accept that taxability in that sense.
All he's done is define a stable order as one where people have the sort of public reason
in the way he suggests.
Now, supposing though he says, no, that isn't what I mean.
What I mean is that the society won't stay together on the basis of Morris v. Vendi.
When he's made a, not a philosophical claim at all, he's made an empirical claim, and
we want to know why does he think that most societies after all do carry on for long periods
with considerable divergence, we don't follow public reason that we're still here, why would
What do you think that public reason is necessary for stability in a non-controversial sense?
Now I was originally planning to say something about the law of peoples, but I think I've
said enough to show there are severe problems in all the systems, so I think we'll have
the rest of the time for discussion.
Yeah.
David, just a question, given the position that you've outlined that there are laws that have for the importance of equality,
a couple of points. There are some of us who have not been quite as successful as authors and publishers as laws were.
Would he be offended if I not had the score and asked for a percentage of his $400,000 sales?
Secondly, would he suggest that the policy from the publishing go to those who are in the publishing field who are less fortunate or go to the farmers, everybody else, regardless?
And thirdly, did he voluntarily offer to turn over his wealth from his unjust acquisition of 400,002 people, or was he waiting for the taxman to come and take his money?
Distribute the profits he got from that to less successful authors or less fortunate people.
Did he apply his difference principle in his own life?
Well, that's an excellent question.
G.A. Cohen raised an objection very much like yours, you're in good philosophical company.
He said, remember, in the difference principle, we're allowing inequalities because, say,
we know that people who are able to earn higher incomes will have incentive to produce more.
We know this.
It's kind of a standard fact of economic psychology.
So he said, well, you know, if we're really egalitarian, we shouldn't be motivated by
such incentives.
We should produce the same as much as before, even if we aren't getting more money.
So he's a very similar point to the one you're making.
I think what Rawls would say in response, and I don't think he did give away his money,
but what he would say in response is, remember, what he's trying to do is say, what is the
proper basic structure of society?
He's not saying, given that structure, how should individuals act? But he's saying, he
would say, given that, he's entitled to his money as long as the social system is set
up in the way he suggests. But it's a very real question whether one can make that kind
of separation that he wants. Why don't, is he right in thinking that the basic principles
and also to determine institutions of justice don't have consequences for individual conduct
in just the way you suggest.
I'm inclined to think there's a great deal in the objection you're suggesting, but this
is a matter that's very much been discussed in the journals and it's one of the big issues.
Dan?
Dan.
The question was is the notion of public reason that should be taken as historically conditioned, is it a universal, we always use the same public reason, or would this change say in the Middle Ages, 13th century?
or would this change say in the Middle Ages, 13th century people might have had, we're
trying to use public reason, might have had much more theological views than now. Well,
I think first that when Rawls once talked about public reason, he's confining it to
modern democracy such as the United States, he's not at all committed to the view that
say in other historical periods the way to solve problems is through an analog of public reason.
I don't think he would say he hasn't addressed, at least in political liberalism, he isn't addressing
I did want to say a couple things not directly responding to your question, but your question
suggests one is we see in the notion of public reason where we're trying to get this kind
of consensus, it's an idea that at least has some similarity to Rousseau's general will.
Remember where Rousseau's general were getting everyone to agree on what the common policy is.
Rawls in his lectures was, stresses Rousseau, lectures on history of political thought, stresses Rousseau very much.
One of the great sociologists, Robert Nisbet, who we've written about, in a review of Theory of Justice, said, well, he's in the tradition of Rousseau, he was one of the first to spot that, and I think he's entirely right.
The other thing I wanted to mention that your question suggested is, supposing we go back to theory of justice,
we don't think we're not talking about public reason, we're going back to theory of justice.
Remember, people in the original position are not supposed to take account of their own conception of the good.
Now, this is your question, probably not the Middle Ages that suggested this to me.
Supposing, as was the case in the certain parts of the Middle Ages, practically everybody
had the same conception of the good, so we're imagining, let's say, people in the original
position at a time where everybody, or practically everybody, has the same conception of good.
On Roller's view, we couldn't, those people couldn't take account of their own conception
of good in deciding what to do, even though we're assuming there aren't significant minorities
with other views it would follow in Rawls' initial view as he has the odd cons when people even that state couldn't take
and the kind of their own conception of the good.
Yeah.
Well, the question was, would Rawls be, how would Rawls be thought of, say, 50 or 100 years from now?
He's now regarded as the top theorist, but what is, would it be, that might not be the case,
it was pointed out that Hobbes was regarded as extremely controversial when he was writing,
now he's viewed as a classic, and so couldn't it be that Rawls' reputation could go down?
Well, I hope it does. There were people at the time who, even when the book came out, didn't like it.
For example, Richard Hare, reviewed in Philosophical Quarterly, he gave an extremely negative review.
I understand from David Sacks, who was, remember I mentioned him, the one who wrote on Falsing Plato's Republic,
who was a great friend of Rawls, that Rawls was very upset by that review.
and then the last sentence was something extremely negative I think he said
something like this book isn't up to the standards of analytic philosophy and he
left that out in the as his review was reprinted he left that sentence out so I
think certainly there are critics of as I say Nozick, Anthony Flew, Murray Rothbard
I've raised very good points against him, and we can hope that those arguments will be successful.
But I can't at all predict the future, but I can predict that we're out of time now, so thanks very much.