Applied Ethics Rawls and Nozick
Rawl’s (hereinafter RS) main idea is that social justice
is fairness and his general conception of justice has at
least 2 main ideas: 1st basic liberties, or the civil and
political rights of a constitutional democracy, should
have priority
- All social primary goods, or goods that are
distributed directly by social institutions such as –
civil rts and liberties, opportunities, income – are to
be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution
of any of these advantages is to the advantage of the
least favored.
So the only inequalities Rs wants to remove are those
which disadvantage someone but if certain inequalities
benefit everyone by drawing out socially useful talents
and energies, then they might be acceptable to
everyone. Suppose society gives requires higher taxes
from someone else than I pay. If doing so promotes my
interests, then equal concern for my interests suggests
for Rs that we allow that inequality.
Ex: might want to keep a fully functioning system of
emergency medicine in our society – emergency wards
staffed round the clock – might be to our advantage to
pay emergency health care staff more money – to
make their income a little higher than everyone else’s
– so they will endure the demands of the job
Rs principles of justice are as follows:
First principle: Each person is to have an equal right
to the most extensive total system of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for
all.
Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are
to be arranged so that they are both: a) to the greatest
benefit of the least advantaged, and B) attached to
offices and positions open to all under conditions of
fair equality of opportunity.
Rawls is giving priority and special protection to what
he calls basic liberties, ie, the standard civil-political
rights recognized in liberal democracies – the right to
vote, to run for office, due process, free speech,
mobility, freedom of thought and association, liberty
of conscience and other rights and liberties protected
by the rule of law – indeed one way of differentiating
liberalism from other political doctrines is that
liberalism gives priority to these basic liberties, etc.
Some Rawlsian Terminology:
Primary Goods for Rawls are social or natural.
Social Primary Goods are goods that are directly
distributed by social institutions, e.g., income and
wealth, opportunities and powers, rights and liberties.
Natural Primary Goods are distributed by nature, e.g.,
health, intelligence, vigour, imagination, natural
talents. These are affected by social institutions but
not directly distributed by them.
Persons have 2 moral powers: 1) the capacity to
formulate a rational conception of the good life and 2)
the capacity to act, understand and apply the
requirements of justice. These moral powers enable
each person to be a free and responsible agent taking
part in social cooperation.
A Comprehensive Doctrine is a belief or value-system
(religious, moral, philosophical) which sets out a whole
way of living and giving meaning to a life.
Comprehensive doctrines give their adherents a
program for pursuing what is good, valuable, or what
makes life worth living. There is a wide variety of
comprehensive doctrines and people may buy in or out
of them to various degrees. Rawls calls this pluralism.
Note: Rawls is against imposing one comprehensive
doctrine of the Good Life on society. Reasonable
Pluralism should flourish w/n a basic framework of
political liberties that would best allow each person to
pursue his/her unique conception of the Good Life.
But how does Rs arrive at these principles? By what
method does he conclude that rational persons who
know they will have to live with each other will choose
these principles of justice?
Original Position
Rawls invites to participate in a thought experiment –
a fascinating hypothetical exercise in devising a social
k that might enable us to come up with a model for
social cooperation
Social congtract theory has often been criticized as a
weak approach because they ask us to rely on
implausible assumptions- that we can imagine a time
and place as a state of nature when everyone was on
their own w/o any kind of pol authority with the power
to command obedience or protect interests or
possessions
– the ? is what kind of contract would indivs in this
state of nature agree to concerning the establishment
of these powers and responsibilities? once we work out
a contract (hereinafter K) and understand its terms,
then we’d know what the govt is obligated to do and
what rules the citizens are obliged to obey
The usual criticism is that there never was such a state
of nature or such a contract and so neither cits nor
govts are bound by it Ks only create obliges if they are
actually agreed to
We might say that a certain contractual scheme for
social cooperation is the K people would have agreed
to if they had negotiated in a state of nature but so
what? A hypothetical K is no K at all. So social Ks are
seen as either historically absurd or morally
insignificant.
Rs says – I’m not proposing my social K theory as a
means of working out the historical origins of soc or as
a means of setting down historical obligations of
persons and govts
Rs proposes his version of social K theory as a means
of, or a representative device for, teasing out the
implications of certain premises concerning moral
equality – Rs wants to provide us with an explanatory
model that best captures the idea of the moral equality
of indivs living together in a soc
– the basic ? is then how people who are free and equal
can come to be governed? Why submit to external
social or governmental authority?
The basic answer is – due to the uncertainties and
scarcities of social life, individuals would retain their
moral equality but willingly give certain powers to the
state but only if the state used those powers in trust to
protect individual from those uncertainties and
scarcities
- if the govt betrays that trust, then citizens are no
longer under an obligation to obey
Further – rulers are entrusted with the protection of
the moral equality of individuals
Rs thought the state of nature model was a bad one
because it did not do away with inequalities that might
exist – some in the state of nature might be stronger or
wield more influence at the bargaining table
So he came up with a really novel twist which he called
the original position (hereinafter op) - remember, the
op is Rs explanatory device or model for working out
the political, or socially cooperative implications, of
persons moral equality
In the op, people are behind a veil of is such that they
don’t know their place in society, their class position
or social status, their fortune in the distribution of
natural assets
– they don’t know whether they are smart or talented
or if so how smart or how talented, they don’t know
their conceptions of the good, their psychological
makeup
– Rs idea is that when people are under the veil of
ignorance, they are all so similarly situated that no one
is able to design principles of justice, or fair social
cooperation, that favors his or her particular condition
– you don’t know what that condition is – you are, as
much as you can imagine, the person beside you.
Remember – this isn’t Rs attempt at a theory of
personal identity – it’s simply a device which might
capture, or sum up, our notions of fairness and
equality and help us to think through their
consequences.
Rs thinks people in the op under the veil of ig would
choose the Principals of justice that I outlined earlier
and you can certainly disagree – you might think
people would have come up with diff ones
First principle: Each person is to have an equal right
to the most extensive total system of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for
all.
Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are
to be arranged so that they are both: a) to the greatest
benefit of the least advantaged, and B) attached to
offices and positions open to all under conditions of
fair equality of opportunity.
But why did Rs think people would pick his principals
of justice?
Rs idea is that while we do not know what position we
will occupy in soc, or what goals or indiv lives we may
want t, there are some things that we each know we all
want to enable us to lead a good life, however we
might define that good life to be – Rs calls these
primary goods
So in choosing principals of justice in the op behind
the veil of ignorance, people want to ensure that they
will each have the best possible access to the primary
goods distributed by social institutions – to income,
wealth, opportunities, rights and liberties
Sound like enlightened egoism? Rs says it isn’t – Rs
says that egoism does not underlie this conception of
justice – since no one knows what position they will
occupy, asking people what is best for themselves is
like asking them to decide what is best for everyone
considered impartially –
as Will Kymlicka puts it “in order to decide from
behind a veil of ignorance which principals will
promote my good, I must put myself in the shoes of
every person in soc and see what promotes their good,
since I may end up being any one of those people.”1
So when you add the veil of ignorance to the op, the
assumption of rational self-interest achieves the same
purpose as benevolence or altruism “because I must
sympathetically identify with every person in soc and
take their good into acct as if it were my own. In this
way, agreements made in the op give equal
consideration to each person.”2 (64-65).
So why wouldn’t people just choose an equal
distribution of social primary goods for all social
positions – everyone gets an equal share of income say
1
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 64.
2
Ibid., 64.
– Rs says that would not make rational good sense if
we can imagine permitting certain inequalities in
income that favor valuable talents and contributions
that would advantage the worst off.
Utilitarianism would not be a good gamble – under
utilitarianism you’re
rights and liberties, your
welfare, might be sacrificed for the greater good of
everyone else - if you can be used as a less than equal
person to benefit everyone else
Rs says the safest bet is a maximin strategy – you want
to set up a system of social cooperation that maximizes
what you would get if you wound up in the minimum,
or worst-off position – you want to work out a scheme
of social cooperation that maximizes the minimum
share allocated under then scheme.
So Rs says you imagine yourself coming out of the op
and ending up at the bottom of the social ladder with a
really crummy distribution of natural assets to boot –
the rational choice, says Rs, is for a scheme that gives
you the best deal if you hit bottom - This means,
argues Rs, that people in the op under the veil of
ignorance will select the difference principle – any
inequalities that are allowed in the distribution of
social primary goods must actually work to the benefit
of the worst off
Criticism –some people argue that Rs builds so many
assumptions into his explanatory model that he rigs
the outcome in favor of his own principles.