Lottery of birth as the nature of obligations

Under the veil of ignorance we would prefer to live in a world having a mechanism to redistribute in a just way the resources that are initially distributed in an arbitrary way (quality of life in the country one you were born, quality of family in which you were born, etc.)

The problem that it is an unrealistic and impossible though experiment involving disregarding all the existing preferences and interests. Moral should refer to reality where the people tend to protect their interest and disregarding of such interests is completely non-intuitive.

Autonomy is important because only the individual herself has full access to her desires and preferences and as such is likely to choose actions maximizing her happiness in a comparatively more effective way than the society that has no way to reveal information about her desires and preferences in any meaningful and complete way (e.g. government cannot get into my head).

Autonomy is only possible if the persons’ actions are rational which means that they (1) recognizes their interest; (2) recognizes the effects of these actions on their interest. Moral intuition: if you are deceived by a mind-controlling machine to step off the cliff because you believe it is a step on a hard road where you want to go – in is not an example of exercising autonomy.

Democracy has absolute value changing the moral nature of state imposed restrictions and obligation. In absence of democracy those are direct restrictions on the personal autonomy akin to slavery. In democracy those are effectually self-imposed restrictions created through the process when individuals’ will is taken into account through the mechanism of direct and indirect vote.

The decision are made by the majority vote, therefore in most cases ability of politician to compromise is absolutely critical in order to advance her agenda. Politicians face pressure to compromise because lack of practical results of their presence in the parliament is likely to diminish the prospect of being re-elected due to disappointment from both voters and sponsors.

Compromising could also have devastating effect on the image and the electorate success of a politician being seen as a betrayal by her supporters – look at the example of electorate failure of the Liber party in the UK after they entered in the coalition with Tories.

If politicians are too ideology-driven and are incapable to compromise this is likely to lead to constant stand-off a dysfunction of the parliament as whole, thus, to the general utility loss.

MPs enjoy permanent media attention allowing them to convey messages to the general public. Important thing here is that, assuming the same media coverage, these messages could be less effective than messages from a non-politician because (1) people might not want to hear politicians at all if they do not trust the political class; and (2) can have partisanship bias against politicians who belong to competing parties.

Minority MPs can still influence coalitions as (1) they could be deciding members on issues across which there is a close to equal split in the parliament; (2) they could strengthen the side effects of the vote because the degree by which certain issue get voted is important as well (see next bullet).

Degree of support for a losing initiative (10% vs 45%) can make a huge difference as it signal the level of political capital for the initiative and therefore can either mobilize new supporters if it is high or demobilize existing supporters if it is low. The same applies for the winning initiative: the tight vote (e.g. ~ 51%) signals low legitimacy of such initiative and is likely to motivate the opponents to re-iterate the voting in near future.