Rawls / Lecture 11
.docCORE 11-120 Week Eleven
Rawls on the Just State
John Rawls is an American philosopher, widely considered the most significant political philosopher of the 20th century. His most important work is A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971. Today we are going to examine the basic outlines of this theory of justice.
Recall Locke’s picture of a legitimate government. This is one that protects individuals’ rights, including property rights, and respects majority rule (provided majority rule does not infringe upon individual rights). Should we say that a society that succeeds in running itself along the lines envisaged by Locke would be a just society? Perhaps it would systematically allow for great injustices; perhaps a Lockean society would be deeply unfair in some way. Consider another theory of justice we have examined in our course: Plato’s theory of justice. According to Plato, a state is just if and only if it is divided into three classes corresponding to the three fundamental tasks of social life and each class performs the work it is suited to and doesn’t try to usurp the role of other classes. A just state would then be one in which everything is in its place; it would be a state run upon perfectly rational lines. But would such a state really be just? Would it be fair to each of its citizens? Would you agree to join Plato’s republic if you didn’t know which class you were going to be assigned to?
To gain any purchase on these kinds of issue, we need to clarify what we mean by justice in the state. What would be for a society to be just? A just society would not necessarily be one in which no injustices ever occur; injustices can arise for so many contingent reasons, like human error or foolishness, and we don’t blame society as such for these kinds of injustice. Rather, a just society would be one that is run according to genuinely just principles: the basic structure of the society would be just. This is Rawls’ starting point. Rawls also starts from the idea that a just society would be a fair society. He calls his conception of justice, “justice as fairness.” Rawls conception of justice as fairness involves more than respect for rights and more than fairness within the legal system. It involves the distribution of what Rawls calls primary social goods: wealth, opportunities, liberties and privileges, and what Rawls calls the bases of self-respect (e.g. equality of political representation). For this reason Rawls is said to be advancing a theory of “distributive justice” in A Theory of Justice. However, let us start our examination of Rawls’ theory by looking at the concept of fairness.
Let us substitute the question–What is a just society?–with the question–What is a fair society? What does it mean to say that a society is fair? Here is one proposal: a fair society would be one that any rational and self-interested person would want to join. This isn’t quite right. A rational and self-interested person would want to join a society in which her particular talents and advantages worked best for her (she is rational and self-interested after all). For example, if she was particularly good at sport, she would prefer a society where successful sportspeople are treated as heroes and rewarded beyond all measure (i.e. our society). This would be a biased choice and we need a way of eliminating this kind of bias if we are to describe a perfectly fair society. Bias emerges on our scenario because rational and self-interested people are inevitably biased towards rules and principles that would give them special advantage; this is just an expression of their rational self-interest. So how could we make this fundamental kind of choice – what kind of society to join, i.e. what kind of basic social principles to agree to – without introducing bias? Rawls answer is the veil of ignorance.
The veil of ignorance is Rawls most important methodological tool. It is a kind of thought experiment. Imagine that we had to choose which kind of society we wished to belong to, but had no idea of the position we are to occupy in it. We don’t know whether we are to be born into a wealthy family or a poor one, a well-adjusted family or a mad-house one. We don’t know whether we are to attend good schools or inadequate ones; forge close ties of privilege or stand largely alone. We don’t know whether we are talented and intelligent; whether, for example, we have a good head for business or whether a fog descends upon us every time someone starts to talk finance or tries to set up a deal with us. We don’t know whether we are to have great capacity for work or whether we are lazy or are exhausted easily. We don’t know whether we are to have strength of will or an addictive personality. What do we know in this thought experiment? We know general principles of economics, sociology and psychology; we know about the environment and its potential and its limitations. We know about the world in a general and abstract way; we just don’t know about the basic principles of our society (this is what we are to choose in the thought experiment) or our particular place in society. Now we ask ourselves the question: what kind of society would we choose to live in? We are asking the question from behind what Rawls calls “the veil of ignorance.” Because we are choosing the basic principles of society from behind the veil of ignorance, we have eliminated all bias and special pleading from our choice of basic principles. We are no longer negotiating as we choose basic principles; we are no longer trying to get the most advantageous deal for ourselves given our special qualities or situation. We are therefore deciding what would be fairest for all.
Rawls works in the social contract tradition of political philosophy – like Hobbes and Locke. He imagines a contract between people who wish to live in a just and fair society, one that reflects equal mutual respect. According to Rawls, in forming a social contract we decide upon the basic structure of society, i.e. we decide upon the basic principles on which society will run. (Don’t worry, this will get less general and more precise very soon.) Rawls calls this situation in which we make this decision “the original position.” The most important thing about the original position is that, in it, everyone operates behind the veil of ignorance. In original position, behind the veil of ignorance, we choose the basic principles of our society. Although we are self-interested choosers, the veil of ignorance ensures that we choose fairly. Like other social contract theorists, Rawls is not hypothesising an actual historical event. The social contract and the original position are hypothetical constructs. If a society’s basic structure is one that would have been chosen by self-interested and rational choosers in the original position (and so behind the veil of ignorance), this makes that the society is a just and fair one. Or so Rawls believes.
Is Rawls right about this? Would choice behind the veil of ignorance reveal what is fair for all? Take the example of sporting talent again. A tremendously talented soccer player (aka football player) can expect, with moderate luck, to become very rich. There is much hard work and sacrifice that goes into a successful soccer career, but it isn’t all about work and sacrifice. Primarily, it is a matter of talent. Should the talented have great advantages over the untalented? Life, Rawls observes, is a natural lottery. Is it fair that the spoils go primarily or exclusively to the winners of this lottery? Rawls thinks that, intuitively, this is not fair. A fair society would ameliorate the advantages got by winning the natural lottery. This is known as Rawls’ natural lottery argument.
However, Rawls doesn’t have to appeal to the intuitive support of the natural lottery argument. Instead, let us try to answer the question by asking: would we, as rational, self-interested people, choose a society in which “the winner takes all” if we had no idea whether we were likely to be a winner or not? Perhaps we would be tempted to gamble. But remember we are gambling with the whole of our lives and we are gambling only once. (There’s no chance of making up our losses the next time we choose which kind of society to live in.) And in conditions of moderate scarcity, we know that the preponderance of people will not be winners. It seems clear at least that a “winner takes all” choice would be irrational in these circumstances. So what choice would be rational?
Rawls answers that, behind the veil of ignorance, we would choose very conservatively. There is too much at stake to gamble, so we would follow the choice principle called “maximin”. On this principle, the rational thing to choose in positions like the one Rawls imagines is to maximize the worse outcome. Choosing according to maximin means that you would be assured a better outcome than any other if things go badly for you. Of course, there are certain things that you would want no matter what position you occupy in society: equal liberties and rights (e.g. freedom of political association, freedom of conscience in personal matters, freedom of religious conviction, equal rights before the law); and equality of opportunity. Rawls refines these basic choices into two principles of justice.
The Two Principles of Justice are:
1 Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all.
2 Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
The first principle has lexical priority over the second. This means that the first principle must be satisfied in full before the second is satisfied at all. The second principle has two parts: equal opportunity and the welfare of the least well off. This latter principle is highly distinctive. It represents most clearly Rawls’ commitment to the rationality of maximin choice in the original position. It is called “The Difference Principle.” Let us look more closely at the difference principle.
If primary social goods – such things as wealth and privileges – were distributed equally throughout society, we would have a perfectly egalitarian society. But there are good economic reasons for thinking that everyone would be economically worse off in such a society. One obvious reason is that incentives are needed for people to work hard and use their talents to create wealth, wealth which is distributed throughout the community. And there may be other general advantages to an unequal distribution of wealth and privilege. For example, giving special privileges to the Governor General, President, or Constitutional Monarch might have social advantages for everyone. For example, it may help ensure political stability in times of democratic deadlock. (Notice that only Governor Generals and Presidents satisfy the equal opportunity clause, and then only potentially.)
The implications of applying the difference principle are easiest to grasp in terms of taxation. Taxation, particularly progressive taxation in which the percentage of tax increases with taxable income, is one means of redistributing wealth for the benefit of the least well-off. Too much taxation of the wealthy would generate significant disincentives for people to pursue wealth. Under the burden of such taxation people would be likely to scale back their work, or try to cheat the system, or opt out of it altogether, say by moving their operations off-shore. The result would be that investment dries up, innovation and business initiative dries up, as do jobs and other economic opportunities. Taxation revenue consequently falls and along with it opportunities to redistribute wealth. Everyone, including the least well-off, would suffer under an excessively progressive regime of taxation. On the other hand, too little taxation and the least well-off suffer economically. Between these extremes there will be an optimum taxation level, according to the difference principle. This is optimized to most benefit the least well-off. The inequalities of income – not redistributed through taxation – are justified because they benefit the least well-off. The vexed question is exactly where this optimum level is. But Rawls is concerned to defend a view of what constitutes this optimality. Inequalities of wealth and privileges are only justified, according to the difference principle, if any other distribution of wealth and privileges would leave the least well-off even less well-off.
Utilitarians in economics generally hold that we should try to maximize the total amount of wealth, or in other versions, maximize the amount of average wealth. Locke thinks that any disparity of wealth is just provided wealth is acquired justly (i.e. without at any stage violating the natural rights of others). Rawls agrees that there are a range of individual rights and liberties all just societies must adhere to (though he doesn’t think that they are “natural”). However, he thinks this is not enough for a society to call itself just. A truly just society would ensure the just redistribution of wealth. Thus Rawls offers a more egalitarian picture of justice than either Locke or the utilitarians. A society is just only if it distributes wealth and privileges to maximize the position of the least well-off of its members.