Who Am I and If So How Many? (29 page)

How about we play a game of dreaming up a truly just society? We have a board and a set of pieces, and we can make up rules to produce the best possible outcome for everyone. The basic setup is this: a group of people – men and women, young and old – live together in one self-contained area, namely, our board, which offers everything a person could need: plenty to eat and drink, a warm place to sleep, and lots of room to move about. To start our best possible society from scratch, we’ll make the people on our board know nothing about themselves. They have no clue whether they are smart or stupid, beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, old or young, male or female. A ‘veil of ignorance’ has been draped over their characteristics, assets, and abilities, rendering them devoid of biography.

These people have to devise rules for how to get along in order to prevent chaos and anarchy from taking over. Each of them has to attend to basic human needs – access to drinking water, food, and sleeping quarters – but the veil of ignorance prevents them from seeing themselves clearly and assessing any other
requirements
. So they sit down together to come up with rules that would work for them while remaining ignorant of their personal status.

What principle do you think they would agree on first? It’s quite a challenge to imagine what they’d come up with, because people behind the veil do not know what they are like in real life and cannot predict what would be best for them. The veil prevents individual interests from swaying the group’s decision and is designed to guarantee fairness and ensure that shared interests prevail. Since it could turn out that a given individual’s initial conditions are not advantageous, people will project themselves into the role of the weakest and promote fair rules that see to the needs of the weakest among them. No one dares to suggest anything risky, because a risk might work against that individual’s interests. The group draws up a list of all suggestions for distributing the important primary goods. Then the group agrees on a ranking that allows each member to get a guaranteed minimum of liberties and primary goods, with everyone obtaining a fair share. The resulting rules might look like this:

Are you persuaded, or are you at least willing to go along with this 0approach? If so, you are a kindred spirit of the late philosopher John Rawls, who thought up this model.

Rawls led a very eventful life before turning to philosophy. He was the second of five sons, two of whom died of diseases they had caught from him (one of diphtheria and the other of pneumonia). Rawls’s parents were very active in politics, his mother in the women’s rights movement and his father, an attorney, in the
Democratic Party. Rawls attended the Kent School in
Connecticut
, then entered Princeton University in September 1939, the same month that Germany invaded Poland. By the time he graduated in 1943, the United States had entered World War II, and Rawls enlisted in the army. He served as an infantryman in the Pacific, where he toured New Guinea and the Philippines. He went to Japan just after the Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rawls visited Hiroshima and observed the terrible aftermath. The army offered him the opportunity to become an officer, but he was so dismayed by his experience that he declined. He returned to Princeton for graduate school; his dissertation on moral philosophy bore the title ‘A Study on the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with
Reference
to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character.’ Rawls had a successful career as a philosopher, and in 1962 he joined the Harvard faculty as a professor of political philosophy. He was not a brilliant orator – he stuttered and was shy in front of audiences – but his colleagues, students, and friends appreciated his modesty and attentiveness. He usually spent the day in his study, sitting barefoot at the edge of his sofa with a writing pad on his knees. He liked to jot down notes while talking to people, which he would read over later and then give them a copy. He never regarded himself as a great philosopher, but rather as a man for whom philosophizing was a communal exercise in contemplation. In 1995, he suffered the first of a series of strokes that greatly impeded his work, and he died in 2002 at the age of eighty-one.

Although he wrote four major books and numerous essays, Rawls made his mark on the history of philosophy with
A Theory
of Justice
, which is possibly the most illustrious book on morality to have been published in the second half of the twentieth century. Though its title is succinct, it represents a monumental attempt to craft a modern moral philosophy, with a guiding principle that is amazingly clear and simple: fairness for everyone is the basis of justice. A society that free individuals on an equal footing would themselves devise is a fair and just society. Hence, a social order is
just when everyone would have approved of it before knowing what place he or she would occupy in the society.

The first principle holds that in a just state, all citizens enjoy the same basic liberties. But because people have differing abilities and interests, social and economic inequalities are bound to emerge over the long run. One person may work harder than another, or have more business sense, or simply be luckier. The next thing you know, that person owns more than the other. Nothing can be done about that. For the state to continue being guided by fairness, Rawls introduces a second principle: although social and
economic
inequalities cannot be avoided, these inequalities are acceptable only when the least advantaged still derive the greatest possible benefit.

Rawls later claimed that his book was intended only for a small circle of his friends, but its success was overwhelming.
A Theory of
Justice
was translated into twenty-three languages and sold more than 200,000 copies in the United States. The enormous sensation it created forced Rawls to continue honing his theory. He spent thirty years reworking and adding to it. The underlying idea has a long history, harking back to Epicurus (see ‘The Distant Garden,’ p. 286), who envisioned a state based on a reciprocal contract. An ideal state is one that the members of a society in full possession of their mental faculties would voluntarily commit to a contract. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke took up this idea in the seventeenth century and outlined elaborate contract theories; Rousseau wrote
The Social Contract
. By the twentieth century, however, contract theories had been consigned to oblivion. Wittgenstein had attempted to banish ethics from philosophy altogether; prescriptive statements about life struck him as illogical and therefore meaningless. It was thus all the more startling that Rawls came back to the old tradition of the social contract in the late 1960s.

Rawls was unable to persuade many people of the political relevance of his work during that turbulent point in history. In 1971, people were preoccupied with the Vietnam War. There
were mass demonstrations against the government, and fierce debates raged about the state and its system of property ownership, civil rights, and the freedom of the individual. Capitalism and socialism were irreconcilably opposed, and both had shown their ugly faces, in Vietnam and in Czechoslovakia. The publication of Rawls’s book, which attempted a grand reconciliation, came at this unlikely moment, although Rawls had not planned his book as a response to these political tensions. But his system, which was aimed at social equalization, was too far to the left to appeal to those on the right, and those on the left regarded him as overcautious and timid. These controversial friend-or-foe lines turned the meticulously argued
Theory of Justice
into philosophical dynamite.

Conservative critics like to point out that Rawls’s fictitious ‘original position’ is not very productive. As both Rousseau and Rawls were aware, this kind of idea is a construct, and its epistemic value is debatable. In reality, critics remind us, things originated differently from the way Rawls imagined – justice and fairness are not the true driving forces of man. They argue that a need for justice, which Rawls hoped to cement by means of the original position, is much less pronounced in reality, and is trumped by the driving forces of egoism and the need for free unconstrained development, as is evident in every society. Hadn’t the moral philosopher Adam Smith made a convincing case back in the eighteenth century that it is egoism – not justice – that impels a society, both economically and morally? As Smith stated, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ For the butcher to benefit, he has to sell his wares at competitive prices, or at least allow for the financial circumstances of his customers. This is how a functioning polity and a ‘free market’ arise.

According to Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, ‘an invisible hand’ guides the pursuit of our own interests and ‘without intending it, without knowing it, advance[s] the interest of the
society.’ Smith’s twentieth-century admirers, first and foremost Rawls’s colleague at Harvard, Robert Nozick, use this idea to defend the status quo of every society, because it is the result – for better or for worse – of the true forces driving human behavior. Inventing additional forces on the drawing board does not make sense. It is utterly misguided, Nozick explains, for Rawls to use principles of fairness to set community rules; society has no need for principles of that sort. Why shouldn’t man be able simply to enjoy in peace all his natural gifts, his undeserved talents, and his fortuitous head starts in the race for the limited natural and social assets in his life? Why must his successes benefit others? Isn’t it enough that they do so in the bigger picture? For Nozick, Rawls is a socialist in disguise who completely misjudges the true nature of man.

Rawls a socialist? Socialists would roar with laughter at the very idea. Here, too, the critique begins with the fictitious original position. As ignorant as those under the veil might be, Rawls stresses that they are ‘free persons.’ Making the will of a select group of individuals the basis of a theory of justice is problematic, however. As we know, not all members of a society are fully self-determined and free. What about small children and people with severe mental disabilities, who are incapable of casting a vote? If only the interests of mature adults are taken into account, these disadvantaged individuals could easily be deprived of rights – at the very least orphans and the most severely mentally disabled lacking family support. The equality of all people is thus a tricky starting point, even in a fictitious construct. Even if all people have essentially the same interests, that is not enough to make them equal.

The question of equality becomes especially thorny when Rawls’s original position is applied to different countries and regions. Even if we accept that congruent interests make for a successful and good society, couldn’t that same argument be used to set one society apart from others? Peter Singer (see ‘Beyond Sausage and Cheese,’ p. 162) points out that the inhabitants of
wealthy countries could agree that it is in the general interest to split their surpluses among themselves instead of giving them to the inhabitants of other countries. Singer claims that the number of interests shared by people in all countries is much smaller than Rawls thinks, and he also takes issue with Rawls’s stance on property. What Nozick considers leftist arguments, Rawls’s leftist critics regard as too far to the right. Rawls included the right to property among the basic political liberties, arguing that property helps people maintain their independence and thus contributes to their self-respect. Only those who respect themselves are able to respect others and thus to act morally. For some leftist critics, property is given far too much weight. Rawls did not elaborate on this issue; the comprehensive and detailed index at the end of
A
Theory of Justice
lists neither ‘property’ nor ‘possessions.’

As much as Rawls strove for a politically disinterested model and universally acceptable principles, he was unable to win everybody over, which is hardly surprising. A philosophical book that everyone can agree on has yet to be written, and if it were written, it would surely be inconsequential. Let us examine the three key points of contention in Rawls’s theory, leaving aside the
aforementioned
political issues.

The first point is the value of a social model built on the fictional construct of the original position. Rawls’s original position, unlike those in other contract theories, is not a state of nature but a state of society. The markers of the classic natural state that are found in Thomas Hobbes and elsewhere – violence, anarchy, and
lawlessness
– do not appear in Rawls’s characterization. Rawls’s original position more closely resembles a refined cooperative. And the material basis – enough goods for everyone – sounds more like Switzerland than the Sahel or Hobbes’s poverty-stricken England in the seventeenth century. All rigors of nature and all deprivations are carefully kept away in order to foster and help develop man’s good nature. If Rawls’s original position were characterized by catastrophes and deprivations, there would be a quick end to group solidarity, even with a veil of ignorance concealing personal
qualities. When threatened by a deluge, people do not debate issues of equal opportunity; they fight for a place in the boat.

The second point is whether Rawls is correct in making justice such a dominating factor. His original position, which places liberty at the top of the ranking, situates justice based on equal opportunity and on leveling the social playing field right below it, as a constraint on liberty. Effectiveness and affluence come third. The prominent position accorded to justice is laudable and makes his theory appealing. An affluent state run by a dictator – for example, Kuwait – ranks below a poor democracy. His critics accord greater importance to unrestricted freedom, stability, and efficiency than to justice: better to have an affluent and stable, yet unjust, state, they argue, than a just but poor society. But whereas a utilitarian weighs the sum of the happiness produced by wealth (see ‘Aunt Bertha Shall Live,’ p. 139), Rawls insists that the sum of justice is what counts. The utilitarians claim that ‘what is good for many is just,’ but John Rawls insists, ‘What is just is good for many.’ This topic can be talked to death, but in the end neither side has absolute precedence over the other. Values may be more or less appealing, but it is in their nature to be subjective and not open to objective confirmation. Even a theory as ingenious as Rawls’s cannot escape this problem.