4 ms·

The problem with Rawls is simple: Behind the veil of ignorance, "maximizing the preferences of the worst off" has many appealing properties. However, in the re

by nanis 5y ago

The problem with Rawls is simple: Behind the veil of ignorance, "maximizing the preferences of the worst off" has many appealing properties. However, in the real world, where both one's own actions and events out of one's control exert influence in one's outcomes, it creates a huge incentive problem as it slowly turns into the "dictatorship of the worst off."

LightG 5y ago
Not sure that holds. If laws are made behind the veil, then, by definition, they are neutral to the worst off and the best off. Edit: lots of talk about "if" and "best" and "worst" below. I don't think they're the point. It's about right and wrong regardless of if / best / worst. Sure people have agendas, the aim (which may sometimes / often fail) is to work beyond those agendas. For me Rawls is a goal, not a fact.
- notahacker 5y ago
  That's actually the more specific criticism of Rawls: he argues behind the veil of ignorance people generally would promote the interests of the worst off above all else, and critics (including those who think the veil of ignorance is a great concept) disagree with this conclusion (which depends on an additional assumption we are extremely risk averse)
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    This critique comes from utilitarians like Harsanyi and misses Rawls's point. (He's not a utilitarian anyway.) You can be extremely risk prone and nevertheless come to the conclusion that society ought to help you in the unlikely event that you have to endure extreme hardships. There is a difference between personal risk taking behaviour and the more abstract, general considerations behind the veil of ignorance.
- nanis 5y ago
  > If laws are made behind the veil IF The laws we live with are never made behind the veil. Relatedly, I have done some classroom experiments where the laws were indeed made behind the veil. Students overwhelmingly chose minimum guaranteed income from experiment to equalizing everyone's incomes (which is what is required by maximizing the preferences of the worst off) from the experiment before the task and their specific earning potentials were revealed.
- rrivers 5y ago
  Laws can never be neutral. They always direct behaviors and relationships towards specific directions.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
Practical problems with it don't really matter (unless you are a pragmatist :) There is no reason to suppose that, given an unknown position in that society, someone would choose to max-min. Someone might choose rather to maximize justice, for example. That's what most western philosophers did for a few thousands of years. Rawls' argument assumes his own preferences are axioms without presenting them as such. Many such cases.
- nanis 5y ago
  > Practical problems with it don't really matter Oh, but they do because people's half-baked understanding of the philosophy get warmed up and served in all sorts of ways that affect our quality of life.
woodruffw 5y ago
> it creates a huge incentive problem as it slowly turns into the "dictatorship of the worst off." Where is the dictatorship, precisely? The veil of ignorance challenges us to select those principles that we'd find agreeable to us given the kind of lives we wish for and no other prior information about ourselves. Commonly observed consequences of this are the elimination of homelessness and basic privation, both of which are achievable today in every developed nation. But there's no dictatorship involved in that -- it's just boring domestic policy.
- nanis 5y ago
  > Where is the dictatorship, precisely? In Social Choice Theory, "dictatorship" is defined by the "social" choice always matching the most preferred alternative of an individual (or, sometimes, as "social preferences" always matching the preferences of an individual.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Sure, but just to be clear: the "dictator" in SCT is a particular mathematical model for preference selection. It doesn't imply a political dictator, and it isn't a necessary condition for SCT -- there are plenty of non-dictatorial preference selection systems. It's not clear from his actual positions that Rawls would favor a dictatorial model, or that he even accepts SCT (which predates his academic output by ~40 years) as a decision substrate. Put another way: "worst off" isn't a blindly overriding position for Rawls; we can all recognize ways in which we would be the "worst off" but also not entitled to preferential treatment via the Original Position (Eichmann at the gallows being an intuitive example for most people).
    - nanis 5y ago
      > It doesn't imply a political dictator, Who cares when the set of allowable things are defined by what would be best for people who are worst at it?
mariodiana 5y ago
The problem with Rawls's philosophy is simple. His veil of ignorance and original position have the trappings of the state of nature and social contract theory, but his approach is radically different. He is not claiming anything fundamental about human nature or human existence. Rawls is proposing a small set of principles to use to build a model that we can use for moral reasoning. But the key difference is that the model's legitimacy (and usefulness) comes from the fact that the conclusions arrived at from using it seem to conform to our moral intuitions. By our moral intuitions he means, the sense of right and wrong that he and other elites share. Rawls never claimed universality. He argued that different societies would have different conceptions of justice. The purpose of his model was to act as a heuristic device for reasoning about the "hard" questions. In other words, if the model conforms to 99.9 percent of our moral sense, then when we get to the margins and have trouble deciding, the model becomes our guide. The important thing to keep in mind is that he and his likeminded sophisticates have already made up their minds about what "decent" people think, and use that to make the model. But most people don't realize that that's what's going on, because on the surface—meaning, before you wrestle with his impenetrable prose—his method seems to resemble the Enlightenment approach of Hobbes and Locke (and, arguably, Rousseau). Rawls says nothing about right and wrong, or even justice. Instead, he says what the "smartest people in the room" have already decided.

by nanis 5y ago

LightG 5y ago

Not sure that holds. If laws are made behind the veil, then, by definition, they are neutral to the worst off and the best off. Edit: lots of talk about "if" and "best" and "worst" below. I don't think they're the point. It's about right and wrong regardless of if / best / worst. Sure people have agendas, the aim (which may sometimes / often fail) is to work beyond those agendas. For me Rawls is a goal, not a fact.

notahacker 5y ago
That's actually the more specific criticism of Rawls: he argues behind the veil of ignorance people generally would promote the interests of the worst off above all else, and critics (including those who think the veil of ignorance is a great concept) disagree with this conclusion (which depends on an additional assumption we are extremely risk averse)
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  This critique comes from utilitarians like Harsanyi and misses Rawls's point. (He's not a utilitarian anyway.) You can be extremely risk prone and nevertheless come to the conclusion that society ought to help you in the unlikely event that you have to endure extreme hardships. There is a difference between personal risk taking behaviour and the more abstract, general considerations behind the veil of ignorance.
nanis 5y ago
> If laws are made behind the veil IF The laws we live with are never made behind the veil. Relatedly, I have done some classroom experiments where the laws were indeed made behind the veil. Students overwhelmingly chose minimum guaranteed income from experiment to equalizing everyone's incomes (which is what is required by maximizing the preferences of the worst off) from the experiment before the task and their specific earning potentials were revealed.
rrivers 5y ago
Laws can never be neutral. They always direct behaviors and relationships towards specific directions.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

Practical problems with it don't really matter (unless you are a pragmatist :) There is no reason to suppose that, given an unknown position in that society, someone would choose to max-min. Someone might choose rather to maximize justice, for example. That's what most western philosophers did for a few thousands of years. Rawls' argument assumes his own preferences are axioms without presenting them as such. Many such cases.

nanis 5y ago
> Practical problems with it don't really matter Oh, but they do because people's half-baked understanding of the philosophy get warmed up and served in all sorts of ways that affect our quality of life.

woodruffw 5y ago

> it creates a huge incentive problem as it slowly turns into the "dictatorship of the worst off." Where is the dictatorship, precisely? The veil of ignorance challenges us to select those principles that we'd find agreeable to us given the kind of lives we wish for and no other prior information about ourselves. Commonly observed consequences of this are the elimination of homelessness and basic privation, both of which are achievable today in every developed nation. But there's no dictatorship involved in that -- it's just boring domestic policy.

nanis 5y ago
> Where is the dictatorship, precisely? In Social Choice Theory, "dictatorship" is defined by the "social" choice always matching the most preferred alternative of an individual (or, sometimes, as "social preferences" always matching the preferences of an individual.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Sure, but just to be clear: the "dictator" in SCT is a particular mathematical model for preference selection. It doesn't imply a political dictator, and it isn't a necessary condition for SCT -- there are plenty of non-dictatorial preference selection systems. It's not clear from his actual positions that Rawls would favor a dictatorial model, or that he even accepts SCT (which predates his academic output by ~40 years) as a decision substrate. Put another way: "worst off" isn't a blindly overriding position for Rawls; we can all recognize ways in which we would be the "worst off" but also not entitled to preferential treatment via the Original Position (Eichmann at the gallows being an intuitive example for most people).
  - nanis 5y ago
    > It doesn't imply a political dictator, Who cares when the set of allowable things are defined by what would be best for people who are worst at it?

mariodiana 5y ago

The problem with Rawls's philosophy is simple. His veil of ignorance and original position have the trappings of the state of nature and social contract theory, but his approach is radically different. He is not claiming anything fundamental about human nature or human existence. Rawls is proposing a small set of principles to use to build a model that we can use for moral reasoning. But the key difference is that the model's legitimacy (and usefulness) comes from the fact that the conclusions arrived at from using it seem to conform to our moral intuitions. By our moral intuitions he means, the sense of right and wrong that he and other elites share. Rawls never claimed universality. He argued that different societies would have different conceptions of justice. The purpose of his model was to act as a heuristic device for reasoning about the "hard" questions. In other words, if the model conforms to 99.9 percent of our moral sense, then when we get to the margins and have trouble deciding, the model becomes our guide. The important thing to keep in mind is that he and his likeminded sophisticates have already made up their minds about what "decent" people think, and use that to make the model. But most people don't realize that that's what's going on, because on the surface—meaning, before you wrestle with his impenetrable prose—his method seems to resemble the Enlightenment approach of Hobbes and Locke (and, arguably, Rousseau). Rawls says nothing about right and wrong, or even justice. Instead, he says what the "smartest people in the room" have already decided.