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Consider Rawls’s most famous concept: the original position. Perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary philosophy, it goes like this: imag

• AlbertCory 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • nchmy 2y ago
    No one said anything about exact same outcome as everyone else. You've just projected that from behind your deeply ignorant veil.
    • AlbertCory 2y ago
      Rawls' "thought experiment" is always employed by people who already agree with him about liberalism, to "prove" that everyone would agree with him if he rigs the experiment. (And by the way, if you want to see ignorance, look in the mirror.)
  • harimau777 2y ago
    The idea is to establish principles of justice without knowing what your position is in society; not that the society forces the same outcome. Take your example of athleticism. You probably wouldn't want a society based on the principle "society values people according to their athleticism" because you don't know if you will be athletic or not. However, you might want a society based on the principle "society values whatever traits someone brings to the table" because then the athletic person can be valued for their athleticism and the non-athletic person can be valued for some other trait.
    • AlbertCory 2y ago
      The idea is nonsense, as I said. No, I wouldn't want a society based on the principle "society values people according to their athleticism." As I said, you are begging the question and removing the agency from this hypothetical justice-seeking person. I might want a society that lets me excel, create a business, and make money, if I turn out to be good at that. Rawls' "experiment" is simply forcing everyone to be like him.
  • dctoedt 2y ago
    > The idea of "yourself" having no knowledge of yourself is an absurdity. But your knowledge of "yourself" is likely to be flawed, and/or to evolve as time goes on. As Mark Twain famously said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
    • AlbertCory 2y ago
      > your knowledge of "yourself" is likely to be flawed I see. So your knowledge of other people is better than their knowledge of themselves? And you get to make choices for them? I don't even know what the point of that last quote is supposed to be. Yes, he did say that. So what?
      • dctoedt 2y ago
        > * So your knowledge of other people is better than their knowledge of themselves? And you get to make choices for them?* I don’t understand: Neither of your statements follows from mine. Oh, and sometimes — not always by any means, but sometimes — others do know us better than we know ourselves.
• gotoeleven 2y ago
  If your answers would be different with than they would be without this knowledge then please don't vote. Isn't this like table stakes for being a thoughtful person who isn't a sociopath? The most influential thought experiment in contemporary philosophy is to not act like a toddler?
  • jjmarr 2y ago
    I watched something based on this in my debate club, so this isn't my own original thought. There's a strong argument that the knowledge someone has from being disadvantaged contributes to their views on justice. The original position also incentivizes ignoring the rights of small groups of people since you likely aren't going to be a part of one. One also gets into issues like reparations for past injustices. Those benefit a small group of people at the cost of the many (hard to justify with the original position), but can still be a form of justice since we want to balance past wrongs.
    • senderista 2y ago
      Right, the veil of ignorance AFAICT (Rawls may have addressed this somewhere) sidesteps the question of probability. Shouldn't you weight the interests of a group proportionally to the likelihood that you would have been born into such a group, i.e. by their relative population?
      • The_Colonel 2y ago
        That kinda depends on your subjective risk aversion/tolerance. I think the veil of ignorance is a great thought experiment everyone should think about, but there shouldn't be any prescribed way how to think about it.
    • harimau777 2y ago
      While that's technically valid, it feels like it's going against the spirit of the "original position". That is to say, it seems to me that the original position isn't intended to literally say "run an optimization on the probability density function in order to maximize your expected happiness". Instead, it seems to me that it's intended to illustrate the idea that whatever rules society operates under need to work regardless of what your starting point in society is. Stated another way, while that argument is probably a valid way to "win" a competitive debate, it doesn't strike me as particularly useful for exploring the concept that Rawls is presenting.
• dsubburam 2y ago
  I like Kant's formulation of this sentiment better, his categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." i.e., act according to a principle that makes sense for everyone else also to follow. If you jump the subway turnstile to avoid payment, what happens if everyone does likewise?
  • gradschoolfail 2y ago
    Very parallel with the maxim (which, i confess, havent fully figured out, yet, but I find somewhat amusing) (P. C. Hodgell) "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
  • AlbertCory 2y ago
    This is not the same thing at all, and Kant was not a socialist.
    • zaik 2y ago
      Rules that are fair for everyone regardless of sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness etc? Must be socialism.
      • The_Colonel 2y ago
        Both a communist and a capitalist will (likely) agree with your statement, it's just that each will understand the word "fair" differently.
      • AlbertCory 2y ago
        Rawls' "thought experiment" is used to prove that all people would choose socialism. It's an explicitly political use of begging the question, as I said. Kant was a moral philosopher. There is a difference. And there's a reason why Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant never came up with Rawl's "veil of ignorance": because it is itself ignorant.
        • 2y ago
• zetazzed 2y ago
  Controversially, Rawls asserts that you clearly want to maximize the worst outcome in this case (the "maximin" principle). Economists strongly disagree as it doesn't take into account probability. If you have the potential to live in Junkland, where life is moderately unhappy for everyone, or in Omelas, which is utopia for 1,000,000 individuals and pure torture for 1, Rawls asserts that you should obviously choose Mediocreland. But if you are randomly assigned a place in Omelas, you have really great odds of coming out quite well. The book includes some contortions to ensure this outcome. It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.
  • actionfromafar 2y ago
    I am not quite well in Omelas. Don’t think I can ever fully be.
  • lofenfew 2y ago
    > Economists strongly disagree What do economists have to do with it, seeing as its a philosophical position, and not one that attempts to predict the economy (badly)? Mathematically, we can deal with it by taking the pth power of whichever metric of utility per individual, then maximizing the expected value. When p->inf, then we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing the maximal utility. When p->0, we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing minimal utility, ie rawls position.
    • Vecr 2y ago
      Why would a rational actor want to do that though? Show me a single decision theory that does reasonably well in game theory simulations (I mean R-CDT/UDT tier), that also supports maximin, and I'll write a 1000 word article in the praise of John Rawls.
  • reubenmorais 2y ago
    Which principles would you choose in order to construct Omelia? Who gets to be tortured? How do you make sure they don't have enough friends and family suffering about their predicament to skew off your statistics? How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery? I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.
• passion__desire 2y ago
  You can divide the cake into two pieces anyhow but I will choose first.
  • Vecr 2y ago
    You can't run the divide-and-choose algorithm from the original position, because you can't have one person design society and the other put them into it. Might make a good short story though.
    • passion__desire 2y ago
      In both stories, the idea is to keep all parties honest in the transaction.
• katzinsky 2y ago
  So what do you do when it turns out there are large groups of people who just can't socialize well in an environment like that where other groups are a majority? Liberalism doesn't answer this nicely because of the belief that everyone is more or less fungible.
• rayiner 2y ago
  That formulation prioritizes avoiding harm to small minorities at the expense of maximizing the well being of the majority. Consider by contrast how East asian countries approach public policy: the needs of the typical person are elevated above the needs of people with different or special circumstances. That’s why they can have nice things like public transportation and clean and safe cities.
  • dyauspitr 2y ago
    You need a communal society with enough ambient social pressure to keep people “typical” for that system to work.
    • rexpop 2y ago
      Such societies may find themselves implementing Procrustean policies meant to enforce conformity. One classic (red herring) image is "Harrison Bergeron," but actual transphobic attitudes are more pressing.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      Which is impossible to maintain under a Rawlsian viewpoint that prioritizes minorities. Consider the Asian social norm against being overweight and the attendant enforcement mechanisms. It benefits most people for whom social reinforcement can help them maintain a healthy weight. But it’s unpleasant for a minority. Rawlsian thinking tends to oppose such welfare-maximizing policies, by focusing the inquiry on that minority.
      • dyauspitr 2y ago
        You’re preaching to the choir. I’m all for a common culture and societal pressure to adhere to it. But as circumstances are, the preexisting common culture in the US is no longer viable as this country is now heavily heterogenous, both ethnically and ideologically. You can try extracting aspects from the past culture that are still relevant but that’s clearly not acceptable to a sizable part of the country as they hold the parts most unacceptable- latent bigotry and the other- as the most crucial aspect of the previous common culture.
• throwaway22032 2y ago
  I don't believe that your concise form follows from the original form. Furthermore I think that this specific misunderstanding is a huge conflict point in politics, and contributes significantly to things like the left-right divide. The fundamental difference being that one can realise that, statistically, they have a significant risk of being in a "losing group", whilst still thinking that designing a society with such "losing groups" results in a better system overall. The stripped back "spherical cow" form of it would be as follows: imagine a society in which you can be born as one of two people. A person requires 80 potatoes in order to survive. One of those people is capable of farming a hundred potatoes per week, which is enough to feed one person but not two (if shared, both will die). The other of those people is capable of farming only fifty potatoes per week, which is enough to feed no-one, and if shared is still not sufficient as a total of 160 potatoes is required in order to feed both. The optimal way to design that society then is to allow the second person to starve and the first person to live alone, even though in this thought experiment there is perhaps a 50% likelihood that you "spawn" as the person who will be put to death, because the alternative is that you die regardless. Extrapolating from there you can have other examples - say that 99% of people are green, and 1% blue, but green people are deathly afraid of blue people to the extent that they will develop anxiety and depression if the blue people are around. The best society is clearly then one where the two groups are segregated and do not interact, even if that might suck if you're born as a blue person "cut off from the world", because otherwise it sucks regardless. Succinctly - it basically begs the question - it assumes that equality and fairness is somehow obvious and a priori but it's really not at all.