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Controversially, Rawls asserts that you clearly want to maximize the worst outcome in this case (the "maximin" principle). Economists strongly disagree as it do

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.
- lolc 2y ago
  Thank you for putting it that way. I was always confused by the Omelas story, what people got out of it.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.
- Dracophoenix 2y ago
  > How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery? Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.
latentnumber 2y ago
But what you're assuming is a static starting position. The entire point of liberalism is, if you read the essay, to be fair. It is absurdly unfair to that one person and I'm pretty sure they'll never be able to advance in this society. This is not just about that one person though, it's the perception that society does not really care about an individual and that individual can be you. However, fairness is the starting position in Junkland and the argument is that this begets progress while a society like Omelas shows a complete disregard for fairness. This was the spirit of the original position.
humanfromearth9 2y ago
The answer to that seems to be so simple. Each of the 1Mio rich people gives just less than 1Mioth of his property/values to the one poor soul, and all ends up with utopia and restores fairness - at least with regard to property. There may still remain unfairness regarding physical and mental integrity, as well as regarding freedom. The two former ones are difficult to handle/solve.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  Omelia is not a problem to be solved, its a thought experiment with predefined rules for how it operates. In order for the million people to live in utopia, there MUST be a person sacrificed to suffer utterly. These facts cannot be changed. The questions then arise about the ethics and morality of this society.
  - even_639765 2y ago
    But it can't be a thought experiment about humans since humans would not tolerate the outcome in the first place. Humans are moral animals who are compelled to act on their morality. One aspect of morality is fairness. Another is compassion. See Johnathon Haidt's work on this. As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.
    - krapp 2y ago
      It's hyperbole, but humans do tolerate a similar outcome all the time. Our modern technological civilization is in many ways built on suffering. Migrant workers suffer to pick our vegetables and clean our homes, child slaves suffer to build our electronics and mine rare earth minerals. We buy goods from companies like Amazon knowing how they treat their employees. Most of us don't care as long as we get our goods on time. People have rationalized far greater evils (chattel slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism and colonization), incorporated them into their moral framework, and turned the cognitive dissonance into virtue. Those people simply choose their lot in life, they're lazy and indigent, God made them less than us, that's just the price of progress. Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.
rayiner 2y ago
> 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. It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.
- hollerith 2y ago
  >designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme. It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Humans are risk averse and overestimate the probability of low-probability outcomes. So focusing people on hypothetical scenarios where they are someone other than themselves leads to over-focusing on the welfare of small minorities at the expense of the majority. Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users. Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.
    - dctoedt 2y ago
      > the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users. It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
slibhb 2y ago
I'm don't think you're being fair to Rawls. Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off. So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical. That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.
- Vecr 2y ago
  > That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about. The Wikipedia page says that's a common criticism of Rawls, but it might be wrong.

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.

lolc 2y ago
Thank you for putting it that way. I was always confused by the Omelas story, what people got out of it.
rbanffy 2y ago
There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.
Dracophoenix 2y ago
> How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery? Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.

latentnumber 2y ago

But what you're assuming is a static starting position. The entire point of liberalism is, if you read the essay, to be fair. It is absurdly unfair to that one person and I'm pretty sure they'll never be able to advance in this society. This is not just about that one person though, it's the perception that society does not really care about an individual and that individual can be you. However, fairness is the starting position in Junkland and the argument is that this begets progress while a society like Omelas shows a complete disregard for fairness. This was the spirit of the original position.

humanfromearth9 2y ago

The answer to that seems to be so simple. Each of the 1Mio rich people gives just less than 1Mioth of his property/values to the one poor soul, and all ends up with utopia and restores fairness - at least with regard to property. There may still remain unfairness regarding physical and mental integrity, as well as regarding freedom. The two former ones are difficult to handle/solve.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
Omelia is not a problem to be solved, its a thought experiment with predefined rules for how it operates. In order for the million people to live in utopia, there MUST be a person sacrificed to suffer utterly. These facts cannot be changed. The questions then arise about the ethics and morality of this society.
- even_639765 2y ago
  But it can't be a thought experiment about humans since humans would not tolerate the outcome in the first place. Humans are moral animals who are compelled to act on their morality. One aspect of morality is fairness. Another is compassion. See Johnathon Haidt's work on this. As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.
  - krapp 2y ago
    It's hyperbole, but humans do tolerate a similar outcome all the time. Our modern technological civilization is in many ways built on suffering. Migrant workers suffer to pick our vegetables and clean our homes, child slaves suffer to build our electronics and mine rare earth minerals. We buy goods from companies like Amazon knowing how they treat their employees. Most of us don't care as long as we get our goods on time. People have rationalized far greater evils (chattel slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism and colonization), incorporated them into their moral framework, and turned the cognitive dissonance into virtue. Those people simply choose their lot in life, they're lazy and indigent, God made them less than us, that's just the price of progress. Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.

rayiner 2y ago

> 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. It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.

hollerith 2y ago
>designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme. It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Humans are risk averse and overestimate the probability of low-probability outcomes. So focusing people on hypothetical scenarios where they are someone other than themselves leads to over-focusing on the welfare of small minorities at the expense of the majority. Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users. Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.
  - dctoedt 2y ago
    > the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users. It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

slibhb 2y ago

I'm don't think you're being fair to Rawls. Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off. So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical. That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.

Vecr 2y ago
> That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about. The Wikipedia page says that's a common criticism of Rawls, but it might be wrong.