The counter thought experiment to Rawl's is: imagine two worlds, one in which the obvious implications of Rawls's thought experiment were made law and one in w

The counter thought experiment to Rawl's is: imagine two worlds, one in which the obvious implications of Rawls's thought experiment were made law and one in which they weren't. Fast forward 20 generations. Discover that the Rawlsian world is an economic shambles of inequality and ethnic warfare while the other exceeds our most techno- optimistic dreams. What went wrong? The point of the experiment is to show only that by rejecting the the possibility that such a thing could occur, you're exposing your implicit belief that you know the causal connections between equity, economics, technological advancement and human happiness, just like Rawls believed he did. But you don't know that system. Rawls's thought experiment's real success is to smuggle into the conversation an exceedingly vast set of knowledge claims about how complex systems in the real world must behave. It's a thought-terminating thought experiment.