In summary, then, Rawls agrees with utilitarianism about the desirability of providing a systematic account of justice that reduces the scope for intuitionistic balancing and offers a clear and constructive solution to the priority problem; about the need to subordinate commonsense precepts of justice to a higher criterion; and about the holistic character of distributive justice. We know how the argument will go from the utilitarian side. The parties in the original position do not decide what is good or bad for us. So long as the veil of ignorance prevents the parties from knowing their own identities, providing them with the relevant information about their society need not compromise their impartiality. Joshua Cohen, Pluralism and Proceduralism. This does not mean that just institutions must give people what they independently deserve, but rather that, if just institutions have announced that they will allocate rewards in accordance with certain standards, then individuals who meet those standards can be said to deserve the advertised rewards. . . See, for example, section 2 of The Basic Structure as Subject, where he associates the comprehensive interpretation with Sidgwick (PL 2602). Rawls does, of course, offer an additional argument to the effect that the parties in the original position would reject the classical view. Since utilitarianism puts individual liberty on the same scale as economic opportunity and wealth, he reasoned, the parties would reject utilitarianism. Of course, to say this would be to concede that Rawls takes the conventional distinctions among empiricallyindividuated human beings even less seriously than does utilitarianism. Any further advantages that might be won by the principle of utility . If that happened, they would seek to change the society (contrary to the finality condition) and, of course, they would not accept its rules (contrary to the stability condition). Although I have argued that this temptation should be resisted, it seems fair to say that the Rawlsian and utilitarian approaches to justice have some important elements in common and that these elements run counter to one deeply entrenched tendency in our moral thought. So if they choose rules that allow slavery in their society, they do not know how likely it is that they will wind up as slaves. Rawls's conjecture is that the contract doctrine properly worked out can fill this gap (TJ 52). In other words, section 29's appeals to psychological stability, selfrespect, and the strains of commitment are all intended as contributions to the overarching enterprise of demonstrating that Rawls's principles would provide a satisfactory minimum whereas the principle of average utility might have consequences with which the parties would find it difficult to live. Rational choice must often rest instead on selfknowledge: on a careful attempt to ascertain which one of a diverse set of ends matters most to us. Indeed, one of the broad morals of Sandel's analysis is supposed to be that the difference principle is a sufficiently communitarian notion of justice that it requires a thoroughly communitarian conception of the self. T or F: Libertarians reject inheritance as a legitimate means of acquiring wealth, T or F: The phrase "the declining marginal utility of money" means that successive additions to one's income produce, on average, less happiness or welfare than did earlier additions, T or F: Robert Nozick uses the Wilt Chamberlain story to show the importance of economic re-distribution, T or F: Rawls's theory of distributive justice is a form of utilitarianism, T or F: The United States leads the world in executive pay, T or F: According to John Rawls, people in the original position do not know what social position or status they hold in society, T or F: According to the "maximin" rule, you should select the alternative under which the worst that could happen to you is better than the worst that could happen to you under any other alternative, T or F: Distributive justice concerns the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens, T or F: According to Mill, to say that I have a right to something is to say that I have a valid claim on society to protect in the possession of that thing, either by force of law or through education and opinion, T or F: In his Principles of Political Economy, J.S. The United States honored her at long last, in the year 2000, by minting the Sacagawea gold dollar. Has data issue: false In short, utilitarianism gives the aggregative good precedence over the goods of distinct individuals whereas Rawls's principles do not. Holists conclude that it is impossible to assess the justice of an assignment of benefits to any single individual without taking into account the larger distributive context of that assignment. 7 0 obj Find out more about saving to your Kindle. However, Sandel believes that the underlying theory of the person suffers from incoherence19 and cannot, therefore, provide Rawls with a satisfactory response to the charge that he too is guilty of neglecting the distinctness of persons. {+ aa?=,|[4/ Thus his official arguments against utilitarianism take the form of arguments purporting to show that it would be rejected by the parties. To be specific, in the parts we did not read, Rawls argued that the parties in the original position would choose to maximize average utility only if two conditions are met: Rawlss chief reason for denying that this makes sense is the familiar one: maximizing expected utility is too risky in this situation. Whereas the idea of arranging social institutions so as to maximize the good might seem attractive if there were a unique good at which all rational action aims, it makes more sense, in light of the heterogeneity of the good, to establish a fair framework of social cooperation within which individuals may pursue their diverse ends and aspirations. In, It is worth noting that, in his earlier paper, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. For each key term or person in the lesson, write a sentence explaining its significance. Herein lies the problem. For instance, I suspect that most of us believe that something like the following is more plausible than Rawlss two principles (this is very rough). I will conclude by discussing some apparent differences between Rawls's position in A Theory of Justice and his position in Political Liberalism.4. Scheffler also suggests that the complexity of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice may help to explain his willingness, in Political Liberalism, to treat utilitarianism as a candidate for inclusion in an overlapping consensus. Rawls' Rejection of Utilitarianism - John Piippo At the end of Sacagawea's journey, Clark offered to raise and educate her son. Accordingly, what he proposes to do is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Rawls believes that, of all traditional theories of justice, the contract theory is the one which best approximates our considered judgments of justice. His aim is to develop this theory in such a way as to offer an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior . He says that the choice of principles should not depend on the parties' special attitudes toward risk, and that the veil of ignorance therefore prevents them from knowing whether or not they have a characteristic aversion to taking chances (TJ 172). Perhaps so, but Rawls shouldn't concede too much here. WebAbstract. There is still a problem, of course, given his insistence in Theory that neither classical nor average utilitarianism can put fundamental liberal values on a sufficiently secure footing. Surely, though, this is not why rape is wrong; the pleasure the rapist gets shouldnt be counted at all, and the whole thing sounds ridiculous. Intuitionists do not believe that there are any priority rules that can enable us to resolve such conflicts; instead, we have no choice but to rely on our intuitive judgment to strike an appropriate balance in each case. In fact, Rawls states explicitly that the arguments of section 29 fit under the heuristic schema suggested by the reasons for following the maximin rule. Or, if TV isn't enough, do something else pleasurable: go to the opera, drink beer, master the piano, read Jeremy Bentham, etc. It describes a chain of reasoning that would lead the parties in the original position to choose utilitarianism. Chapter 3 - Justice and Economic Distribution Flashcards Third, they have questioned whether Rawls's principles can truly be said to guarantee the parties a satisfactory minimum and whether the parties, who are ignorant of their conceptions of the good, can truly be said to care little for gains above such a minimum. But, they would say, this would happen only in dire conditions, when life was bound to be intolerable for some people anyway. They can also help us to see that some people may be troubled by Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism, not because they sympathize with those aspects of the view that he criticizes, but rather because they are critical of those aspects of the view with which he sympathizes. And if all or many precepts are treated as first principles, there is no gain in systematic clarity. (2) Their vigilant observations and careful recordings of the geography and wildlife helped open the area for settlement. In effect, then, an intuitionist conception of justice is but half a conception (TJ 41). But its fair to say that it has one dominant theme. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. These considerations implicate some significant general issuesabout the justificatory function of the original position and about the changes in Rawls's views over timewhich lie beyond the scope of this essay. There are really two questions here. That is, they help to show that the two principles are an adequate minimum conception of justice in a situation of great uncertainty. Yet Rawls says that this assumption is not founded upon known features of one's society (TJ 168). Under normal conditions neither would permit serious infringements of liberty while under extraordinary conditions either might. Hostname: page-component-75b8448494-6dz42 But this suggests that the parties reject theories of justice that incorporate monistic conceptions of the good because Rawls's argument for pluralism has led him to design the original position in such a way as to guarantee that they will do so. endobj My point is about the nature of his argument. 1 0 obj The losses of some people may, in principle, always be outweighed by the greater gains of other people. <> At this point we are simply checking whether the conception already adopted is a feasible one and not so unstable that some other choice might be better. After all, he had said in section 29 a) that the stability argument is one of the main arguments for the two principles (TJ 175), b) that it fits under the heuristic schema suggested by the reasons for following the maximin rule (TJ 175), and c) that it depends on the laws of moral psychology and the availability of human motives, which are only discussed later on (sections 7576) (TJ 177). They would be unwilling to take the chance that, in a society governed by utilitarian principles, a utilitarian calculation might someday provide the basis for a serious infringement of their liberties, especially since they have the more conservative option of the two principles available to them. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. In the end, he speculates, we are likely to settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. Render date: 2023-05-01T02:24:57.324Z And the problem becomes more acute, for the reasons given above, when the overlapping consensus is conceived of as affirming not merely liberal principles in general but Rawls's theory of justice in particular. Yet it marks an important difference between his view and the views of other prominent critics of utilitarianism writing at around the same time, even when those critics express their objections in language that is reminiscent of his. This means that, in a society whose basic structure was regulated by the two principles, allegiance to those principles would, under favorable conditions, develop naturally out of preexisting psychological materials.

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