Episode 85: Rawls on Social Justice

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 85 is something like what is justice? And we read most of the first three chapters of John Rawls A Theory of justice, Originally published in 1971. You can join the discussion, get links to the text and get lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin defining the appropriate division of social advantage in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey Behind a Veil of Ignorance in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Mark: Beautiful.

0:51 Wes: Why?

0:51 Mark: There are some ground rules we try to follow in these discussions, the first one of which is try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background knowledge in philosophy. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on things other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you'd understand me if only you'd read John Grisham's Justice Is a Tingly Bottom. Number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more amusing. And we should say when we started off that of this book we read, we started going on the recommendations of what Rawls said in his introduction to Read, which is sections one through four of chapter one, most of chapter two, sections 11 through 17, and all of chapter three.

And so that's like almost 200 pages, right? Yes, at least to the end of chapter three. It's almost 200 pages.

1:36 Dylan: It's a 600 page book, people.

1:40 Seth: 600 page book. That I don't think needed to be that long.

1:44 Mark: No, no.

1:45 Dylan: He's meticulous in a peculiar way.

1:49 Seth: That's an interesting way of putting it.

1:52 Dylan: His writing, besides being boring in a funny way, is. It's obsessive. And so it's not exactly like he's a bad writer. It's very lawyerly.

2:03 Wes: That's right.

2:04 Dylan: Not lawyerly in the sense of like here as is and wherefores, but in the sense of constantly patting the edges of his argument. He's always routinely anticipating counter arguments or things that he left out or qualifications that he must make. So it's incredibly meticulous in that way. And he structures it so that he presents his idea and then he is going to go about sort of deriving it, kind of like Kant does. It's excruciating at times.

2:35 Wes: It's a social contract theory written like it's a contract.

2:39 Mark: Yeah, well, we've said before in terms of some of the more difficult continental figures that people write according to the fashion of their age. And Rawls was credited in some things I read as re establishing political philosophy as a viable field in analytic philosophy, which. Which at the time, early 70s, I think, the quine and the carnap and the other things like that that we'd read that had a lot of charts and logical theorems and other things like that. So I think that's maybe how he felt like he had to write. And I even see that in the David Chalmers book we read last December, a similar kind of obsessiveness to detail. Although that book did not make me want to fall asleep and or kill myself in the way that Rawls did.

3:23 Seth: Okay, I wouldn't go that far with Rawls, but I will say that as soon as he said something to the effect of imagine two individuals, x sub 1 and x sub 2, I just skipped to the next page where he started speaking in English again and completely ignored all the little graphs because they had no explanatory power whatsoever. That was clearly a rhetorical device to make this sound more rigorous than the subject matter allowed itself for.

3:49 Wes: Let's never read anything like this again. Life is too short. Let's just read Nietzsche for the rest of the podcast.

3:57 Dylan: Well, the juxtaposition is a little jarring, I have to say. I got a little bit of whiplash.

4:02 Mark: Well, and it makes you. Since Nietzsche was so hostile toward the British empiricist tradition, especially as morals went, and Rawls was so obviously the heir to that tradition that it was hard to not read this through a Nietzschean lens.

4:18 Wes: Right.

4:19 Mark: But that said, there's some very influential ideas here, and this is some political philosophy that's actually used in the real world today. Crazy.

4:29 Dylan: That is pretty interesting for me. What I'm complaining about with the writing is just that it feels like it could be a lot shorter. He's trying not to just lay out his own claim, but he's also trying to make an argument for why it has to be that way. Maybe that's one of the reasons why it's longer than you would necessarily need it to be.

4:48 Seth: This may also be a situation where many things that we take as given now or obvious may not have been then, so he felt the need to over explain. We've read other texts like that in the past where we feel like we get the point quickly and we wonder why it takes so Much effort. And then you have to kind of put it in context.

5:07 Dylan: Well, he juxtaposes himself against utilitarianism being the long running dominant account of political philosophy for 200 years or something like that. Is he right about that? That utilitarianism was the default dominant account of political philosophy?

5:24 Wes: Yeah, I think he's right. I think it still has a lot of sway as well. I mean, Rawls is influential, but so is utilitarianism.

5:31 Mark: Let me remind folks that if you feel like why aren't they talking about what the text actually says yet? That Seth Paskin recorded an awesome 10 minute summary for you that you should go listen to first. Stop this recording. Go listen to that one first. Just if you don't already know basically what Rawls was talking about. Not that we're going to continue to be evasive through the rest of this discussion, but that might help.

5:56 Wes: One more thing about style though, which is that even though it's hyper rational, it's chaotic. There's a kind of disorganized quality to it, even though it's trying to be super organized that comes with all the detail. It's just a matter of someone who doesn't think they have an obligation to be interesting. It's a matter of style. Ironically, it's a means justifies the ends sort of writing. It's the kind of thing that drove me out of grad school. And the other thing, just to segue from the Nietzsche, is that this is what I think of when I think of when all the gayness has been sucked out of science. This is the result.

6:28 Dylan: All the gayness has been sucked out of political philosophy. You get John Rawls.

6:32 Wes: Exactly.

6:33 Mark: It's a reference text. Isn't that kind of how it reads?

6:36 Wes: Yeah, it's better to read a summary. Read things that have been written about Rawls can actually be really interesting.

6:42 Mark: Well, when I was actually going back to it though, sections one through four, they are a summary. It's pretty perfectly adequate in explaining the major concepts. It's just then that the entirety of chapter three is getting into all the picky little details of why the original position and the veil of ignorance are described in the way that they are and considering alternatives and trying to head off objections and things like that. So yeah, if you just want the view. He does state it right up front.

7:09 Seth: Yeah, that's true. And this really is one of those texts that you're supposed to have read or you're at least supposed to know the ideas because it gets thrown around a lot in the lounge and in the conversation in philosophy. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have studied it in depth. It's just it clearly was influential. It introduced some new ideas at a point in time when those new ideas were ready to be received. And you should be aware of what those ideas were and how they impacted the culture or the scene. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to grind through all 600 pages, which Rawls himself, as Mark just alluded to, tells you you don't really need to do, which is nice.

7:51 Mark: I don't think Rawls actually read all the 600 pages. That's too much.

7:54 Wes: I mean, yeah, actually, from what I

7:57 Mark: understand, he spent the entire rest of his career refining this and heading off more objections. And do you guys have the original or the revised edition?

8:05 Dylan: I have the original one that I read when I was in undergrad.

8:08 Mark: Me too.

8:09 Dylan: Back in 88, 89.

8:12 Wes: When was it revised, though? I have the revised edition.

8:14 Seth: 95, I think.

8:16 Wes: Well, it's originally published in 71.

8:18 Mark: Yep. And supposedly the revisions are substantial, but I don't know what they are. So I read the old one. It seemed like it was fine. Do we have any substantial thing to say about the revised edition?

8:29 Wes: No.

8:29 Dylan: Maybe somebody will comment on it on the blog. Maybe somebody knows a lot about Rawls.

8:33 Mark: All right, so people that know what the difference is, go do that.

8:39 Wes: So even though we're doing these summaries, or some of us are, we should probably still say, what?

8:45 Dylan: Wait, wait, nudge, nudge.

8:49 Wes: I think we should still do a little summary in the actual podcast.

8:51 Mark: Go right ahead.

8:52 Wes: No, I mean, I'm not, Seth.

8:56 Seth: So while we encourage you to go listen to that short 10 minute summary that I recorded in case that's just too much work for you to do, and in order to ground the conversation which we are about to have, I will give the elevator pitch. Summary. So Rawls thinks that the only major and useful conception of justice that's been thrown out there is that by the utilitarians, which is justice as utility. And when he says justice, he means social justice that would be generating the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. And Rawls feels that that doesn't adequately capture our actual conception of justice.

So specifically that we believe that there are certain inviolable rights that individuals have that no amount of social good can override. So he thinks that we think it would not be right if you could increase the welfare of a majority of the population by killing some minority of the population. Or killing 10 people, even unjustly, or having slaves. Or having slaves, that that would not be just.

10:03 Mark: And children in Taiwan making your clothes,

10:07 Seth: things like that, things like that, that. That doesn't accord with our notion of what justice is, but that's allowed by the utilitarian conception. So he's trying to present an alternative. And if this sounds familiar for those of you who maybe think of the Trolley example, the famous philosophical examples where you're challenged in a thought experiment to ask whether it's right to kill one person to save 10 or whatever, that's exactly the framework he's setting.

10:35 Mark: Except in this case, should it be the law that you have to kill the one person to save the many? Since this is about laws, and moreover, he describes it as we're talking about the basic structures of society. We're not talking about every time a judge makes a decision, what principles should they look for? No, they should of course just interpret the law, but how do we set up the law in the first place?

10:54 Seth: Yeah, this is. He's talking about the principles that would drive the institutions, that would actually be both law creating and law dispensing. To me, it's before the law in that sense. There's supposed to be principles of justice that precede any specific laws.

11:09 Mark: And he also seems to think in describing this that he certainly doesn't have any a priori notion about what the proper role of government is. He says, look, there are a bunch of goods. And he, in this initial formulation is talking about both material goods and sort of rights and opportunities. Those are all goods. And it is society's job to figure out how to help us cooperate, to distribute those in a just way. So that doesn't mean equally necessarily. It could mean everybody gets what he works for or whatever like that. But since the notion of goods is not just again, about money, about material things, it's also about rights, then yes, some parts of it do, according to his analysis, have to be equal. That these inviolable rights, as you were just referring to, Seth.

11:59 Seth: Yes, so, and without trying to give the Same summary in 10 minutes that I already recorded once, his problem statement is to provide a theory of justice which would A stand in opposition to and be a viable alternative to the utilitarian conception, and B, address his primary concerns, which are those that were just outlined by Mark, and that's what the rest of the book is.

12:22 Wes: The thing that motivates this whole inquiry is the idea that we need some rules for getting along together. It's the same way that Many a roommate situation starts. Theory of justice is kind of an abstract thing, but principles of justice ultimately end up amounting to what are the basic rules that allow us to formulate the more general rules of a society where people can actually cooperate? And then the question is, what's included in those rules, and whether or not you want to get into specific conceptions of the good or keep them general.

12:52 Dylan: Can I read a quote from Mr. Rawls in section three at the beginning? That section is called the main idea of the theory of justice. My aim is to present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction. The familiar theory of the social contract is found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. In order to do this, we are not to think of the original contract as one to enter a particular society or to set up a particular form of government. Rather, the guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the subject of the original agreement.

They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. These principles are to regulate all further agreements. They specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established this way. Regarding the principles of justice, I shall call justice as fairness. The thing I wanted to point out about that is the notion that this is all thinking that would go before you thought about forms of government and stuff like that.

By thinking about what justice is, Rawls is saying, this is whatever your government is going to do, it's going to have to embody this, because justice is the virtue of government. Justice is the virtue of social cooperation. And so in order to even decide about how you're going to even think about choosing your government, you have to settle this question.

14:19 Wes: Yeah. He says that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. That's an important premise that not everyone's going to accept. Someone might think that the first justice of a social institution is that it adheres to certain religious beliefs or that it furthers a certain religious conception of the world or any other conception of what's good. So his idea to step back to this more general level of justice is an important premise.

14:45 Mark: Well, and there's a reason he doesn't want to run with any particular teleological or ethical account that individuals might have. Because the whole point is he's assuming that there are individuals with diverse viewpoints, with diverse goals. And yet, you know, we need rules to figure out how those people can cooperate together in a way that is beneficial to all of them. And that's, as was in Dylan's quote, determines whether this is going to be considered a just system. Whether it's going to be a legitimate society, is whether it's something that everybody, no matter what their particular goals were, if they didn't know what those goals were, if they just are considered as beings that have some goals and want to achieve them, then what would they agree to? What would they buy into?

15:30 Dylan: Yeah, I think you can break it up into two big pieces. Maybe it's three. But he states up front pretty early what his criteria for a theory of justice is, what justice amounts to, a just society. And then the other parts amount to the things that go into proving that, like the criteria you're going to use to establish that this is the right understanding of justice. At the beginning of it, he sets out what the two principles of justice are.

15:59 Seth: Section 11. The two principles of justice.

16:01 Dylan: Yes, page 60.

16:03 Mark: And the order of these is important because he thinks these are not just two principles, but the first one applies. First, it applies in all circumstances. And once that has settled things, then the second one applies.

16:12 Dylan: So I'm going to read like the paragraph right at the beginning just to give you yet another flavor for the way he writes and sort of the way he understands his project. Two Principles of Justice. I shall now state in a provisional form the two principles of justice that I believe would be chosen in the original position. In this section, I wish to make only the most general comments, and therefore the first formulation of these principles is tentative. As we go on, I shall run through several formulations and approximate step by step, the final statement to be given much later.

I believe that doing this allows the exposition to proceed in a natural way. The first statement of the two principles reads as, first, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both A reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and B attached to positions and offices open to all.

17:11 Mark: So let's discuss each of those. There's really three points in there. So the first one, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. I mean, that is one I bet that most of our listeners would intuitively agree with. Right, that you can have as much freedom as possible, but just don't infringe on the freedoms of Others.

17:30 Wes: Yeah.

17:30 Dylan: Classic liberalism.

17:32 Mark: You do not have the freedom to own slaves because that would impinge on the freedom of the slaves to. Oh, well, I guess they could own other slaves and then those slaves could own you. You get the point. Anybody else want to say something about number one?

17:44 Seth: Well, I guess the question becomes, what are those liberties? Right. That's the money question.

17:49 Dylan: You think it really matters a lot what the specific liberties are at the end?

17:53 Seth: I think at this first blush, when you say, well, it seems something intuitively that we can all agree on. Most people would agree that, at least in the society we live in, people have an equal right to basic liberties. But I think there is some dispute that would come up when you talk about certain liberties, which is what we see currently in our society. Sure. What's a basic liberty that you have a right to.

18:13 Wes: Yeah.

18:13 Mark: You have the right to take lots of drugs. It looks like it.

18:18 Seth: Liberty.

18:19 Mark: If you just look at the formulation here, it looks like it would really allow a lot. It's basically a statement of Mill's harm principle. Get as much freedom as possible as long as you're not harming anybody else.

18:30 Wes: Mm.

18:31 Mark: As long as you're not restricting their liberty.

18:33 Seth: Yeah. Where harm would be defined as impinging or infringing on their liberty to do the same thing.

18:38 Mark: Right. So, of course, hurting them, killing them, is one way of infringing on their liberty. But also, like, I just think about freedom of speech. So you have as much freedom as your speech, but if your speech involves screaming over another person so they can't speak, they can't have that speech, then that would be one of the natural limits.

18:56 Seth: Right. I think that the place where this will become most challenging is in the concept of property, whether you have a basic right to own property, which. That's where everything gets complicated.

19:06 Mark: Yeah. It seems like he doesn't want to include that in number one.

19:09 Wes: That.

19:09 Mark: That's dealt with by number two. Social and economic equalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle, the difference principle. So that's the big crazy one. That's the revolutionary step here.

19:27 Seth: Yeah. But that requires a little bit of context so that it doesn't sound like completely wacko, socialistic kind of thing. There's a logic to him saying it the way he says it.

19:37 Dylan: Yes. There's kind of a mathematical balance that he's trying to arrange.

19:42 Wes: First of all, he's allowing for inequality.

19:44 Dylan: Yes.

19:44 Wes: The equality will be of opportunity. Yes. But he's saying that the inequalities will be such that they should be to the advantage of everyone. So that if one person gets to make more money than others, I suppose it's to the advantage of everyone. That's the question in terms of, say, taxation, progressive taxation, where you redistribute some of that money to the least advantage. But there would never be an institutional inequality where you would benefit the people who are already more advantaged. Right.

20:13 Mark: It seems like the sum effect of the setup of the basic rules has to yield this benefit to the least advantage. It's not that any given.

20:21 Seth: No, in fact, that's explicitly.

20:23 Dylan: It's the difference principle.

20:25 Seth: Yeah.

20:25 Dylan: It's that the difference between the highest and lowest has to be essentially maintained. That is that as the more advantage gain advantage, the least advantage also have to gain advantage.

20:37 Mark: No, I understand that. I'm just saying in terms of. You don't have to consider each and every law with regard to this. Because if you have one law that says we're going to allow great accumulations of wealth, but then you counterbalance with that and say, oh, but we're going to tax the crap out of you. So in other words, the more wealth that the richest people have, the more we're going to be able to tax them and give welfare to the poor. And so that's going to lift the poor. That's one way of allowing that. Now you could have different ways of allowing that.

21:07 Wes: Well, you might believe that trickle down works that way, Right? Yeah, I believe that you don't need to tax the rich, but it's going to benefit the poor in terms of some more indirect way. Yeah. So you can have different theories of how inequalities are actually going to benefit the least advantaged.

21:21 Mark: Right. When I read this first, I didn't think about taxation. I thought about the argument that people have given in light of our Bergmann New Work episode, in favor of capitalism, that no, capitalism is what has lifted the world out of poverty. Even though now there are huge differences between in wealth, between the most privileged and the least privileged. Still the least privileged are better off than they were before these economic endeavors worldwide went on. That is the argument anyway.

21:50 Dylan: Yeah.

21:51 Wes: So we jump forward to these principles without saying too much about original position and how he arrives at them.

21:57 Mark: I think that's fine. To do it in this order to just throw it out and point out. Well, you might say that this number two here is not so radical if some staunch defender of conservative capitalism would be in favor of some version of it, but it does at least sound pretty radical. Okay, so let's see where he gets this.

22:13 Wes: So these principles are not just, I'm Rawls and I think this is what would be best for a society.

22:19 Mark: Right. Or this reflects our intuitions.

22:21 Wes: This is something he thinks that people would. If you, in his thought experiment, in the original position, where you put people in a room together and they're figuring out the rules for a society, the most general rules, and they don't know what their situation is going to be in that society. They don't know if they're going to be rich, they don't know if they're going to be poor. They don't know if they're going to have certain natural abilities, highly intelligent or not as intelligent. Then you get them to figure out the rules so that they're always taking into consideration the fact that they may be one of the least well off members of society.

And you formulate rules that way. And he's saying these are the types of rules people will choose over. Say something like utilitarianism, which may seem kind of counterintuitive because a utilitarian will say, why not maximize everyone's welfare or the welfare of society as a whole? Why allow these inequalities? Or that's kind of a different argument. Someone might say why allow any sort of inequality? But Rawls has an argument for that. Why people would pick these principles as opposed to some other.

23:20 Dylan: Yeah, but just to clarify, Wes, utilitarianism wouldn't be the same thing as maintaining fundamental equality, right?

23:28 Wes: Right.

23:29 Dylan: Rawls is about equality in one way, but the idea of having everybody be equal, like chopping all the wheat to the same height, is not utilitarianism.

23:37 Seth: Right.

23:37 Dylan: Either.

23:38 Wes: Right. I didn't mean to say that. So in a utilitarian scheme, it could be that if we were to maximize the general welfare of society on a scale of, say, 1 to 10, at 8, it could be the case that there are a lot of zeros, but enough tens to balance out the zeros. Let's say when you're averaging everyone together, everyone's welfare together. And this is why Rawls says it doesn't take into account individuals. But Rawls is saying, well, if you didn't know where you were going to be in a society, you would choose a society where everyone's basic welfare is, say, at a three, even though the welfare of society as a whole is a 7, and people's general welfare only ranges from, say, 3 to 7 instead of 0 to 10.

In other words, you'd be more cautious. He's cutting out any attempt to gamble and say, well, I would rather have a chance at a possibility of having a 10 on the scale of happiness. But he's saying if you can't possibly know, and you don't know whether you're going to be talented or not, and so on and so forth, you'll choose a society with the highest basic level.

24:36 Mark: He argues against that risk taking position on two grounds. First, that it's too important that the way he's setting this up is there's only one decision and that will determine your whole life. And he's also, just by stipulation, saying that everybody, even though we don't know our particular positions and all these things about ourselves, we have to assume that we will have progeny, that we have interest in what happens with the next generation too. So you're not going to take a risky gamble not only on your own entire life, but that of your children. So that's one thing. And the other thing is just one of the things you don't know in the position behind the veil of ignorance is what your particular attitude is towards risk.

25:12 Wes: Right. Keep in mind that when you're behind the veil of ignorance, you're not actually alive or an actual human being.

25:19 Dylan: Can we back up for just a second and say you mentioned, Wes, that we hadn't talked about the original position? The original position is what other contract theories had talked about as the state of nature. So I found it interesting right at the outset that he wants to rename it as original position. And he has specific reasons, I think, for wanting to do that, in that he's not going to try to justify this as a natural state of man kind of argument where you reason back a la Rousseau or something and say this is the way man is, and then they come out of the state of nature and form this social contract and yada, yada, yada, he's going to say that we're going to talk about an original position. That is the starting point for thinking about how just relations are manifest before they get corrupted by inequality.

26:12 Wes: Yeah, it's a thought experiment that forces you to be fair. So in a typical contract theory state of nature situation, it's almost like you're hypothesizing about how societies came about. So if you're Hobbes, you might say life was nasty, brutish and short. And then people said, well, we better make some rules about being nice to everyone. It'll benefit everyone, even though we'll have to give up certain liberties, such as the liberty to smash my neighbor's head. And yeah, so Rawls isn't making any hypothesis like that. He's saying what's the best procedure for figuring out the fairest way that we would actually form such a contract in the absence of any hypothesis about what state of nature was it would lead us to do so.

What would be the best procedure, hypothetically for doing so? Even though we know we can't actually do it in the real world, what would force us into this position of fairness? Well, we have to get rid of, for instance, knowledge of our own abilities. Because if we knew that we were really, really smart, that might affect our decision making about the kind of society we want. We would lean towards a society in which we might not be considered less fortunate, let's say. So I think of it as a thought experiment where you're sort of enforcing a fair mindedness.

27:22 Dylan: I think that's right, but I think you're conflating the veil of ignorance and the original position. I think the veil of ignorance is the thought experiment that gets you into the original position.

27:31 Wes: Well, when you're in the original position, you're behind the veil of ignorance.

27:35 Dylan: Yes, but I think that the veil of ignorance is the mechanism by which you get yourself into the original position. So there seems to be two things going on. One is I'm going to start my reasoning about figuring out what justice is from an original position. And that is the position of equality, that everybody is equal. And I need to get to that position to do my reasoning as a rational person by getting to that position before I'm corrupted by inequality. So the way I'm going to do that is to do this thought experiment and I'm going to put myself behind the veil of ignorance as a procedure.

And I can do that because I'm a rational human being. And I'm going to purge my thoughts of a variety of prejudices having to do with my particular circumstances. I'm going to allow for circumstances and in fact particular circumstances to exist and I'm going to allow knowledge of them existing, but I'm not going to allow them to be my own particular circumstances. So I won't be swayed by those. And I think those are two different things you pointed out. And I think you're exactly right that it's not genetic and it's not anthropological the way in which someone like Hobbes or other social contract theories have been.

28:53 Wes: It's not something I can actually enter into. I can use it as a thought experiment in order to think about what's fair. But in the original position, because you are behind the veil of ignorance, you wouldn't know what your own specific conception of the good is. Right. And you wouldn't know what your own situation would be. It's like being in this mythical place before being born. Right.

29:14 Mark: Well, it's comparable to when we were reading Hume and Smith. They would talk about imagine, an impartial spectator and what they would think about this. The idea is not that you can let me apply the veil of ignorance myself and now I'm in the original position and I can reflect on my intuitions. It's really just imagining if people could get in this position.

29:32 Wes: Right. What would they do or were in

29:33 Mark: this position, what would they say?

29:34 Wes: Exactly. Which is something I think we can to a large extent imagine run through that thought experiment. I think. Yeah. Dylan, the other point you made was that you do get it's not a veil of ignorance from all contingent truth. Right. So you would know general truths about say sociology, economics and things like that.

29:51 Dylan: Yeah. What I wanted to ask is, is there anything to say about the original position itself as being the appropriate starting place? The original position is a position of fundamental equality and so there's non trivial baggage associated with that.

30:06 Wes: Right, right.

30:07 Dylan: And I guess I'm inclined to think he's right, but I want to raise the question. One might say, look, it's just not true that everyone is equal and that we shouldn't even be thinking about justice from the standpoint of equality because it doesn't period.

30:23 Seth: I don't think he's talking about justice as equality. He says justice as fairness acknowledges that there are inequalities. It's that trying to put some boundaries on how those inequalities cash themselves out in the society so that it's still fair to everybody involved.

30:39 Dylan: No, I was going to say a deeper form of inequality. Not just. I mean, this would go to Wes's earlier mentioning of other ways of considering justice is you just say, look, some people are ordained. I don't buy the fact that people are equal in that way as just being equal. Human beings, even if I admit that there's inequality of abilities in certain sense, there's a deep sense of equality. In Rawls account, do we have to

31:07 Wes: assume people are equal from the very beginning? I don't think we have to assume. Then.

31:10 Mark: I think it's a hypothetical. It's saying that if you see the task of justice as a way of justifying a society to its members so that if you have a society that meets the criterion of justice and then one of its members complains, then you can say, well, you know what? You have implicitly agreed to this social contract. Right? That's the way all social contract theorists do it. Now historically, social contract theorists were trying to justify for the most part societies that actually were existent. Whereas Rawls is actually saying, well, if there were a just society, I understand that probably none of the societies, in fact, that's why I'm doing this, because we want a goal where to move society.

So the idea is what kind of society should we have? What kind would a bunch of equal people, people who deserve some justification, agree to? So it's the fact that we are all deserving of this justification. That's where the equality comes from in this decision making process. If you say that justice is just, well, these people are ordained. What you're saying is the other people that aren't ordained really they don't deserve a justification for their society at all. Justice doesn't apply to them. But that's just not the game that we're playing here.

32:24 Dylan: Yes, I just wanted to point that out, that the starting point is a rejection of monarchy or any other kind of special dispensation for individuals that would allow for different versions of justice. The original position is from the outset assumes that whatever justice is is going to apply to everybody. And in that way, as Mark says, we're all playing this game of equality in that way.

32:51 Wes: It also assumes that justice is the priority. It assumes that right is a higher priority than good. Because if I thought that good were a higher priority than right, what is a good society? The best society I might think is a theocratic society. A society in which church and state are closely tied together, for instance. And if I think that that trumps justice and fairness, that that' then the game is over right there. You have to assume that right precedes good and that this particular conception of justice, justice is fairness. Because the original position is just an answer to the question of what's the fair way to figure this out.

33:26 Dylan: I think he in fact at the end links utilitarianism in with exactly that kind of society, pointed towards some kind of good. And that's his deep criticism of it, is that it's a way of saying what's the good for the rest of society? So it's really not liberal, it's not properly liberal. And that's his answer to it, is that we shouldn't be even trying to maximize the good for society. Period. End Stop. We should make the minimal judgment we can. And that in the end means that we have to operate on the principle of fairness.

33:56 Wes: And part of the reason for saying right is more important than good is pluralism, because the idea that people have different conceptions of the good. And for societies to function, they're going to have to be able to accommodate that. They're going to have to be able to accommodate different religions. And historically, I think it's a pretty good assumption to make that pluralism has to be taken into account because otherwise you create a lot of misery.

34:18 Mark: It's a fruitful source of critique and elaboration of the ideas in here that there has to be some limit to this pluralism. That even in Rawls there are the basic goods that we assume in the original position. At least everybody wants a piece of that. We have to assume that everybody has rational aims and that they want to achieve these aims.

34:41 Wes: Yeah. Not every conception of the good will end up being consistent with the just society. And many of them will be ruled out. Yeah, my good as the murderous psychopath will be ruled out in a justice.

34:53 Mark: Exactly. And so you could go farther than this. So one of the books that I had read for the New Work podcast was Robert Skidelsky's book about the good life and arguing that this pluralism taken to an extreme is actually harmful because you say whatever bullshit that you want, as long as it's not harmful to me, then it's sort your right to want that and it's none of my business and I shouldn't be trying to argue with you about it. And he thinks that. No, actually there are a lot of specific things that if we had a conversation about it. So he wants to argue specifically that the overemphasis on money is just not in accordance with the good life, that we need to take a more Aristotelian take on human nature and say there really are objective goods.

And we can't just for political purposes say, oh, well, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. Everybody's notion of the good is the same. Like, no part of the political task is to have a conversation about this and figure out what the common good is and what the good life that maybe we all should be striving for together. Which is easier said than done.

35:54 Wes: You'd have to make the argument that people's individual goods really aren't sustainable unless they're carried out at a communal level, let's say. So someone might say, well, yeah, that's fine for you if you're not a materialist, that's fine, but I am. And we live in a liberal society and we just have to tolerate each other. And the idea is that that actually works. But someone might say, well, actually that doesn't work. People's individual conceptions of the good aren't really fulfillable in the absence of, again, some sort of society level acknowledgement of what's good in the robust sense. Because Rawls will say, yeah, we need society level acknowledgment of his minimal conception of the good.

36:31 Dylan: We don't have to get into the criticism a lot right now, but I mean, an obvious criticism is going to be that on this basis, how do you say, well, you know what, actually, female genital mutilation, that's not such a great idea and we're going to not allow you to do that.

36:48 Wes: Well, you can say that because it's not consistent with rights.

36:51 Mark: What if the person who it's being done to or the women in the society, they're just, you could say, brainwashed by their tradition or something like, you know, on reflection, even if you had a democratic vote in those societies, they would want to keep that. But you want to argue that no, there's something objectively wrong about that. Does this let you rule it out?

37:09 Dylan: Yeah, I don't want to get sidetracked into specific. What I want to point out is that there is an open question in this on how you argue against or argue for certain specific mores in society and it becomes at some level challenging.

37:24 Wes: Well, I think anything where you're harming someone, I mean, it would be just as challenging under a utilitarian, under any conception, I think, to say, what's the moral argument against female genital mutilation? Because I think Rawls, with a strong sense of rights, is in just as good a position as in any other theory. In some ways better. Right, because utilitarianism, that's one of the common challenges. Certain forms of utilitarianism that you can conceive of harming someone being okay if it's overall better for the general welfare. But with the conception of rights, you cut that off at the bud.

37:56 Mark: Yeah, we're going to have all the problems with abortion and blah, blah, blah, and who exactly gets rights and do you have to be an adult to get rights? But that's much too specific for this book, at least in the part we read after going through the Social Contract episodes. And then we got to Hegel, who just craps on the whole idea. And like, that's ridiculous. How could you see society as based on a pact? How could you see in a matter of historically people giving up rights in order to embrace something like. No, the history is just people subjugating each other and that's the basis of all society.

Well, I don't even think a sophisticated straight up social contract theory is actually going to fall victim victim to that argument because they're going to say, look, we're not actually saying something about history as it played out. We're doing this hypothetical thought experiment here. And Rawls it seems, is just as immune to that kind of criticism and in fact much more straightforwardly so because he's saying, yes, this is a completely hypothetical thing and it's really just meant to tease out our basic intuitions as people in this time and place, I think even about what fairness is.

But does he fall victim to any of the ammunition you would use against social contract theorists as we have read them and for previous episodes can be used against Rawls as well?

39:13 Seth: Yeah, I think so.

39:14 Mark: Give us one.

39:15 Seth: I don't know if it was Wes or Dylan alluded to it earlier, the idea that the actors still have to be rationally self interested, that one of the central elements of the social contract theory is that you have autonomous individuals who are rational and self interested. One of the things that I don't think has been mentioned yet, but which is a key part of the structure of this is that Rawls posits that the reason people enter into a polity social situations of society is that you have people who are more or less self sufficient as individuals, but recognize that in entering into a group with other people they stand to either gain or achieve things that they cannot get for themselves or that their life will be more secure or whatever.

And it's a basic premise that people would need to recognize that and rationally be able to understand that entering into some kind of an agreement with other people is a means to achieve that. And there are some people who feel that it's not at all clear that that is how people would operate in a hypothetical state of nature.

40:20 Wes: But it doesn't have to be how people would operate though, because again this is just a thought experiment for figuring out what's fair. And so you have rational actors only because it's what you need.

40:30 Seth: The thought experiment requires a rational actor, doesn't it?

40:33 Wes: Yeah, but you don't. Actual people don't have.

40:36 Mark: You're imagining a rational act.

40:38 Wes: You don't have to have actual people be rational in a state of nature.

40:42 Seth: I get that. But if Rationality is one of the criteria.

40:45 Wes: I think you're onto something. In the sense it's sort of the

40:48 Seth: same if you deny that people are rational.

40:50 Wes: You have to assume that justice is fairness is your priority and he can't make an argument to you if you are a theocrat. There's no argument for someone like Rawls to make to convince you to say my justice's fairness trumps your theocratic conception of the good. No one would be convinced by that. You have to already accept his first premise and walk with him down that lane. I think you have to accept liberalism basically before you even follow Rawls through the rest of the argument. To accept the conception of justice's fairness being the first virtue of a social institution and then go from there.

41:25 Seth: Is that a criticism, Seth?

41:27 Dylan: Tell me if I'm interpreting you correctly. But I thought you were making a weaker claim on irrationality than that you would be say separately devout to an alternative conception like being a theocrat, but that you might have other calls for your decision making. Your decisions might not always be in your own rational self interest in an everyday way. It's the same kind of criticism one would have of economics based upon where you assume everybody makes their own rational self interested economic decisions and that you make your forecasts and your understanding of how an economy works on that basis and the fact that people are irrational in normal everyday ways.

42:14 Wes: But the thing it's not a theory about. So fairness is what we're looking for. And then we set up a thought experiment to arrive at that. And that thought experiment requires rational actors, but it doesn't require actual societies to have rationale.

42:28 Dylan: No, but the claim is that all just acts will follow this method. Right? So let's say this. I know that my brother committed a crime. Is it just or unjust of me to not turn him in? It's not clear to me that it's unjust. It seems to me that in Rawls concept of fairness you would have a sense of justice with respect to societal rules, procedural justice, okay. And it would not admit of those circumstances. And that's the way it's designed. And that's one of its virtues. But I'm taking Seth's point to be that the non rational decision making goes right to the foundation of what we might even consider to be just or unjust. Not in the sense of a theocracy in terms of making a government, but in the sense of what it would be just or unjust for me to do or just or unjust to happen in society.

43:21 Mark: Doesn't he rule out that kind of individual decision making that that's not what he's talking about in this whole book?

43:27 Dylan: I think that that's the criticism, guys. I'm not saying that he doesn't have a way out of it that he draws that box. I think the criticism is that that box is a misplaced box. I think that would be the argument.

43:39 Wes: Well, I think you have to reject one of two initial premises. One is that fairness is what you're after, justice is fairness is what you're after. Or you have to reject the idea that the best way to get at what's fair is a thought experiment requiring only rational actors. But beyond that, the consequences, saying that, well, this doesn't take into account the fact that people are fundamentally irrational and. And so on. This sounds to me like maybe it amounts to criticism that, well, maybe people's individual goods or the good of a society doesn't actually end up being compatible with the just fair society. You understand what I'm saying?

44:16 Dylan: I think that's exactly what it's going to end up as.

44:18 Wes: Yeah. So it's an idea that it goes back to the position of that hypothetical theocrat I brought up. It's like there is a good which trumps this conception of society. And yeah, I think you could be anti liberal in that way. And it's. There's no argument in Rawls against that. And I don't think he's trying to argue you out of that position. I think if you're anti liberal to begin with, there's nothing in this book that can convert you.

44:39 Dylan: The only thing I would quibble with about that is the characterization of all such positions as being equivalent to wanting a theocracy.

44:47 Wes: That was just an example. I know it could be, it could be utilitarianism, it could be any conception of the good.

44:52 Dylan: Yeah, it could be just preference of family.

44:54 Wes: Yeah, it could be, you know, Plato's Republic.

44:58 Mark: But the family idea in particular brings in. I just don't know enough about his position and I know he talked later about international agreements and what would be just about those which is not dealt with in this book. But aren't we of course members of different levels of society at the same time? We have states, we have the federal government, we have our city, we have, and this is just in keeping with the history is ignoring any complications or benefits, you know, given our Federalist Papers discussion that could be brought about by having a multi layered society like that. We're just talking about, okay, whatever layer we're talking about this is what justice would be in it.

45:39 Seth: Let me bring a quote into play. So on page 18 he says, One should not be misled then by the somewhat unusual conditions which characterize the original position. The idea here is simply to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of justice and therefore on these principles themselves. Thus, it seems reasonable and generally acceptable that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstance in the choice of principles. It also seems widely agreed that it should be impossible to tailor principles to the circumstances of one's own case.

We should ensure further that particular inclinations and aspirations and persons conceptions of their good do not affect the principles adopted. The aim is to rule out those principles that it would be rational to propose for acceptance. However little chance of success only if one knew certain things that are irrelevant from the standpoint of justice or specifically what your position would be in the society after the principles of justice had been settled. What I was trying to get at in saying this is one criticism of Rawls has been that if you accept those restrictions, then you essentially strip out all the important content that makes up an individual and puts them in a position to actually even make judgments.

If you don't know. For example, if you say, well, I have to assume that I don't know that I'm male or female, white or black, Asian, where I'm from, what my social strata is, and for that matter, perhaps even what my geographical location is,

47:26 Mark: or my religion, my values, my religion,

47:28 Seth: my values, whether I have kids or not. Yeah, there's a legitimate argument that there's really nothing left on which you can make any kind of judgment about what would be reasonable and acceptable. Because at one point he defends this and he says there's still some significant content there to the individual. But what I'm saying is there may be even a more fundamental criticism, which is that the idea of trying to approach this saying that the restrictions you would place on a rational argument for the principles of justice is the restriction you would place on the principles themselves may itself be flawed.

48:05 Wes: One thought is that when you challenge thought experiments, I think it can be tricky because you can't really. I don't think it's legitimate to challenge them on the basis of whether or not the premise of the thought experiment is actually possible. But it has to be consistent. If you think there's something inconsistent here, then that's actually a problem. But it doesn't seem inconsistent to me in the sense that, yeah, even if you don't know a lot about yourself, you know a lot simply by the virtue of the fact that you're a human being. In other words, you're just a generalized human being. And so certain basic minimal goods, for instance, you're going to know you want those. And that's precisely what gets factored, for instance, in the system or liberty, that sort of thing. I don't see any inconsistency in that.

48:44 Mark: Right. The specific argument that Seth started to give that maybe there's not enough information here left to motivate a decision at all, is one that Rawls actually makes himself against the Humean impartial spectator, which I had already mentioned, is another possible alternative to this thought experiment, that he does really think that in that case, without going to the detail of that, that you've taken out too much and nothing would motivate the decision. But you know, you have some aims and you want to forward those aims. That's enough. And I think that point actually is debatable given especially what we were just saying in the Bergmann episode.

Why assume that people come set with a bunch of aims and those just need to be respected? I mean, I know this is also getting on the objection, the Skidelsky objection that I just referred to, that maybe there's some overriding conception of the good that should trump your ill informed aims. But why assume that even there are aims that are coherent at all? That's another way of putting the objection to them being rational agents.

49:46 Wes: Yeah. Seth, you're saying that we need some good. Right. Otherwise there's nowhere to go. Rawls is saying, well, I have a thin theory of the good. I have these basic things. So even though you don't know your social circumstances, you know more general things about what human beings want. And yeah, I think so. Seth, your point is that. Well, yeah, if you go too far, you could strip the hypothetical people in the original position of having any sort of good, and then I think you're right, you would be in trouble. He thinks he hasn't gone too far. He thinks it's thin, but it's not water.

50:16 Seth: No, no, he clearly does not think he's gone too far. And it may be that the criticism I'm trying to articulate here really only gets at his specific conception of justice and not his theory of justice in general. Right. I think there's a strong and legitimate criticism to say that Rawls's final formulation of justice is something that's heavily influenced by the things that he claims he's stripping away when we start from scratch, because the conception of justice that exists even in our own contemporary society across the world, you can find many, many, many different conceptions of justice which I think could be argued fit his two principles.

I mean, I know he doesn't think so, that he thinks that if you get to the original position, you're going to come up with some formulation of these two principles. And that in turn those two principles are going to yield his specific conception of justice. But I think it's harder to argue against the veil of ignorance and the original position yielding those two principles than it is to argue that those two principles yield his specific conception of justice.

51:23 Wes: So these primary goods that he thinks every rational man is presumed to want. This is on page 54 of my edition. These are rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth. So you could see how someone might object to. When we're making our decision about society. These are the things that we're taking into consideration. Although he does take into account later on what he calls social primary goods like self respect.

51:50 Mark: I do want to point out one more quote, this is from the end of Section 4, about why he wants to describe the original position as he does. He says there is, however, another side to justifying a particular description of the original position. This is to see if the principles which would be chosen match our considered convictions of justice or extend them in an acceptable way. We can note whether applying these principles would lead us to make the same judgments about the basic structure of society which we now make intuitively in which we have the greatest confidence, or whether in the cases where our present judgments are in doubt and given with hesitation, these principles offer resolution which we can affirm on reflection.

In other words, he's not just saying that the particular description he's given of the veil of ignorance is just sort of given by reason. It's that it gives the answer that he wants to get.

52:37 Wes: Well, it's not entirely that. It's the idea of reflective equilibrium. Where, yes, if our thought experiment produced a society that we intuitively thought was just evil, that would be a good objection to it. What we want in the end, we're going to measure the results of our experiment by what he calls our considered moral judgments, which is not just any moral judgment, but it's moral judgments that we've reflected upon. And it also suggests that we can modify both ends. The equilibrium part of the reflective equilibrium is that we can measure the results of our theory of justice against our considered moral judgments. But we can also go the other way. So it may Be that we may end up modifying some of the things that we take for granted because of this thought experiment. So it's not entirely like I have to Jerry rig this just to get exactly.

53:22 Mark: But you could say, all right, well, this sounds okay in the abstract. But then I see that it yields principle two that says we don't allow disparities in wealth unless allowing the highest earners even more will also help the lowest earners. That. No, actually I think that anybody should have as much wealth as they can get as long as it doesn't actually hurt. That doesn't have to help the other people. People, they're independent people. Why would I have to help the other person and say, okay, well, I guess I need to make an adjustment in how I understand the original position and the veil of ignorance because it yielded a bad result.

53:58 Dylan: No, I mean, he argues against that on the basis of fairness. Right.

54:01 Wes: Well, not just on fairness of rational self interest. I mean, the interesting thing about this is, you know, you're meant to derive all this from rational self interest. There's no altruism. There's no. So we're not going to rely on that. And he thinks utilitarianism relies too heavily on something like altruism. So the idea is that just because you are making a calculation about based on the fact that you may, you know, when you draw your lot, you may end up being in the position of the least fortunate. Then you wouldn't make a decision to say, yeah, people can be as wealthy as they want as long as it harms no one. You would embrace the difference principle.

54:33 Dylan: Yeah, but be careful about saying it's not just about fairness. I think it is just about fairness. What you would rationally choose under the veil of ignorance is the procedure by which you implement fairness.

54:43 Wes: Right.

54:43 Dylan: It's not as if you say, I'm going to look upon this situation from where I'm at and balance this like Solomon and make some kind of fairness there. The original position and the veil of ignorance are an explicit procedure combined with the presumption of rationality to implement the notion of fairness.

55:01 Wes: Right. And the idea is that you would have a lot of trouble actually getting at what's fair if you relied on, for instance, people's benevolence. You want a procedure where you assume the least and yet still get what you need.

55:13 Mark: Right. I was trying to just anticipate the libertarian objection to this, which we'll have a whole other episode on at some point so we don't have to go too much into detail. On. But I think the objection would be that there's something illicit in the original position itself in a way that's comparable to Rawls's argument against, again, the impartial spectator, which he thinks is something that would be more likely than this original position to yield approval of the utility principle. Because the impartial spectator is sort of looking at society as a whole and thinking, what would be the best society? Well, maybe the best one would be the one with the most overall, not even average utility, but just the most overall maximal happiness. Maximal utility. And Rawls says that ignores, as you said earlier, Wes, there are individuals involved.

55:58 Wes: Well, it doesn't. The reason why it doesn't work is because the impartial spectator doesn't have to live in the result. If I have to live in the result, and I may be the one with zero happiness, even though overall societal happiness has been maximized, according to Rawls, I'm not going to take the utilitarian route. Yeah. If I don't have to live in it, and there's no. I'm not risking zero happiness, then yeah, I might.

56:18 Mark: But in thinking of it that way, right. In thinking of it as a number of people around a table who have to reach an agreement, which is what this original position is different than one single impartial spectator thinking about this, you're taking a different attitude towards the individual. And a libertarian could take it one farther and say, why are you even imagining that there are all these people around a table and they don't know what positions we're in? Like there's something essential about the human condition, our facticity, to put it in Heidegger's terms, that we are in a position so that there's something illicit about this abstraction to determine what justice and fairness is. To my not knowing my position that there's something evil going on there.

57:01 Wes: Well, there are some people who think that thought experiments in general are illicit, and I don't think they're right. That's a challenge I think we can discard. But yet to show that this is illicit. Again, you could say, well, fairness isn't the priority, which we've already discussed. Or you could say, this isn't really the best way to get at fairness. There's some flaw in this actual procedure, but they'd have to be more specific. They couldn't just say, there's something generally illicit about this. They'd have to say, specifically, why doesn't this lead to the fairest result?

57:27 Mark: Just channel your Ayn Rand for a moment and try to imagine what that position would be regarding this initial situation of it's going to be the luck of the draw and people will have different talents. And yes, they might want to affirm the first principle of equality of rights, that we're equal in that respect, but that beyond that the rest is up to our each of us is equipped with an individual, willing nature. And the way that human nature works is you work hard, you earn things, you gain things. And so really the only role of society then, the only role of justice then would be to make sure that everybody is free to express that earning power, that is their nature and that any after the fact redistribution of wealth, or you can only get wealth to a certain point without helping is illicit, is unfair.

58:19 Wes: I think the Randian's implicit premise though is usually I'm an ubermensch and everyone else, most of the people are losers.

58:25 Mark: Forget about the specificity of Rand.

58:27 Wes: That's important because we're talking about a real calculation of people. Again, we're assuming their rationality, they're not foaming at the mouth and they have self interest. So they're making really the best possible calculation. So an Ayn Randian knows that 90% of society are losers. And if they're actually in the original position, they know that there's a 90% chance of ending up as a loser. Their worldview now maybe I'm mischaracterizing them, but do you understand what I'm saying? They would have to account for the fact that regardless of their theory of the will and the idea that everyone can will their way to success, if that is actually the position, they may not be that one.

They may be the person with a mental disability. They could be anyone, presumably, if they're rational. Even if they're Ayn Randians, when push came to shove, they would make the right calculation, which would be, no, we have to.

59:16 Mark: The losers should not be neglected.

59:18 Wes: Right, because I could be one.

59:20 Dylan: Yeah. Well, so the criticism then would be criticizing this procedure for allowing us to determine what the proper account of justice is. You would have to say, well Rawls, you're wrong about using the original position as being the proper way to account for justice, social justice even, I think

59:41 Mark: specifically the part about not knowing your own abilities. Like even if you say you don't know your position in society. And okay, I'm allowing the thought experiment to go forward. I don't know my position in society, but I still know because I can reflect upon myself and apply my reason that I am perfectly capable of winning whatever the challenge is so just give me a sort of a fair playing field and let me go. And there's no room in that to saying, well, I might end up being a loser and not having my current faculty of reason or something like that. That's just not even a legitimate abstraction.

1:00:11 Wes: Yeah, I could see someone talking themselves into that nonsense.

1:00:15 Seth: Can I read some more from the text, please? See if this either strengthens or weakens his I feel like Wes is a better defender of Rawls position than Rawls is. It is assumed, then, that the parties do not know certain kinds of particular facts. First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position, his social status. Nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength and the like. Nor again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of his psychology, such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism.

More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. He goes on, that's everything. Economic, political, the whole kit and caboodle. Then he says, as far as possible, then the only particular facts which the parties know is that their society is subject to the circumstances of justice. Whatever this implies. It is taken for granted, however, that they know the general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory. They know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology.

So you don't know the economic or political situation of your society. You don't know your own psychological or physical place, but you understand generally economic theory and human psychology. In other words, we assume that you understand the concepts of optimism, pessimism, confidence, physical traits, the veil of ignorance. You're not so ignorant.

1:01:51 Dylan: Yeah, you're only ignorant about the particulars as they apply to you and your circumstance.

1:01:56 Seth: Exactly.

1:01:57 Dylan: You know all that you would know except about where you particularly are in that.

1:02:03 Seth: So if your conception of justice and the way to distribute goods. Let's just focus. There's two aspects, two principles. One is the equality principle, which is, you know, equal liberty as long as it doesn't impinge. And the other is the distribution of the benefits or advantages that are generated by cooperation. So we cooperate instead of me making X and you making X for a total of 2x. By cooperating we can make 3x. Then the question becomes, what do we do with that extra X? Do we split it 50 50? Or because you have a certain set of skills, you get 70 I get 30.

That's the question at issue. And it sounds to me like what he's saying is, well, we already understand, for example, the labor theory of value. We already have some conception of property. We already have some conception of capital and how capital goes to work. We just don't know whether we're the capitalist or the laborer. And that right there strikes me as just fundamentally biased in terms of him saying, okay, this is not really a theory of justice broadly construed. This is a theory of justice for 20th century Western, maybe even specifically American society.

And this thought experiment makes sense. If we all agree that the principles we already agreed to as being the founding principles of the way in which our society and our country is structured, then we can abstract from that and do a thought experiment that says, well, how would you structure this? Or what would you change if you didn't know that you were going to be white and male and born into privilege? And to that extent, it makes sense. But generalizing this as a more general principle of this is a theory of justice that we could apply across the board to different societies.

That's where I run into trouble with this.

1:03:51 Wes: Well, it's important to keep in mind, though, that even though his hypothetical parties know these general facts, it's not like he's applying them here specifically. It's not like he's applying a specific economic theory to get his result. So he's still trying to appeal to a very general concept of what's fair,

1:04:07 Mark: which is why he doesn't even, you know, say what the liberties in question are. Because it, you know, in a given society, the different goods, the different liberties, they could be identified in different ways. And he seems to think that as long as there's some distribution of them involved, then you can apply this.

1:04:23 Seth: What if I live in a bartering society? So then the principles of economic theory that I understand are going to be different than the principles of the economic theory that somebody who's already existing in a capitalist, or for that matter, a socialist society, might understand.

1:04:37 Dylan: How is the notion of what is social justice going to change based upon that? That doesn't amount to you knowing something about your particular circumstance.

1:04:46 Wes: Because the two principles we get right are the ones that Dylan read at the very beginning of the podcast. What page is that again?

1:04:51 Dylan: It was like page 11. He revises them into section 46, which is his final version of them. But it's just what Seth summarized as the principle of equal liberty and then the principle of fair distribution of inequality.

1:05:07 Wes: Right. So the question is Whether you think those are going to depend on your culture, the appeal of those things, because we're asking people in the original position whether they would choose these things, and we're asking whether or not, if we allowed for cultural differences, whether that would sway people away from those, perhaps towards some other principles. And then someone who was objecting would have to say what those principles are. Who's going to reject equal liberty?

1:05:29 Mark: Yeah, only societies that haven't sort of discovered equal liberty yet. You know, it's easy for us in a liberal society with the advances we've made and how we understand equality and to make this jump and see the original position as sensible. But someone who's born in a caste society, Rawls is going to say, yeah, that person is going to think that this original position is much more foreign to their everyday intuitions than it would to us. But still, if they put themselves in that position, they would make that same decision. Right. You don't know which caste you're going to be born into. So, oops, I guess we shouldn't have a caste system. It's just sort of absolutist. It's not supposed to be culturally relative in that sense.

1:06:06 Seth: Yeah, I would be the first to admit that I'm getting hung up on some particulars here, but let's just take a little bit of a step back. If Rawls was to articulate this instead of the way he did through 139 pages, and we're still just talking about the original position, if he just said, listen, if you and 10 other people were going to form a community in order to work together to benefit each other, everybody's going to work together because the overall benefit is greater when you work together than it is when you work individually. And you understand that when people work together, they take on different roles, that there are structures that need to be put in place, there are general rules of conduct that need to be observed, and there needs to be some way of adjudicating disputes and of distributing the benefits that get generated when everybody works together.

Now, imagine that you were going to do this, but you didn't know in advance that any particular position that you defined when you shaped your conception of what society was going to look like, like you didn't know whether you were going to be in position one or position ten, how would you go about doing that? And his conclusion, it gets more elaborate about the liberal values and all that, but what he's basically saying is, anybody who is faced with that situation would want to structure society in such A way that they wouldn't necessarily want people to be equal, and they wouldn't deny harder workers the rights to the fruits of their labor.

They wouldn't deny people who wanted to be more artistic, you know, to go off and pursue that, if that's what made it fulfilling. All they'd want to make sure is that whatever position you took, you would have some measure of protection against being essentially exploited, victimized, run roughshod over, or essentially forgotten by everybody else. Is that a fair conception? And if so, does that seem pretty reasonable? Because it sounds reasonable when you say it.

1:08:06 Mark: Yeah, and actually, I was just thinking it's a fancy version of when you have your kid cut a cake like you cut it, and you know you're gonna get the last piece everybody else is gonna get to pick first. So then you try to make them as even as possible.

1:08:18 Dylan: He uses that exact example, actually, as an example of procedural justice.

1:08:23 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah.

1:08:25 Dylan: That you allow one person to make the cut and the other person to do the selection. I forget what page it's on, but it's exactly that.

1:08:30 Seth: Page 85. I made a note.

1:08:34 Dylan: Yeah. So he says the intuitive idea is to design the social system so that the outcome is just whatever it happens to be, at least so long as it is within a certain range. The notion of pure procedural justice is best understood by comparison with perfect and imperfect procedural justice. To illustrate the former, consider the simplest case of fair division. A number of men are to divide a cake. Assuming that the fair division is an equal one, which procedure, if any, will give this outcome? Technicalities aside, the obvious solution is to have one man divide the cake and get the last piece.

And the others, being allowed their pick before him, he will divide the cake equally, since in this way he assures for himself the largest share possible. This example illustrates the two characteristic features of perfect procedural justice. First, there is an independent criterion for what is a fair division, a criterion defined separately from and prior to the procedure which is to be followed. And second, it is possible to devise a procedure that is sure to give the desired outcome. Of course, certain assumptions are made here, such as that the man selected can divide the cake equally, wants as large a piece as he can get, and so on.

But we can ignore these details. The essential thing is that there is an independent standard for deciding which outcome is just and a procedure guaranteed to lead to it. Pretty clearly, perfect procedural justice is rare, if not impossible in cases of much practical interest. And then he goes on, interestingly, to talk about imperfect Procedural justice, which he talks about in a criminal trial in which sometimes the guilty are let go and the innocent are found guilty.

1:10:14 Wes: Mm.

1:10:15 Seth: That's actually a really interesting section. We were using the cake example to talk about.

1:10:22 Mark: Are you laughing? Because the. Just the activity of him reading that much of the text aloud was self evidently not that interesting. It was started as a. Yeah, I

1:10:30 Wes: just woken up and heard Seth say.

1:10:34 Mark: Of course there are these other details that we don't need to consider. It's that extra sentence that makes really sums up.

1:10:40 Wes: Yeah. Soporific effect of Rawls.

1:10:44 Mark: Yes, the cake was the most exciting part of the chapter, I'll admit that.

1:10:48 Seth: Well, no, the example is flawed because he says that there's going to be men sharing a cake and it should just be kids, obviously, at a birthday

1:10:55 Mark: party, manly men sharing a cake

1:11:01 Wes: and

1:11:02 Dylan: does he have a palsy and so he can't actually cut it evenly.

1:11:05 Seth: That's right. Or what if he's on a diet and he wants to divide the cake in such a way that he gets the smallest piece?

1:11:12 Mark: He has to be behind the veil of ignorance and he doesn't know if he's on a diet or not.

1:11:16 Seth: That's a good point. That's an excellent point. He doesn't know whether he has diabetes.

1:11:21 Mark: He doesn't know whether the cake is poison or not.

1:11:24 Seth: He doesn't know what flavor the cake is. He doesn't know whether he likes that flavor of cake or if he has a gluten intolerance.

1:11:34 Mark: But obviously in this context, it's just used to illustrate this pure procedural justice, the point of which is really a practical one. It's one of the many points that Rawls makes to define exactly what he's talking about, that he's again talking about justice in setting up the basic institutions and rules of the society. So then it's not about the justice of every individual outcome. So you could have a perfectly fair set of rules that involve some randomness, like a capitalist sort of system in which your business might fail, you'll get less of the wealth or whatever, but as long as we have the sort of safety net that would be implied by the difference principle built into it, that's okay.

So he's trying to set up. That's what this pure procedural business is supposed to be about. It's a matter of simplicity really, that you just can't have such an elaborate theory of justice that will tell a judge what to decide in every single dispute. You just need to set up some basics.

1:12:34 Dylan: He has an interesting discussion, though. About procedural justice, in which he acknowledges that slavishly acting according to procedure can lead to injustice.

1:12:47 Seth: This section on procedural justice, there's actually three examples that he gives. That's the part I thought was interesting, Wes, Not Dylan's dramatic reading of it. There's the cake example, which is intended to show you can know what your desired outcome is, and you can have a perfect process to achieve that desired outcome. The second example, he talks about a criminal trial where you know the outcome, but the process for getting to that outcome is imperfect. So there can be mistakes, essentially. And then the third example, which I thought was really interesting is he talks about gambling.

And gambling is one where you have actually, your procedure is perfect or solid, but your outcome is unknown. The rules of the game are clear, but you don't know who will actually be the winner, so to speak. I kind of read this, and I didn't quite understand how it fit into the broader narrative, because this is part of an extended section about procedural justice, which I didn't understand exactly what the significance was, But I thought that was an interesting. The idea of gambling sort of representing a way where the rules are solid but the outcome is unknown.

And I think the intent was to say that in the way in which we implement justice in a society, we can't have perfect procedure.

1:14:05 Mark: Well, we can have perfect procedure, but we don't have known outcomes.

1:14:08 Wes: Right.

1:14:09 Seth: Well, that's the part I didn't understand. I don't understand why he was bringing this into the conversation. Was it to make that point?

1:14:14 Mark: That's what I took out of it.

1:14:15 Seth: Okay. I think it had to do somehow with the notion of distributive justice, that there was something about procedure in the distribution of advantages. But I wasn't able to make that connection in my head.

1:14:27 Dylan: To me, the part about gambling resonated with the notion of the lottery of existence, that whether it be our genetic lottery or we have no control over the circumstances into which we were born. You read one section earlier where he talks about this, and he's actually fairly eloquent about the injustice of decisions and benefits being allocated based upon the lottery that people win, or that their disadvantage based upon the lottery people lose of their lives. It seems to me that that's where that gambling example comes in, that if you have a set of rules that just follow a specific procedure, it may not be the case that you end up with something fair at the end.

1:15:16 Seth: Okay, I can see that. And that is one of the things that I think is compelling about this account or at least what he's trying to do is the notion that not all starting positions are equal. Right. There are. Clearly in any given society, the way the social institutions distribute rights and duties and define and determine advantages is going to be inequal, that there are always going to be starting points that are more favorable than others. And he says the first task of the theory of justice is to address that inequality, which I take to be exactly what you were talking about, Dyl, which is societies are going to have racial inequalities, gender inequalities, income inequalities, and so forth.

And the first thing that your theory of justice should address is the fact that people are different, they're born different. And the attributes and abilities that they have, that they're born with, and the places they're born into the families, the socioeconomic conditions will give them a more or less better chance at taking advantage of, of everything that the society has to offer. And the theory of justice's first action is to address that. And that's where I think the libertarian critiques or the Ayn Randian critiques or whatever would jump off ship at that point.

1:16:37 Mark: I had another point that I thought was interesting, which was strict compliance theory. He brings this up, it's in section two. It's just a way of really saying what he's talking about. But you could maybe say this in the same way that we were saying you could object to some elements of his thought experiment, that you might not like this either. The other limitation our discussion is that for the most part I examine the principles of justice that would regulate a well ordered society. Everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions.

Though justice may be, as Hume remarked, the cautious, jealous virtue, we can still ask what a perfectly just society would be like. Thus I consider primarily what I call strict compliance as opposed to partial compliance theory, the latter having to do with theories of punishment, doctrine of just war, justification of various ways of opposing unjust regimes, etc, etc. So when we are making this initial decision from the original position, we are assuming that once we pick our rules that they will in general be followed and that is what will enable it to be a just society that we, those who made this original agreement, can agree to.

But you might object to this whole procedure by saying governments are inevitably corrupt. There's no point in talking in the ideal like this at all, that we have to sort of start where we are and deal with non ideal situations as opposed to this ideal situation. It's just a completely different approach to morality to even deal with the ideal in this way. I don't know. Did anybody else find that interesting or objectionable or.

1:18:11 Dylan: I didn't find it objectionable at all. The idea that you would say that your just society would assume that people were acting justly. That was how you'd figure out if it was working. That made sense. It would just mean that people that weren't acting justly were acting unjustly.

1:18:29 Mark: Well, just think of the contrast between this and the thinking in the Federalist Papers and in the setting of the Constitution, where the whole point in setting up these rules is to assume that everybody that gets in a position of power is going to try to abuse that power and that we have to have constant checks on them. That's not the kind of consideration that enters into Rawls's picture here. And you could just say, well, Rawls is just like Kant says, we can't figure out the right thing to do by actually even looking at what anybody actually does.

That the empirical is totally irrelevant. We have to somehow examine, use reason, use our intuitions, get at what the ideal would be. That's what right is. And from then that'll sort of give us a basic compass point for dealing with the nitty gritty of legislation and stuff like that. But there's nothing like that in evidence, I think in again, the Federalist Papers model.

1:19:21 Dylan: But the Federalist Papers isn't an argument for justice, the Federalist Papers.

1:19:25 Mark: It's an argument for how to set up institutions in a way that will maximize justice. Yes, it's actually doing what is being suggested in here.

1:19:33 Dylan: Yeah, but that's a different Rawls reply would be that they're answering a different question. The question of how to set up a government in order to maximize the possibility of having a just society is different than asking the question about what are the rules themselves and what is

1:19:49 Mark: a just society in the first place.

1:19:51 Wes: Rawls is just asking a more general question. They're trying to set up a specific institution. Nothing's to say that you can't do the Federalist Papers after you've done Theory of Justice.

1:20:00 Dylan: That would be his exact response, I think.

1:20:02 Mark: Sure. I guess I'm just thinking of like, well, what is the comparable response to Kant? You might not say, no, the empirical is not irrelevant to what the right is. And in the same way, if we want to figure out a way to improve our society, the way to do that is not to in the abstract figure out sort of what justice is. Because all of our societies, no matter what we do with them will fall vastly short of that. And so what we need to do, you know, just refer to our Bergmann discussion a couple episodes ago, is just look at the horrible state that things are in now and figure out what are ways that particular things can be improved with.

1:20:39 Dylan: But the point there is, how do you decide where to point your ship, right?

1:20:44 Mark: Not by doing some thought experiment, abstract. You look at what people are actually suffering from, what people are actually asking for.

1:20:52 Dylan: How do you decide what they're suffering from? How do you decide where you should be even trying to weigh that distinction from Rawls perspective. He's saying we're going to try to come up with rules for how to structure our society, and the question is going to be how do we adjudicate whether or not it's just or not? And that's what he's trying to figure out, how you would point that ship.

1:21:14 Mark: I just find it interesting that it seems much more natural, maybe because it's a less familiar area of inquiry for us to buy Rawls's basic ordering of the problem here, that first we sort of do the abstract work and then we would get down to the nitty gritty. And as you say, the abstract work helps orient us. But the whole history of moral philosophy going through Nietzsche says that for ethics in general, that's probably not the best way to go, that sitting back and figuring out the abstract moral rules and things is not necessary, and it's hard.

And that you can probably get a lot done if you're a Nietzschean or a Hegelian or something. A variety of the modern positions on ethics do not require such an initial orientation. And the other choice is not nihilism, is not saying that there are no values or something. You could still have an idea that there are better and worse societies without first going through an exercise to figure out what a just society would be. And in fact, we do that all the time. Even though there's some politicians that are, you know, have read Rawls or are familiar, you know, this is certainly a prominent line of thought, but thoughts like this, philosophy like that is not a necessary component of advancement in greater freedom and greater liberty and all the things that we like about modern societies better than ancient societies.

1:22:37 Dylan: Well, I mean, you could make the argument that there was no question of justice on the mind, say, in the Federalist Papers at all, and that the goal was to generate a process that was liberal in a more limited sense than trying to optimize fairness, and that it had, as its notion, wanted to preserve property. And it wanted to maintain liberty broadly understood and allow for stability. And that those rules required not a sense of justice, but a more down and dirty sense of maintaining general civic, social virtues that have nothing to do necessarily with justice and with a special emphasis on economic growth and stability.

1:23:23 Mark: And of course, a very strict attention to the practical details of what arrangements have worked in the past. Should we have a king, would that work better? We want to very strictly delimit the power of the government in certain ways, and we want to have a bill of Rights and all this kind of stuff. People that object to Rawls, again, say, look, you're saying it would be just. It would be great if benefits would flow to the least fortunate whenever we allow more inequality. But you haven't said really what is supposed to bring that out. Is it just national decrees?

Is it just taxes? Is there going to be any limit on how we're going to allow this to take place? Or you might even say, okay, yeah, I understand your conception of justice. This is what I would choose in the original position. However, on my view of how governments actually work in the real world, no legitimate government could exert the kind of power that would be required to bring this vision of justice about. So I'm going to alter my view of justice to something that's actually attainable in ways that I consider legitimate.

1:24:29 Dylan: Rawls thinks that there is an answer to the question of what justice is. And the way you formulated it is you say there isn't an answer to what justice is except that thrasymachus answer in the Republic that justice is the will of the stronger.

1:24:46 Mark: I don't think that that was implied by what I just said.

1:24:49 Dylan: Well, I think it is. It's whoever makes the rules says what justice is. And so in real life, we just understand that there really isn't justice in the sense of being outside of any particular circumstance. It's just whoever happens to be in power. And so I'm going to make rules that regulate that and only that. And so there's no answering the question of what is just or unjust, except in particular circumstances.

1:25:18 Mark: I guess I'm not sure how your proviso fits in with your overall point that I was making the very claim that it's not a choice between yes, there is a conception of justice that we can agree to, or Thrasymachus's nihilism to say that there is no fact of the matter. But you might either say that the abstract, perfect justice is unobtainable enough, that it is of no use to us in actually ordering societies. That's one thing. Or you might say that first and foremost we have to consider what people in power are allowed to do, not consider what the results should be for individual people.

But we have to look at what is justice is a matter of power not being concentrated overly in some hands or something like that. If that is your starting point, then you're not going to get to be talking about what is the proper method of distribution because there's no power that could be in a position to distribute. But in that sense you could be saying, yes, there is justice in particular circumstances if the laws that we've agreed to are obeyed or not obeyed or something like that, but still not have to refer it back to some absolute justice.

1:26:30 Dylan: Well, it seems to me that you're presenting the problem that the priority of the question of justice versus the structure of society, they A might have a different priority and B, they may not be intertwined.

1:26:46 Mark: Yes, okay.

1:26:48 Dylan: And I don't know where Rawls would come down on that. My impression is that he thinks that deciding this question of justice ought to be prior to our implementation of the rules and explicit structures of society because justice is the virtue of society. That would be my guess. But in the second section or the 400 pages we didn't read, apparently he's more concerned about the specific institutions.

1:27:15 Mark: Yeah, he wants to show that his rules actually will give us institutions that we would, on considered reflection, would go for. So he wants to just make it as intuitive as possible, given your current beliefs, which makes it in that sense sound less foundationalist. You know, just in the same way we were saying that by reflective equilibrium. It's not like he's starting with these are your fundamental axioms, moral axioms, and they're self evident. And I'm putting you the original position as a way of showing which ones are, are really self evident if you ignore these contingent details of your life.

And then we can just deductively get a whole structure of society out of that. He really does think that, you know, this is a matter of theorizing that we shouldn't understand philosophical method as coming up with foundational principles like that. That reflective equilibrium is really quite a radical and modern alternative to that, which is you don't start with self evident principles. You start where you are. You start with your most deeply considered opinions of the moment and then you engage in a Socratic process of analyzing those. And maybe you end up with something radically different.

But it would be very surprising, as we've said before, if your theory ended up saying murder is great or something like that, and that would be a point you'd be less likely to modify in the process of making all of your beliefs consistent, which is what reflective equilibrium is all about.

1:28:40 Dylan: Didn't you just answer your own question

1:28:41 Mark: mark to say that he's actually not being the hoity toity absolutist?

1:28:47 Dylan: Yeah. The response is that you use reflective equilibrium, and in fact he is using the circumstances of life, even in the original position, in allowing for people to have notions and understandings of all the landscape of circumstance that exists in the world, but not be able to leverage their own specific lottery in making the decisions about understanding what justice is. And that process would ultimately rely on reflective equilibrium, which involves the admission of all those individual circumstances.

1:29:25 Mark: Well, I think we covered a lot of the interesting points here, and I think given our really extensive focus on this initial move and how this differs from social contract theory, I think was quite appropriate for us that we are less interested in the details of the actual theory at this point. We will have some economics episodes and things in the future, but, you know, less interested in the plausibility of the results. I guess maybe that's a good question to throw out. We've talked all about how he argues for the results, but what do you all think about his ultimate difference principle? That you shouldn't allow any more inequality than would benefit the lowest. So even if you have natural inequalities, you shouldn't be able to use your superior intelligence to benefit yourself unless it also benefits those that lack such gifts or that are the worst off in some other ways.

1:30:14 Seth: I think there's kind of, from my perspective, two different points to challenge that that are interesting to talk about. The first is if you have a concept of equal liberty where equal liberty consists in not infringing upon other people's equal liberty to do the same, then it feels like the correlating social advantage, like if you gain some kind of advantage by naturally exercising your equal liberty that causes no harm, in other words, doesn't infringe, then it feels to me like there's probably a pretty good argument in there to say that you should be justified in doing it and that the outcomes of your exercising your natural abilities or what have your rights don't necessarily have to benefit others.

1:31:03 Mark: You have a good singing voice, so you're morally obliged to entertain the rest of us.

1:31:07 Seth: Yeah, something like that. I think that's a great example, by the way. And then I guess somebody would say, well, if you get paid for it, you know, like that. Then it's like, oh, so money's already involved, so we already have the presumption of capital again. Bastards. But the other part of it is, is it fair for Larry Ellison, who owns Oracle Corporation, right, to become massively wealthy and spend $60 million to race a yacht if it doesn't benefit, it has to benefit the least advantaged in the society and say, okay, well, maybe what he does doesn't benefit the least advantaged, but he started a company that employs, let's just say, 60, 70,000 people, and it certainly benefits those people who get paychecks.

And it feels like he wants to use the difference principle, the least advantaged members of society. And he thinks that that bypasses some of the challenges of calculating utility and the practical and theoretical problems of the utility principle. But if I could say, okay, well, this person is naturally advantaged and they're going to do this and it will benefit this section of the society. It will not benefit this section of society. And if you say, okay, well, the person who's least advantaged, if they happen to fall into the section of society that it benefits, then it's okay.

And if they happen to fall into the section of the society that doesn't benefit from it, then it's not okay. That just doesn't resonate with me. I understand what he's getting at, and I think that there's a conception of the good of the least advantaged member of society that's encapsulated by the first principle that he's trying to cash out in the second principle. But I don't think that the way he does it, it certainly doesn't accord with my intuitions. It doesn't capture what I think of as distributive justice in the right way.

1:32:58 Mark: Doesn't he have an assumption built into that, something like the continuity principle, that if you're helping the least fortunate, then it also helps the one Next up,

1:33:07 Seth: you know, up to you, that that's just naive. The world doesn't work that way. We're not transitive on a chain of causality like that. It just doesn't work that way.

1:33:16 Dylan: Is calculation regarding the difference principle, on the one hand, it seems like I agree with Seth that it is a way of bringing a kind of moral or ethical dimension into the question of fairness and justice, a way of regulating inequality so that it allows for difference without letting it get out of hand. That's essentially the way it's working. I found myself unpersuaded by the detailed calculations that he was trying to make, especially the notion that those calculations were going to be more persuasive than typical utilitarian calculations, where you need to make a quantitative value of everything and add them up and then take the average and make sure it gets maximized and yada yada, yada.

It seems to present very similar challenges to it. And it doesn't seem to be implementable in the way he's talking about it. And so it makes me skeptical of it being the way to argue for that particular social good. I do find the question of addressing difference in fortune with regard to fairness and that basic liberal formulation of government relatively persuasive, despite my concerns about other forms of justice and stuff. That maybe to something what Mark was speaking about earlier. There's a way in which I'd be more inclined to understand this as a foundation for structuring your government as to maximize this, as opposed to rising to the questions of just or unjust actions.

And maybe Rawls just at the end of the day, isn't concerned with the question of the justice of an individual act. It seems hard to not want to talk about that. And maybe that's not his fish to fry. I find something from a structural standpoint about making a government pretty persuasive about the notion of the original position.

1:35:14 Mark: So are you curious enough about his opinion about straight up moral matters to read chapter six, Duty and Obligation and chapter seven, Goodness as Rationality?

1:35:24 Dylan: I read those at one point. I have all kinds of notes in the sidebar. All right, goodness is rationality. Which one's that one?

1:35:32 Mark: It's in part three ends.

1:35:34 Dylan: Okay.

1:35:35 Mark: Rather than talk about the good, the right, the just in the abstract, on the personal level, and then talk about it in regard to a society, he thinks it's much more reasonable to talk about it in setting up a society. And then once you've got the society set up, talk about the way we actually do in real life, the justice of individual actions. Given that you are in a society that has certain laws, you know, that's the way the legal system works. We talk much more about the rightness of an action in that sense than we do in a strictly moral sense.

I guess that goes along with my Hegelian sort of intuitions about ultimately there's something unjustified about the mores of any given society. But as long as you've got a structure that allows those things to be examined and improved, then just talk about legal rights. Just talk about justice according to your society. That that does most of the job that moral philosophy wants to do. My closing then would be to say, despite my criticisms here, you know, just like with moral philosophy. Yes, I'm kind of a moral skeptic and I like Nietzsche's take, but I still find it useful to do the.

Well, if there are objective moral truths, then what would they be? Let's do come up with a theory, let's examine Kant versus Mill and blah, blah, blah. You know, I find it equally interesting and valuable, in fact, even more so to do that with society, because really we have to have an ethical code that we tsk, tsk people when they don't obey what we think they should do. But with a society, we have to have actual laws. So wouldn't it be nice if those were sensible? There's an actual purpose to this in a way that moral philosophy maybe doesn't have access to.

1:37:18 Dylan: Do you want to read the rest of the book for the next episode?

1:37:21 Mark: What do you think, Wes?

1:37:22 Wes: No, I never want to read any of this again. Or anything like this makes me want to stop reading philosophy.

1:37:29 Mark: I did kind of feel like that. Like it didn't actually make me want to kill myself. It's not like that. I look at any given sentence and I'm just. No, it was just boring, that's all. It's a much more mundane kind of complaint. And then I found, after I had gone through it once, when I was sort of going through back parts of it to take notes, it was okay. I could just skim that and I could pick out what, you know. There are some actual real interesting things in here. The whole notion of reflective equilibrium, ideal versus non ideal ethics, strict compliance theory versus partial compliance theory. I think these are really useful contributions to ethical discussion. So a big thumbs up.

1:38:09 Seth: Yeah, I'd agree with that. We've talked numerous times on this podcast about a lot of times great philosophers transcend being terrible writers and. And how being a good writer is so important. And this might be one of the last generation where you could kind of write as badly as he does and still be considered. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there was still at the time, I think, a kind of moral authority that went along with having a position like being a university professor or being a Harvard professor. And that seems to be waning these days.

1:38:42 Mark: Everyone must write like Dan Dennett in the future.

1:38:45 Seth: Oh, God.

1:38:46 Dylan: I guess I kind of agree with calling it bad writing, but part of me doesn't agree with it in that I didn't find it to be bad Writing in the way reading Lacan is, or even Husserl or something like that, where it's a kind of confluence of abstraction and jargon filled obfuscation. In some ways it's just really boring. I didn't find it unclear. I found it perfectly clear to read. I understood every sentence he's saying. It was like Carnap to me. I didn't fall asleep reading this the way I fell asleep reading Carnap. And that might be just a dispositional difference because I remember Mark saying he was all excited about Carnap when he was reading it and I started reading it. I was like, holy crap, Are you kidding me?

1:39:35 Mark: Yeah. In either case, if you can keep at a jolly pace and sort of keep it. What is this section about? What is the point I'm getting out of this section. Let's get that and then move on to the next. If you can keep that momentum with either these books, then I think it would be a pleasurable experience. But if you can't, if you just get bogged down in what sentence you're reading and like when is the next action going to start? Then it's really just as easy to say to give up on philosophy altogether.

1:40:00 Seth: Well, I think that that's. Yeah, when I say bad writing, I don't necessarily mean just like Dylan said, we have to specify the flavor of bad writing.

1:40:09 Dylan: It's a smorgasbord.

1:40:12 Seth: This is the flavor of bad writing where you don't say in one sentence what you can say in ten. That being said, I think the idea that you distinguish between the theory and the conception of justice and that there's an idea that there are certain principles of justice which we can agree upon. I think if we could even get that far, that would be a really interesting and important milestone. And I did find while I was reading this, thinking about discourses that are happening in our current society and saying to my that oh, here's a case where this conception that we're in this for mutual benefit, social cooperations for mutual benefit, has fallen apart. It gave me a framework for judging some of the stuff that's going on pretty harshly. Which is I guess why Rawls gets his reputation as kind of a liberal and we're going to read some more conservative responses to this.

1:41:04 Mark: Is it also true that pretty much any style of what you might call bad writing, one gets inured to that? You know, if we read enough things like this that we'd probably be fine with it.

1:41:16 Seth: I was going to say Wes is still writing blog posts about Kant So obviously we have a have an example.

1:41:22 Mark: My interaction with students, like when they have to read Locke or Hobbes or something, it's very much like my experience reading this. It seems strange that something written in modern English with clear sentences should be a foreign style to us. But. But if it's a sort of reference book style and that's not what we're used to reading, then we're not going to take it in in the way that the author intended. Next time we're going to read Thomas Kuhn's the Structure of scientific revolutions from 1962. We are supported by your donations. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution if you like this episode.

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1:43:21 Seth: Good night.

1:43:21 Wes: Good night.

1:43:22 Dylan: Good night.

1:43:30 Unknown speaker: I'll rent the sky full you make it the bluest blue over you I'll get the birds to sing Melody's Only God could think I've ordered the universe to be on its best be behavior but there's only one thing I can guarantee I'll be your

1:44:16 Mark: to keep.

1:44:23 Unknown speaker: Offering you the atmosphere fears of all that I know you oh oh dear? I brought in the sounds and smells? Of all that you love so well? I've ordered the universe to be on its best behavior? But there's only one thing I can guarantee? I be your

1:45:08 Seth: to keep?

1:45:16 Mark: And?

1:45:16 Unknown speaker: And if the bluest blue becomes a darkening gray? And if those atmospheres chase all the birds away? I know it's still okay?

1:45:41 Mark: Milf?

1:45:41 Unknown speaker: The. The world misbehaves? I think I know you'll still be happy? Cause all you want is me? And there's only one thing I can guarantee? I will be yours to keep? And whatever else will be? Will be? I'll be your

1:46:34 Dylan: Sam?