Consider Rawls’s most famous concept: the original position. Perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary philosophy, it goes like this: imagine you are with a group of people who are tasked to select principles of justice to regulate the fundamental institutions of society. The plot twist, however, is you don’t know anything about yourself. You agree to step behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and pretend that you don’t know your sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness or anything that might distinguish you from others.
Someone else put it a little more concisely: Work to create the world you would want to be born into if you didn't know in advance who you were going to be.
I like Kant's formulation of this sentiment better, his categorical imperative:
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
i.e., act according to a principle that makes sense for everyone else also to follow. If you jump the subway turnstile to avoid payment, what happens if everyone does likewise?
I think Kant's idea is important in its own right, but very different from what Rawls is talking about.
Kant is addressing the need for a moral philosophy to be coherent, in that you have to play out the consequences of what it would lead to. However, you are not asked to put yourself in anyone else's shoes; if you were a rich and powerful person, you might want to act in deference to rich and powerful people, and think it would be great for everyone to act that way universally.
Rawls is asking you to create a rule book the you would be willing to follow no matter who you were in society. If you are rich, you are supposed to imagine if you would still support the rules if you were poor. So from our previous example, would you want everyone to defer to rich and powerful people if you were poor?
The important aspect of The Original Position is that you are supposed to come up with a system where you wouldn't be against it no matter who you were in society.
No, Kant specifically says that we don't have to consider consequences. His categorical imperative isn't about consequences. It's concerns whether actions, when univerisalized, contradict themselves. In reality, actions aren't universalized, so it's not about considering actual consequences.
It's often said that Rawls is a restatement of Kant for modern liberals, though there's plenty of dissent over that claim. Besides, Rawls restricted himself to political philosophy whereas Kant is talking about knowledge and morality (and also politics).
I agree with others saying it's not the same thing at all.
For one thing, Kant's formulation has a problem that Rawls' doesn't: at what level of detail should you make your categorical imperatives?
Is there always a moral obligation to obey the law, or to be truthful? Clearly not, there are obvious counterexamples to both. You could try to refine your rules-based morality system, but you're never going to account for all possible edge-cases.
It's not the same thing as saying hold yourself to the moral standard that you wish were applied to everyone.
As I understand it: You don't make your categorical imperative (its just one btw), and it has nothing to do with moral, law or truth. And yes, it covers all edge cases but it won't work because they can't build that many Porsches.
Successful leaders would probably refine it and create subcategorical categories that can be handled in ways that are a better fit for their special local case of imperativeness, which means you might still be on the right track after all
You're right, yes, I should have gathered that from both the name and the use of that maxim, which is clearly singular.
> it has nothing to do with moral, law or truth
That's not right, it's talking about morality.
> it covers all edge cases but it won't work because they can't build that many Porsches
I'm not sure what you mean here.
I don't see a serious refutation of my main point. Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail, and trying to cover all edge-cases in a rules-based morality is a losing battle.
From a quick look at Wikipedia [0] it seems Kant's categorical imperative falls at the first hurdle - he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.
The difference is that Kant's categorical imperative allows for you to wish for all women to be slaves. Rawls' doesn't since you may be a woman and you have no way of kniwing behind the veil of ignorance.
Rawls' "thought experiment" is used to prove that all people would choose socialism. It's an explicitly political use of begging the question, as I said.
Kant was a moral philosopher. There is a difference. And there's a reason why Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant never came up with Rawl's "veil of ignorance": because it is itself ignorant.
I don't believe that your concise form follows from the original form.
Furthermore I think that this specific misunderstanding is a huge conflict point in politics, and contributes significantly to things like the left-right divide.
The fundamental difference being that one can realise that, statistically, they have a significant risk of being in a "losing group", whilst still thinking that designing a society with such "losing groups" results in a better system overall.
The stripped back "spherical cow" form of it would be as follows: imagine a society in which you can be born as one of two people. A person requires 80 potatoes in order to survive.
One of those people is capable of farming a hundred potatoes per week, which is enough to feed one person but not two (if shared, both will die). The other of those people is capable of farming only fifty potatoes per week, which is enough to feed no-one, and if shared is still not sufficient as a total of 160 potatoes is required in order to feed both.
The optimal way to design that society then is to allow the second person to starve and the first person to live alone, even though in this thought experiment there is perhaps a 50% likelihood that you "spawn" as the person who will be put to death, because the alternative is that you die regardless.
Extrapolating from there you can have other examples - say that 99% of people are green, and 1% blue, but green people are deathly afraid of blue people to the extent that they will develop anxiety and depression if the blue people are around. The best society is clearly then one where the two groups are segregated and do not interact, even if that might suck if you're born as a blue person "cut off from the world", because otherwise it sucks regardless.
Succinctly - it basically begs the question - it assumes that equality and fairness is somehow obvious and a priori but it's really not at all.
You can't run the divide-and-choose algorithm from the original position, because you can't have one person design society and the other put them into it. Might make a good short story though.
Controversially, Rawls asserts that you clearly want to maximize the worst outcome in this case (the "maximin" principle). Economists strongly disagree as it doesn't take into account probability. If you have the potential to live in Junkland, where life is moderately unhappy for everyone, or in Omelas, which is utopia for 1,000,000 individuals and pure torture for 1, Rawls asserts that you should obviously choose Mediocreland. But if you are randomly assigned a place in Omelas, you have really great odds of coming out quite well. The book includes some contortions to ensure this outcome. It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.
Which principles would you choose in order to construct Omelia? Who gets to be tortured? How do you make sure they don't have enough friends and family suffering about their predicament to skew off your statistics? How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?
I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.
There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.
> How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?
Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.
Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off.
So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical.
That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.
What do economists have to do with it, seeing as its a philosophical position, and not one that attempts to predict the economy (badly)?
Mathematically, we can deal with it by taking the pth power of whichever metric of utility per individual, then maximizing the expected value. When p->inf, then we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing the maximal utility. When p->0, we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing minimal utility, ie rawls position.
Why would a rational actor want to do that though? Show me a single decision theory that does reasonably well in game theory simulations (I mean R-CDT/UDT tier), that also supports maximin, and I'll write a 1000 word article in the praise of John Rawls.
The answer to that seems to be so simple. Each of the 1Mio rich people gives just less than 1Mioth of his property/values to the one poor soul, and all ends up with utopia and restores fairness - at least with regard to property. There may still remain unfairness regarding physical and mental integrity, as well as regarding freedom. The two former ones are difficult to handle/solve.
Omelia is not a problem to be solved, its a thought experiment with predefined rules for how it operates. In order for the million people to live in utopia, there MUST be a person sacrificed to suffer utterly. These facts cannot be changed. The questions then arise about the ethics and morality of this society.
But it can't be a thought experiment about humans since humans would not tolerate the outcome in the first place. Humans are moral animals who are compelled to act on their morality. One aspect of morality is fairness. Another is compassion. See Johnathon Haidt's work on this.
As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.
It's hyperbole, but humans do tolerate a similar outcome all the time. Our modern technological civilization is in many ways built on suffering. Migrant workers suffer to pick our vegetables and clean our homes, child slaves suffer to build our electronics and mine rare earth minerals. We buy goods from companies like Amazon knowing how they treat their employees. Most of us don't care as long as we get our goods on time. People have rationalized far greater evils (chattel slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism and colonization), incorporated them into their moral framework, and turned the cognitive dissonance into virtue. Those people simply choose their lot in life, they're lazy and indigent, God made them less than us, that's just the price of progress.
Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.
People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others. At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.
In the first case, what you're looking at is unawareness, stiff competition for limited attention and care budgets, and a diversity of opinion with respect to the evaluation of tradeoffs for this specific, micro-topic. People who labor in sweatshops that provide goods for Amazon want those jobs because its better than the alternative. They don't want those conditions, but that's a problem that is not going to be fixed tomorrow, whereas they have to worry a lot about their tomorrow. People making decisions within that complex matrix of forces is not evidence that Amazon buyers don't care about other people. It's evidence that the world is complex and that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time. Even Ghengis Khan was talked out of genociding the Chinese by someone who admired Chinese society and suggested that he would be better off taxing the skilled artisans of China instead of genociding them, as he usually did to any society that defied him.
Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ? Or that morality was the sole possession of a tiny vanguard ? If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.
>People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others.
Yes it is. People don't care enough to not use Amazon - suffering is simply priced into the market and people are fine with that.
>At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.
It very much is. Colonialism was built on slavery and genocide, and the colonizers cared very little for the suffering of the colonized.
>Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time.
"That's just how the world works and has always worked and it's absurd to take issue with it" is only one of many excuses people use to reconcile their morality with the amount of suffering they benefit from. No point even thinking about it if it's simply the law of nature.
>Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ?
Now we're at the part of the comment where you purposely misconstrue my comment and make it into some weird anti-leftist rant.
No, I didn't say that, and when did I even mention anything about modern partisan politics? Of course diverting from the topic with strawman arguments means you don't have to take the topic seriously, which is another coping mechanism.
>If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.
Ooh. "I wonder what you'd be willing to do?" That's a nice turnabout. The only true evil is pointing out evil. I bet you also like to say the only true racists are the black people who keep complaining about racism. Turning me into the enemy, nothing but a windmill to be tilted at, is yet another coping mechanism.
Thank you. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point. Not only would you not leave Omelas, you don't even think there's anything wrong with Omelas. Rather you'd be the one spreading FUD about anyone who does leave.
But what you're assuming is a static starting position. The entire point of liberalism is, if you read the essay, to be fair. It is absurdly unfair to that one person and I'm pretty sure they'll never be able to advance in this society. This is not just about that one person though, it's the perception that society does not really care about an individual and that individual can be you. However, fairness is the starting position in Junkland and the argument is that this begets progress while a society like Omelas shows a complete disregard for fairness. This was the spirit of the original position.
> It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.
It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.
You find it incomprehensible of late, but you've made similar arguments on this site in the past; for instance, the Rawlsian logic you're objecting to here is the same as the logic you use to justify antiterrorism work. So whatever the issue is here, I don't think it's your background in engineering.
I don’t support anti terrorism because I put myself in the shoes of victims of terrorism. I do it because I think terrorism requires harsh responses to maintain norms against political violence. So for example I would abolish the TSA because I’m not afraid of actually being the victim of a terrorist attack.
It’s possible this sentiment is punitive—I just want to see terrorists punished—and such a response isn’t necessary to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence. But I would submit that extreme responses to e.g. Islamism is important to keep a real threat to order at bay. We’ll probably have a real A/B experiment with this in Bangladesh now that Hasina—who was doing a good job crushing the Islamists—has been overthrown. Will Bangladesh turn into Pakistan in the absence of that enforcement? We will see.
It’s the same thought. Terrorist attacks are directed to the nation as a whole even if they kill a small percentage of the population. That makes them different from events that just happen to kill the same number of people.
>designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios
I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme.
It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.
Humans are risk averse and overestimate the probability of low-probability outcomes. So focusing people on hypothetical scenarios where they are someone other than themselves leads to over-focusing on the welfare of small minorities at the expense of the majority.
Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule
This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.
Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.
>Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes
Oh, wow, I had no idea. (Rawls's response is quite different from my response to the hypothetical of the veil of ignorance.) Sorry for adding noise to this thread. I agree with everything you wrote in this thread.
> the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.
It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.
> But that’s just another type of catering to the minority at the expense of the majority.
Rawls's original position (a.k.a. veil of ignorance) is, in essence, "There, but for the grace of God, go I or my loved ones — so let's help others the way we'd hope to be helped if life had dealt us a similarly-bad hand." (That latter part should sound familiar ....)
Not to mention that relief of human suffering comes mainly from technological advances and that, in turn, depends on advances in material science and basic science which wouldn't exist except for the economic incentives produced by a capitalist society which produces "stuff" for the 90%.
> The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.
We saw a lot of folks carefully ignoring a related issue during the covid pandemic: They argued angrily that it made no sense to mandate masks, lock down society, and spend billions on vaccine development, when only a small percentage of people would die or have long-term adverse effects. (There was a lot of that kind of talk in Texas.) But those folks never seemed willing to admit that they were really saying, "I'm willing to roll the dice that I'll be all right; the rest of you, well, you're on your own."
Sadly, folks like that seldom take enough precautions on their own — and they're often the first to plead for "the gummint" to help them when they get in trouble. (Cf. the bail-outs of big, de-regulated banks during the financial crisis that kicked off the Great Recession, the demands for federal hurricane assistance by people who lived in flood zones, etc. Privatize the profits, socialize the risks.)
Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up. The vax was hugely destructive to healthy people and did not prevent transmission. These things are well established facts. The argument was never ”I'm too selfish to care about grandma”, it was always about the facts at hand.
> Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up.
You’re going against what’s been widely publicized as the overwhelming scientific consensus, so it’d be useful if you’d cite some evidence, including your qualifications, to help the rest us feel comfortable accepting your judgment in this area. And you seem excessively sure of yourself (as do some of your other comments — yes, I looked you up), which tends to weigh against accepting your view.
(Reposted from below): I skimmed through your last cite about myo/pericardiotis, a meta-study in BMJ. There's an interesting sentence in the discussion part: "Thus, while the risk of myo/pericarditis is higher in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated group, the absolute risk of myo/pericarditis is small in both groups." (Emphasis mine.) That seems to be an important fact, but you don't seem to have picked up on it — either that or you're intentionally not mentioning it for your polemical purposes.
We're getting off topic here. This discussion is about Rawls and whether it's OK for majorities to tell minorities that suffer misfortune, yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's not our problem.
But since you're going there: Sure, there are studies saying various things. I'm not competent to evaluate these studies. So, like jurors in a courtroom trial (I'm a lawyer), I go with indirect evidence and which witnesses seem most reliable.
A March 2023 Washington Post article [0] quoted a lot of experts, including Dr. Peter Hotez, a local Houston icon. Hotez and his colleague Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because they came up with corbevax, a low-cost covid vaccine that can be made very cheaply (esp. in developing countries) and put it in the public domain with no patent coverage. It might not be as good as mRNA vaccines (I have no idea), but it's far, FAR better than no vaccine at all.
All of the folks quoted in the WaPo article are vaccinated. (Several touted vaccines.) Most said they wore masks in poorly-ventilated crowded spaces.
I have confidence that Hotez — who's among many, many others who hold similar views — stays open to evidence and doesn't fall in love with his own opinions or get locked into groupthink.
And to repeat: We don't know who you are, and you've offered no evidence about your qualifications concerning pandemic measures or the significance of the studies you cited.
In a courtroom trial, judges and jurors generally aren't experts; that's what expert witnesses are for. But a purported expert witness won't even be allowed to testify in front of the jury until the party that wants to call the witness has put on evidence of the witness's qualifications, and the trial judge has concluded that the witness's opinion testimony is likely to be reasonably reliable. This is called the Daubert standard: A proposed expert witness has to be shown to (probably) know WTF s/he is talking about. [1]
We have no Daubert evidence about you. So for now I'll stick with Peter Hotez and his friends.
You moved the goalpost. First, you wanted evidence. So I gave you evidence. Now you say you can't evaluate evidence, even the evidence of the people who told you to social distance admitting, under oath, they don't know where that idea came from and they know of no evidence to support it.
Look, friend: I don't have infinite time to go digging into all the cites you provided. For all I know, you're doing the Steve Bannon "flood the zone with shit" trick — I don't know that you're doing that, but neither do I know that you aren't.
YOU say that these publications say various things. But I'd also asked you for evidence that you know what you're talking about and can be trusted to be honest. You didn't provide any such evidence, nor even your real name.
EDIT: I skimmed through your last cite about myo/pericardiotis, a meta-study in BMJ. Key phrase: "Thus, while the risk of myo/pericarditis is higher in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated group, the absolute risk of myo/pericarditis is small in both groups." (Emphasis mine.) That seems to be an important fact, but you don't seem to have picked up on it — either that or you're intentionally not mentioning it for your polemical purposes.
That formulation prioritizes avoiding harm to small minorities at the expense of maximizing the well being of the majority.
Consider by contrast how East asian countries approach public policy: the needs of the typical person are elevated above the needs of people with different or special circumstances. That’s why they can have nice things like public transportation and clean and safe cities.
Which is impossible to maintain under a Rawlsian viewpoint that prioritizes minorities. Consider the Asian social norm against being overweight and the attendant enforcement mechanisms. It benefits most people for whom social reinforcement can help them maintain a healthy weight. But it’s unpleasant for a minority. Rawlsian thinking tends to oppose such welfare-maximizing policies, by focusing the inquiry on that minority.
You’re preaching to the choir. I’m all for a common culture and societal pressure to adhere to it. But as circumstances are, the preexisting common culture in the US is no longer viable as this country is now heavily heterogenous, both ethnically and ideologically. You can try extracting aspects from the past culture that are still relevant but that’s clearly not acceptable to a sizable part of the country as they hold the parts most unacceptable- latent bigotry and the other- as the most crucial aspect of the previous common culture.
Such societies may find themselves implementing Procrustean policies meant to enforce conformity. One classic (red herring) image is "Harrison Bergeron," but actual transphobic attitudes are more pressing.
Blanket outlawing of utilitarianism is its own slippery slope.
Just because some long dead philosophers, mostly affluent people who avoided real work and utilitarian choice, had time to sit and cobble together some syntax and semantics doesn’t mean it’s literally possible to live by their high minded babble
And to the moral point; today the majority rely on as little labor as possible paid as little as possible to make their food and clothes; consuming the few willing to work for little for the benefit of the many is daily life for richer countries. Pretending our society is beyond such because our historical philosophy says it is pretentious wank
The idea is to establish principles of justice without knowing what your position is in society; not that the society forces the same outcome.
Take your example of athleticism. You probably wouldn't want a society based on the principle "society values people according to their athleticism" because you don't know if you will be athletic or not. However, you might want a society based on the principle "society values whatever traits someone brings to the table" because then the athletic person can be valued for their athleticism and the non-athletic person can be valued for some other trait.
The idea is nonsense, as I said. No, I wouldn't want a society based on the principle "society values people according to their athleticism." As I said, you are begging the question and removing the agency from this hypothetical justice-seeking person.
I might want a society that lets me excel, create a business, and make money, if I turn out to be good at that. Rawls' "experiment" is simply forcing everyone to be like him.
Rawls' "thought experiment" is always employed by people who already agree with him about liberalism, to "prove" that everyone would agree with him if he rigs the experiment.
(And by the way, if you want to see ignorance, look in the mirror.)
If your answers would be different with than they would be without this knowledge then please don't vote.
Isn't this like table stakes for being a thoughtful person who isn't a sociopath? The most influential thought experiment in contemporary philosophy is to not act like a toddler?
I watched something based on this in my debate club, so this isn't my own original thought.
There's a strong argument that the knowledge someone has from being disadvantaged contributes to their views on justice. The original position also incentivizes ignoring the rights of small groups of people since you likely aren't going to be a part of one.
One also gets into issues like reparations for past injustices. Those benefit a small group of people at the cost of the many (hard to justify with the original position), but can still be a form of justice since we want to balance past wrongs.
Right, the veil of ignorance AFAICT (Rawls may have addressed this somewhere) sidesteps the question of probability. Shouldn't you weight the interests of a group proportionally to the likelihood that you would have been born into such a group, i.e. by their relative population?
That kinda depends on your subjective risk aversion/tolerance.
I think the veil of ignorance is a great thought experiment everyone should think about, but there shouldn't be any prescribed way how to think about it.
While that's technically valid, it feels like it's going against the spirit of the "original position". That is to say, it seems to me that the original position isn't intended to literally say "run an optimization on the probability density function in order to maximize your expected happiness". Instead, it seems to me that it's intended to illustrate the idea that whatever rules society operates under need to work regardless of what your starting point in society is.
Stated another way, while that argument is probably a valid way to "win" a competitive debate, it doesn't strike me as particularly useful for exploring the concept that Rawls is presenting.
It goes against the spirit of the thought experiment because it's an attack on that spirit.
Abstractly, Rawls says society shouldn't be racially/ethnically/socioeconomically/etc prejudiced. The vast majority of people agree with this obviously.
Concretely, he says this can be achieved by ignoring your racial/ethnic/socioeconomic/etc status.
The claim is that the more you ignore your own lived experiences, the less you can use the knowledge that it gives you.
Rawls also argued that people would maximize the minimum utility behind the veil of ignorance, as they wouldn't want to risk being a persecuted minority.
This didn't come up during the debate, although it should've since it's why "whatever rules society operates under need to work regardless of what your starting point in society is".
If we don’t know going into this hypothetical what sort of person we’ll be, we can still play the odds and say we should lock up child rapists and murders for life. It is very unlikely we’ll be born as one, and letting them go free will allow them to harm multiple people…
That's a very relevant thing you bring up: The way we design our society changes not only the outomes for roles of certain fixed probabilities - it changes the probabilities as well. If you lock up the rapists and murderers, there's a lower chance your role will include being the victim of a rapist or murderer.
You always have to consider all sides of every decision as well as higher order effects.
> Isn't this like table stakes for being a thoughtful person who isn't a sociopath?
Not all thoughtful people come to the same conclusions, and it's nice to try to axiomatise these things anyway, so you have something to point at when trying to formulate new rules.
For instance, non-toddlers understand the Golden Rule, which seems good enough on its surface, but on deeper reflection can let bad behaviour through.
Hypothetically, I like bribes: I can pay others to change the rules in my favour. I also like receiving money for changing rules. So this passes the Golden Rule, but fails Kant's Categorical Imperative.
Most people - just going by observation - appear to advocate policies based on who they actually are rather than on abstract principles. You're going to have to live with them voting.
Furthermore the argument that it is a bad idea isn't even strong. The veil of ignorance is powerful and interesting but voting is about different cultures negotiating to make decisions. That all but guarantees there will be different conceptions about what is fair that are not the veil of ignorance and those need to be respected. They aren't sociopaths, they just don't agree with you.
So what do you do when it turns out there are large groups of people who just can't socialize well in an environment like that where other groups are a majority?
Liberalism doesn't answer this nicely because of the belief that everyone is more or less fungible.
>If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from? From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?
>When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’.
I'm non-religious and I'd say none of these three things. I derive my value system from empathy and (from what I strive to be) logical consistency.
> ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’
None, but why should a society-or-civilisation-sized thing be any more valid as a source for your values than anything else? There is no intrinsic wisdom in society-and-civilisation-sized things (quite the opposite could be argued). Ultimately the author's conclusion is basically that you need a religion in order to have a value system, and that liberalism is a sort of quasi-religion that can offer that. In fact, it is entirely possible to have a coherent value system that is not based on a religion, quasi-religion or mass-movement of any kind.
There's a current growing body of understanding that what we think of as valuable is formed by religious thinking. I would argue that what we think of as "empathy" is itself culturally constructed. These ideas are real but they are formed and shaped by the culture. The basic idea is that human values and rights are not actually self evident.
A kind of cultural Christianity where the values have formed the sub structure of our western lives, institutions and thinking, so much that we can get rid of the actual religion but the values and impact it has had remains. Richard Dawkins recognises this today and calls himself a cultural Christian.
We need to look at history, other religions and cultures to see what other value systems there are, and to see what a value system really means. Anthropology really helps with this. One example would be to look at how people treat outsiders or foreigners.
I imagine a modern atheist seeking to change the world would have to recognise what cultural constructivism means, recognise that value systems are constructed and negotiated, understand that the meaning and value of things are a process of narrative and probably end up creating something like Christianity as a result!
If empathy is a social construct, shouldn't, we see e. g. societies without empathy as we (e. g. cultural Christians) know it? Is there some example of that?
I'd say that western societies have a lot of empathy. We notice two things: 1. a general reducing in the amount and 2. a change in the meaning (or construction) between places and cultures.
So for a favourite HN topical example it might be considered to be more empathetic to let homeless people sleep on the streets of San Francisco. In the past it might have been considered to be more empathetic to the people in the city to remove homeless people and put them in special nice shelters instead. "What gives people more dignity?" There are other, many and much important issues at play with this example but I think this could be an example about a change in how we think about empathy.
For the general trend of reduce of empathy, I think that goes in hand with individualism - thinking about oneself at the expense of thinking of others. Possibly it might not really be a reduction of the potential for empathy but perhaps just a reduction of the applications of it, like how a muscle reduces in size when its not being used. Alternatively we may express empathy in certain spheres of life from before. Different muscles being used but same energy being expended.
I don't think that it's necessarily a binary "empath" or "no empath" so much as differences in who a given culture says you should be empathetic towards, what you should be empathetic about, how empathetic you should be, what obligations empathy entails, etc.
So you might see a society that says that certain races, cultures, or "sinners" do not deserve empathy or deserve less empathy.
Another example are highly free market oriented political philosophies which argue that businesses should be governed by maximizing profit rather than empathy.
You should probably tie it back to the disputed point somehow - religiosity and values.
If you see bad values - "extremely frequent killing, cannibalism, rape, incest, etc" - what's their religiosity?
> Arguably, nowhere is this scholarly silence starker than in Sub-Saharan Africa (hence-
forth SSA), often cited as the world’s most religious region.
> The two most extensive data sources on the topic, however, are the Pew Research Center (2010) and Afrobarometer (2018), both of which assess the proportion of unaffiliated individuals across the region at around 3.2 per cent.
> If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from?
There's an even easier rebuttal: how does the believer choose which texts to obey and which to discard? Even if he blindly pledges himself to one particular translation of one particular text, how does he decide whether to eat bacon, kill homosexuals, or stone disobedient children?
The New Testament supersedes the Old. The examples you list are from the Old Testament. At least the first one about eating pork is. I don't recall any OT commandments about the other two.
As a moral relativist, I'd go even farther: I derive my values from me. Or my own intuition.
Since I believe values to follow are arbitrary, it doesn't matter that much where they are derived from. Religion? Sure. Bodily pleasure? All right. Following the vibes? No problem. Civilization-sized or not, meh. No explanation needed.
It's only when I descend towards the practical life, and have to put on my hat of a good citizen, the choice and origin of values starts becoming relevant. There, I may say: I derive my values from my intuitions on co-operation.
But are my intuitions drawn from liberalism, or did they merely end up similar to liberalism? Having been part of a somewhat liberal society since birth, I can't give an answer one way or the ohther.
I derive my values from systems theory, for sure not liberalism.
Every complex adaptive system has needs for coming into existence, maintaining that existence, and adapting with the environment.
When two complex adaptive systems interact, a third one with new capabilities emerges with the two as components. This emergent system has needs for its existence, maintenance, and adaptability.
Most/all of life is complex adaptive systems interacting.
So there exists needs we all have on the specific level of each body, as well as collective needs emerging from our interactions.
One of those needs, for the sake of maintenance, is the moderation of meeting our needs.
In order to learn to moderate our needs, we need to oversatisfy and undersatisfy them so we can learn what it feels like to do so and when.
So our needs are nondual, in the sense that we need to fast/feast on each.
And then there's the needs related to maintaining our external environments.
If we choose to live and serve life, we need to learn to moderate the needs of the environments we live in.
> Then, as now, the word ‘liberal’ (with its roots in the Latin liber and liberalis) combines two meanings: freedom (liberty) and generosity (liberality).
The essay goes into much more detail on liberal ideas, but what's more interesting to me is how many different political models liberalism can actually fit into.
The author goes into some detail on liberal socialism. On the other end you can also have liberal anarchism though.
I've heard the term "voluntarism" being used to describe an anarchist approach where people choose to help their communities, though the rebranding mainly seems to be because "anarchy" is viewed with a lot of stigma today.
Socialism requires a very large government vacuuming up resources and distributing them to society as the government determines is most fair and equal.
Anarchism has no government. There may be overlaps in people's motivations and how communities of people interact, but the difference in scale, or existence of, the government is a pretty big difference to me.
> Socialism requires a very large government vacuuming up resources and distributing them to society as the government determines is most fair and equal.
I've not read any socialist literature in a long time but a quick glance at wikipedia confirms what I remember; Government isn't a requirement for socialism. That doesn't mean that there isn't "state socialism", there is, but there is also stateless e.g. anarchism.
That gets into a bit of a gray area for me, happy to be wrong here.
Socialist anarchism still revolves around some kind of communal ownership. I've never been quite sure how that could be run without some kind of governmental structure, whether it calls itself that or not.
In practice, the only implementations of socialism that I'm aware of all included large governments and were/are more like communism than not.
Anarchism is a separate concept which can be combined with socialism.it speaks to the role of government, or lack thereof.
The classic counter example of the other end of the spectrum would be anachocapitalism, which is about as far from socialism as you can get, but also embraces anarchism
> The classic counter example of the other end of the spectrum would be anachocapitalism, which is about as far from socialism as you can get, but also embraces anarchism
After reading "on the other end" I was expecting to be met with anarcho-capitalism.
I disagree with you on AC embracing anarchism. Only the word is embraced and nothing else. Anarchism is against masters/hierarchies and that is why they are against both state and capitalism. AC is against state, for different reasons, no other relations to anarchism.
It doesnt sound like we will be able to agree on the definition of any words, and I dont think you are using them in the conventional or scholastic manner. have a good day.
Now I really want to hear the definition of anarchism you are using. I won't reply or try to drag you in to a discussion or anything like that. I would just love to hear it. Thanks.
The counter thought experiment to Rawl's is: imagine two worlds, one in which the obvious implications of Rawls's thought experiment were made law and one in which they weren't. Fast forward 20 generations. Discover that the Rawlsian world is an economic shambles of inequality and ethnic warfare while the other exceeds our most techno- optimistic dreams. What went wrong?
The point of the experiment is to show only that by rejecting the the possibility that such a thing could occur, you're exposing your implicit belief that you know the causal connections between equity, economics, technological advancement and human happiness, just like Rawls believed he did. But you don't know that system.
Rawls's thought experiment's real success is to smuggle into the conversation an exceedingly vast set of knowledge claims about how complex systems in the real world must behave.
> From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too? When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’. But to this I reply, as politely as possible, that those are not suitable answers. Personal experience, friends and family and human nature are situated and formed within wider social, political and cultural contexts. So I ask again: ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’
Simple: Our constitution, our legal framework that (mostly) protects us from corruptive forces, our ability to trust that sellers can't sell us poison and lie to us about it, our ability to enter into transactions with total strangers without worry, our free elections, our freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom to be who we are.
People are stumped because they're not looking at it for what it is. There's no mysticism wrapped around our secular societies like there are around religions, so people tend to not notice it. But if you look at it - REALLY look at it - it's nothing short of miraculous what we've achieved. Life before we had these things was VERY, VERY different from the peace and prosperity we've enjoyed for almost a hundred years.
And it's unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic that they've lost sight of it to the point where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...
Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
I believe it is Christianity, even though I am not religious, my parents were not either, but my grand parents and their parents and so on where. And even though my parents stopped they took their guide from their family and society steeped in this and many of the values stick around for a while
Thousands of people are choosing strongmen over our current system. That suggests that our current system is not viable regardless of what position in society you happen to end up in. In other words, democracy is threatened by dictatorship precisely because it fails the "original position" test.
> There's no mysticism wrapped around our secular societies like there are around religions, so people tend to not notice it.
The claim to not having mysticism is part of the mysticism. The current economic system funnels economic value from the poor to the ultra rich. You're telling me that having two different groups of people with the same physiological needs being given vastly different quantities of resources is some kind of natural state? That "mysticism" isn't required there?
> And it's unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic that they've lost sight of it to the point where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...
If you're waxing on about how great the status quo is, you're most likely the entitled one
> The current economic system funnels economic value from the poor to the ultra rich.
The economic system creates values (and you can compare it with alternatives such as Soviet Union to realize just by how much). It does this in an unequal way, by chance, historical context and self-selection preferences. But the creation of value still trumps any inequality it might have. With TV, air conditioning and phones, an entry mid-class person in US is having it ten times better than the kings of middle ages.
This is precisely what Rawls is trying to get at with his "original position". Our system certainly creates value and that value is certainly unequally distributed. Would someone support that situation if they did not know what part of the value distribution they would receive?
I think it's likely that a lower class person might prefer an alternative system that produced somewhat less value but distributed it more equally.
> I think it's likely that a lower class person might prefer an alternative system that produced somewhat less value but distributed it more equally.
As evidenced by the vast amount of poor Americans emigrating to Cuba, or poor Brazilians crossing the border to Venezuela. They really desire all that sweet equality.
You are presenting a false dilemma. The only options are not American corporate capitalism or authoritarian communism. We could instead have varying degrees of welfare capitalism or one of the numerous other systems that have been suggested such as anarcho-syndicalism.
> you can compare it with alternatives such as Soviet Union
Not really because there are too many other variables
> But the creation of value still trumps any inequality it might have.
Why is inequality even necessary here in the first place? How do you know that creation of value can't exist in the presence of equality? The Nordics do a better job at it
> With TV, air conditioning and phones,
This is the mysticism I was referring to. Look at all of this cool stuff, no don't look at the rich people poisoning the water supply
> is having it ten times better than the kings of middle ages.
yeah and it's 1000x better than cavemen banging on rocks in the stone age, so the peasantry should be 1000x as grateful
> Not really because there are too many other variables
You can average out countries that equalize property rights to the state vs. average of countries where property variance is respected, and check which ones are doing better vs worse.
> How do you know that creation of value can't exist in the presence of equality?
Equality of output would imply equality of inputs? People will no longer have the right to decide for themselves if they want to be busy creating wealth or busy doing more social/pleasurable things?
> yeah and it's 1000x better than cavemen banging on rocks in the stone age
Why do you take that improvement for granted? (in the context of today's nuclear treats, it's not a given that we'll able to propel this rate moving forward in the next 100 years, there's a non-zero probability that we wipe ourselves back to the stone age).
Or more generically, if you had to chose between two economic policies, one with 1'000x improvement where people can take risks and see variation in rewards according to their choices (and an element of luck/historical background), and another one where everyone is forced to the same output, irrespective of their actions, which leads some to pursue more pleasure activities to a larger fraction of their existence and the improvement is just 50x, which one would you choose for the society?
Is equality worthy as a goal in itself? And if so, enough in order to stop people in self-selecting doing what they want and letting them keep some percentage as a reward for assuming the risk? Even if it leads us as a society to slower growth?
> unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic ... where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...
And yet in nation after nation hundreds of millions are voting strongmen to lead them. If one is serious about understanding the reasons a good place to start is to stop blaming them ("entitled", "myopic", "curmudgeons"...) and make a genuine effort to understand their world view.
These are not fringe elements but hundreds of millions dissatisfied with status quo and want something to change, and are willing to give strongmen a chance. They don't care how the life was 50 or 100 years ago or that life today is 99% better. Their lived reality has lead them to believe they are leading a shitty life. Telling them they are myopic or entitled will only lead to further disconnect.
I always find it hard to understand if someone wants to give up their human rights whats stopping them, just do it and be done with it and enjoy all the oppression and atrocities you want heaped upon yourself, why do they want to drag the rest of humanity into their fetishes.
Their goal isn't to "give up their human rights" or to heap oppression and atrocities upon themselves. Their goal is to escape their current position in the social hierarchy.
That's one of the reasons why it's important to make sure that everyone in society is provided for; because if their needs aren't met under the current society then they have an incentive to destroy it in favor of a different society.
But they are deliberately choosing a society that would be even worse for them and actually repressive, so regardless of their stated goal this is what they actually want. They want to be oppressed, kept in the dark, have atrocities committed upon themselves. Instead of a solution they want to dive head first into the death trap rather. It is my viewpoint that we should fast track the process and give such people exactly what they want, and isolate them into their authoritarian dream shithole so that the rest of the world does not have to be involved in their personal fetishes.
This is the hard problem of society. What to do with the % of your population with that are capable of being conned by charming, but obviously bad tragic lying narcissists (Trump / Boris Johnson) or have some fundamentally anti-human streak like racism.
Perhaps it isn't so much that we're sufficiently far way from WWII now that people have just forgotten the dangers, more that we haven't been explicit enough about the red flags and lessons offered by people like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin (and then Mao, Pol Pot etc).
It's no surprise that strong men usually go for educators first.
One problem is that most people just don't really examine what's going on, either because they don't have the time, skew gullable, are generally trusting or don't have the relevant critical faculties.
Education can help with some of those. I was very heartened by this recent news piece
The trust placed in the US’s constitutional and legal frameworks to safeguard transactions is commendable but often doesn't reflect the full picture. While these systems are designed to prevent overt harm, they frequently fail to protect against subtler forms of exploitation prevalent in many capitalist enterprises. For instance, industries like fast food and tobacco not only legally sell products known to harm health, but they also heavily market these to vulnerable populations, maximizing profit at the expense of public well-being.
This issue isn't just about individual interactions or the inherent honesty of our society; it's about systemic structures that prioritize profit over people. The reality is that our economic model often allows, and sometimes encourages, practices that are detrimental to consumer interests but beneficial to corporate bottom lines.
> The reality is that our economic model often allows, and sometimes encourages, practices that are detrimental to consumer interests but beneficial to corporate bottom lines.
Thank you for proving my point.
There is no such thing as a perfect system, and there never will be. Human society is simply too complex to be modeled perfectly - and without a perfect model, a perfect system is an impossibility. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to improve it, but it ALSO doesn't at all detract from the marvelous, unlikely miracle we witness every day and are so blasé about that we'd even contemplate supporting those who intend to burn it to the ground.
Every time I bring this subject up, the curmudgeons always come out to tell us how bad we have it today. And they can do it too, because everyone who experienced the before times is now dead and can't speak up (I'm only old enough to speak up about the air pollution). Only a careful study of history can give a (partial) picture of just how shitty life was for 99% of people compared to today.
While it's true that no system is perfect, recognizing the US's achievements doesn't mean we should overlook its flaws, especially when they're as tangible as rapidly rising costs for essentials like housing and healthcare. The harsh conditions of the past shouldn't justify complacency today. Instead (as Rawls recommends), we should acknowledge these challenges should compel us to strive for a fairer distribution of resources and opportunities, ensuring progress continues for future generations.
I’m not sure why you’d place the blame on capitalism for this set of problems. If the reward were status or sainthood or whatever else, enough people would still be sufficiently motivated to mistreat each other. That the reward is “profit” in the form of some government money tokens doesn’t seem particularly important.
If you look at the food in the US for example one of the most distorted elements is the abundance of high fructose corn syrup - because the government subsidises it.
The issue isn't simply that profit motivates bad behavior, but rather how our capitalist system, particularly through lobbying and legislation, disproportionately amplifies the influence of well-capitalized interests. For instance, the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup in our food supply isn’t just a random government subsidy; it's a direct result of agricultural subsidies shaped by powerful lobbies. These policies don’t emerge in a vacuum but are crafted in ways that systematically benefit the incumbents with the most capital, often at the expense of public health and smaller competitors. This underscores a structural imbalance where laws and subsidies are swayed more by capital than by the collective welfare of the populace.
> Switch the word “capital” for “status” and you have any human economic system.
Status can easily be taken away. You can not put status in a an index fund a watch it grow without doing anything. You can't give your status, without anyone knowing, for a favor.... The idea that switching "capital" for "status" will still get you the same thing is just dumb.
In modern theory about capitalism, the government isn't separate from "the market" but part of it. The recent theory I've read postulates that capitalism can't exist without the government, and that powerful nations were part of what enabled the emergence of modern day capitalism.
This aligns with John Rawls’ idea that economic AND political systems should be structured to benefit the least advantaged. Rawls acknowledged government and markets are connected, and advocated for a fair system that ensures equity and supports all, not just the powerful.
It’s obviously impossible because in such a system the least advantaged would rapidly become the most advantaged, while being incentivised to retain the outward image of remaining the least advantaged.
The “constitution” becomes (again) just a piece of paper when most of the people can’t afford housing (valid for all Western countries) and when they’re a major medical emergency away from fucking up their life for good (valid mostly for
US).
Without housing and without decent healthcare everything else doesn’t matter anymore.
But as this forum is full of techies who are among the only ones still benefiting from this current system then of course that pro-liberalism nonsense like the stuff espoused by Rawls will have lots of adherents.
I just listed to a podcast interviewing Alexandre Lefebvre about his book ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’
He draws a parallel with Sorin Kierkegaard’s idea of “Christendom” and a new kind of “liberal-dom”. Where our personal values system is born out of the sea of liberal institutions that we love in, like constitutions.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
It is clearly provocative, as it obviously provoked the commenter, and it isn't interesting. A simple Google search can provide the rationale for it, and focusing on something so trivial is unlikely to provide more thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating discussion than the actual article.
As I understand it, that capitalism generally implies that "white" is not being used specifically to mean something like "the name of a group of a specific group of people from a given region/culture", instead it is being used to mean the default American culture that provides the frame of reference against which our society tends to measure other cultures. So for example, "Black" would be capitalized because it is a specific group separate from the default of "white" while "Anglo Saxon" would be capitalized because it is a specific subgroup within "white".
This probably isn't a perfect analogy, but it might be somewhat similar to not capitalizing "earth science" but capitalizing "Lunar Science". It's assumed that if you don't specify then the default is that the science you are talking about is on Earth.
Someone else put it a little more concisely: Work to create the world you would want to be born into if you didn't know in advance who you were going to be.