Words&Dirt

“We have finally arrived at Rawls’s crucial thought experiment, his version of a social contract, and the answer to the question of what sort of society we should agree to have, given all of these considerations.  Rawls’s approach here is ingenious and can be appreciated even if one does not happen to agree with his particular conclusions.  He invites us to imagine that we are sitting around a table to discuss the basic structure of a new society and that we represent all the people who will be a part of that society.  There is a twist to this imaginary constitutional convention: a veil of ignorance.  Rawls suggests that the participants in the discussion should deliberate as if they had no information about their own or their constituents’ ethnicity, gender, age, health, wealth, or any other natural endowments.  What they do know is what humans generally desire (safety, food shelter, and so on), that the society they are about to agree on has resources but that they are not unlimited, and that their society will be pluralistic (there will be people of different ethnicities, gender orientations, religions, political ideologies, and so forth).  Given this unique position from behind the veil of ignorance, what sort of society would we agree to put in place?

It is crucial here to appreciate what Rawls is trying to do.  He is certainly not saying that actual societies will ever be built this way, just as no actual social contract has ever been signed or agreed to by all members of any society.  (Born in a given country, we usually have little choice but to accept whatever laws regulate its society; emigration is an option accessible only to a minority of people and at any rate gives people only limited choices of where else to go.)  Rather, Rawls is challenging us to imagine the sort of rules we would be willing to build into society if we did not know in advance that we were at an advantage (or disadvantage) over others because of simple luck at birth.  Remember that, for Rawls, one’s natural endowments and conditions of birth aren’t the sort of thing to be either morally proud of or ashamed of, because they are the result of a lottery, not of one’s doing.

Now, utilitarians (reflecting the dominant position in political philosophy before Rawls’s book) would argue that we should of course maximize the happiness of as many people as possible.  But Rawls answers that this strategy is likely to result in unacceptable restrictions of the rights of one or more minorities.  Instead, Rawls argues, the veil of ignorance will foster the adoption of a ‘maximin’ criterion, whereby people––because they don’t know whether they’ll end up winning the lottery and being one of the few lucky beneficiaries of either exceptional natural endowments or birth in a privileged gender, ethnicity, or social class––will want to maximize the minimum level of resources that all have access to.  The resulting society will look neither like a welfare state (because too much control would end up in the hands of a small elite) nor like a libertarian society founded on laissez-faire capitalism (a society in which wealth and power would probably be even more skewed).  It won’t even be a socialist system, since too much control would be arrogated by the state.  Instead, Rawls, concludes, we will have either a property-owning democracy or a social democracy––in other words, a state close to the actual situation in some European (particularly Scandinavian) countries.  Naturally, it is perfectly possible to object to such a conclusion.  What is harder to do is to rationally justify in what sense any other society would be better than this one, as long as we agree that justice essentially means fairness.”

––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 226-8

“I do not like Nature, she was a bitch to me in fifth grade when we were partners together on the make-the-book-diorama project and she said, Let’s make a mirror into a lake for Swan Lake, and I said, There’s no book Swan Lake, but we can do another book with a swan, like The Trumpeter of the Swan? by the man who wrote Charlotte’s Web about the spider?  SOME PIG?  And she said great so I read it and I made a little swan out of Fimo clay which had even that red stripe on the beak that all swans all have but everyone forgets.  And I was supposed to go to her house to finish it but when I did she opened the door like why was I there.  And I held up the clay swan and made a trumpet sound and she said, Why are you here?  And I said, For our book project? and she pulled twenty dollars out of her pocket like they were magic jeans that worked like an ATM machine, and she said, Can you just finish it for both of us, please, Louellen?  Louanne, I said, and her eyes were all tired and droopy and slitty.  Did you even read the book? I asked, and she said, Take the money and run, kid.  And I took it, not because I wanted it but because she told me to take it and because she called me kid which was nice in a weird way even though we were and are the same age.  Nature is like that; you just sort of do what she says because her hair is that shiny light swaying-field color that makes your brain get all puffy.”

––”Lemonade,” from The Color Master, by Aimee Bender, pg. 87-8