Anti-Climacus

WELL: Some quick thoughts on an alternative to Rawls' maximin principle for the distribution of social goods (can you tell what I've been reading lately?):

Rawls sets down as the conclusion which free, equal and rational people would come to in distributing goods as one in which those who would be worst off would be in the best possible position*, on the logic that every person would realize that the worst of person in a society could easily be them, and they'd want to make sure that they'd be as well off as possible.

But it doesn't seem to me that this equally follows. Consider the example of lottery tickets: you might choose not to buy one because you know that the odds of your buying the winning ticket are practically zero. Everyone may well follow this same logic, thus no one buys a ticket because they recognize they have almost no chance of winning. Nevertheless, there is always a winning combination of numbers; it's just something about how the brain processes those extremely small probabilities that makes rationality go astray.

So it seems like you could have a modified maximin principle, in which everything is distributed in a Rawlsian manner, except for what's given to one person, who is given nothing (or, if one wants to argue that this violates a rational person's belief in the inviolability of a person, the minimum necessary for subsistence), and what would've gone to them goes equally to everyone else. This doesn't violate any of Rawls' conditions: everyone would freely agree to it, it's no more a violation of equality than justice as fairness (which isn't an equal distribution), and it's something a rational person might think: the odds of being that person are small in a small society, practically zero in a large one. You could then extend this principle via the paradox of the heap to establish that a group of people in the original position would be willing to accept putting even a large number of people in this minimal distribution of goods.

*though there wouldn't be an equal distribution of goods, because there have to remain some incentives for industry on the part of individuals.