Anti-Climacus

A BRIEF THOUGHT ON JOHN RAWLS:

In the last week or so, I've come to hold something like the following view:

The original position/veil of ignorance in Rawls' A Theory of Justice is designed to be a thought experiment concerning 'fairness,' and nothing more or less.

I've come to this position because it seems clear to me that people like to begin their philosophical or political reflections with their intuitions. This is almost always a mistake. People have intuitions about many things, even analytic philosophers, and there is no particular reason to believe these intuitions are consistent.

Further, if you are the sort of person who believes at least some values are socially constructed, it's difficult to get to the facts of the matter. The average person, I think, takes their intuitions as reflections of the reality of a situation, and devotes little or no time to exploring the implications if this belief is mistaken.

Consequently, when we come to a subject like "what are the acceptable limits of difference in the material conditions of society?", there is no easy way to separate our considered beliefs from our feelings. That is, my idea of what constitutes fairness itself will be determined by many factors out of my explicit control, and which I would not recognize unless explicitly prompted to take account of them.

It's this material, I believe, that Rawls wants to exclude in the original position: you don't get to know your nation, historical period, religion, economic status, etc. The reason for denying this knowledge isn't because, as critics would have it, because a Rawlsian person is a shell of a human being, stripped of all their most important traits. Instead, Rawls makes this argument to try and get us to reflect how many of our presuppositions are just that--assumed facts about the world that may be otherwise. I think it's not really any more complicated than this: don't assume you already know the correct distribution of goods in a society.

If I'm reading this correctly (or within the bounds of acceptable interpretations of Rawls), this doesn't mean persons in the original position will definitely choose Justice as Fairness, but it does mean they will be doing something other than just engaging in political debate.