John Rawls' Theory of Justice

not many contemporary thinkers achieve the prominence in their lifetime of having their name youtaite into an adjective but this happened to John wall's many political philosophers are proud to call themselves rule Xion among academics there's an extraordinary degree of consensus that the most important work of political philosophy from the second half of the last century was Woolsey's a theory of Justice published in 1971 the books influence has been felt well beyond the university campus it's radical claimed that what matters most in society is the position of the worst off has filtered through to politicians and policymakers Jonathan Wolfe is professor of a philosophy at University College London Jonathan Wolfe welcome to philosophy bytes very nice to be back again we're gonna focus on John Rawls his theory of justice which is probably the most famous work written in the twentieth century of political philosophy could you tell me a bit about John Rawls who he was John Rawls was an American philosopher who works from the 1950s until the end of the century so long working life he concentrated on political philosophy for most of his life he began writing important papers in political philosophy in the late 1950s and never stops in a sense still hasn't stopped because there's still more of his work being discovered even ten years or so after his death he was based for most of his life in Harvard and as you say his major work was a theory of justice which was published in 1971 that was based on work he had started in the 50s and after he finished work on a theory of justice he carried on developing the view seeing new problems seeing solutions new applications and so on so it's really his life's work but what was the key idea in this book while Rawls put forward what looks at first sight a very simple theory of justice he put board what he called his two principles of justice in fact there are three of them so it's quite a mystery why he called in two principles but anyway the first of rules is principles is known as the Liberty principle which says that each entitled to an equal and extensive set of basic liberties so these are rights civil rights and political rights everyone is entitled to the sorts of liberties that one tends to get in liberal highly developed societies the second principle gets a bit more interesting it splits into two one of them is known as the difference principle and the other is the fair opportunity principle the fair opportunity principle again seems rather bland that says that everyone is entitled to fair equality of opportunity but the difference principle is where things get interesting and the difference principle is a principle about the distribution of income and wealth in society now Rawls is view is that there is a sense in which fairness requires an equal distribution of income and wealth but he says it may be that inequalities in society could be to everyone's benefit for example if you have a competitive economy with higher wages going some very productive people this could bring out incentives that could make everyone better off so his view is that fairness in a sense requires equality but if everyone literally everyone would be better off by inequality then inequality is justified and here is the difference principle the difference principle says inequality is justified only if they make the worst off as well-off as possible so this is Rawls is really distinctive contribution to political philosophy but he didn't just plug these ideas out of the air did he I mean he had a particular way of arriving at these conclusions that's right though when you say he didn't pluck them out of the air one way of understanding that is well someone must have had those ideas before he did and another is what he must have had arguments for them now Rawls particularly as he got beyond his earliest works was very respectful to the traditions in political philosophy if he could possibly attributes any of his ideas to anyone else he would do he was in a way the opposites and many of us he didn't seem to crave originality crave the reverse so he tried to stick his ideas on other people and he could do that with the liberty principle to some degree and the opportunity principle for one of the remarkable things is not even Rawls could find anyone who'd held the difference principle a lot of people thought that inequalities were justified if they were to the advantage of the worst off so it was a common thing to say in the 1940s for example by British Labour politicians that inequalities are justified if they make all of us better off but Rawls added this further twist it's not enough that they should make us all better off they've got to make the worst off as well-off as possible so this is Rawls as a really distinctive idea but how did he get to that position I mean what mode of reasoning led him to that conclusion well this is what is so interesting about rules and that he didn't just have a radical theory and new theory he had a radical new argument Rawls realizes how difficult it is to argue for any principle and political philosophy but in Rawls his case he used the method of a hypothetical contracts or also known as the original position Rawls idea is that quite often people disagree about justice because they're biased by their own interests so if I knew that I was rich I might be very much against taxation if I knew I was poor I might be very much in favor who's right the rich person or the poor person Rawls is response to this is to say well let's take these two people and let us imagine that they don't know whether a rich or poor could they then come to an agreement of some sort so what type of taxation would you like in your society if you didn't know whether you were rich or poor would you agree to racial discrimination in your society if you didn't know what race you were would you read to sexual discrimination if you didn't know what sex you were so Rawls is basic idea is to say let us strip things that could bias people from in imagination of course it so you have to imagine yourself stripped of anything that might lead you to be prejudiced in your own favor so Rawls says let's imagine people getting together but they don't know how wealthy they are they don't know what race they are they don't know what sex they are they don't even know what he calls their conception of the good is what they like in life and then he says well how would these people design society what principles our justice would people in this hypothetical contract situation behind what he calls the veil of ignorance what would they agree to so in this imaginary case I'm behind the veil of ignorance I don't know what position I'm going to occupy in society and that's what he calls the original position I have to think through what principles would create a fair society in that situations that work well it's half right it was right right up until the last point when you said the people behind the veil of ignorance have to ask themselves what would be a fair Society in fact Rawls says the veil of ignorance itself insures fairness what these people should be asking is what in their selfish interest they would want so if you didn't know what your role in society was going to be how would you selfishly want society to be designed if you didn't know whether you were going to be a dustman or a manual worker or whether you're going to be a city banker what wage differentials would you think would be the right ones to have in your society between the city banker and the manual worker possibly not the ones we've got at the moment so rules has got these radical conclusions here about in general terms how in structure of society this is what he thinks we'll choose in that position of ignorance that has the cash out does it mean there won't be opera people won't be able to go on holiday to the Bahamas what are the conclusions there well the principles are at a fairly abstract and higher level their principles to structure what equals the basic structure of society they're not meant to be principles that guide our day-by-day behavior so Rawls himself doesn't say that you as an individual have a moral duty to make the worst off as well-off as possible he's not telling you to give your money away that will be dealt with by the tax system for him so for us we will have all the freedoms under a Rawls in society that we have now so there could be opera if people wants it and they're to pay for it maybe even if people want to vote for it but the main thing that Rawls wants to do is to say at an even deeper level than the Constitution we should be governed by these very strong ideas there should be equal Liberty should be fair opportunity for everyone and we should arrange our economic institution so that the worst off as well as possible that's the theory now there are objections that can be laid against it surely other for instance it's not obvious to me that I wouldn't want the opportunity of a big payoff you know I might want to gamble from my position behind the veil of ignorance because it'd be quite nice to end up with a ticket for the lottery that you might just win so this is a criticism that Rawls faced probably from the first day he ever wrote his theory that what he's doing - saying that behind the veil of ignorance you should really play very very safe you should try to arrange things so that the worst offers as well off as possible and you're saying well maybe it was worth a bit of a gamble that maybe I could gamble a little bit for the sake of great wealth and wouldn't it be rational for me to do this and in particular utilitarian critics and rules said well why shouldn't we gamble quite considerably isn't it rational to gamble under some circumstances even if you know you can lose now what Rawls did later on and his work was to try to clarify the difference between his view and the utilitarian first one he says well what are you prepared to gamble with of course you talk about gambling with your money would you gamble with your liberties will you gamble with your opportunities Rawls thinks it's not rational to gamble with your liberties or opportunities and so he says the Liberty principle and the opportunity principle are fairly resistant to the gambling argument so Rawls says the first victory against utilitarianism is to establish the Liberty principle and the opportunity principle having done that he says well maybe someone will come back so we should have a mixed principle of justice which says we should have the Liberty principle and the opportunity principle and then a utilitarian principle for distributing money now Rawls is first answer to that is that this is just too risky that if you really were in the original position and you had to think about your total life prospects it would be irrational to take a big risk if you're risking your livelihood for the sake of a lottery gain this is ridiculous because you could end up in the gutter now there's an obvious apply to this which is say well okay let's rule out the grave risks then let's just have a safety net so instead of making the worst off as one off as possible why not have the Liberty principle the opportunity principle a safety net and then a bit of utilitarianism for gambling even so all still thinks it would be more rational to go for the difference principle in the original position partly I think this may be a view about money not being terribly important after all some sort of rather romantic socialist view once people have got enough why should they strive more and that may be fair enough if you do have a time minimum why would you want the gamble some of that for the sake of gray's again so in the end I think it would come down to a matter of temperament so the argument for difference principle is not in my view stone cold but it's pretty good as I understand it John Rawls gave precedence to liberty above all his other principles one was that it's a hard thing to argue for but the sorts of examples that he uses or other people have used concerned things like the justification of slavery or more recently apartheid in South Africa some people argued that white rule in South Africa was actually better for the blacks because of economic prosperity and so it was actually better for black people not to have the vote and this is an argument that's been made time and time again if poor people are given the vote they will mess things up now you might argue against that on the grounds of staying well this empirically isn't true give black people in South Africa though they'll behave very responsibly but Ross's answer would be well that's not the criteria that if people don't have the vote if they're not given basic political liberties if they're discriminated against then that is enough reason to change the system not rusting everything just on the economic prosperity that seems to me to suggest and other criticism of rules they're basically you're imagining this original position but who's doing the imagining probably a bunch of liberal philosophers in Harvard or wherever in a seminar and they have overlapping value systems we're not talking about a bunch of fascists here what would they choose the structure of this thought experiment actually allows you to smuggle in your purchases well that's a very question the basic motivation for Rawls's theory in my view is the thought that's ignorant is way of modeling impartiality so if you make people ignorant of certain things they have no choice but being impartial but you have a question as you save quite rightly well what should you be made ignorant of you made ignorant of your race of your sex of your earning power but why those things if you're being made ignorant of what rules cause your conception of the good the things you like in life well you don't know that you even like liberty or opportunity and so how can you make a choice at all so what Rahl says is well we've got to assume people value what he calls the primary goods and the primary goods are roughly speaking liberty opportunity what he calls the social basis of self-respect and money income and wealth and Rawls is justification for this is that these are the things you would value whatever else you valued in life so whatever your conception of the good whatever you want out of life Liberty opportunity and money and the social basis of stuff respects our all purpose means for achieving that but surely there are people have got completely different conceptions that the good like a monk for instance who wants to spend a spiritual life meditating not concerned with money in the least money would even enter is world money might even be an obstacle it is true there are some people who choose to be monks Rawls will say and they've chosen to be monks they weren't forced to be marks they have that decision therefore they valued Liberty they valued the Liberty to be a monk they valued the opportunity for your monk if they weren't given that opportunity that would have been a problem for them it is true that they may not want to have wealth but nevertheless they might still want to live in a society where the worst offer as well off as possible who monks do do good works they want to try to improve the material conditions of other people even if they opt out themselves on the whole so Rawls I think could say that these are all purpose means but I think there's a residual worry here the monk may value a type of community whereby there's a notion of social solidarity or collective or common good and it's less clear that's opportunity liberty and money ways of achieving common goods so this was a criticism made by Michael Sandel and other community errands that the theory of John Rawls is biased towards liberal individualistic conceptions of the good rules is theories have been tremendously influential in academic circles but did they actually change anything politically well it's always hard to trace the connection between ideas and practice though was a time in the maybe the early eighties at this conference to the SDP there was a proposal made to adopt Rawls as theories official philosophy of the SDP this was turned down on the grounds that no one could understand it but Gordon Brown has read Rawls current crop both of Labor and conservative politicians many of them studied Rawls and have taken in Rawls as ideas and I think if you look across public policy now there is a special concern for the worst off in society that if you think about what it is to be a failing society is to fail the worst of that there will be a group that excluded people who have not got a stake in society so broadly across politics at least in Europe and maybe now in America all those things have been rather different there over the last decade but there's a particular concern with how the worst offer fairing and important programs to improve that furthermore within the civil service until fairly recently a type of utilitarianism was dominant the civil servants were very interested cost-benefit analysis they were interested in promoting programs if the benefits outweighed the costs this is still true but there is a concern for the worst often there's concern for the distribution of benefits so a few years ago the Treasury here introduced into the green book its official guidance type a weighting system so the benefits to the poor were counted as greater than benefits to the rich which is a type of royalty anism so rules probably has had an impact on the real world politics but he is surely had a huge impact on political philosophy I mean I wonder if you could just summarize what that is well I think we can date political philosophy at least in twentieth century to pre-rolls and post rules between mill and rules as nothing of the same statute so you can spend a life and people have as a scholar of rules very few political philosophers between mill and rules for whom that would have been a sensible way of spending your time what Rawls did was completely changed the mood and political philosophy his first substantive papers came out in the 1950s to understand the impact it's quite interesting to look at what else was going on at the same time we were in the late legacy of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy most work in political philosophy was a matter of pretending really to clarify terms there would be books called the vocabulary of politics papers called the grammar of something so you had this really more abundant state of political philosophy it seems to me and and then you read Rawls his first paper and here's someone who has got a theory and he's got an argument for us so those two things the theory and the argument quite unique and have it to be systematic implausible was absolutely unheard of for a hundred years Jonathan wolf thank you very much my pleasure thank you and you can hear more philosophy bites at WWF ooh lucifer bites calm philosophy bites is made in association with the institute of philosophy at the university of london for further information about the institute go to WWF elusive usasac UK you [Music]

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Keywords: Philosophy, John Rawls, Political Theory, Political Philosophy, Liberalism, Social Contract, Justice, Ethics, Egalitarianism, Kantian, Utilitarianism, Veil of Ignorance, Original Position, Reflective Equilibrium, Fairness, Liberty, A Theory of Justice, Principles of Justice, Political Liberalism, Distributive Justice, Contractarianism, Difference Principle, Socialism, Liberty Principle

Id: zhVByiXBxi4

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2016