Political Philosophy & Rawls' Theory of Justice

questions of distributive justice are everywhere even though we might not always realize that consider for example the government's recent decision to scrap the 10 percent tax rate now of course this was a government that introduced the 10% tax rate and the point of it was to get rid of the poverty trap so that people who were unemployed non benefit could take a job a part-time job or a low paid job without suffering too much of a loss recently they decided to scrap it in the name of simplifying the tax system unfortunately and this was not something they had anticipated a significant number of people would be worse off under the tax change and those people were from fairly poor families and so the government's policy would make some people who were relatively poor slightly worse off as a result of the tax change now a lot of people thought that that would be unjust but why what was unjust about it what was the principle of Justice underlying their judgement presumably there are some people who thought it wasn't unjust it was perfectly reasonable that the tax rate should be perhaps the same for everyone well why was that why is it more just to have the same tax rate as differential tax rates so we discuss issues of justice with each other in the pub we listen to the radio people talking about unacceptable government policies or very rarely but it does happen from time to time applauding a new government policy on the grounds that it's just but why do they think that one thing is just rather than another it's clear that there are different opinions you might be able to work out the principle of justice that you believe perhaps you believe in some principle of equality or perhaps you believe in some principle of self sufficiency and that everyone should be responsible for their own lives ok very good you can articulate that principle but why do you believe it why do you believe that principle rather than something else if your friend disagrees with you what can you do to show that you are right and they are wrong can you prove it and can you prove your belief about justice or about any ethical matter is correct for example in mathematics so people tell me it's possible to prove things that you can start off with some axioms and you can deduce consequences and anyone who understands mathematics if you've got it right will be compelled to agree with you in science people collect evidence to prove their theories they do experiments they make observations so they proceed by observation and confirmation of theories but in ethics or political philosophy can we do this and can we prove anything from first principles by pure logic can we collect evidence well what sort of evidence so it looks like moral philosophy and political philosophy which is our main subject of this lecture are in a difficult position from the point of view of argument that even if you have a clearly articulated belief about justice it's very hard to show what you can do to demonstrate that you are correct in fact you know this is the problem it goes fairly deep in our public understanding that a lot of people will think that there is a distinction between facts and values the facts are what you can demonstrate values are something else something you are attached to in some way but not being able to demonstrate it in the same way this goes as I've said quite deeply into our public culture and it's the legacy of a very popular philosophical view this is the view of logical positivism a view that was made famous by the English philosopher Freddy Eyre a jair but came out of Vienna like so much in the 20th century before the Second World War the vienna circle were famous for positing the idea that for a statement to be meaningful it has to be something which is either logically true or could be verified by experience so if a statement to be meaningful it has to be either something you can show to be correct by logic alone or by scientific discovery anything else anything that's not verifiable according to the logical positivists is meaningless now Horace Lee they argued that theology becomes meaningless as a result of this that is you can't prove that God exists by pure logic you can't prove that God exists by experience that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist what it means according to the positivists is that any discourse about God is completely meaningless we're not saying anything at all when we say that God exists or God doesn't exist and so a lot of people who are opposed to religion opposed to mysticism thought that logical positivism was a very liberating doctrine we can cut through all this theological nonsense we can't debate it even because it doesn't make any sense logical positivism was attractive to people of a certain caste of mind but it had a somewhat unfortunate consequence which is that statements about values also seem to come out as meaningless as well that is if I thought that a certain person was evil but I can't show that to be true by logic alone I can't show you what experiments I will do or what data I would collect to show that this person is evil and so according to the positivists this appears to be meaningless however they had another way out they thought no it's not right actually to say that ethical judgments are meaningless rather what they said is that they are disguised statements which express your emotions so if I was to say that someone was evil that's not to make a type of claim about them but rather is to express my emotions that is to say someone is evil would be to say that I strongly disapprove of that person that I have a very negative attitude towards them to say something is good would be to say I strongly endorse it or improve or approve of it and so for obvious reasons that this was known as the Booher a theory of ethics that is if I say something is good that's like cheering it if I say something is bad that's like saying boo to it so this makes moral discourse meaningful again but at a cost because what it means now is that there's no real disagreement and consider two people two children arguing whether vanilla ice-cream is better than chocolate ice cream now in for myself I can't quite understand why anyone bothered to invent chocolate ice cream I think it's an abomination and can't bear it but it appears that it sells and some people like it and possibly even prefer it to vanilla I can't quite get myself into the head of someone who would prefer chocolate vanilla chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream but nevertheless there we have it some people in an argument will say chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla ice cream and other people would say vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate question is are they engaging in a rational disagreement or not if you had two children who were tearing each other apart over this argument you would probably think the way to settle it is to explain to them very carefully that what they're really saying is that one of them likes vanilla more than chocolates and the other likes chocolate more than vanilla there's no real disagreement between them they're both just giving their opinion or rather they are expressing their approval and disapproval so if we reinterpret ethics so that it becomes an expression of emotions it turns out we don't have any ethical disagreements anymore if I say someone is evil and you disagree with me I'm just booing them and you're cheering them and that is not a cognitive form of disagreement ie there are no genuine beliefs involved because after all you could agree that I approve or disapprove of what I do so you can say yes from your point of view that person is evil but from my point of view there good end of discussion so this type of logical positivism makes ethics and political philosophy very hard to do in fact it makes it more or less redundant and equally if we press this idea that there's a fact value distinction and we can argue about facts but not about values then we're ruling out intelligent ethical and political discourse of course in some cases we might disagree about something because of the facts so if I say so-and-so is evil and you say no they're very good then I tell you something they've done you might then change your mind so it could be that your ethical opinion is based on a lack of knowledge of the facts and so changing your views about the facts can change your views about the ethics but that won't work in every case so you can have two people who completely agree about all the facts of a case and one person thinks something good has happened and the other doesn't so for example we could agree with all the consequences of scrapping the 10% tax rate and one person could think the government acted rightly and fairly in doing that another person might think they were quite wrong what can we do to try to argue that one of them is right one of them is wrong well after the Second World War when logical positivism was at its height in english-speaking philosophy there was a certain desperation about political philosophy in fact if you look at writings in the 1950s and the sixties one of the major topics was whether political philosophies was dead or not whether it had been killed off by logical positivism so once we understand the logical analysis of value terms is a really anything left to be done in political philosophy and so this makes a question of working out whether we can argue in political philosophy quite an important one remember the question of whether we can argue is a question of really about whether there's anything you can say to another person to convince them that you are right and they are wrong even if you agree now we can see about all the facts of the case the two of you agree about all the facts you've got no factual disagreement one of you thinks what this happened is right the other one thinks it's wrong what can we do now John Rawls I barely mentioned so far but he is the subject of this lecture I promise you and really made the most important leap in showing political philosophers how they can argue and indeed coming up with a very interesting intriguing clause for an interesting theory of justice and we will get there but I want to start slowly by thinking about other cases so forget now about politics but think about another context in which issues of fairness or justice arise so here's an example that philosophers have talked quite a lot about suppose you and a friend are playing a game of cards competitive game of cards and to make it interesting that suppose you're playing for money you're the dealer you deal out the hands you haven't looked at your hand yet your opponent picks up their hand before anything else happens you notice that there's a card on the floor lying face-up so you look at the card and say oh no bum deal will throw the hands in there's a card on the floor but your opponent says no no let's play this hand out I want to play this hand out so you've got a dispute you think the right thing to do is to throw the hand in the other person thinks it's time to play this hand that you ought to just carry on as you are how are you going to resolve that disagreement well it might be you can't resolve it it might be you have to fight or call everything off and finish it but let's not be so pessimistic right away I mean what strategies are there for trying to resolve this and I want to outline four different approaches that we would commonly use to try to resolve a disagreement like this the first is that you know it's possible that we conventionally play according to a set of rules so it might be that we're playing in a club where there are House Rules or it might be that as we sat down one of us said Nevada rules or whatever we'll play according to a certain set of rules so we've made an agreement to abide by a set of rules so all we need to do is look at those rules and hope that the situation we're in not a very uncommon situation so it's probably there we have to see if that is mentioned in the rule book and imagine it as you turn to page 15 and there it says if a card is exposed during the deal accidentally exposed during the deal the hand should be thrown in and readouts or it might be it says the opposite you might say even if a card is exposed you should still play the handout one way or another it will be settled by the rules so that's what we could call an actual contracts or on actual agreements we have made an agreement to abide by a certain set of rules and the rules cover this situation now that might be fairly rare if we're playing in a club no doubt it would be covered but if we're playing at home it's very unlikely that we agree to rules so what else could we do plus second approach would be to call someone over to arbitrate in this is known as the impartial spectator view that is you find someone who doesn't particularly want either person to win doesn't have any reason to favor one over the other and you just ask them what you should do again if you're playing in a club you'd call the referee over for a judgement again if your two little children squabbling you'd call your mother over and hope that she would give an impartial judgments though she may have reasons for giving it one way rather than another in the actual case but we might both defer to the impartial spectator so we would agree to be bound by an arbitrator and this arbitrator would then make a decision on what would seem to be fair and impartial grounds still we might not be so lucky that is there might not be an actual contract there might not be an impartial spectator around so what else could we do well the third thing we could do is imagine a hypothetical spectator so we could sit there and think well what would so-and-so do suppose you have a friend who is really good at cards and you both respect him you say well what would Fred do if he was here what would he say and you could both try to imagine what he would say and it might be one of you who said yeah actually your rights if Fred were here we would throw the hand and or Fred will here we would play it out and and that would be a way of trying to resolve the situation of course it's not a fail-safe way not infallible because you might disagree about what Fred would say which case you're back to where you are but it's not impossible that you could make some progress this way just by thinking about what the other person might suggest okay that's three methods so far actual contract impartial spectator hypothetical spectator and if you're following very carefully you should be able to work out what's coming next which is a hypothetical contract now the idea of a hypothetical contracts is that you might say to each other well what would we have agreed to if we discuss this now of course in a way that's an idle speculation because you are discussing it and you're disagreeing it at the moment so you don't seem to be able to make an agreement but you might say well what would we have thought before we started dealing any cards out before we doubt the first hand if we'd discuss this what would we have thought about what would we have come to then your friend might say actually you're quite right if we discuss this before we delve only hand I would agree that if a card is exposed we should throw the hand in and you can imagine what's going on here and he may be your friend for the first time that evening has been dealt a decent hand is blinded by their own interests to realize that their solution isn't the ideal one and so it could be they're biased in their own interests by the hand they've been dealt and so what you are doing is suggesting that if you had discussed this when you couldn't be biased by your own interests because you didn't know what your own interests were you would have made a different agreement one that would seemed fair and just now this notion of a hypothetical contract made under conditions of ignorance is the key move that John Rawls made in trying to show how we can argue for principles of justice what Rawls does is to imagine people and society getting together to try to come up with principles that they would think are fair and reasonable so imagine that the government decides to have a commission on justice and gets a hundred people thousand people together all from different backgrounds and says what we want to do is to get you to agree principles of justice and those principles will be binding on society as a whole once you've finished it so it's not just a trivial report this one isn't just another report this can be prison someone's desk this is serious and the people who come up with the principles of justice are going to be responsible for generating the principles of the rest of us but including those people too will live by well a thousand people hundred people is rather unmanageable let's just start with two people to begin with so imagine we have two people and they have to agree to principles of justice now it might be a miracle if they agree to very much I mean if they're from different backgrounds one of them are as rich the other is poor for example one of them has certain types of interests perhaps healthy outdoor sports and religion the other person spends all the time drinking and playing poker they were the one that disputed whether the hands should be thrown in or not it may be that we're not going to get very much agreement between them and this is really the point about the hypothetical nature of the contract remember in the card game if people could look at their hand they were much less likely to come to an agreement because they'd be biased by their own interests so Rawls his idea is we get people together but they have to go through a thought experiment of imagining themselves ignorant of certain features that might bias them in their own favor so it might be one of these people is male and has a view that men should be paid more than women as a matter of course but suppose this person didn't know whether they were male or female would they still think that would they still think that men should be paid more than women much less likely so Rawls idea is we think about the things that could bias us on our own interests and imagine ourselves ignorant of them so sex is one race perhaps even more obviously should be included how old you are would be another one how talented you are might be the most important of all but if you didn't know whether you're a talented person strong skilled intelligent so on then you might think about justice very differently to the way that you do so Rawls says let us put people together in what he calls the original position contract situation it's a thought experiment not a real experiment so in this thought experiment we put people together we make them ignorant of their abilities their race their sex their age their wealth and possessions we make them ignorant about the general facts of the society they live in and say to them we want you to agree on principles of justice for your society bearing in mind you don't know what role you will play in that society so how would you like your society to be if you didn't know what your position was didn't know how talented you were didn't know how old you were how young you are whether you had lots of dependents you knew nothing about yourself nothing about your personal characteristics how would you like society to be designed Rahl says one way of thinking about this is imagine how you'd want your society to be designed if your enemy was going to place you in it now as a rather quaint thought because I don't think many of us actually have enemies these days maybe some of us do but you can imagine someone who doesn't like you trying to put you in a the worst position in society well Rahl says that no this is just a way of sort of softening you up for thinking about the theory rather than a serious argument but it's worth thinking about it how would you like society to be if there was a chance that you would be in the worst position in that society of course many of us have have a good idea that we wouldn't be in the worst position because we have there is talents and family connections and backgrounds and friends who have helped us out so we wouldn't be in the worst position but suppose you didn't know whether you had any of that would you think about society in a different way so the argument then is that there are things that we can know about ourselves that will bias us in our own interests and make us more attracted to one type of theory rather than other and so typically obviously not universally people who are rich might be rather opposed to redistribution through taxation people who are poorer might think redistribution through taxation is just so you can imagine how people's personal interests will typically determine their political disagreement or their disagreements about theories of justice but it is a bit insulting actually to think that the only thing that determines your theories of justice are things like your position in the world it is not true that all rich people are opposed to taxation it's not true that all poor people are in favor of redistribution and taxation so we can illustrate this by thinking about real-life politicians now it's actually rather hard now to come up with examples of real-life politicians who have any distinctive views it's all that everyone seems to be trying to grapple for the same Center ground so we have to go back a few decades but imagine a disagreement between Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher now Tony Benn argued in favor of equality Margaret Thatcher in favor of individual enterprise and responsibility why did they disagree well it's not because Tony Benn was a man and Margaret Thatcher was a woman or that Tony Benn was poor and Margaret Thatcher was rich because that was not true Tony Benn was from a very wealthy aristocratic family although actually I have no idea whether he personally was wealthy or not I'm sure he could have become wealthy had he wish to have been so so we have an ideological disagreement there a disagreement about theories of justice which is not based on personal interests rather is based on a view about the good society so Rawls makes a very unusual step which is to say if we're going to have people agree about theories of justice we're going to have to make them ignorant of their conception of the good now this phrase conception of the good sentence rather grandiose do you have a conception of the good but all he means is two things one is the things that you value in life so in your own personal life what do you like we mentioned people who religious people who like healthy outdoor sports there are people who like going to debating societies there are people who like doing nothing except watching television eating pizza people have all sorts of different life pursuits you have to forget about that but you also have to forget about your theory of justice so we want people who are choosing principles of justice without having a theory of justice in their heads now this begins to look rather difficult because after all if you're going to have people coming together to agree then surely they need to know what they want out of the agreement actually we could make things a little bit clearer at the moment by type of simplification because Rawls has said people are ignorant about everything that makes them different from each other well in that case we'll have a room full of people a room full of clones really trying to come to an agreement but of course if they all have the same things in their head they all have the same ideas then we may as well just talk about one person rather than many people in agreement so we can slim the argument down to one person we have one person behind the veil of ignorance and this person knows nothing about what they're like they don't know their strengths skills abilities a race their sex and so on they also don't know what they like they don't know what they enjoy in life or what principles of justice that they would approve of and we're asking this person to choose principles of justice to live by so far described it's an impossible task because if you don't know what you like then you don't know what type of society you'd like to live in how could you possibly choose as far as you know from everything we've said you enjoy being in pain or you enjoy being very poor so you'd want a society which where everyone was in pain and poor if you really don't know anything about what you like so Rawls says we have to give people a certain amount of knowledge if we're going to get anything sensible about this and so he says we should assume people want what he calls the primary goods now the idea of the primary goods are things that are useful to you in life whatever else you want to do they're primary because they are what he calls all-purpose means whatever you want to get out of life these things will be useful so what are they well include Liberty opportunity and money roughly income and wealth so whatever else you want from life Liberty is a good thing opportunity is a good thing and income and wealth will be a good thing he also adds the social basis of self-respect that's a complication I think I'll leave to one side just for this lecture but we'll concentrate on these primary Goods liberty opportunity and money and he says let us imagine your choosing in your own interests you want to make things appropriate for you that is the principles that you are choosing a ones that will serve you however it turns out however you end up in terms of your abilities strengths skills race sex and so on so you want to design society which will give you liberty opportunity and money and as much as you can reasonably hope for so that you can get on in that world and pursue the things you value irrespective of where you end up in it whether you end up high or low in that society that's a situation we're in so can we imagine ourselves into this situation everything now depends on us being able to carry out this thought experiment so the thought experiment is one in which you know nothing about yourself but you have to design society so it's in your self-interest could you do that but a lot of people have thought that this is an impossible thought experiment how could you possibly do this but I'm not sure I think that a bit of imagination you could probably think your way into this here's a illustration I've used before imagine tomorrow morning you wake up you've got no memory of how you got to where you are you find yourself in a hospital bed you look down and you're completely covered from head to toe in bandages so you can't see your skin in fact you can't really make out your body shape from this because there's all sorts of strange bits of padding going on and you realize you don't remember your name you don't remember your sex you don't remember your religion you don't remember your race you don't remember what job you used to do don't remember whether you've got family so in other words you're suffering from amnesia and this is not a uncommon situation but you appear to have normal reasoning abilities and the nurse gives you the Sudoku and you can do it you can't do the crossword because it requires lots of factual information that you can't remember but nevertheless there you are and the nurse explains to you that you've just been through a terrible trauma however you're going to make a terrific recovery by tomorrow you'll be perfectly well again and you can leave the hospital and the bandages will be removed it's been an extraordinary day your shot your short-term memory a very short-term memories okay medium term memory or memory for facts has completely gone but it will come back then the nurse tells you now you're in a very privileged position because we can do this thought experiment on you here's professor John rules so a tall man and white coat walks through the door and says okay we don't have much time what I want you to do is to design society in a way that will be satisfactory to you however it turns out tomorrow when we take the bandages off so we want you to come up with an idea of how society ought to be arranged in fact we want you to come up with principles of justice and what I'll give you in a moment is a whole list of principles of justice that you could consider so I'm not expecting you to do there 2,000 words 2,000 years of political philosophy overnight I'll give you a lot of information briefing aren't answer lots of questions if you want but I want you to design societies so you will be happy with it or as happy as you can reasonably be all I can tell you is you want Liberty and you want opportunity and you want money how would you arrange things so that it'll be okay however it turns out when we take the bandages off tomorrow well this is quite a responsibility that you are now designing principles of justice for your society not just for you but for everyone in your society of course it would take more than overnight to implement any change but let's not worry about that for now what would you do what would your thoughts be what rahl suggests is the first thing you do is choose what he calls the Liberty principle now this is a principle that says that every person should have an equal and extensive set of basic liberties now by basic liberties Rawls means things like freedom of speech freedom of assembly habeas corpus freedom to vote freedom to run for office and all the ideal Civil and Political liberties we see in a modern liberal democracy that's working well now Ross thinks it's pretty obvious that you would choose this from behind the veil of ignorance or in your hospital bed why is that well what else would you choose what is your alternative to choosing the Liberty principle well there are largely two alternatives one is to choose some sort of principle of discrimination so you can have a principle that says that people of one religion should pay higher taxes or people from one race and not allowed to stand for office but if you didn't know what religion or race you were from that would be a completely irrational thing to agree to because you might be doing yourself harm by agreeing to it so if you didn't know what group you belong to you wouldn't agree to any principle of discrimination so we would agree to equal liberties then the question becomes do we make these liberties as extensive as we can or do we limit them in any way well why would we limit them what reason would there be for limiting liberties well you might think there are some reasons perhaps you might think that if we're in an economic crisis then we might want to limit people's Liberty may be conscripted to the workforce to make sure that we there's enough food for everyone to go around so there might be reasons in emergencies to to limit people's Liberty and Rawls accepts that so what he says is let's limit the scope of the discussion to what he calls the circumstances of justice but we could think of non-emergency situations so in emergencies we might want to have different principles but in ordinary day-to-day situations ordinary life we're not in a situation of emergency there seems to be no good reasons for limiting Liberty secondly what would you do about opportunity what Rohr says again you would want a principle of equal and extensive fair opportunity because again you can use the same arguments why would you discriminate against any group why would you want less than full equal opportunity for everyone so the arguments for the fair opportunity principle as Rawls calls it are very similar to the arguments of a fair Liberty principle or the equal Liberty principle okay so let's move on to money what do we do about money following the same logic which seem to suggest what we should do is equalize money let's give everyone the same amount of money but Rawls is not so sure that that argument is a good one and the reason for this cut is that it's been a very famous criticism of theories of equality that it involves what is known as leveling down to explain suppose for some strange reason there are only two alternatives to us either we could have a society of inequality where even the people who are relatively poor are pretty well-off so we can have a society of wealth but inequality or we can move to a society of equality but it would make everyone worse off literally everyone would be worse off under equality well if you believe in equality it looks like you believe in leveling down that is making everyone worse off for the sake of equality now you might think of course if you're making everyone worse off in terms of money you might be making them better off in terms of social solidarity or they can spend that money better prices will fall but really what we're talking about is making everyone worse off all things considered and can it really be right to make everyone worse off all things considered just for the sake of equality to put this the other way round Rahl says that a lot of economists and psychologists have thought that human beings need incentives in order to be hard-working if they are hard-working that's for the benefit of everyone but if they need incentives to do it then perhaps it's going to be in everyone's interest to give them incentives so Rawls makes actually a rather modest concession he says if these economists and psychologists are right if inequality will make us all better off then we should accept those inequalities but only if they make us all better off so Rawls is view is not that we should bring about equality but that we should make the worst off in society as well off as possible that might mean sharing out everything equally but it might mean allowing some inequalities so for example if there are some people who are incredibly productive but are only interested in working hard if they get extremely well paid we might say it's worth allowing them to be highly paid for the benefit of everyone indeed you might think a lot of inventors like this they invent things for the money having done that they make everyone else better off if it really was a good invention the iPod say has probably made everyone better off those frustrating for some people I do admit but anyway whoever invented that is no doubt extremely rich that has improved a lot of people's lives and doing so Rawls would say that's the sort of argument that he would agree to that particular case may or may not fit his pattern but the general idea is that if inequalities if the the the general idea is that if the permission of inequalities will make everyone better off then that is acceptable so here is Rawls's difference principle it is that in terms of income and wealth we should make the worst off as well-off as possible now that may seem like a pretty straightforward thing to come up with it doesn't sound very difficult or complex as far as I can tell though Rawls was the first person in the history of thought to formulate that principle of Justice that a just society is one that makes the worst off as well-off as possible there are people who have said that you judge the Justice of society by how well it treats the worst off this was a common theme in immediate post-war labor politics and so many people come in that Lee for example made that point that we did we judge the decency or justice of our society by how well it treats the worst off we're also took it further and said what we have to do is make the worst off as well-off as they can be and you can see from behind the veil of ignorance why that would seem a sensible thing to do because you don't know whether or not you're going to be in the worst off group if so then if you don't know whether you're going to be in the worst off group you've got every reason for trying to make the worst off position as good as possible so Rawls says ok well is that a good argument it's certainly an intriguing argument a highly plausible argument that from behind the veil of ignorance you would choose Rawls as principles of justice annoyingly Rawls calls them to principles of justice but there are three here the Liberty principle the fair opportunity principle and the difference principle the last two subsections of the same principle in Rawls is presentation so here's a question for you if you were in the hospital bed if you were in the original position behind the veil of ignorance would you choose the difference principle the Liberty principle and the opportunity principle go forward quite straightforwardly I think there are questions you could raise but the arguments are fairly strong for the difference principle the argument is that you want to make the worst off position as good as possible because you might be in that position well why it might you disagree with that some people have said that in the original position actually that's a bit of a boring choice that is imagine what society would be like if we were to make the worst off as well-off as possible there might be fairly limited income differentials probably not much difference between the worst off and the best off and so no one is going to be a hugely wealthy we're all going to be of a sort of prosperous comfortable existence is that really how would want our society to be I mean maybe it would be much better to have some people who are wealthy some people who are middle-class no one too poor so of course we want to take care of the worst off we'd need some sort of social safety net a social minimum but do we want to be so conservative in our choice that we make the worst position as good as possible so this is a debate that I will just I think leave you with this point if you were in the original position would you play safe choose a difference principle make the worst off in society as well off as possible and thereby have a society where there's a great deal of equality no chance of getting really spectacularly rich but most people would be comfortable almost everyone would be comfortable or would you prefer a society of greater inequality no one is completely left behind but there are chances to get wealthy chances to do things this in a way I think is the main debate that Rawls has left us with how much gambling would there be from the original position now of course there might be something else on your mind that you don't accept this method of arguing at all you think there's something wrong with this hypothetical contracts or this hypothetical choice method that's an argument for another day but I just want to leave you with that question what would you choose from the hospital bed

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, John Rawls, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Political Theory, Positivism, Liberalism, Social Contract, Emotivism, Subjectivism, Fact-Value, Justice, Theory of Justice, Veil of Ignorance, Original Position, Relativism, Contractarianism, Rawls, Logical Positivism, Vienna Circle, Freedom, Distributive Justice, Political Liberalism, Difference Principle, Democracy, Liberty, Principles of Justice, A Theory of Justice, Non-Cognitivism, Liberal, Egalitarianism

Id: XwVqDBB9PwM

Length: 41min 52sec (2512 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2017