Many of us feel that our societies are a little
– or even plain totally – ‘unfair’. But we have a hard time explaining our sense
of injustice to the powers that be in a way that sounds rational and without personal
pique or bitterness. That’s why we need John Rawls, a twentieth-century
American philosopher who provides us with a failproof model for identifying what truly
might be unfair – and how we might gather support for fixing things. Rawls: http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/35/100835-004-0A003A0A.jpg Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 1921,
Rawls—nicknamed Jack—was exposed, and responded, to the injustices of the modern
world from a very young age. As a child, he witnessed at first hand shocking
poverty in the United States, http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qhA2oMrxkIQ/Tj6AiqtlZqI/AAAAAAAAErs/djyozUjG9A8/s1600/There%2527s_no_way_like_The_american_way.jpg the death of his brothers from an illness
he unwittingly transmitted to them, and the horrors and lawlessness of the Second World
War. http://haveblogwilltravel.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/old_town_warsaw_waf-2012-1501-311945.jpg All this inspired him to go into academia:
he wanted to use the power of ideas to change the unjust world he was living in. It was the publication of A Theory of Justice
in 1971 that properly made Rawls’s name. http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/565/846/734846565.0.m.jpg Having read and widely discussed his book,
Bill Clinton was to label Rawls ‘the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century’–
and had him over to the White House for dinner on a regular basis. What, then, does this exemplar of fairness
have to tell the modern world? TEXT: 1. Things as they are now are patently unfair The statistics all point to the radical unfairness
of society. Comparative charts of life expectancy and
income projections direct us to a single overwhelming moral. Here are three important example charts but
we probably should re-draw them (a small graphic design task) for the film so that we haven’t
stolen theirs: http://pgpf.org/sites/default/files/sitecore/media%20library/PGPF/Chart-Archive/0015_life-expectancy-full.gif I’d also suggest the first graph on this
website--it’s from a video: http://ethericstudies.org/responsibility/one_percent.htm Here’s for the whole world:
http://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/files/2009/05/conley_champagne_distribution.png But day-to-day, it can be hard to take this
unfairness seriously, especially in relation to our own lives. That’s because so many voices are on hand
telling us that, if we work hard and have ambition, we can make it. Rawls was deeply aware of how the American
Dream seeped through the political system and into individual hearts – and he knew
its corrosive, regressive influence. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/THIS_IS_AMERICA..._WHERE_EVERY_BOY_CAN_DREAM_OF_BEING_PRESIDENT._-_NARA_-_515762.jpg He was a statistician who knew that the rags-to-riches
tales were overall so negligible as not to warrant serious attention by political theorists. Indeed, mentioning them was merely a clever
political sleight of hand designed to prevent the powerful from having to undertake the
necessary task of reforming society. Rawls understood that debates about unfairness
and what to do about it often get bogged down in arcane details and petty squabbling which
mean that year after year, nothing quite gets done. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Barack_Obama_presidential_debate_preparations.jpg What Rawls was therefore after was a simple,
economical and polemical way to show people how their societies were unfair and what they
might do about it. TEXT: 2. Imagine if you were not you Rawls intuitively understood that a lot of
the reason why societies don’t become fairer is that those who benefit from current injustice
are spared the need to think too hard about what it would have been like to be born in
different circumstances. So he devised one of the greatest thought
experiments in the history of political thought, He called it: ‘the veil of ignorance.’ Show in text: THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE and show a picture Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves in a conscious,
intelligent state before our own birth, but without any knowledge of what circumstances
we were going to be born into; our futures shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Hovering high above the planet (Rawls was
fascinated by the Apollo space programme), we wouldn’t know what sort of parents we’d
have, what our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local
hospital could do for us, how the police and judicial systems might treat us and so on… satellite view: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Flat_earth_night.png The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate
is: if we knew nothing about where we’d end up, what sort of a society would it feel
safe to enter? The ‘veil of ignorance’ stops us thinking
about all those who have done well and draws our attention to the appalling risks involved
in entering, for example, US society as if it were a lottery– without knowing if you’d
wind up the child of an orthodontist in Scottsdale, Arizona one option//example: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8340/8240125300_bb65771f96_b.jpg or as the offspring of a black single mother
in the rougher bits of eastern Detroit. one option/example: http://pixabay.com/p-279457/?no_redirect Would any sane birth-lottery player really
want to take the gamble of ending up in the society we now have? Probably not--they’d insist that the rules
of the entire game had to be changed. Otherwise it would be too risky. TEXT: 3. You know what needs to be fixed Rawls answers the question for us: any sane
participant of the veil of ignorance experiment is going to want a society with a number of
things in place: they’ll want the schools to be very good, the hospitals to function
brilliantly, unimpeachable and fair access to the law and decent housing for everyone. The veil of ignorance forces observers to
accept that the country they’d really want to be born randomly into would almost certainly
be a version of Switzerland or Denmark. In other words, we know what sort of a society
we want to live in. We just haven’t focused on it properly until
now - because the choices have already been made. Rawls’s experiment allows us to think more
objectively about what a fair society looks like in its details. When addressing major decisions about the
allocation of resources we need only ask ourselves: ‘how would I feel about this issue if I
were stuck behind the veil of ignorance?’ The fair answer emerges directly when we contemplate
what we would need in order still to be adequately positioned in the worst case scenario. TEXT: 4. What to do next A lot will depend on what’s wrong with your
society. In this sense, Rawls was usefully undoctrinaire
– he recognised that the veil of ignorance experiment throws up different issues in different
contexts: in some, the priority might be to fix air pollution, in others, the school system. But crucially, Rawls provides us with a tool
to critique our current societies based on a beautifully simple experiment. We’ll know we finally have made our societies
fair when we will be able to say in all honesty, from a position of imaginary ignorance before
our births, that we simply wouldn’t mind at all what kind of circumstances our future
parents might have and what sort of neighbourhoods we might be born into. The fact that we simply couldn’t sanely
take on such a challenge now is a measure of how deeply unfair things remain – and
therefore how much we still have left to achieve. All this John Rawls has helped us to see.
This is really a terrible introduction to the thought of one of the greatest political philosophers of the twentieth century. They make Rawls sound like a polemical, partisan hack who bought into conflict theory when he was not at all. They put all the emphasis on the Veil of Ignorance, some of the main implications of which (that is epistemic universality, that all rational people would agree with what to do under his veil of ignorance) Rawls later was skeptical of and was one of the main reasons why other leftists (communitarians) when after Rawls. Really, the Veil of Ignorance is not as essential to Rawlsian thought as this video makes it sound. They don't focus on other nuances of Rawls' thought, such as distributive justice and the like.
It's seriously disappointing that this video is such a terrible introduction to Rawls, because we are in need of a tool that actually honestly appraises what Rawls has to say without injecting partisan nonsense into it and without highlighting elements of his thought that he himself found somewhat dubious.
This video talks about the concept of a Veil of Ignorance and then ignores what Rawls actually said about Justice.
His main contribution was the system of distributive justice he came up with, which UNLIKE many other systems doesn't require revolution, dissolving our government, or other whole cloth change. It's a prescriptive set of ideas for how policies and decisions should be made, and completely compatible with a capitalist system.
Let me try to put it into my own words. Rawls puts forth two main ideas (or commandments), with the second having two subparts - these follow in order of priority.
1) Freedom. Everyone is to have the basic liberty and freedom as long as it does not interfere with the liberty of others. In a way, you can think of this as the "negative liberty" as explained by Isaiah Berlin and is not incompatible with what a lot of libertarians believe. People, generally should have freedoms to act and think as they please.
2) Inequality is OK! This is what trips people up about Rawls. Provided the first conditions are met, then inequality can be good and maximize incentives for people to work and make society better. However, inequality has to satisfy the following:
A) Any system of inequality or incentives which privilege people must be open in equal opportunity to everyone. So you have to truly have the opportunity, regardless of who you are, or who your parents were, or what you were born with.
B) Incentives or inequality and rewards which create privilege have to benefit the people who are WORST off the most. So you can make rich people richer if it helps poor people more than it helps the rich people. And you can increase life expectancy of the well off if it increases life expectancy of the worst-off, more.
That's it. It's pretty simple (I'm sure I've butchered it a bit, but the core ideas are there). The Veil of Ignorance is simply the WAY that you evaluate those concepts - so you don't get to say that it's OK to be born into wealth, because not everyone can be born into wealth, and when you're evaluating fairness you have to judge from a position of not knowing whether you'd be born into wealth or abject poverty.
But if you think of, for example, progressive taxation, then you can use a lot of current capitalist system incentives and unfairness with some small changes. Unfair to pay some professions a lot of money? Well it's OK if they are really open to everyone in society, and if the profession helps people OR you tax the money and use that money to benefit the worst off - so despite the one person getting rich, the government uses some of that wealth to make the poorest people better off.
Rawls' system is very compatible with gradual change from our modern society into something more fair in a distributive justice sense. Obviously our current society is very unequal and unfair from a perspective of distributive justice, but Rawls is not advocating governmental overthrow or a completely different system. His theory of justice is a way to design a system, or, crucially, design changes to our existing system which produce more fair and more equitable distributions of wealth and advantage.
I liked the video. And glad whoever posted it on you tube and on this site did, as it has led to some discussion.
I may have been introduced to his thoughts a while back but now just getting reacquainted with it.
Happy that others have added some info about what else he has thought.
I appreciate that he wanted to find a way to make things more just. Now about his concept of the veil of ignorance, considering that people do have biases when they think about things, which can be conditioned by their own outcomes in life, (status, wealth or lack thereof, etc) since there are many variables that can come into play. I think it could be a nice exercise in empathy as someone has said, when considering having certain laws, or regulations in a society to consider how those would impact people have all walks of life. I say this in a general sense. I tend to do this, despite not having had been exposed to this theory and well bottom line is that its important to be aware of our biases, and i do agree that that could be done by considering how this could affect different people, of different levels of wealth or impoverishment etc. Having empathy, and recognizing how something impacts things in an obective sense is a good all around.
Remember reading this at Uni and being struck how simple yet undeniable poignant his theory was...
These school of life videos are pretty awesome
When I studied Rawls, the Veil of Ignorance was an important component of the discussion; however, much more emphasis was placed on the Difference Principle. Perhaps this was a conscious choice by my professor, but his academic focus was very much on Rawls so I am guessing there was a good reason for this decision. In any case, the video isn't the worst introduction as it can't be expected to cover everything in A Theory of Justice in 7 minutes, but I thought it does gloss over some of the most important features of Rawls' theory.
If you're looking for a counterpoint to Rawls' distributive model, check out Iris Young: http://web.mit.edu/sgrp/2007/no1/YoungRGLJ.pdf