>>>Okay, I’m finally getting back to the blogging schedule I set for myself when I launched this WordPress blog: lecture every Wednesday, Science Sunday on, well, Sunday. I promise to stick to it for at least the next couple months.<<<

Today, we’re going to move from moral philosophy, which is generally concerned with individual actions, to political philosophy, which is concerned with the structure of society. However, there are important similarities, too–the sort of political philosophy we’ll be talking about tries to say how society should be, rather than merely describing or explaining it. Most philosophers, I think, see there’s an important relationship between moral and political philosophy, though it’s controversial what that relationship is.

This lecture and the next will focus on the philosophy of John Rawls, who’s known for thoroughly overshadowing everyone else in political philosophy. My philosophy 101 teacher said he’s one of the philosophers of the 20th century who people will still be reading in a few centuries. I don’t know if that’s really true, but he still is kind of a big deal.

Rawls’ first big idea is the idea of the “original position,” or somewhat more informatively the “veil of ignorance.” This is the idea that a just society would be one that people could agree to live in if they had to design society without knowing what position in society they’d have–you don’t know what race or social class or whatever you’d be born into. You have to design a society ignorant of whether you’ll be rich or poor, black or white, male or female, you’re ignorant of those things, that’s why it’s called the veil of ignorance.

You should understand that the veil of ignorance it completely imaginary–Rawls doesn’t imagine we’ve ever been in, or ever will be in, or even could be in, such a situation. It’s just a device for thinking about justice. This is a contrast to, say the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that once upon a time there was no government and therefore a war of all against all and therefore life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and then people sat down and made a social contract which said there would be a government which would end the free for all war and life wouldn’t be so nasty, brutish, or short. And Hobbes said if you don’t believe me that we used to live that way, look at the way the savages live over in America–Hobbes lived in the 17th century, when it was OK to call Native Americans savages–where there is no government beyond the family unit. As an anthropological aside, Hobbes was wrong about the savages in this respect, even though Rousseau was also wrong about his horribly patronizing image of the noble savage. Aboriginal societies do have governments, even though they also tend to have what we would consider very high murder rates.

So the veil of ignorance is an imaginary situation. But though it’s often lumped with the sort of imaginary situations we discussed in the ethics unit under the heading “thought experiments,” it serves a different purpose than those situations. Those situations say “Here’s an ethical principle. Here’s a situation that might, in principle, come up. Is the principle plausible in that case?” Rawls’ claim about his “veil of ignorance” scenario is that if you contemplate it and ask what would be right to do in that case, you’ll get a general answer to the question of what is just. This is because it would be wrong to take into account the things you’re prevented from knowing in the veil of ignorance scenario–the question of your own personal place in society. Justice is supposed to be universal, a rich man’s principles of justice shouldn’t be any different from a poor man’s.

There’s a final, subtler point about how you’re supposed to use the veil of ignorance: imagining yourself as someone who actually has to live in the society, though you don’t know in what role, introduces a selfish element. Suddenly, it’s not just that you have to reason about principles of justice in an abstract way, just avoiding class biases. You can look out for number one, even though you don’t know what number one’s social status will be. You can try to make out good, even though the rules of the game make this tricky. This will become very important, very fast.

Before I move on to what conclusions Rawls draws from the “veil of ignorance” approach, what do people think of it? I’m just pausing on this point, because I’m going to mainly focus on what conclusions Rawls draws from this, without questioning his basic approach. I’m assuming most people find it has some appeal, so we can move straight to the implications, but I admit I may be wrong about that.

Now for Rawls’ big conclusions, derived from the liberty principle. Rawls claimed that people put under the original position would choose to organize society based on two principles, both important, though the first trumps the second. The first is the “Liberty Principle,” which states that everyone ought to get the maximum amount of “basic liberties” possible–things like freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest, voting rights, and so on. The second is the “Difference Principle” which says that you can’t have inequalities, differences, in access to goods (basically economic inequalities) except ones justified by concern for the interests of the least well-off.

The difference principle, I should point out, only makes sense in the context of the assumption that the resources of society aren’t fixed. If the resources of society were fixed, it would be impossible to improve the lot of the worst-off by allowing inequalities. You would just give everyone equal amounts of everything, and then you couldn’t do any better. Making anyone better off would require making someone worse off, and then those people would be the worst-off, because everyone was initially equal.

That’s the broad theory–in principle, but why exactly would allowing inequalities make even the poorest better-off? Well, one reason is that allowing people to get rich as an incentive for being productive might–indeed probably is–the best way to get people to be productive. People are selfish. This might sound like a surprising claim, but it shouldn’t. Remember in the lecture on famine relief, we looked at how caring for people in the third world as much as we care for ourselves would require radically altering our lifestyles. The idea of being fully selfless, once you realize what it really means, sounds crazy. I understand that even Mother Teresa, when she got old and sick, helped herself to medical care too expensive to provide to everyone her charities were helping.

This doesn’t mean that everyone will rape and pillage and murder if it gets them ahead. But even if there wasn’t a single person in the world willing to rape and pillage and murder to get ahead, it could still be true that self-interest is by far the best way to get people to be productive. We have pretty good evidence that that’s true. Also, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. One, given what we know about evolution, it’s likely that selfishness is a very deeply wired instinct. Second, utopian societies based on the assumption that everyone will automatically work for the good of the community have a history of failing. It’s greedy Yankee capitalism that gave us all the prosperity we take for granted (I’ll say more on why that’s true once we get done with Rawls).

To bring this back to the real world a little, the idea of selfish motivations getting people to do socially beneficial things has played a fairly big role over taxation. The idea of “supply side economics” is that the more you tax people, the less incentive they have to work, so lowering taxes will get people to work harder and stimulate the economy. Potentially, cutting taxes could increase tax revenue, if the economy is stimulated enough. That argument is, by the way, an excellent example of how hard these theoretical arguments are to apply to the real world. One low-tax advocate illustrated the argument by saying “if the tax rate were 100 percent, no one would work.” To which the comedian (and now Senate candidate) Al Franken responded: “Yes, I agree. The marginal tax rate should be somewhere between 0 and 100 percent.” The argument doesn’t prove as much as “supply siders” sometimes imply.

Back to Rawls: his difference principle accounts for these issues. He says it’s OK to have some inequalities, if that’s what it takes to get people to be productive. It’s just that the productivity you’re encouraging has to be for the sake of the worst-off in society. And that’s supposed to follow from the idea of designing society under a veil of ignorance, with the designers having to take up some role in society, but they don’t know what.

The big question now: how is the difference principle supposed to come out of the veil of ignorance? (You could ask the same thing about the liberty principle, but it’s the difference principle where the debate is really interesting.)

Two foundational concepts: decision under uncertainty, and decision under risk. Like a lot of words, starting with “logic,” these things have a special meaning in a philosophical only partly based on their ordinary meanings. In this case, it will be especially confusing, because commonsense–not to mention a thesaurus–would suggest they mean basically the same thing, but in philosophy they mean something very different.

In both cases, you’re supposed to imagine yourself with a list of possible things that might happen beyond your control, and a list of possible actions, and know what will happen for each combination of an action on your part. The thing is, in decision under uncertainty you have absolutely no idea which of the things that might happen, beyond your control, will actually happen.

How little of an idea are you supposed to have? The best way to understand this aspect of decision under uncertainty is to compare decision under risk. In decision under risk, you know the odds of each possible outcome. Gambling games with fair, known mechanisms and known rules are the classic example of this. They’re also a really good example of the idea of different possible outcomes. For example, playing the lottery:

. . . . . . . Would Win. .Wouldn’t Win
Play lottery: Prize!. . . Lose Ticket Price
Don’t play:. .Nothing. . .Nothing

For this to be a case of decision under risk, you would have to know the odds, for example by knowing that a million tickets will be sold, that exactly one ticket will win, and all tickets have an equal chance. Then you would know you’d have a one in a million chance of winning if you bought a ticket.

A very standard thought about decision under risk: multiply the odds of each outcome with the benefits or cost of that outcome, and add up that number for all the possibilities to get an “expected utility.” Then take the option with the greatest expected utility. For example, consider the one-in-a-million lottery. Say the prize is three million dollars. Now if the ticket costs $5, then the expected utility is three million, divided by one million, minus five, or negative $2. However, if the cost is only $1, then the expected utility is positive $2. The very standard thought about risk says you should be willing to buy the $1 lottery ticket, but not the $5 one. Note that for a lottery to be profitable, there has to be a negative expected utility, that’s why hoping to get rich off the lottery is generally considered a bad idea.

However, Rawls claims that designing a society under the veil of ignorance isn’t a decision under risk, it’s a decision under uncertainty. Therefore, we don’t get a nice, tidy rule, like maximizing expected utility, to tell us what to do. However, Rawls says that there is a rule for decision under uncertainty that works at least for the veil of ignorance. It’s called the Maximin rule: maximize how well you’ll do in the worst possible (minimum) scenario. That’s why, according to Rawls, you should maximize the welfare of the worst off in society.

To know what to make of this argument, we’ll have to say a fair amount more about decision under uncertainty and risk, more than I want to cram into this lecture. Therefore, I’ll just take questions now and put off the resolution for next time.