Rather, it appears to play a role in motivating the design of the original position itself. In other words, the arguments of section 29 are intended to help show that the choice confronting the parties has features that make reliance on the maximin rule rational. WebQuestion: John Rawls rejects utilitarianism because: 1) that maximizing the total well-being of society could permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits. It describes a chain of reasoning that would lead the parties in the original position to choose utilitarianism. In general, the use of maximin is said to be rational when there is no reliable basis for assessing the probabilities of different outcomes, when the chooser cares very little for gains above the minimum that could be secured through reliance on maximin, and when the other options have possible consequences that the chooser would find intolerable. After reviewing John Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice and then examining Michael Sandel's and Robert Nozick's criticisms of those arguments, Scheffler points to three important similarities between utilitarianism and Rawls's own theory. In this context, utilitarianism, with its prominent place in the traditions of liberal thought and its various more specific affinities with Rawls's own view, presents itself as a natural ally. Utilitarians are all about increasing happiness, after all, and assaulting peoples self-esteem or pushing them to regard social life as unacceptable are very strange ways of maximizing happiness. In the Preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls observes that [d]uring much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some formof utilitarianism (TJ, p. vii/xvii rev.). Joshua Cohen, Pluralism and Proceduralism. Around the year 1788, a Shoshone girl named Sacagawea, also known as Bird Woman, was born. This means that, in a society whose basic structure was regulated by the two principles, allegiance to those principles would, under favorable conditions, develop naturally out of preexisting psychological materials. Heres the second question. This possibility arises, Rawls suggests, because utilitarianism relies entirely on certain standard assumptions (TJ 159) to demonstrate that its calculations will not normally support severe restrictions on individual liberties. On this issue, he and the utilitarian are on the same side. In slightly different ways, however, all of these appeals are underwritten by the contrast that Rawls develops at length in Part III between the moral psychologies of the two theories. We may speak here of a contrast between monistic and pluralistic accounts of the good. <> This does not mean that just institutions must give people what they independently deserve, but rather that, if just institutions have announced that they will allocate rewards in accordance with certain standards, then individuals who meet those standards can be said to deserve the advertised rewards. Thus his official arguments against utilitarianism take the form of arguments purporting to show that it would be rejected by the parties. Rawls's strategy is to try to establish that the choice between average utility and his two principles satisfies these conditions because (1) the parties have no basis for confidence in the type of probabilistic reasoning that would support a choice of average utility, (2) his two principles would assure the parties of a satisfactory minimum, and (3) the principle of average utility might have consequences that the parties could not accept. The principle of utility, as it has come to be interpreted at least, is a comprehensive standard that is used to assess actions, institutions, and the distribution of resources within a society.25 Rawls's concentration on the basic structure and his use of pure procedural justice to assess distributions give his theory a greater institutional focus. Rawls believes that teleological theories, which define the good independently of the right and define the right as maximizing the good, tend also to interpret the good in monistic terms. 2) the On the other, non-utilitarian alternatives are left out. On the one hand, utilitarians will say that they wouldnt make life intolerable for anyone: that doesnt make any sense if youre trying to maximize happiness, after all. His own theory of justice, one might say, aims not to resist the pressures toward holism but rather to tame or domesticate them: to provide a fair and humane way for a liberal, democratic society to accommodate those pressures while preserving its basic values and maintaining its commitment to the inviolability of the individual. @free.kindle.com emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. In the end, he speculates, we are likely to settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. Thus, the excessive riskiness of relying on the principle of insufficient reason depends on the claim about the third condition, that is, on the possibility that average utility might lead to intolerable outcomes. If so, however, then their ultimate concern is not the same as his, even if it can be expressed in the same words. But this is no reason not to try (TJ viii). For they rely on something like a shared highest order preference function as the basis for interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing, and such a function treats citizens as subscribing to a common ranking of the relative desirability of different packages of material resources and personal qualitiesincluding traits of character, skills and abilities, attachments and loyalties, ends and aspirations. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service. on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Of course, to say this would be to concede that Rawls takes the conventional distinctions among empiricallyindividuated human beings even less seriously than does utilitarianism. 11 0 obj However, defenders of average utility have questioned whether it makes sense to suppose that there is an attitude toward risk that it is rational to have if one is ignorant of one's special attitudes toward risk. We are in the second part of the argument in which we ask if the acknowledgment previously made should be reconsidered (TJ 504). (By the way, Judge Richard Posner, who might be called Jeremy Bentham redivivus, accepts just this view of rape in his Sex and Reason. Thus, Rawls believes, there is a chain of argument that begins with a worry about the possibility of rational decision and concludes with an endorsement of hedonistic utilitarianism. Rawls seems to be proposing that the putatively less plausible of the two versions of the very theory which, in A Theory of Justice, he had treated as his primary target of criticism, and as the primary rival for his own principles of justice, might actually join in an overlapping consensus affirming those principles. a. Adam Smith defends capitalism by appealing to the idea of a natural, moral right to property. This argument is straightforward and appears decisive. Stability means that they can only choose principles that they would accept if they grew up in a society governed by them. Why arent we talking about maximizing utility, period? Indeed, according to one familiar and traditional view, justice consists, at least in part, in giving people what they may independently be said to deserve. 2 0 obj We have to ask how, on Utilitarian principles, this influence is to be exercised. This extension to society as a whole of the principle of choice for a single individual is facilitated, Rawls believes, by treating the approval of a perfectly sympathetic and ideally rational and impartial spectator as the standard of what is just. There was a handout for this class: 24.RawlsVsUtilitiarianism.handout.pdf. A utilitarian assumption is that we can put all good things on a single scale that they call utility. Hugo Bedau, Social Justice and Social Institutions. In summary, then, Rawls agrees with utilitarianism about the desirability of providing a systematic account of justice that reduces the scope for intuitionistic balancing and offers a clear and constructive solution to the priority problem; about the need to subordinate commonsense precepts of justice to a higher criterion; and about the holistic character of distributive justice. They adopt a particular rule for making decisions under uncertainty: maximize expected utility. "A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution." Despite his opposition to utilitarianism, however, it seems evident from the passages I have quoted that he also regards it as possessing theoretical virtues that he wishes to emulate. It is Rawls, after all, who says that a distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations, and who insists that there is simply no answer to the abstract question of whether one distribution is better than another. It helps to explain why the parties are denied knowledge of any specific conception of the good, and why they are instead stipulated to accept the thin theory of the good, with all that that involves. In my opinion, they mostly boil down to one point: the parties would not be willing to run the risk of being the big losers in a utilitarian society. However, even if the role of the argument against monism in Theory raises questions about the justificatory significance of the original position construction, and even if the philosophical character of the argument is in tension with the political turn taken in Rawls's later writings, I believe that the argument can stand on its own as an important challenge to utilitarian thought. 10 0 obj Fourth, they have argued that Rawls's own principles of justice are not altogether riskfree, since the general conception of justiceasfairness would permit the infringement of basic liberties under extraordinary conditions. Note, however, that under the index entry for average utilitarianism (606), there is a subheading that reads: as teleological theory, hedonism the tendency of. 12 0 obj The second is his agreement with the utilitarian view that commonsense precepts of justice have only a derivative (TJ 307) status and must be viewed as subordinate (TJ 307) to a higher criterion (TJ 305). The Fine Tuning Argument for God's Existence, Freedom from Self-Abuse (Cutting) - Sermon, The Lemonade-Twaddle of the Consumer Church, Five Views On the Destiny of the Unevangelized. Nozick suggests that Rawls can avoid this tension only by placing an implausible degree of weight on the distinction between persons and their talents.17 Michael Sandel, following up on Nozick's point, argues that Rawls has a theory of the person according to which talents are merely contingentlygiven and wholly inessential attributes rather than essential constituents of the self.18 For this reason, Sandel argues, Rawls does not see the distinctness of persons as violated by the idea of treating the distribution of talents as a common asset. I like TV as much as the next person, but I care about my child in a different way. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. If that association is unwarranted, then the contrast between the classical and average views may be less dramatic than Rawls suggests, and the claims of the original position as an illuminating analytic device may to that extent be reduced. See TJ 166, where Rawls says that the principle of average utility is not a teleological doctrine, strictly speaking, as the classical view is, since it aims to maximize an average and not a sum. Despite the vigor of his arguments against utilitarianism, however, some critics have contended that Rawls's own theory displays some of the very same features that he criticizes in the utilitarian position. This is presumably because the maximization of average utility could, in societies with certain features, require that the interests of some people be seriously compromised. In this sense, classical utilitarianism gives what it regards as the aggregate good priority over what it regards as the goods of distinct individuals. In Rawlss lingo, we have a highest order interest in the development of our two moral powers, the powers to have a rational plan of life and a sense of justice. Since he also believed that personal and political liberty are needed for personal and moral self-development, he thought that the parties would give priority to individual liberty over other goals, such as increasing economic opportunity or wealth. hasContentIssue false, Rawls on the Relationship between Liberalism and Democracy, Rawls on Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law, https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651670.013, Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. That is, they help to show that the two principles are an adequate minimum conception of justice in a situation of great uncertainty. Great Philosophers: John Rawls (1921-2002) If, however, there is some dominant end to which all of our other ends are subordinated, then a rational decision is always in principle possible, since only difficulties of computation and lack of information remain (TJ 552). Content may require purchase if you do not have access. Sacagawea proved her value to the expedition on many occassions. He and Sacagawea joined the expedition. Finality means that the parties can only choose principles that are final: that was one of the conditions on the original position. <> Rawls will emphasize the publicity condition in order to show that utilitarians cant give people the kind of security that his principles can. In fact, Rawls states explicitly that the arguments of section 29 fit under the heuristic schema suggested by the reasons for following the maximin rule. 1. One-Hour Seminary - What About People Who Have Nev Dr. Michael Brown Speaking at Our Summer 2018 Conf What Makes Jesus Different From Other Gods? The other two involve trying to show that the parties would choose Rawlss principles of justice in order to avoid results that they would find unacceptable. To the extent that this is so, they can help to illuminate Rawls's complex attitude toward utilitarianism: an attitude that is marked by respect and areas of affinity as well as by sharp disagreements. This is the sort of argument that Samuel criticized earlier. WebQuestion 4 Rawls rejects utilitarianism because: a) He saw it as a threat. See Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics, Chapter One in this volume. Of course, this is not to deny that the principle of average utility would have more appeal than classical utilitarianism for the parties in the original position. Rawls rejects utilitarianism because it might permit See also Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical, 2489. Whether or not these arguments are successful, they may be seen in part as responses to the emphasis on system that is a feature both of Rawls's theory and of utilitarianism. The idea that the distribution of natural talents should be regarded as a common asset is not the idea of an aggregate good that takes precedence over the goods of individual human beings. Furthermore, hedonism is the symptomatic drift of teleological theories (TJ 560) both because agreeable feeling may appear to be an interpersonal currency (TJ 559) that makes social choice possible and because hedonism's superficial hospitality to varied ways of life enables it to avoid the appearance of fanaticism and inhumanity (TJ 556). As I have argued elsewhere, it is very difficult to see how this might work.31 For one thing, the participants in the consensus he describes are envisioned as converging not merely on the principles that constitute a political conception of justice, but also on certain fundamental ideas that are implicit in the public political culture and from which those principles are said to be derivable. Rawls's desire to provide a constructive conception of justice is part of his desire to avoid intuitionism. If hes right about that, the parties cannot perform the calculations needed to use the maximize expected utility rule. However, a number of critics have argued that Rawls's position has important features in common with utilitarianism, features in virtue of which his view is open to some of the very same objections that he levels against the utilitarian. But its fair to say that it has one dominant theme. At any rate, it has attracted far less controversy than Rawls's claim that the parties would reject the principle of average utility. To be specific, in the parts we did not read, Rawls argued that the parties in the original position would choose to maximize average utility only if two conditions are met: Rawlss chief reason for denying that this makes sense is the familiar one: maximizing expected utility is too risky in this situation. Rawls denies that the parties in the original position can assign probabilities. These arguments appeal to what Rawls calls finality and stability. x\wHnrA1lf7n;gkDTu}''oE7bD`/3O T:%3?*e Fp=wWZ8*|RvT90dy,1{|3D-gE{[*] V|+5Y(F=2gxcZ}IQh6\9;;bsMzal{z )TreGw$a'J6sm~O#|f7$k2Sb1_OGrm%b[Cmx(d-&M- endobj There are really two questions here. Nor, he maintains, does the irreducible diversity of our ends mean that rational choice is impossible. See for example PL 1345. This leads him to the unexpected conclusion that the classical view is the ethic of perfect altruists, by contrast with the principle of average utility which, from the perspective afforded by the original position, emerges as the ethic of a single rational individual (with no aversion to risk) (TJ 189). Furthermore, Rawls asserts, the possibility that the society might allow some members to lose out would cause its members to lose self-esteem. endobj My hope is to arrive at a balanced assessment of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism. (6) Sacagawea, with the baby on her back, and seemingly heedless of danger, calmly salvaged the equipment.

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