Of course, as Rawls recognizes, utilitarians frequently argue that, given plausible empirical assumptions, the maximization of satisfaction is unlikely to be achieved in this way. 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. of your Kindle email address below. After all, he had said in section 29 a) that the stability argument is one of the main arguments for the two principles (TJ 175), b) that it fits under the heuristic schema suggested by the reasons for following the maximin rule (TJ 175), and c) that it depends on the laws of moral psychology and the availability of human motives, which are only discussed later on (sections 7576) (TJ 177). In other words, section 29's appeals to psychological stability, selfrespect, and the strains of commitment are all intended as contributions to the overarching enterprise of demonstrating that Rawls's principles would provide a satisfactory minimum whereas the principle of average utility might have consequences with which the parties would find it difficult to live. )", Consider this. Samuel Freeman, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right. See Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics, Chapter One in this volume. For example, Robert Nozick holds that there is a tension between Rawls's assertion that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution (TJ 101) and his charge that classical utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons. There are really two questions here. This assumption, Rawls argues, implies the dissolution of the person as leading a life expressive of character and of devotion to specific final ends, and it is only psychologically intelligible14 if one thinks of pleasure as a dominant end for the sake of which a rational person is willing to revise or abandon any of his other ends or commitments. Indeed, the point goes further. Total loading time: 0 WebQuestion 4 Rawls rejects utilitarianism because: a) He saw it as a threat. Although the case for holism has considerable force, and many of our intuitions about distributive justice are indeed holistic, there are other, nonholistic ideas about justice that also have widespread intuitive support. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible,as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthusbut that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.** The Methods of Ethics, IV.1.2, 34. It isnt even considered by the parties. Do you feel that capitalism is fair across the board for small business owners as, Corporations differ from partnerships and other forms of business association in two ways. <> They note that I sometimes watch TV when I could be doing things for my childs future. 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. My hope is to arrive at a balanced assessment of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism. Since utilitarianism puts individual liberty on the same scale as economic opportunity and wealth, he reasoned, the parties would reject utilitarianism. No assessment of the overall distribution of benefits and burdens in society or of the institutions that produced that distribution is normally required in order to decide whether a particular individual deserves a certain benefit. A Theory of Justice tackles many things. Rather, the original position has been structured so that utilitarianism is guaranteed to lose. The utilitarians will emphasize their ability to cope with disasters, cases where suspensions of the normal rules of justice are needed. Why arent we talking about maximizing utility, period? 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. 6 0 obj In this sense, utilitarianism takes the distinctions among persons less seriously than his principles do. 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Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. They can assign probabilities to outcomes in the society they belong to. Nevertheless, once we recognize that, for some people, the words in which Rawls articulates his criticism may serve as a way of expressing resistance to holism, it is understandable why some who have echoed those words have not followed Rawls in seeking to devise a constructive and systematic alternative to utilitarianism. My point is about the nature of his argument. If this analysis is correct, then Rawls's argument may apply to a broader range of utilitarian theories than was initially evident. There has been extensive discussion and disagreement both about the meaning and about the merits of Rawls's claim that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinctions among persons. stream Yet these differences, important as they are, should not be allowed to obscure an important point of agreement, namely, that neither view is willing to assess the justice or injustice of a particular assignment of benefits in isolation from the larger distributional context. T. M. Scanlon, Rawls' Theory of Justice, H. L. A. Hart, Between Utility and Rights, in. What is Rawls ethical theory? Rawlss theory of justice revolves around the adaptation of two fundamental principles of justice which would, in turn, guarantee a just and morally acceptable society. The second principle states that social and economic positions are to be (a) to everyones advantage and (b) open to all. Thus, if we are to find a constructive solution to the priority problem, we must have recourse to a higher principle to adjudicate these conflicts. 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. Rawls contends that people would find losing out in this way unacceptable. The dispute about whether utilitarianism is too risky or not. These issues have been extensively discussed, and I will here simply assert that, despite some infelicities in Rawls's presentation, I believe he is correct to maintain that the parties would prefer his two principles to the principle of average utility. Render date: 2023-05-01T02:24:57.324Z In this way, we may be led to a monistic account of the good by an argument from the conditions of rational deliberation (TJ 556). For two years, the boy was carried on his mother's back. See for example PL 1345. By itself, the claim that even the average version of utilitarianism is unduly willing to sacrifice some people for the sake of others is not a novel one. 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. They would be unwilling to take the chance that, in a society governed by utilitarian principles, a utilitarian calculation might someday provide the basis for a serious infringement of their liberties, especially since they have the more conservative option of the two principles available to them. stream We saw this when talking about libertarianism. Nevertheless, the impulse to treat some form of utilitarianism as a candidate for inclusion in the consensus, when considered in the context of Rawls's aims in Political Liberalism and his sympathy for certain aspects of the utilitarian doctrine, no longer seems mysterious.33 Whether or not the tensions between that impulse and his forceful objections to utilitarianism can be satisfactorily resolved, they provide a salutary reminder of the complexity of Rawls's attitude toward modern moral philosophy's predominant systematic theory. If hes right about that, the parties cannot perform the calculations needed to use the maximize expected utility rule. See, for example, section 2 of The Basic Structure as Subject, where he associates the comprehensive interpretation with Sidgwick (PL 2602). However, I believe that Sandel's analysis raises the metaphysical stakes unnecessarily and that the tension between Rawls's principles and his criticism of utilitarianism can be dissolved without appealing to either of the two theories of the person that Sandel invokes. Whereas the idea of arranging social institutions so as to maximize the good might seem attractive if there were a unique good at which all rational action aims, it makes more sense, in light of the heterogeneity of the good, to establish a fair framework of social cooperation within which individuals may pursue their diverse ends and aspirations. } 1. This suggests to Rawls that even if the concept of the original position served no other purpose, it would be a useful analytic device (TJ 189), enabling us to see the different complex[es] of ideas (TJ 189) underlying the two versions of utilitarianism. Stability means that they can only choose principles that they would accept if they grew up in a society governed by them. Critics of utilitarianism, he says, have pointed out that many of its implications run counter to our moral convictions and sentiments, but they have failed to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it (TJ, p. viii/xvii rev.). Some people may think that holism itself undermines liberal values, so that Rawls's aim is in principle unattainable. endobj <> WebRawls rejects utilitarianism because a. he saw it as a threat b. it might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits c. governments wanted it d. it values moral purity it At the very least, his argument challenges utilitarians to supply a comparably plausible and detailed account of utilitarian social and economic institutions and of the processes by which, in a society regulated by utilitarian principles, motives would develop that were capable of generating ongoing support for those institutions and principles. To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org Of course, utilitarians will be unimpressed. A French-Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau lived with the Hidatsa. Cited hereafter as TJ, with page references given parenthetically in the text. First, since the parties agreement in the Original Position is final, they know that they cant go back on it once they get to the real world. Classical utilitarianism, as he understands it, holds that society is rightly ordered, and therefore just, when its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it (TJ 22). The fact remains, however, that classical utilitarianism attaches no intrinsic importance to questions of distribution, and that it imposes no principled limit on the extent to which aggregative reasoning may legitimately be employed in making social decisions. The conception of the two principles does not interpret the primary problem of distributive justice as one of allocative justice (TJ 889). a. Adam Smith defends capitalism by appealing to the idea of a natural, moral right to property. In his early essay Two Concepts of Rules, for example, he writes: It is important to remember that those whom I have called the classical utilitarians were largely interested in social institutions. It is ironic, therefore, that the author of that complaint not only is not opposed to holism about distributive justice but in fact is one of its strongest advocates. A particularly difficult conflict between the explorers and a group of Sioux, in South Dakota, convinced Lewis and Clark that they needed an interpreter. Herein lies the problem. As Rawls says: Teleological views have a deep intuitive appeal since they seem to embody the idea of rationality. Thoughts about God, culture, and the Real Jesus. (2) Their vigilant observations and careful recordings of the geography and wildlife helped open the area for settlement. 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. Why might the parties in the original position choose average utilitarianism? (By the way, Judge Richard Posner, who might be called Jeremy Bentham redivivus, accepts just this view of rape in his Sex and Reason. 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. In other words, they turn on the possibility that the way to maximize average utility across a whole society will involve leaving some with significantly less liberty, opportunities, or wealth than others have. But the reason why a utilitarian society would fail the conditions is the same one Rawls had used before: someone in a utilitarian society could be a big loser and find life as a loser intolerable. Rights are certain moral rules whose observance is of the utmost importance for the long-run, overall maximization of happiness, it would be unjust to coerce people to give food or money to the starving, According to John Rawls, people in "the original position" choose the principles of justice on the basis of. Not surprisingly, Sacagawea actually did much of the translating her husband had been hired to do. The arguments set out in section 29 explicitly invoke considerations of moral psychology that are not fully developed until Part III. T or F: Libertarians reject inheritance as a legitimate means of acquiring wealth, T or F: The phrase "the declining marginal utility of money" means that successive additions to one's income produce, on average, less happiness or welfare than did earlier additions, T or F: Robert Nozick uses the Wilt Chamberlain story to show the importance of economic re-distribution, T or F: Rawls's theory of distributive justice is a form of utilitarianism, T or F: The United States leads the world in executive pay, T or F: According to John Rawls, people in the original position do not know what social position or status they hold in society, T or F: According to the "maximin" rule, you should select the alternative under which the worst that could happen to you is better than the worst that could happen to you under any other alternative, T or F: Distributive justice concerns the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens, T or F: According to Mill, to say that I have a right to something is to say that I have a valid claim on society to protect in the possession of that thing, either by force of law or through education and opinion, T or F: In his Principles of Political Economy, J.S. 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. It is a feature of the Original Position, of course. BUS309 - Week 3 - Chapter 3 - Justice and Economic Distribution, This week we are covering textbook topics found in Chapter 4, "The Nature of Capitalism," (beginning on page 117) and Chapter 5, "Corporations," (beginning on page 156). For these precepts conflict and, at the level of common sense, no reconciliation is possible, since there is no determinate way of weighing them against each other. Rawls hopes to derive principles of social justice that rational persons would Sacagawea proved her value to the expedition on many occassions. In Rawls's own theory, of course, institutions are made the central focus from the outset, since the basic structure of society, which comprises its major institutions, is treated as the first subject of justice.23 This in turn leads to the idea of treating the issue of distributive shares as a matter of pure procedural justice (TJ 845): provided the basic structure is just, any distribution of goods that results is also just.24 Once the problem of distributive justice is understood in this way, the principles of justice can no longer be applied to individual transactions considered in isolation (TJ 878). But this is no reason not to try (TJ viii). In summary, Rawls argues, the classical utilitarian view of social cooperation is the consequence of extending to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflating all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator (TJ 27). The other two arguments against utilitarianism both turn on the following assumptions: Rawls has two ways of showing that the first condition is satisfied. First, they have argued that the standard assumptions are sufficiently robust that it would not be excessively risky for the parties to choose average utility even if this meant relying on the principle of insufficient reason. x[K#A?. (3) The planning of the expedition, however, showed some disregard for the realities of the journey. Yet that capacity is, as a rule, not strong enough nor securely enough situated within the human motivational repertoire to be a reliable source of support for utilitarian principles and institutions. As I have indicated, substantial portions of Part III are devoted to the detailed elaboration of this contrast along with its implications for the relative stability of the two rival conceptions of justice and their relative success in encouraging the selfrespect of citizens.7 Furthermore, Rawls says explicitly that much of the argument of Part II, which applies his principles to institutions, is intended to help establish that they constitute a workable conception of justice and provide a satisfactory minimum (TJ 156). 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. Although classical and average utilitarianism may often have similar practical consequences (TJ 189), and although those consequences will coincide completely so long as population size is constant, Rawls argues that the two views are markedly distinct conceptions whose underlying analytic assumptions are far apart (TJ 161). Instead, he says, the [h]uman good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are heterogeneous (TJ 554). The parties in the original position do not decide what is good or bad for us. No loss would wipe them out and they will come out ahead in the long run. <>/Font<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 960 540] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> All it means is that formal principles play a limited role in determining such choices. However, as Rawls acknowledges, the maximin rule is very conservative, and its employment will seem rational only under certain conditions. c) Governments wanted it. "A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution." . Consequently, Rawls reasons, it makes no sense to take the riskier rather than the safer option. We have a hierarchy of aims, with some being of a different kind than others. If they do use this rule, then they will reject average utility in favour of his two principles, since the maximin rule directs choosers to select the alternative whose worst outcome is superior to the worst outcome of any other alternative, and the two principles are those a person would choose if he knew that his enemy were going to assign him his place in society.