Rawls sets up the original position as a hypothetical
designed to capture our deepest sense of justice. If one agrees to the system
in which the principles of justice are agreed to, one must inherently agree
with the end principles are fair: “The original position is defined in such a
way that it is a status quo in which any agreements reached are fair. It is a
state of affairs in which the parties are equally represented as moral persons
and the outcome is not conditioned by arbitrary contingencies or the relative
balance of social forces. Thus justice as fairness is able to use the idea of
pure procedural justice from the beginning” (Rawls, 104). Yet I find Rawls’
notion of the original position to be troubling. Rawls asserts that all of
those involved in the hypothetical have no knowledge of their place in society,
and thus will only agree to things that are in the interest of the whole group.
He also maintains, though, that individual must have his or her own interests
with his “mutual disinterest principle:” “I have assumed that the parties
regard themselves as having certain fundamental interests that they must
protect if they can; and that, as free persons, they have a highest-order
interest in maintaining their liberty to revise and alter these ends” (Rawls, 158). Those behind the veil of ignorance have
interests, they just are assumed not to know the “character” of those
interests.
Something about Rawls’ original position and the veil of
ignorance didn’t sit well with me going into tutorial, and still doesn’t sit
right following this reading. To me it seems like an attempt to use unspecific
biases to mask the fact that he can’t come up with a scenario to get humans to
choose principles of Justice in a truly unbiased way. Professor Hurley mentioned the work of Jean Hampton during our tutorial this week (I believe we’ll be reading something
by her later in the semester), and mentioned that she raises a similar
question, putting much more eloquently than I can, and I am curious to hear
what you guys think: can we possibly capture impartiality with ignorant
partiality? Does Rawls’ original position capture our notions of impartial
justice or is it merely ignorant partiality mimicking that goal?
I'm glad you brought this up, and I'll offer my interpretation of his admittedly confusing interests and disinterests. His starting point is to come up with a comprehensive theory of social justice, and in order to achieve "justice as fairness," we have to reach some shared conception of fairness. As you pointed out above, his way of doing that is the veil of ignorance. In my understanding, he employs self-interest of individuals in the original position to best secure a just society for all members. The fact that nobody in the original position knows their particular station in society is what enables them to account for as many potential experiences as possible; they know they might fill the shoes of any "representative man," so their self-interest motivates them to cut up the cake as evenly as possible. To me, this seems like a pretty good way to come up with fair principles, especially if measured against our considered judgments and deliberated through reflective equilibrium; maybe what you are questioning is whether we are actually able to engage in this philosophical exercise in the first place. That, I think is certainly a valid concern. Also I may just be unclear on the "unspecific biases" you seem to have a problem with, so let me know if that's the case. I just wanted to engage with this as best I could, because this part of Rawls' argument didn't bug me too much.
ReplyDeleteTo clarify, I think the way Rawls uses ignorant self-interest (or partiality, as you put it) secures impartiality in coming up with principles of justice as fairness. The fact that we are equally concerned about ending up as any particular "representative man" means we won't treat any one of them differently (hence the impartiality).
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