Rawls

John Rawls

Imagine you have been given an extraordinary task: to design, from scratch, the basic rules of a society, its laws, its distribution of wealth and power and opportunity, the whole structure within which people will live. But there is a catch. You must choose these rules from behind what John Rawls called a "veil of ignorance." Behind it, you know all the general facts about human beings and societies, but you do not know a single thing about who you yourself will be in the society you are designing. You do not know whether you will be rich or poor, brilliant or slow, healthy or sick, a man or a woman, of the majority religion or a hated minority, born to privilege or to nothing. You might be anyone. Now: what rules would you choose? This thought experiment is the engine of the most important work of political philosophy in a century, and its power lies in a single, simple insight about fairness. We all tend to favor the rules that happen to benefit us, the talented want a society that rewards talent, the wealthy a society that protects wealth. The veil of ignorance strips that bias away at a stroke. Forced to choose without knowing your own place, you cannot rig the game in your favor, because you do not know what your favor is, and so you are compelled, for the first time, to choose impartially, to design a society that would be acceptable to you no matter who in it you turned out to be. Justice, Rawls proposed, is simply whatever such an impartial choice would produce. He called it "justice as fairness."

Protecting the person you might be. So what would you choose, behind the veil? Not, Rawls argued, the rules a utilitarian would pick, the ones that maximize the total wealth or happiness of society all added together, because a society can pile up an enormous sum of wealth while leaving some of its members in misery, and behind the veil, you might be one of those left in misery. Reasoning carefully, not knowing your fate, you would protect yourself against the worst outcomes. And so, Rawls argued, you would choose two principles, in order. First, you would insist on equal basic liberties for everyone, freedom of speech and conscience and political participation, guaranteed to all and not to be traded away, because whoever you turn out to be, you will want those freedoms, and you will not gamble them for any promise of riches. Second, having secured equal liberty, you would turn to wealth and power, and here Rawls reaches his most striking conclusion. You would not demand perfect equality, because some inequalities, higher pay that draws people into harder or scarcer work, can end up making everyone better off, including the poorest. But you would permit inequality only on one strict condition: that it actually improves the position of the worst-off. This is the famous "difference principle": inequalities of wealth and power are just only insofar as they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. Behind the veil, not knowing whether you will land at the top or the bottom, you would want the bottom to be as high as possible, because the bottom might be where you live.

The accident of birth. Beneath the machinery of the veil lies a moral conviction that is the true core of Rawls's thought, and the most quietly radical thing he ever said. We like to believe that people deserve what they get, that the successful have earned their success and the poor have only themselves to blame. Rawls asked us to look harder at where our advantages actually come from. The talents you were born with, your intelligence, your health, your energy, your aptitudes, you did nothing to earn; they are a matter of sheer genetic luck, a hand you were dealt. The family that raised you, the schools you happened to attend, the country and the century you were born into, the encouragement or neglect you received as a child, none of it was your doing; it all befell you. Even your capacity for hard work and discipline, Rawls noted, is largely the product of a fortunate upbringing you cannot take credit for. All of this he called the "natural lottery," and his point was devastating: that the distribution of advantages from which our whole social hierarchy flows is, at bottom, arbitrary from a moral point of view, a matter of luck, not desert. No one deserves their starting place in life. And from this follows the core of justice as fairness: that a fair society does not simply let the winners of the natural lottery keep all their winnings while the losers are left behind, but treats the good fortune of the gifted as, in a sense, a common asset, to be arranged so that it benefits everyone, and above all those who were dealt a poorer hand. We are not, on this view, self-made; we are lucky, or unlucky, and justice is what we owe one another in light of that truth.

No one is expendable. There is a deeper principle still beneath all of this, and it explains Rawls's lifelong quarrel with the doctrine that had dominated English-speaking ethics before him: utilitarianism, the idea that the right action or policy is whatever produces the greatest total good summed across everyone. Rawls found something morally intolerable in that summing. When you add up everyone's welfare into a single total and then maximize that, he objected, you treat society as if it were a single giant person with one big pool of satisfactions to be enlarged, and in doing so you lose something essential: the fact that society is made of distinct individuals, each with one life to live, a life that is irreplaceably their own. Utilitarianism, Rawls charged, "does not take seriously the distinction between persons"; it permits the suffering of some to be simply cancelled out by the greater happiness of others, as though a benefit to you could compensate for a harm to me, when you and I are different people and my loss is not made good by your gain. Against this Rawls set one of the ringing sentences of modern philosophy: "Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." There are things, he insisted, that may not be done to an individual no matter how much aggregate good might result, because each person is an end, not a resource to be spent for the benefit of the sum. Justice, for Rawls, begins with the refusal to treat any person as expendable.

Living together while disagreeing. In his later work Rawls confronted a problem his early theory had passed over, and it is one of the central problems of our age. A free society, he recognized, will always contain people who disagree, deeply, permanently, and reasonably, about the biggest questions there are: about God and the afterlife, about the meaning of life, about what is ultimately good and how one ought to live. These disagreements do not vanish with education or argument; they are the permanent condition of a society that allows freedom of thought. So how can people who fundamentally disagree about ultimate things still live together under shared institutions that all of them can regard as legitimate? Rawls's answer was what he called "political liberalism." The principles by which we govern our common political life, he argued, should not be grounded in any single religion or philosophy, not even a true one, because to impose one comprehensive worldview on everyone is exactly the tyranny a free society forbids. Instead, those principles should be freestanding, statable and defensible without appeal to any particular faith, so that citizens of many different worldviews can each affirm them, for their own reasons, from within their own traditions, an "overlapping consensus" on the rules of shared life. And when we debate the most fundamental political questions, Rawls asked us to practice "public reason," to offer our fellow citizens grounds they could in principle accept as free equals, rather than insisting on premises that only our own group holds sacred. It is a vision of how a society can be at once deeply diverse and genuinely just: united not by a shared creed but by a shared commitment to fair terms of cooperation among people who will never fully agree.

Fairness you cannot cheat. The room reads Rawls from the wider record, since his work remains under copyright, and the chat says so; he was a careful, painstaking writer and a famously modest and generous man, who spent decades patiently refining a single great structure of argument. He almost single-handedly brought political philosophy back to life as a serious enterprise, after it had thinned into the analysis of language, and the entire field still defines itself in relation to him, the libertarians and communitarians and socialists and feminists who answer him as much as those who follow. His critics charged that the difference principle demands too much, or that the lone chooser behind the veil is too abstract a figure to ground a real community, and the arguments have run for half a century without exhausting him. But his enduring gift is that thought experiment that anyone can run, in a boardroom or a parliament or an argument at the dinner table: before you defend the arrangement you happen to benefit from, ask whether you would still endorse it if you did not know which place in it would be yours. It is, in the end, the golden rule made rigorous, fairness reconceived as the choice we would make if we could not cheat in our own favor. Rawls gave the modern world its most powerful instrument for telling a just arrangement from a merely self-serving one, and in an age tempted to mistake good luck for merit and power for desert, the quiet question of the veil, what would you accept if you might be anyone, has lost none of its uncomfortable force.