Joker
(Joker)
July 25, 2007, 9:59pm
1
The idea of the original position is perhaps the most lasting contribution of John Rawls to our theorizing about social justice. The original position is a hypothetical situation in which rational calculators, acting as agents or trustees for the interests of concrete individuals, are pictured as choosing those principles of social relations under which their principals would do best. Their choices are subject to certain constraints, however, and it is these constraints which embody the specifically moral elements of original position argumentation. Crudely, the rational calculators do not know facts about their principals which would be morally irrelevant to the choice of principles of justice. This restriction on their reasoning is embodied, picturesquely, in Rawls’s so-called veil of ignorance, which occludes information, for instance, about principals’ age, sex, religious beliefs, etc. Once this information about principals is unavailable to their agents, the plurality of interested parties disappears, and the problem of choice is rendered determinate. (Because each individual’s trustee has the same information and motivation as every other individual’s trustee, the original position is a situation of choice, not of “negotiation” between a plurality of distinct individuals.) According to Rawls, agents so situated would choose two principles of justice, lexically ordered, affirming the equality of basic rights and an approach to social inequalities governed by the difference principle, according to which inequalities are unjust unless removing them would worsen the situations of the worst-off members of society. Original position argumentation is an example of contemporary contractualism, involves a pure-proceduralist approach to the determination of moral principles, and is framed by reflective equilibration with widely agreed principles of public morality. It also illustrates the pragmatism of Rawls’s approach to political theorizing.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
( Opinions welcomed.)
Just another justification, be it an elegant one, for socialist redistribution. What’s missing and/or deemphasized in Rawls “theory of justice” is that redistribution hurts GDP, and as such a society not following redistributive models will over time lag developmentally behind a society not following the model, eventually the poorest in the latter non-redistributive society will overtake the richest in the socialist society.
Why the lag? Incentives - sorry its our shitty human nature to work only when we get something ourselves - to see a redistributive society that totally failed look at the USSR.
Joker
(Joker)
July 27, 2007, 9:31pm
3
Calguy1123:
Just another justification, be it an elegant one, for socialist redistribution. What’s missing and/or deemphasized in Rawls “theory of justice” is that redistribution hurts GDP, and as such a society not following redistributive models will over time lag developmentally behind a society not following the model, eventually the poorest in the latter non-redistributive society will overtake the richest in the socialist society.
Why the lag? Incentives - sorry its our shitty human nature to work only when we get something ourselves - to see a redistributive society that totally failed look at the USSR.
I personally see Rawl’s description of the original position to be like that of Rousseau’s original nature theory of man.
Locke also had somthing of a similar belief.