Rawls’ Metaphor “Justice as Fairness”/
What is Justice?
What is fairness?
What means do we have to discover, to criticize, and to modify our biases, our prejudices, and our ideologies that guide our everyday performance in the world?
I have discovered that an analysis of our speaking is a guide to the manner in which our consciousness and unconsciousness are structured. Our speaking—the words we use can indicate the nature of the ideas that we have. Speech is a guide to the structure of our beliefs, knowledge, and our ideologies, which are the product of our past experiences and understanding, which in many cases is the result of many unconscious developments.
We use such metaphorical expressions as: Tomorrow is a big day. I’m feeling up today. We’ve been close for years, but we’re beginning to drift apart. It is smooth sailing from here on in. It has been uphill all the way. Get off my back. We are moving ahead. He’s a dirty old man. That was a disgusting thing to do. I’m not myself today. He is afraid to reveal his inner self. You need to be kind to your self.
All of us use metaphors constantly and we all recognize the meaning of these metaphors when others speak them. This leads me to the inference that our everyday speech is a means for insight into our comprehension of what we really ‘know’. Most of these metaphors can be a guide to what our conscious and unconscious has stored up in our brain regarding the nature of reality. These metaphors can guide us into a comprehension of where we are and perhaps why we are there (notice all the metaphors I use in trying to convey my conceptions). Metaphors provide insight to the self.
John Rawls in A Theory of Justice attempts to accentuate and define the principles of ‘justice as fairness’.
Rawls develops the concept ‘veil of ignorance’ as a means to develop the abstract substance of justice. From this beginning he developed the fundamental principles of social justice. Under the ‘veil of ignorance’ there exists no self-interest there exists only common interest because all under the veil are ignorant of any individual reality i.e. social position, wealth, intelligence etc.
Rawls empathizes, through the veiled eyes of the hypothetical Everyman, the rational choices for the first principles of justice. “Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."
In this hypothetical position of a “veil of ignorance” Rawls assumes that we would agree that “Justice is Fairness” is an appropriate metaphor in our search for principles of justice.
Why does Rawls use the concept of fairness as a means to comprehend the concept of justice? He does so because we use metaphor both in its linguistic and in its conceptual mode almost always to clarify an unknown by comparing it to a known.
How have we developed our comprehension, i.e. our concept, of fairness? We have developed the concept of fairness beginning very early in our life. We learned very early that we could use the word ‘fair’ to convince our mother that our sibling had mistreated us. “Bobby is not being fair, he is eating my cookies!”
Constantly throughout our life we have constructed, via numerous different experiences, many aspects of our concept of fairness. If we could look into our brain we might see a group of neuron networks all clustered together all of which is our concept of fairness. I recognize that science can tell us that these clusters are not in one location but are scattered about the grey matter.
What Rawls is saying is that we can take our great cluster of concepts that together make up our concept of fairness and remove those component concepts that relate fairness to our place in society, our class position or social status, our distribution of natural assets and abilities, our intelligence, strength and the like, and from what remains we can examine in the effort to determine what fairness is and thus what the principles of justice are.
Essentially Rawls is suggesting that we can abstract a concept of fairness, stripped of those concepts that are related to our social and financial situation, and thus derive the fundamental comprehension of our concept of fairness and use this concept to develop principles of justice.
My ideas about the nature of concepts and metaphors come primarily from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson.