Some people understandably abhor many of the tendencies in modern life that create pressure to think holistically about distributive justice, and believe that our moral thought, rather than seeking to accommodate those tendencies, should serve as a source of resistance to them. do not know what final aims persons have, and all dominantend conceptions are rejected. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Rawls will emphasize the publicity condition in order to show that utilitarians cant give people the kind of security that his principles can. Thus, in looking at the two versions of utilitarianism from the standpoint of the original position, a surprising contrast (TJ 189) between them is revealed. There was a handout for this class: 24.RawlsVsUtilitiarianism.handout.pdf. One of the few times he has anything substantial to say about it is when he includes classical utilitarianismthe utilitarianism of Bentham and Sidgwick, the strict classical doctrine (PL 170)among the views that might participate in an overlapping consensus converging on a liberal political conception of justice, the standard example (PL 164) of which is justiceasfairness. A French-Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau lived with the Hidatsa. These similarities may make it seem that Rawls's theory fails to remedy utilitarianism's neglect of the distinctness of persons. Liam Murphy, Institutions and the Demands of Justice. One day, their boat overturned in a sudden storm. Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. 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. Since the impartial spectator identifies with and experiences the desires of others as if these desires were his own, his function is to organize the desires of all persons into one coherent system of desire (TJ 27). c) Governments wanted it. Surely, though, this is not why rape is wrong; the pleasure the rapist gets shouldnt be counted at all, and the whole thing sounds ridiculous. We talked about Rawlss contention that the parties in the original position would reject maximizing average utility as the fundamental principle for their society. 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. 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. During the trip, Sacagawea was able to visit her original Shoshone family, when she was briefly reunited with her brother. 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. Furthermore, hedonism is the symptomatic drift of teleological theories (TJ 560) both because agreeable feeling may appear to be an interpersonal currency (TJ 559) that makes social choice possible and because hedonism's superficial hospitality to varied ways of life enables it to avoid the appearance of fanaticism and inhumanity (TJ 556). But they agree on the need for such a criterion and on the derivative and subordinate character of commonsense precepts of justice. Rawls's desire to provide a constructive conception of justice is part of his desire to avoid intuitionism. A Theory of Justice: An Introduction to John Rawls - Medium it might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits Thus his official arguments against utilitarianism take the form of arguments purporting to show that it would be rejected by the parties. This means that, in a society whose basic structure was regulated by the two principles, allegiance to those principles would, under favorable conditions, develop naturally out of preexisting psychological materials. Sacagawea proved her value to the expedition on many occassions. When she was just a young girl, Sacagawea's tribe was attacked by an enemy tribe, the Hidatsa, and she was captured. Part of Rawls's point, when calling attention in Two Concepts of Rules to the interest of the classical utilitarians in social institutions, was to emphasize that the construal of utilitarianism as supplying a comprehensive standard of appraisal represents a relatively recent development of the view: one he associates, in that essay, with Moore. <> Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. . Indeed, according to one familiar and traditional view, justice consists, at least in part, in giving people what they may independently be said to deserve. 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. endobj Instead, the aim is to show that choosing as if one had such as aversion is rational given the unique features of . 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. The main grounds for the principles of justice have already been presented. Around the year 1788, a Shoshone girl named Sacagawea, also known as Bird Woman, was born. It isnt even considered by the parties. The dispute about whether utilitarianism is too risky or not. Each sentence below refers to a numbered sentence in the passage. For Rawls, by contrast, the good life for an individual consists in the successful execution of a rational plan of life, and his principles of justice direct us to arrange social institutions in such a way as to protect the capacity of each individual to lead such a life. In short, utilitarianism gives the aggregative good precedence over the goods of distinct individuals whereas Rawls's principles do not. Leaving the utilitarians to one side for a moment, I think Rawls was trying to make a similar point about politics at the end of 28 and in 82. Common sense precepts are at the wrong level of generality (TJ 308). In slightly different ways, however, all of these appeals are underwritten by the contrast that Rawls develops at length in Part III between the moral psychologies of the two theories. Rawls' Rejection of Utilitarianism - John Piippo Lewis and Clark met Charbonneau, who offered to translate for them. Here is what that means. The argument is not presented to the parties in the original position as a reason for rejecting utilitarianism or teleological views in general. These chapters identify four, Which of the following is an accurate statement? The significance of this criticism is subject to doubts of two different kinds. Given these starting points, it seems antecedently unlikely that the parties will accept any theory of justice that relies on a hedonistic or other monistic conception of the good. Render date: 2023-05-01T02:24:57.324Z Nor can the justice of an overall allocation of goods be assessed independently of the institutions that produced it. The fact that Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism is marked not only by sharp disagreements but also by important areas of affinity may help to explain some otherwise puzzling things he says about the view in Political Liberalism. . 6 0 obj To save content items to your account, Yet it marks an important difference between his view and the views of other prominent critics of utilitarianism writing at around the same time, even when those critics express their objections in language that is reminiscent of his. But, they would say, this would happen only in dire conditions, when life was bound to be intolerable for some people anyway. Defenders of the principle of average utility have challenged Rawls's arguments in a variety of ways. To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org Yet is probably fair to say that it has been less influential, as an argument against classical utilitarianism, than the argument offered independently of the original position construction. The latter view is committed to increasing the population, even at the cost of lowering average utility while the former is not. Rawls has three reasons why parties in the Original Position would prefer his two principles of justice over average utilitarianism, a principle that would require the society to maximize average utility or happiness. Whether or not these arguments are successful, they may be seen in part as responses to the emphasis on system that is a feature both of Rawls's theory and of utilitarianism. Thus, the excessive riskiness of relying on the principle of insufficient reason depends on the claim about the third condition, that is, on the possibility that average utility might lead to intolerable outcomes. It is natural to think that rationality is maximizing something and that in morals it must be maximizing the good (TJ 245). Mill argued for the desirability of breaking down the sharp and hostile division between the producers or workers, on the one hand, and the capitalists or owners, on the other hand, T or F: According to libertarianism, liberty is the prime value, and justice consists in being free from the interference of others. (6) Sacagawea, with the baby on her back, and seemingly heedless of danger, calmly salvaged the equipment. If, however, there is some dominant end to which all of our other ends are subordinated, then a rational decision is always in principle possible, since only difficulties of computation and lack of information remain (TJ 552). In view of the inevitable diversity of reasonable comprehensive doctrines in a modern democratic society, Rawls argues, this is not a realistic assumption and hence the test of stability is inadequate. <> Rather, it appears to play a role in motivating the design of the original position itself. Thus, they have maintained, there is less of a difference than Rawls indicates between average utility and his own view in respect of their riskiness. In this sense, intuitionists deny that it is possible to give a general solution to what Rawls calls the priority problem, that is, the problem of how to assign weight to conflicting considerations of justice. This is the flaw in Brian Barry's response to my earlier discussion (in The Appeal of Political Liberalism) of utilitarian participation in an overlapping consensus. In other words, there is a difference between maximizing average utility and maximizing utility, period. But the parties in the original position have to make a single decision that will never be repeated and that could have calamitous implications over the course of their entire lives. This is, he says, a peculiar state of affairs, which is to be explained by the fact that no constructive alternative theory has been advanced which has the comparable virtues of clarity and system and which at the same time allays these doubts (TJ 52). At the end of Sacagawea's journey, Clark offered to raise and educate her son. "A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution." Nozick suggests that Rawls can avoid this tension only by placing an implausible degree of weight on the distinction between persons and their talents.17 Michael Sandel, following up on Nozick's point, argues that Rawls has a theory of the person according to which talents are merely contingentlygiven and wholly inessential attributes rather than essential constituents of the self.18 For this reason, Sandel argues, Rawls does not see the distinctness of persons as violated by the idea of treating the distribution of talents as a common asset. 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. His primary goal is no longer to develop his two principles as an alternative to utilitarianism, but rather to explain how a just and stable liberal society can be established and sustained in circumstances marked by reasonable disagreement about fundamental moral and philosophical matters. Rawls's claim to have outlined a theoryjustice as fairnessthat is superior to utilitarianism has generated extensive debate. There are really two questions here. For pertinent discussion, see, Rawls gives his most extended defence of his emphasis on the basic structure in The Basic Structure as Subject, which is included in PL as Lecture VII. Rawls produced a number of arguments for this conclusion, some of which are quite technical. Rawls rejects utilitarianism because it is unstable. Result: Permitting some people to be better off than average resuls in the least-well-off Thomas Pogge, Three Problems with ContractarianConsequentialist Ways of Assessing Social Institutions. This does not mean that just institutions must give people what they independently deserve, but rather that, if just institutions have announced that they will allocate rewards in accordance with certain standards, then individuals who meet those standards can be said to deserve the advertised rewards. endobj Often, for example, we seem prepared to say that an individual deserves or has a right to some benefit, and that it is therefore just that he should get it, without inquiring into the larger distributional context. Principles are stable, according to Rawlss use of the term, if people who grow up in a society governed by them tend to accept and follow them. The handout gives two passages from Rawls. for if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individuals happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. One of these is that they are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission.