This drains away much of the motivation for a teleological view. Instead, the thought is that a system that treats the distribution of talents as a collective asset under the terms of the difference principle, is actually required if each person is to have a chance of leading a good life. . After reviewing John Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice and then examining Michael Sandel's and Robert Nozick's criticisms of those Render date: 2023-05-01T02:24:57.324Z If they were engaged in an activity where there would be repeated plays and no particular loss would be devastating, like low stakes gambling, it would make sense for them to maximize expected utility. 1. These people will inevitably conclude that his criticisms of utilitarianism do not go far enough, and that his own theory exhibits some of the same faults that they see in the utilitarian view. 11 0 obj )", Consider this. The force of this challenge, moreover, is largely independent of Rawls's claims about the justificatory significance of the original position construction. It is, therefore, doubly unclear how classical utilitarianism could participate in the overlapping consensus Rawls envisions; for it rejects the fundamental ideas that form the basis of the consensus, and the arguments that begin from those ideas are said to result in its own repudiation. Has Rawls given reasons to prefer his principles of justice over something like these? The possibility of such a consensus lies at the heart of his answer to the question of how a just and stable liberal society is possible in conditions of reasonable pluralism. Since there is, accordingly, no inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his criticism of utilitarianism, there is no need for him to take drastic metaphysical measures to avoid it.21. In this essay, I will begin by reviewing Rawls's main arguments against utilitarianism. Rawls argues that this commitment to unrestricted aggregation can be seen as the result of extending to society as a whole the principle of rational choice for one man (TJ 267). WebRawls explains in A Theory of Justice that he is against utilitarianism because this philosophical system bases itself on aggregate happiness, not justice or fairness. In the parts we did read, Rawls argued that they would have decisive reasons not to follow this chain of reasoning and so they have decisive reasons to reject utilitarianism. He says that the choice of principles should not depend on the parties' special attitudes toward risk, and that the veil of ignorance therefore prevents them from knowing whether or not they have a characteristic aversion to taking chances (TJ 172). This leads him to the unexpected conclusion that the classical view is the ethic of perfect altruists, by contrast with the principle of average utility which, from the perspective afforded by the original position, emerges as the ethic of a single rational individual (with no aversion to risk) (TJ 189). Intuitionists do not believe that there are any priority rules that can enable us to resolve such conflicts; instead, we have no choice but to rely on our intuitive judgment to strike an appropriate balance in each case. Despite his opposition to utilitarianism, however, it seems evident from the passages I have quoted that he also regards it as possessing theoretical virtues that he wishes to emulate. In, It is worth noting that, in his earlier paper, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. If that association is unwarranted, then the contrast between the classical and average views may be less dramatic than Rawls suggests, and the claims of the original position as an illuminating analytic device may to that extent be reduced. 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. Thus his official arguments against utilitarianism take the form of arguments purporting to show that it would be rejected by the parties. Then enter the name part Rawls goes on to suggest that if the terms of the original position were altered in such a way that the parties were conceived of as perfect altruists, that is, as persons whose desires conform to the approvals (TJ 1889) of an impartial, sympathetic spectator, then classical utilitarianism would indeed be adopted. Indeed, I believe that those two arguments represent his most important and enduring criticisms of the utilitarian tradition. It is Rawls, after all, who says that a distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations, and who insists that there is simply no answer to the abstract question of whether one distribution is better than another. Rawls hopes to derive principles of social justice that rational persons would Furthermore, Rawls asserts, the possibility that the society might allow some members to lose out would cause its members to lose self-esteem. Yet both the Rawlsian and the utilitarian accounts are indeed holistic, and this may be part of what Nozick finds objectionable about them. For instance, I suspect that most of us believe that something like the following is more plausible than Rawlss two principles (this is very rough). Joshua Cohen, Pluralism and Proceduralism. % is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings 3 0 obj At any rate, it has attracted far less controversy than Rawls's claim that the parties would reject the principle of average utility. Although the case for holism has considerable force, and many of our intuitions about distributive justice are indeed holistic, there are other, nonholistic ideas about justice that also have widespread intuitive support. 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. One day, their boat overturned in a sudden storm. His own theory of justice, one might say, aims not to resist the pressures toward holism but rather to tame or domesticate them: to provide a fair and humane way for a liberal, democratic society to accommodate those pressures while preserving its basic values and maintaining its commitment to the inviolability of the individual. This is what leads Rawls to make the claim that this form of utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons. That might be the correct answer. Around the year 1788, a Shoshone girl named Sacagawea, also known as Bird Woman, was born. . Finality means that the parties can only choose principles that are final: that was one of the conditions on the original position. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. 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. This is a point that he emphasizes in response to Habermas (PL 42133), and it explains what he means when he says in the index to PL (455) that justice is always substantive and never purely procedurala remark that might otherwise seem inconsistent with the role that Theory assigns to pure procedural justice. 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. It is not clear, however, what happened to the valiant woman who added so much to Lewis and Clark's expedition. Nevertheless, the impulse to treat some form of utilitarianism as a candidate for inclusion in the consensus, when considered in the context of Rawls's aims in Political Liberalism and his sympathy for certain aspects of the utilitarian doctrine, no longer seems mysterious.33 Whether or not the tensions between that impulse and his forceful objections to utilitarianism can be satisfactorily resolved, they provide a salutary reminder of the complexity of Rawls's attitude toward modern moral philosophy's predominant systematic theory. This possibility arises, Rawls suggests, because utilitarianism relies entirely on certain standard assumptions (TJ 159) to demonstrate that its calculations will not normally support severe restrictions on individual liberties. The second is his agreement with the utilitarian view that commonsense precepts of justice have only a derivative (TJ 307) status and must be viewed as subordinate (TJ 307) to a higher criterion (TJ 305). There is still a problem, of course, given his insistence in Theory that neither classical nor average utilitarianism can put fundamental liberal values on a sufficiently secure footing. Each sentence below refers to a numbered sentence in the passage. Web- For utilitarians justice is not an independent moral standard, distinct from their general principle, but rather they believe that maximization of happiness ultimately determines The arguments set out in section 29 explicitly invoke considerations of moral psychology that are not fully developed until Part III. Thus he hopes to produce a solution to the priority problem that offers an alternative to the utilitarian solution but remains a constructive solution nonetheless. Thus it would not occur to them to acknowledge the principle of utility in its hedonistic form. He also suggests that part of the attraction of monistic accounts, and of teleological theories that incorporate such accounts, may derive from a conviction that they enable us to resolve a fundamental problem about the nature of rational deliberation. In Rawlss lingo, we have a highest order interest in the development of our two moral powers, the powers to have a rational plan of life and a sense of justice. Since he also believed that personal and political liberty are needed for personal and moral self-development, he thought that the parties would give priority to individual liberty over other goals, such as increasing economic opportunity or wealth. John Rawls (b. 1921, d. 2002) was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition. His theory of justice as fairness describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system. it might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits Holism about distributive justice draws support from two convictions. Rawls claims that these considerations favor his principles over utilitarianism because it is possible that some people would find life in a utilitarian society intolerable. According to Rawls, they would reject utilitarianism and endorse justice as fairness. Utilitarians are all about increasing happiness, after all, and assaulting peoples self-esteem or pushing them to regard social life as unacceptable are very strange ways of maximizing happiness. To save content items to your account, WebQuestion: John Rawls rejects utilitarianism because: 1) that maximizing the total well-being of society could permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits. As Rawls says: A distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations. endobj We know that Jean Baptiste grew into an accomplished and successful man. In Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical he describes it as one of the faults of TJ that the account of goodness developed in Part III often reads as an account of the complete good for a comprehensive moral conception.15 And in Political Liberalism, he recasts the argument against monistic conceptions of the good; the point is no longer that they are mistaken but rather that no such conception can serve as the basis for an adequate conception of justice in a pluralistic society.16. Rather, the original position has been structured so that utilitarianism is guaranteed to lose. It will depend, for Rawls, on whether the assignment is part of an overall distribution that is produced by a basic structure conforming to his two principles. One of these arguments seeks to undercut the main reason the parties might have for choosing average utilitarianism. Rawls's conjecture is that the contract doctrine properly worked out can fill this gap (TJ 52). Rawlss single-minded focus on presenting an alternative to utilitarianism is a blessing and a curse. At the very least, his argument challenges utilitarians to supply a comparably plausible and detailed account of utilitarian social and economic institutions and of the processes by which, in a society regulated by utilitarian principles, motives would develop that were capable of generating ongoing support for those institutions and principles. Consequently, Rawls reasons, it makes no sense to take the riskier rather than the safer option. This extension to society as a whole of the principle of choice for a single individual is facilitated, Rawls believes, by treating the approval of a perfectly sympathetic and ideally rational and impartial spectator as the standard of what is just. Thus, if we are to find a constructive solution to the priority problem, we must have recourse to a higher principle to adjudicate these conflicts. endobj . In other words, they turn on the possibility that the way to maximize average utility across a whole society will involve leaving some with significantly less liberty, opportunities, or wealth than others have. A Theory of Justice tackles many things. Against this line of thought, Rawls argues, first, that there simply is no dominant end: no one overarching aim for the sake of which all our other ends are pursued. The other two involve trying to show that the parties would choose Rawlss principles of justice in order to avoid results that they would find unacceptable. We know how the argument will go from the utilitarian side. In Political Liberalism (xviixx and xliixliv) Rawls says that the account of stability given in Part III of the Theory is defective, because it tests the rival conceptions of justice by asking whether the wellordered society associated with each such conception would continue to generate its own support over time and, in so doing, this account implicitly assumes that in a wellordered society everyone endorses the conception on the basis of a shared comprehensive moral doctrine. The argument is not presented to the parties in the original position as a reason for rejecting utilitarianism or teleological views in general. (By the way, Judge Richard Posner, who might be called Jeremy Bentham redivivus, accepts just this view of rape in his Sex and Reason. to the dominant utilitarianism of the tradition (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.). And since there is no dominant end of all rational human action, Rawls continues, it is implausible to suppose that the good is monistic. d) It Rather, it appears to play a role in motivating the design of the original position itself. Rawlss Egalitarianism reaffirms the centrality of one of the twentieth centurys foremost political philosophers in informing our thinking about the twin issues of poverty and inequality that confront us afresh in the post-pandemic world. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox. My hope is to arrive at a balanced assessment of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism. Perhaps so, but Rawls shouldn't concede too much here. Doing this would achieve greater satisfaction for a greater number of people. Instead, the aim is to show that choosing as if one had such as aversion is rational given the unique features of . If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. However, I believe that Sandel's analysis raises the metaphysical stakes unnecessarily and that the tension between Rawls's principles and his criticism of utilitarianism can be dissolved without appealing to either of the two theories of the person that Sandel invokes. There is no more reason for the parties to agree to this criterion than to maximize any other particular objective (TJ 563). Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. She \rule {2cm}{0.15mm} plants and animals, helping the explorers to describe the wildlife. The parties have to avoid choosing principles that they might find unacceptable in the real world, outside the original position. Utilitarianism seeks to answer the question: how can we maximize people's, "A utilitarian would have to answer that the pain to the victim outweighs the pleasure to the rapist. The fact that Rawls agrees with utilitarianism about the desirability of identifying a clear and constructive solution to the priority problem leads more or less directly to the second point of agreement. Rawls would tell the parties in the original position these things about our values and they would use that as a reason to reject utilitarianism. Finally, it should give a list of individual liberties great, but not absolute, weight.. Although I have argued that this temptation should be resisted, it seems fair to say that the Rawlsian and utilitarian approaches to justice have some important elements in common and that these elements run counter to one deeply entrenched tendency in our moral thought. <> If it is asked in the abstract whether one distribution of a given stock of things to definite individuals with known desires and preferences is better than another, then there is simply no answer to this question. T or F: Libertarians involves a commitment to leaving market relations - buying,selling, and other exchanges - totally unrestricted. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. In response, he argues that a benevolent person fitting this description would actually prefer justiceasfairness to classical utilitarianism. Suppose Rawls is right and people find it unacceptable to lose out in these ways, such that they will be desperately unhappy or even rebellious. But this is no reason not to try (TJ viii). There was a handout for this class: 24.RawlsVsUtilitiarianism.handout.pdf. The principle of utility, as it has come to be interpreted at least, is a comprehensive standard that is used to assess actions, institutions, and the distribution of resources within a society.25 Rawls's concentration on the basic structure and his use of pure procedural justice to assess distributions give his theory a greater institutional focus.
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