John Rawls Is an Awful Reasoner, part 2
In my last post (“John Rawls Is an Awful Reasoner”), I pointed out some egregious confusions in Rawls’ defense of the maximin decision rule. But that’s really not enough for me. I won’t be happy until I point out at least a few more egregious errors.
So let’s go on to Rawls’ defense of the whole hypothetical social contract idea. He spends enormous energy on talking about what people would choose in the Original Position (hereafter, the “OP”). But there are just a few extremely vague, hand-waving remarks here and there about why anyone should care about the OP in the first place. In other words, why think that the answer to that choice problem has anything to do with what is just or morally right?
There are basically three overlapping arguments that Rawls gives: the fairness argument, the reasonableness argument, and the constraints-on-reasoning argument. My paraphrases/summaries in italics:
I. The Fairness Argument
The OP embodies plausible substantive values, like fairness and equality, that we already accept as part of justice. It’s unfair for people to be advantaged due to luck, including the luck of being born to an upper-class family, or even the luck of being born with useful talents. The OP gets rid of that kind of unfair inequality.
Problems:
So the OP argument begs the question against libertarians and conservatives who don’t think that we should try to neutralize the effects of good or bad luck, particularly with regard to the distribution of talents.
More importantly, this argument requires a confusion between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for justice. The claim of the luck egalitarians, presumably, is that fairness or equality or something like that is a necessary condition for justice, not that it is sufficient. But then, the fact that the OP starts with a fair/equal situation doesn’t imply that it leads to a just outcome.
You could try claiming that fairness & initial equality is sufficient for justice. But then you’d have to refute all other norms of justice. For instance, you’d have to refute the idea of natural rights to property, the idea of justice requiring rewards proportional to merit, etc. You’d have to do this before relying on the OP. Rawls makes no attempt to do this (which of course cannot be done).
II. The Reasonableness Argument
Hypothetical agreement in the OP just shows us what is reasonable. If anyone in the OP would agree to X, then X is reasonable.
Problems:
Again, Rawls is confusing necessary with sufficient conditions. It’s plausible that reasonableness is necessary for justice, but not sufficient. If it’s merely necessary, then nothing follows about the outcome of the OP being just.
If Rawls wants to claim that it’s sufficient, then he again has to refute all other plausible requirements for justice.
What is reasonable in the OP is not necessarily reasonable in reality.
The fact that an arrangement would be reasonable doesn’t mean that you can forcibly impose it on other people.
To illustrate points (3)-(4), let me tell you about the time I ran into John Rawls on the street. We had the following exchange:
John: Yo Mike, you look really happy today. What’s up?
Me: Oh hey, John. Yeah, I’m pretty stoked. See this lottery ticket I have? I bought it yesterday for $3. Today, I found out that it’s the winning ticket. I’m going to be a millionaire!
J: Wow, that’s great! Here’s fifty bucks. Hand over the ticket.
M: Are you crazy? I’m not selling you this ticket for fifty bucks. I just told you, it’s worth a million dollars!
J: Well, if I’d asked you yesterday, before you knew whether it was a winner or a loser, would you have taken $50 for it?
M: Of course.
J: Okay, that settles it. That proves that my offer is reasonable. Since it’s reasonable, that means I can forcibly impose it on you. So give me the goddamn ticket now. [pulls out a gun and points it at me]
There are two problems: (1) Rawls’ offer is not in fact reasonable, even though it would have been reasonable if I didn’t know that I was a winner. (2) Even if it were reasonable, that doesn’t mean he can force me to accept it if I don’t want to.
III. The Constraints-on-Reasoning Argument
The OP is just a heuristic for making us reason in accordance with constraints on moral reasoning that we already intuitively accept. E.g., that one should not tailor moral principles to one’s own personal situation.
Problems:
Again, confusing necessary with sufficient conditions. Rawls speaks vaguely of “conditions” on moral reasoning, without ever specifying whether he means necessary conditions or sufficient conditions. Things like “not tailoring principles to one’s own situation” are plausibly necessary conditions for having a good argument for a principle of justice, not sufficient.
To make it sufficient, the constraints would have to include having full information about the correct values. But then, in order to use the OP, we would have to first figure out the complete, correct theory of values.
The argument here also requires confusing us with the parties in the OP. The fact that the parties in the OP satisfy the appropriate constraints does not mean that we satisfy those constraints when we are going through Rawls’ argument. So we may still be biased (as I rather think Rawls is) in arguing about what the parties would choose, etc. And that is what would actually matter. (By the same token, if the parties didn’t satisfy the constraints, we could still do so.)
By the way, some of the conditions in the OP obviously do not correspond to any plausible constraints on good moral reasoning. E.g., that the parties should be selfish, or that they should not know how many people are in each social class. These conditions were obviously just inserted to try to avoid coming out with utilitarianism.
Now, as in the case of the mistakes about maximin, these are not just a matter of differing intuitions or differing ways of weighing a complex body of evidence. These are egregious errors in reasoning. Confusing necessary conditions with sufficient conditions is really not something that a professional philosopher should do, let alone the most respected philosopher of the past century. It also isn’t something that other philosophers should fail to notice, or should give the author a pass on.
* * *
Look, I understand how other philosophers feel. Wouldn’t it be interesting and just so intellectually cool if the answer to this a priori decision theory problem would tell us the nature of the just society? Especially if that answer was not just the simple, obvious answer of utilitarianism? So we sweep problems under the rug and contort ourselves enough to convince ourselves that maybe this approach could work.
When it comes to the question of why Rawls’ decision theory problem is relevant to justice, he waves his hand vaguely for a few sentences, then quickly moves on to the real fun: working out the decision theory problem (albeit incorrectly, as we saw last time).
But, unlike the profession of academic philosophy, I am able to separate “it would be cool if P” from “P”. Once I see that an argument doesn’t work, I’m not going to keep talking about it for 50 years, no matter how cool it would be if it worked.