John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (2020)
open.library.okstate.edu
open.library.okstate.edu
I read once about a young man who wanted to give away everything he had and go live with the poor and destitute. His uncle told him it would be much more compassionate if he got a job, made alot of money and have that away. I've thought about that alot. His uncle wasn't wrong. If we want to improve humanity as a whole we need alot more people working hard making a lot of money to improve things for everyone. But if no one gives everything away and goes to live in poverty... Something good is lost.
Someone down thread mentioned the obvious solution to the trolley problem being saving more lives. I agree, and also, someone has got to rail against the injustice of whole trolley situation to begin with.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is ethical utility can be good, and we should strain to be better.
Just my random thoughts after reading above.
As far as Nozick goes, I think Proudhon addressed that a century earlier.
That is false. You are a random person, with all of those characteristics decided by the proverbial roll of the dice.
No, not even close. Aversion to torture and torture doesn't. Need for air, water, food, hygiene, clothes, shelter, etc. doesn't.
it seems silly to believe that outcome to be impossible and erroneous to consider, when there are people out there actively working towards that objective.
Sometimes beliefs are more important than facts though. People in general may not have the depth of understanding you do.
Even if you've been lucky enough to have full baseline sensory & motor capabilities for most of your life, on a lifetime horizon chances are pretty good you will eventually develop issues with one or another and who knows what else.
> although he is popular among the younger generation of 'professional-class' capitalists.
This seems like an attempted ad hominem but makes me suspect you might not know who Proudhon is.
> makes me suspect you might not know who Proudhon is.
No, I know exactly who he is. Left libertarianism is ironically very popular among rich millenials & Gen Z, probably because it allows them to be cynical about all institutions when in reality governmental, collective action is the only realistic counter to capitalism.
What you said originally is that Proudhon is popular among a subclass of capitalists, which is a contradiction, being that he was an anti-capitalist. Now you're saying libertarian socialism is popular among a subset of rich people, which also seems pretty suspect at this point in time. Then you're giving an explanation of why this is the case but that also seems implausible and you give no argument or evidence for it (and honestly it just sounds like dismissive hand-waving)... Then you say collective action, exactly what Proudhon (and almost all libertarian socialists, including mutualists) argued for, is the alternative, which is also a contradiction: It can't be the alternative if it was part of the original position. What you're saying isn't making any sense to me...
Being a capitalist who thinks they believe in anti-capitalism may be hypocritical but it is not a logical impossibility.
> libertarian socialism is popular among a subset of rich people, which also seems pretty suspect at this point in time
What do you think is the median income of someone who knows who Proudhon even is? I will confess that I am absolutely speaking from anecdata, not from some income survey of Proudhon supporters, but anybody I have ever discussed him with has been quite well off.
Even most libertarian socialists seem to have been aware of this themselves. Straying from Proudhon, consider this essay (Appeal to the Young) [0] by Peter Kropotkin. Look at the audience he is writing to - it is precisely young, rich professionals!
> collective action, exactly what Proudhon (and almost all libertarian socialists, including mutualists) argued for, is the alternative, which is also a contradiction
That's fair enough, I should have been clearer - I was referring to hierarchical, centralized action as in the form of the state. The "governmental" was modifying the "collective," the comma was not operating as an "or" there.
[0]: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/appe...
I don't think it's hypocritical to not want to live in the system you have to live in.
> Even most libertarian socialists seem to have been aware of this themselves. Straying from Proudhon, consider this essay (Appeal to the Young) [0] by Peter Kropotkin. Look at the audience he is writing to - it is precisely young, rich professionals!
Kropotkin wasn't talking to Gen Z and millennials, which was your claim.
I mean I wish what you were saying were true, but I don't think you're going to find any polls that come even close to supporting popularity among those demographics right now. Maybe in the future.
> I was referring to hierarchical, centralized action as in the form of the state.
So, the opposite of collective action, just dominance by one group over the rest like we already have.
You were the one suggesting it was a contradiction, although I disagree that you have to be a capitalist (ie. have substantial ownership stakes in MOP, like many tech workers do) in our society.
> find any polls that come even close to supporting popularity
My claim is not that most affluent young people are Proudhon lovers (obviously that would be ridiculous, and I understand your ire if you thought that is what I am saying), but rather that most Proudhon lovers are affluent young people.
> the opposite of collective action, just dominance by one group over the rest like we already have.
Yes, that would be the (in my view naive) left libertarian view. I disagree that collective intrinsically means decentralized or non-hierarchical.
It is and then you equivocated on "capitalist." To ideologically be a capitalist and socialist is a literal contradiction. To own capital and be a socialist is not a literal contradiction, but could be hypocritical or not depending on other actions (Engels usually being considered not hypocritical, for example.) To participate in capitalism because one has no choice and be a socialist is never a contradiction or hypocritical.
> My claim is not that most affluent young people are Proudhon lovers (obviously that would be ridiculous, and I understand your ire if you thought that is what I am saying), but rather that most Proudhon lovers are affluent young people.
I see. My anecdata is quite different.. I see it mostly in blue collar jobs in the reunionization movements. Right now Starbucks is the big one, but a lot of burger flippers, clerks, mechanics, etc. I don't think you'd consider any of them rich or capitalists... I should mention that I actively follow these movements.
> I disagree that collective intrinsically means decentralized or non-hierarchical.
It's not really the will of the collective if it's not democratic and it can't be democratic if its hierarchical, wouldn't you say? Like maybe if you had arbitrary right of recall you could argue that, but even then I don't think so because the hierarchy can both manipulate wills of the subordinates (e.g. media) and also just ignore them. That's not very "collective." I mean I'd say hierarchy is definitively domination. Abandoning that is abandoning the meaning of the word... I guess you're right, people in political science do use the word like that, like how natioanlism can be a collectivism, but again I think that's equivocation or we're just talking about two different concepts using the same word.
I feel like it's not either-or, and that we ought to acknowledge that there's a very real information gathering / decision making problem that is in some cases but not others very neatly solved by markets. I don't see why market based systems that don't lead to systematic wealth accumulation are seen as unrealistic.
> why market based systems that don't lead to systematic wealth accumulation are seen as unrealistic.
You still have to resolve Nozick's wilt chamberlain problem and it's not always unclear how that works.
If it isn't possible to accumulate wealth in your market, what is the incentive for participants? Personally, I think inherited wealth is a big, big problem, but also one that can hopefully be eliminated without too much of an impact on the functioning of markets.... while people do accumulate wealth in order to pass on to their children, I am not sure the primary reason people accumulate millions of dollars is just to pass it on to their kids.
Obviously the answer is to produce things that they and others want. That's a sufficient incentive proven by everyone that does subsistence farming or has a hobby... We don't need profit and capital accumulation to survive and do cool shit.
Itself is supposed to be a thought experiment, it has no pretention or suggestion that the imagined design could work. Buuuuuuut, tons of people confuse the two and they start think the society can work as how they imagined.
It's like when someone designs a machine, he/she begins with: let's assume there is no gravity. Well, in science actually you can do a thought experiment like that, but that's not how you design a machine! You need to know what the reality is and work with the reality!
If you want to design a society, you need to start with knowledge about the human nature and the nature of a society. You can't just assume everyone is selfless, or assume nobody is going to kill/rob anybody, or assume everyone will work hard, or assume everyone has the same capabilities, or assume a community of a hundred will work like a community of a thousand. There are lots of fundamental knowledge you need to learn. While you are learning more and more about human nature and societies, you will find out there are lot of common features across cultures and societies, and you will find out the whole idea of imagining a society with your simple rule of justice is just so superficial that it's totally laughable.
That's what makes the whole concept nonsensical. This implicitly assumes the existence of a soul. If 'you' were born as someone else, you wouldn't be you! The only actually coherent thought experiment is being born the same, just in a different environment, but that leads to completely different conclusions. Wealth is an external property, but intelligence, race, gender - aren't.
Seems like there should be a lesson in that, but I'm not quite sure what it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harsanyi
Rawls for some reason focused only on "within a country" so he failed to recognize that the true application of veil of ignorance should push us towards open borders and more aid to developing nations.
ps - "veil of ignorance" is probably the best perspective to take when thinking about all the "trolley problems" - because it leads you to recognize the correct (utilitarian) solution (of saving more people).
While the standard trolley problem lends itself to utilitarian analysis, things get far more complicated with variations such as involuntary organ donation while the donor is still living (i.e. kill one person to get a heart, lungs, kidneys, etc. which can save multiple lives).
> Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
> Other 558 / 1803 (30.9%)
> Accept or lean toward: consequentialism 435 / 1803 (24.1%)
> Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics 406 / 1803 (22.5%)
> Accept or lean toward: deontology 404 / 1803 (22.4%)
1. https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Philosophy+f...
The real problem that Rawls's theory (and other alternatives) solves is the issue of aggregation in itself. If you could save one life at the cost of many, many headaches, a utilitarianist must say that, given sufficiently many minor headache sufferers, you must prevent the headaches. This seems implausible — some believe that no matter how many headaches occur, you must save the person's life instead.
Also, this is a nitpick, but it is a common misconception that trolley problems are problems on whether you should turn the trolley or not. In most trolley scenarios that philosophers study, the correct answer (to turn or not) is really quite clear, and ethical theories tend to arrive at the same answer. The real trolley problem is a meta-problem: why is it in situation X we think it acceptable to turn the trolley, but in situation Y which is very similar, we think it not acceptable? What is the morally distinguishing factor between X and Y?
For example, we think that it is appropriate for a bystander to turn a trolley to kill one, saving five lives. But most philosophers also think it inappropriate for a doctor to kill one healthy patient, harvesting her organs to transplant into five sick people, saving their lives (your example). In both circumstances we kill one to save five, but the second seems unacceptable. What is the morally distinguishing factor? And what are the morally distinguishing factors in more complicated trolley scenarios?
Rawls discussed this in the later work "The Law of Peoples".
I'll agree to international aid, but why open borders? Plenty of people enjoy having a national identity (no man is an island), and open borders essentially forbid that. You may as well demand parents not show favor to their own children compared to the children of others.
Because it's in everyone's interest. The need to migrate can arise unexpectedly at any time.. natural disasters, wars, climate change, economic collapse, etc, etc, etc. You want to promote norms that will help you if you were in the same situation, which you can be quite easily.
Humans are very complex.
People consistently overestimate (by many orders of magnitude) the amount of their taxes that goes to foreign aid. Many people in the US are reluctant to have open borders because of racism. But most moral frameworks would endorse open borders - and there is tremendous economic benefit to open borders as well. Consider https://openborders.info/
Or, because they understand lifeboats.
Or, because they know that open borders screw people on the bottom of the economic ladder.
Or, because they ask "why didn't those people fix their country?" or "if the US takes the best people from that country, who's going to fix it for the ones who stay?"
That said, it's important in any moral discussion to attribute immorality to someone with whom you disagree.
> That said, it's important in any moral discussion to attribute immorality to someone with whom you disagree.
This kind of comment does not belong here.
How would open borders in a country be necessarily beneficial to people in the country?
Are you presuming that if Country A opens its borders, all other countries will?
And, considering first world countries and the countries from which people who would benefit from borders being open, is it likely that conditions in the first world countries will degrade to the point that it would be advantageous for them to immigrate to one of the countries whose citizens would benefit from open borders?
The benefits of immigration have been addressed many places. It works fine in Europe. The point is not to open only one countries borders though, but all of them, because that's what's really in everyone's interest.
> Are you presuming that if Country A opens its borders, all other countries will?
No, I'm not presuming, I'm saying that's what is in everyone's interests to advocate for.
> And, considering first world countries and the countries from which people who would benefit from borders being open, is it likely that conditions in the first world countries will degrade
The point is to help people, which is not free. Anyway, you should think about what makes such degradation possible in the first place. If things would be more equal otherwise, then clearly borders are exploitative in the first place. In any case, everything would reach an equilibrium in the end. It'd be a free market of location.
> The benefits of immigration have been addressed many places.
It is true that immigration has some positive benefits in many cases, but this does not necessarily (which was in the question) demonstrate that it is net beneficial.
> It works fine in Europe.
Can you put "fine" in quantitative terms?
How did you measure this?
How did you measure it against the counterfactual?
> The point is not to open only one countries borders though, but all of them, because that's what's really in everyone's interest.
It's fine to hold an opinion or belief that "that's what's really in everyone's interest", but there is an important difference between belief and knowledge.
Are immigrants fungible? If not, then why is it wrong to discriminate?
> In any case, everything would reach an equilibrium in the end.
Which is down for some people.
"If everyone can't have it, then no one can" is pretty much a guarantee of slower progress. (You can't start with VWs for everyone.)
> This kind of comment does not belong here.
It's okay to call people racist and stupid but what I said is inappropriate?
As to "end up in the same situation", how will a typical US poor person end up in Guatemala "at any time"?
War, climate change, economic collapse, etc. Black swans happen. All empires collapse.
More to the point, those are unlikely possibilities (in a given lifetime), while the negative effects of unlimited immigration on US poor are pretty much guaranteed.
> while the negative effects of unlimited immigration on US poor are pretty much guaranteed.
> More to the point, those are unlikely possibilities (in a given lifetime),
There are no probabilities, small or large, for black swan events. That's the point. Most of the things I listed though are inevitable though, so the unpredictability is more about when than if.
You keep saying this like it's a fact but there's an entire continent as a counterexample and a lot of research on the benefits.
Which pretty much guarantees that said "wherever is good" ceases to be good.
> There are no probabilities, small or large, for black swan events. That's the point.
Actually, there are. The probability of a black swan event is unknown in some sense, but we do know one of the bounds.
Or rather, we do know something about how often they occur. We may under-estimate, but the fact that it hasn't happened often enough for us to have good bounds is, in itself, information about "how often".
But, let's run the experiment. Let Europe take in everyone who wants in and we'll see how things work out in a couple of decades.
If you're right, Europe will finally be able break free of US hegemony. If I'm right,...
And most people tend to speak in forms where their statements can be technically correct yet misinformative, potentially missing out on the opportunity to improve upon the tendencies you point out.
For example, if you were to convert "many" to a quantitative term such as "% of people in the US reluctant to have open borders because of racism" or "% of people in the US reluctant to have open borders, by reason (of which one is racism)", it would be much more difficult to be correct.
I doubt you speak this way with malicious intent, but the unknown effects remain. And this is just one bug among thousands.
I was trying to make the generic point that besides the reasons people give against a policy, the actual reasons may be different than those voiced. I would not be surprised if of those opposing immigration, at least 50% hold different attitudes for non-white immigrants.
And so as to give some deeper insight into the motivation for my question: I often wonder....might the degree to which agents within a system communicate accurately (both in the sending and the receiving) have any substantial effect upon events and the evolving state within the system over time?
Say, if we consider two planets: one whose inhabitants speak "highly" accurately, and one who inhabitants speak.....well, like we do here on planet Earth, circa 2022 (opinions are facts, fantasy is reality, etc - and everyone does it, despite fantasies to the contrary) - all other things being equal, might this cultural norm contribute to some of the issues on this planet that people complain about constantly?
To be clear: I am asking in general, not as an attack on your comments here.
Rawls himself extensively discussed the so-called 'cosmopolitan' critique and it not as if this objection was unanticipated.
Sadly, that series has ended, but there's a lot of good stuff: https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas-seri...
I want a society designed for the benefit of the good, of the excellent, of the virtuous. We should of course have humanity and mercy for everyone.
Nothing about his position is saying that you must design a society specifically for the benefit of "the dishonest, the slothful, and the wicked," if such a design would be worse off under the difference principle. Indeed, many societies would benefit from punishing or disincentivizing such behavior.
What Rawls critiques is the (Christian) notion that the slothful are apriori deserving of punishment or the hard-working apriori deserving of reward, if such a reward structure is not one that would benefit a society of free individuals.
It's not designed to benefit them, it's designed to benefit the least fortunate.
Put it this way: what's the "harm" of dishonesty? If a dishonest person ends up being the worst off in society, then dishonesty has no advantage. Can you even say in that case that dishonesty causes harm? Whereas if someone uses dishonesty to gain personal advantage, then that person is not the worst off in society, and so the society is not designed to benefit them. You might even say that the society is designed to benefit the victims of dishonesty, not the perpetrators.
1) 1% of people earn $1 per day, and 99% of people earn $100 per day 2) Everyone earns $1.01 per day
I think most people, myself included, would take their chances with the first option. The Veil of Ignorance is a useful thought experiment, but I don't think many people would consider a simple Minimax algorithm to be reasonable, and would take into account the well-being of the average person as well.
How do you measure this? I think if you could measure subjective suffering, the situation may be better. Did you assume that people needed the extra $50 for something?
Do you have any evidence for the claim that minmaxing causes a steep drop off in overall expected utility? I'm not sure if research has been done about this with traffic lights, but I think that could be a good case study about this. Minmax for traffic light timings would mean minimizing the maximum wait time at a traffic light, though I could see how such a strategy might hurt the overall throughput of the intersection. In the extreme case, you have one granny trying to cross a 6-lane stroad during rush hour; in the pure throughput model, the road would never stop for granny and in the minmax model, she would only need to wait about as long as it takes her to cross the road. Obviously, different models would still allow granny to cross the road eventually and maybe with less of a throughput hit than pure minmax. All of this is speculation though and I'm curious what the throughput hit would be for minmax.
My evidence is just experience with optimization/utility theory. If you're looking for a paper describing this one takeaway out of thousands from this body of theory, I'm not sure what it's called.
In general, any strategic constraint reduces EV, unless the constraint happens to already be a component of the optimal strategy. That doesn't tell you how steep the dropoff is, just that it exists. Determining the variance/EV tradeoff precisely depends entirely on the structure of the optimization space.
However, any complex optimization space exhibits essentially the same behavior; crushing the outcome distribution to be super narrow (latency, wealth, ROI, test scores, etc.) is typically only possible at great cost to the median and average cases.
Minimax is emphatically not even remotely close to EV maximization, especially for high-dimensional optimization spaces with sharp risk/return curves as I described.
Unsure why you would think I was expecting a NYT article (except as some weird cultural signaling point?), I was thinking more along the lines of a welfare economics or econometrics journal article.
Apologies if this seems harsh, but people's habit of asking for a source on every original or propositional claim on this website really bugs me. Sometimes people are sharing new observations!
Not going to keep responding, I've said all I wanted to.
I am not really clear on what background you could have such a background but be unable to generate this fact, Wikipedia seems to suggest it strongly when it points out that "In non-zero-sum games, this is not generally the same as minimizing the opponent's maximum gain, nor the same as the Nash equilibrium strategy" [2].
This isn't a personal attack, but you really could have got this one solved by looking at either the thread or Wikipedia, but chose to assign someone else research homework instead. If you're curious, check! It's really fun and you learn a lot.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588384 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax#Maximin
Then there are purely distributive arguments: if everyone wants to pay a bunch of money to go see Lewis Hamilton race, thereby enriching Lewis and producing an unequal distribution of goods, can we reasonably say this situation is unjust?[1]
The literature on replies to Rawls is extremely rich, and Rawls himself went on to respond to critics and amend his views in 1993's Political Liberalism. The influence of his earlier work has been longer lived in the public mind than in his own.
[0] Usually communitarians, especially Charles Taylor.
[1] This is a variation of Robert Nozick's "Wilt Chamberlain argument", updated to use my preferred sports star.
An unequal distribution of goods is not, per se, unjust. It merely needs to be justified on the basis that it makes everyone collectively better off, not on the basis that someone deserves more goods for being born into better circumstances.
Some degree of unequal distribution is probably justified because it is necessary to incentivize people born with the potential for running fast to put in the work necessary to achieve that potential.
I think we can. The individuals involved in the transaction all consent to it, but they are not the only ones affected. Lewis Hamilton being rich (beyond a certain level) has a detrimental affect on all in society as it undermines the market system we rely on to drive our economy towards productive ends.
I think you are reasoning backwards (from the preferred social/political outcome, rather than starting with the ethical principles that make one social/political outcome preferred over another).
Dunno why my reasoning is “backwards”. Politics from first principles is fruitless and I don’t intend to play that game. But he can play it if he wishes.
Huemer is definitely writing in a polemical style that might turn some folks off, but I think the basic point -- that Rawls contorts himself to avoid a framework that just boils down to 'maximize utility' -- is more or less on point.
Maximin is also pretty widely accepted in software engineering (though modified to use percentiles) since the 99th percentile response time is much more important than the average response time.
It clearly doesn't though and is specifically constructed to avoid overfeeding utility monsters.
I don't agree with Rawls that it tends to imply maximin (most humans aren't that risk averse) but it doesn't imply maximising expected utility either (it's pretty rational to prefer 'levelling down' to an incredibly unequal society with a low chance of elite status). And whilst the implied risk of the "veil of ignorance" is a hypothetical thing (as are many utilitarian arguments and arguments against utilitarianism) it underlines the fact humans reason differently about value when downside risks are significant.
I don't care how smart you are, if you literally throw out all of our societal standards and think you can do better using your imagination, you're a fool. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water, our justice today has a lot of good ideas. If we want reform, that involves extracting the good ideas and getting rid of the bad ones. Otherwise we're not reforming justice, instead we're coming up with our own standards that we pulled out of our arse.
You should try to think of a more charitable interpretation of the idea. Here's a thought: in a society as unequal as ours, with many people in power satisfied with the status quo, what Rawls is asking them to do is to imagine that they could have been born randomly into any of the families in our society.
Imagine you are not born yet. You do not yet exist. You can be born at any location, of any race, with any birth defect, of any gender, of any societal class. Now, what kind of societal structure would you like to exist if you had to be born into such world? Would you be ok with large wealth/social inequality if you could be born into the bottom rung? Or about survival of the fittest without collective support with the chance you might be born with a inhibiting birth defect?
There was a lot I didn't like about how that class was taught, but this thought experiment alone made it worth taking.
Much like how the strategies of prisoners dilemma change If you are playing an iterated game.
For your birth defect example, consider 2 societies, where 1 bans cousin marriage and the other encourages it. In 50 years time the chance of being born with a birth defect is 5x higher in 1 than the other.
That wouldn't matter for the first generation but imagine you will be born to a random generation between now and 1000 years from now. Which do you choose?
Once you take into account time, then growth, social institutions and incentives come into play. You may prefer to bet on a much richer, healthier society that had a bit less equality or freedom in the past for a while.
Rawls wasn't proposing throwing anything out. He was asking the question, if a bunch of gods got together and set down some social rules under these conditions, what would the society they created look like if they didn't want to end up screwing themselves? His answer was "something like liberal democracy". I don't know if he'd be right, or even if we should pattern our society in the manner of these hypothetical gods. It may be asking the wrong question entirely. Current trends in social justice, for instance, favor rules oriented toward payback for past injustices toward real groups.
Rawls likely would have excluded sexual orientation and gender identity.
It also requires imagination some people don’t have: “I’m a member of the elite caste, but if I were a member of the lower caste I would accept my position.” And perhaps they would have.