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BMc2020

Consider Rawls’s most famous concept: the original position. Perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary philosophy, it goes like this: imagine you are with a group of people who are tasked to select principles of justice to regulate the fundamental institutions of society. The plot twist, however, is you don’t know anything about yourself. You agree to step behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and pretend that you don’t know your sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness or anything that might distinguish you from others.

Someone else put it a little more concisely: Work to create the world you would want to be born into if you didn't know in advance who you were going to be.

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I like Kant's formulation of this sentiment better, his categorical imperative:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

i.e., act according to a principle that makes sense for everyone else also to follow. If you jump the subway turnstile to avoid payment, what happens if everyone does likewise?

Very parallel with the maxim (which, i confess, havent fully figured out, yet, but I find somewhat amusing)

(P. C. Hodgell) "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."

This is not the same thing at all, and Kant was not a socialist.

Rules that are fair for everyone regardless of sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness etc? Must be socialism.

Both a communist and a capitalist will (likely) agree with your statement, it's just that each will understand the word "fair" differently.

Rawls' "thought experiment" is used to prove that all people would choose socialism. It's an explicitly political use of begging the question, as I said.

Kant was a moral philosopher. There is a difference. And there's a reason why Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant never came up with Rawl's "veil of ignorance": because it is itself ignorant.

You seem to be very sensitive to the threat of socialism.

How is Rawls’ view ignorant?

Fair rules that apply to everyone doesn't have any organized political opposition. The debate is about redistributing the fruits of labor.

I think Kant's idea is important in its own right, but very different from what Rawls is talking about.

Kant is addressing the need for a moral philosophy to be coherent, in that you have to play out the consequences of what it would lead to. However, you are not asked to put yourself in anyone else's shoes; if you were a rich and powerful person, you might want to act in deference to rich and powerful people, and think it would be great for everyone to act that way universally.

Rawls is asking you to create a rule book the you would be willing to follow no matter who you were in society. If you are rich, you are supposed to imagine if you would still support the rules if you were poor. So from our previous example, would you want everyone to defer to rich and powerful people if you were poor?

The important aspect of The Original Position is that you are supposed to come up with a system where you wouldn't be against it no matter who you were in society.

No, Kant specifically says that we don't have to consider consequences. His categorical imperative isn't about consequences. It's concerns whether actions, when univerisalized, contradict themselves. In reality, actions aren't universalized, so it's not about considering actual consequences.

It's often said that Rawls is a restatement of Kant for modern liberals, though there's plenty of dissent over that claim. Besides, Rawls restricted himself to political philosophy whereas Kant is talking about knowledge and morality (and also politics).

I agree with others saying it's not the same thing at all.

For one thing, Kant's formulation has a problem that Rawls' doesn't: at what level of detail should you make your categorical imperatives?

Is there always a moral obligation to obey the law, or to be truthful? Clearly not, there are obvious counterexamples to both. You could try to refine your rules-based morality system, but you're never going to account for all possible edge-cases.

It's not the same thing as saying hold yourself to the moral standard that you wish were applied to everyone.

As I understand it: You don't make your categorical imperative (its just one btw), and it has nothing to do with moral, law or truth. And yes, it covers all edge cases but it won't work because they can't build that many Porsches.

Successful leaders would probably refine it and create subcategorical categories that can be handled in ways that are a better fit for their special local case of imperativeness, which means you might still be on the right track after all

> just one btw

You're right, yes, I should have gathered that from both the name and the use of that maxim, which is clearly singular.

> it has nothing to do with moral, law or truth

That's not right, it's talking about morality.

> it covers all edge cases but it won't work because they can't build that many Porsches

I'm not sure what you mean here.

I don't see a serious refutation of my main point. Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail, and trying to cover all edge-cases in a rules-based morality is a losing battle.

From a quick look at Wikipedia [0] it seems Kant's categorical imperative falls at the first hurdle - he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Decepti...

Moral can only be singular too if it exists, so what choice can there be?

> That's not right, it's talking about morality.

Not quite right then - 2 out of 3 aint bad

>I'm not sure what you mean here.

it is something of a hunch that categorically noone is going to have a porsche or everyone. I will rephrase that maybe.

>Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail,

Which detail? how does it matter what kind of food you give a hungry person?

>rules-based morality is a losing battle

Now were talking - you want something that will work with real humans while I am admiring the concept.

>he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.

exactly - the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth

The difference is that Kant's categorical imperative allows for you to wish for all women to be slaves. Rawls' doesn't since you may be a woman and you have no way of kniwing behind the veil of ignorance.

I don't believe that your concise form follows from the original form.

Furthermore I think that this specific misunderstanding is a huge conflict point in politics, and contributes significantly to things like the left-right divide.

The fundamental difference being that one can realise that, statistically, they have a significant risk of being in a "losing group", whilst still thinking that designing a society with such "losing groups" results in a better system overall.

The stripped back "spherical cow" form of it would be as follows: imagine a society in which you can be born as one of two people. A person requires 80 potatoes in order to survive.

One of those people is capable of farming a hundred potatoes per week, which is enough to feed one person but not two (if shared, both will die). The other of those people is capable of farming only fifty potatoes per week, which is enough to feed no-one, and if shared is still not sufficient as a total of 160 potatoes is required in order to feed both.

The optimal way to design that society then is to allow the second person to starve and the first person to live alone, even though in this thought experiment there is perhaps a 50% likelihood that you "spawn" as the person who will be put to death, because the alternative is that you die regardless.

Extrapolating from there you can have other examples - say that 99% of people are green, and 1% blue, but green people are deathly afraid of blue people to the extent that they will develop anxiety and depression if the blue people are around. The best society is clearly then one where the two groups are segregated and do not interact, even if that might suck if you're born as a blue person "cut off from the world", because otherwise it sucks regardless.

Succinctly - it basically begs the question - it assumes that equality and fairness is somehow obvious and a priori but it's really not at all.

You can divide the cake into two pieces anyhow but I will choose first.

You can't run the divide-and-choose algorithm from the original position, because you can't have one person design society and the other put them into it. Might make a good short story though.

In both stories, the idea is to keep all parties honest in the transaction.

Controversially, Rawls asserts that you clearly want to maximize the worst outcome in this case (the "maximin" principle). Economists strongly disagree as it doesn't take into account probability. If you have the potential to live in Junkland, where life is moderately unhappy for everyone, or in Omelas, which is utopia for 1,000,000 individuals and pure torture for 1, Rawls asserts that you should obviously choose Mediocreland. But if you are randomly assigned a place in Omelas, you have really great odds of coming out quite well. The book includes some contortions to ensure this outcome. It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.

I am not quite well in Omelas. Don’t think I can ever fully be.

> Economists strongly disagree

What do economists have to do with it, seeing as its a philosophical position, and not one that attempts to predict the economy (badly)?

Mathematically, we can deal with it by taking the pth power of whichever metric of utility per individual, then maximizing the expected value. When p->inf, then we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing the maximal utility. When p->0, we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing minimal utility, ie rawls position.

Why would a rational actor want to do that though? Show me a single decision theory that does reasonably well in game theory simulations (I mean R-CDT/UDT tier), that also supports maximin, and I'll write a 1000 word article in the praise of John Rawls.

Which principles would you choose in order to construct Omelia? Who gets to be tortured? How do you make sure they don't have enough friends and family suffering about their predicament to skew off your statistics? How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?

I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.

Thank you for putting it that way. I was always confused by the Omelas story, what people got out of it.

There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.

> How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?

Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.

But what you're assuming is a static starting position. The entire point of liberalism is, if you read the essay, to be fair. It is absurdly unfair to that one person and I'm pretty sure they'll never be able to advance in this society. This is not just about that one person though, it's the perception that society does not really care about an individual and that individual can be you. However, fairness is the starting position in Junkland and the argument is that this begets progress while a society like Omelas shows a complete disregard for fairness. This was the spirit of the original position.

The answer to that seems to be so simple. Each of the 1Mio rich people gives just less than 1Mioth of his property/values to the one poor soul, and all ends up with utopia and restores fairness - at least with regard to property. There may still remain unfairness regarding physical and mental integrity, as well as regarding freedom. The two former ones are difficult to handle/solve.

Omelia is not a problem to be solved, its a thought experiment with predefined rules for how it operates. In order for the million people to live in utopia, there MUST be a person sacrificed to suffer utterly. These facts cannot be changed. The questions then arise about the ethics and morality of this society.

But it can't be a thought experiment about humans since humans would not tolerate the outcome in the first place. Humans are moral animals who are compelled to act on their morality. One aspect of morality is fairness. Another is compassion. See Johnathon Haidt's work on this.

As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.

It's hyperbole, but humans do tolerate a similar outcome all the time. Our modern technological civilization is in many ways built on suffering. Migrant workers suffer to pick our vegetables and clean our homes, child slaves suffer to build our electronics and mine rare earth minerals. We buy goods from companies like Amazon knowing how they treat their employees. Most of us don't care as long as we get our goods on time. People have rationalized far greater evils (chattel slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism and colonization), incorporated them into their moral framework, and turned the cognitive dissonance into virtue. Those people simply choose their lot in life, they're lazy and indigent, God made them less than us, that's just the price of progress.

Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.

People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others. At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.

In the first case, what you're looking at is unawareness, stiff competition for limited attention and care budgets, and a diversity of opinion with respect to the evaluation of tradeoffs for this specific, micro-topic. People who labor in sweatshops that provide goods for Amazon want those jobs because its better than the alternative. They don't want those conditions, but that's a problem that is not going to be fixed tomorrow, whereas they have to worry a lot about their tomorrow. People making decisions within that complex matrix of forces is not evidence that Amazon buyers don't care about other people. It's evidence that the world is complex and that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time. Even Ghengis Khan was talked out of genociding the Chinese by someone who admired Chinese society and suggested that he would be better off taxing the skilled artisans of China instead of genociding them, as he usually did to any society that defied him.

Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ? Or that morality was the sole possession of a tiny vanguard ? If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.

>People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others.

Yes it is. People don't care enough to not use Amazon - suffering is simply priced into the market and people are fine with that.

>At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.

It very much is. Colonialism was built on slavery and genocide, and the colonizers cared very little for the suffering of the colonized.

>Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time.

"That's just how the world works and has always worked and it's absurd to take issue with it" is only one of many excuses people use to reconcile their morality with the amount of suffering they benefit from. No point even thinking about it if it's simply the law of nature.

>Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ?

Now we're at the part of the comment where you purposely misconstrue my comment and make it into some weird anti-leftist rant.

No, I didn't say that, and when did I even mention anything about modern partisan politics? Of course diverting from the topic with strawman arguments means you don't have to take the topic seriously, which is another coping mechanism.

>If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.

Ooh. "I wonder what you'd be willing to do?" That's a nice turnabout. The only true evil is pointing out evil. I bet you also like to say the only true racists are the black people who keep complaining about racism. Turning me into the enemy, nothing but a windmill to be tilted at, is yet another coping mechanism.

Thank you. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point. Not only would you not leave Omelas, you don't even think there's anything wrong with Omelas. Rather you'd be the one spreading FUD about anyone who does leave.

> It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.

It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.

>designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios

I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme.

It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.

Humans are risk averse and overestimate the probability of low-probability outcomes. So focusing people on hypothetical scenarios where they are someone other than themselves leads to over-focusing on the welfare of small minorities at the expense of the majority.

Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule

This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.

Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.

> the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.

It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.

But that’s just another type of catering to the minority at the expense of the majority.

> But that’s just another type of catering to the minority at the expense of the majority.

Rawls's original position (a.k.a. veil of ignorance) is, in essence, "There, but for the grace of God, go I or my loved ones — so let's help others the way we'd hope to be helped if life had dealt us a similarly-bad hand." (That latter part should sound familiar ....)

>Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes

Oh, wow, I had no idea. (Rawls's response is quite different from my response to the hypothetical of the veil of ignorance.) Sorry for adding noise to this thread. I agree with everything you wrote in this thread.

Not to mention that relief of human suffering comes mainly from technological advances and that, in turn, depends on advances in material science and basic science which wouldn't exist except for the economic incentives produced by a capitalist society which produces "stuff" for the 90%.

> The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.

We saw a lot of folks carefully ignoring a related issue during the covid pandemic: They argued angrily that it made no sense to mandate masks, lock down society, and spend billions on vaccine development, when only a small percentage of people would die or have long-term adverse effects. (There was a lot of that kind of talk in Texas.) But those folks never seemed willing to admit that they were really saying, "I'm willing to roll the dice that I'll be all right; the rest of you, well, you're on your own."

Sadly, folks like that seldom take enough precautions on their own — and they're often the first to plead for "the gummint" to help them when they get in trouble. (Cf. the bail-outs of big, de-regulated banks during the financial crisis that kicked off the Great Recession, the demands for federal hurricane assistance by people who lived in flood zones, etc. Privatize the profits, socialize the risks.)

Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up. The vax was hugely destructive to healthy people and did not prevent transmission. These things are well established facts. The argument was never ”I'm too selfish to care about grandma”, it was always about the facts at hand.

> Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up.

You’re going against what’s been widely publicized as the overwhelming scientific consensus, so it’d be useful if you’d cite some evidence, including your qualifications, to help the rest us feel comfortable accepting your judgment in this area. And you seem excessively sure of yourself (as do some of your other comments — yes, I looked you up), which tends to weigh against accepting your view.

You find it incomprehensible of late, but you've made similar arguments on this site in the past; for instance, the Rawlsian logic you're objecting to here is the same as the logic you use to justify antiterrorism work. So whatever the issue is here, I don't think it's your background in engineering.

I don’t support anti terrorism because I put myself in the shoes of victims of terrorism. I do it because I think terrorism requires harsh responses to maintain norms against political violence. So for example I would abolish the TSA because I’m not afraid of actually being the victim of a terrorist attack.

It’s possible this sentiment is punitive—I just want to see terrorists punished—and such a response isn’t necessary to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence. But I would submit that extreme responses to e.g. Islamism is important to keep a real threat to order at bay. We’ll probably have a real A/B experiment with this in Bangladesh now that Hasina—who was doing a good job crushing the Islamists—has been overthrown. Will Bangladesh turn into Pakistan in the absence of that enforcement? We will see.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563156

Can you reconcile this with the comment I just replied to?

It’s the same thought. Terrorist attacks are directed to the nation as a whole even if they kill a small percentage of the population. That makes them different from events that just happen to kill the same number of people.

The biggest problem in Pakistan right now is the Army propping up everything. But I doubt that’s what you were driving at.

If even half of what I read about Hasina is true she has completely gone around the bend and has no business running any country anymore.

I'm don't think you're being fair to Rawls.

Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off.

So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical.

That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.

> That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.

The Wikipedia page says that's a common criticism of Rawls, but it might be wrong.

That formulation prioritizes avoiding harm to small minorities at the expense of maximizing the well being of the majority.

Consider by contrast how East asian countries approach public policy: the needs of the typical person are elevated above the needs of people with different or special circumstances. That’s why they can have nice things like public transportation and clean and safe cities.

You need a communal society with enough ambient social pressure to keep people “typical” for that system to work.

Such societies may find themselves implementing Procrustean policies meant to enforce conformity. One classic (red herring) image is "Harrison Bergeron," but actual transphobic attitudes are more pressing.

Which is impossible to maintain under a Rawlsian viewpoint that prioritizes minorities. Consider the Asian social norm against being overweight and the attendant enforcement mechanisms. It benefits most people for whom social reinforcement can help them maintain a healthy weight. But it’s unpleasant for a minority. Rawlsian thinking tends to oppose such welfare-maximizing policies, by focusing the inquiry on that minority.

You’re preaching to the choir. I’m all for a common culture and societal pressure to adhere to it. But as circumstances are, the preexisting common culture in the US is no longer viable as this country is now heavily heterogenous, both ethnically and ideologically. You can try extracting aspects from the past culture that are still relevant but that’s clearly not acceptable to a sizable part of the country as they hold the parts most unacceptable- latent bigotry and the other- as the most crucial aspect of the previous common culture.

Is that kind of depends on the expected value in each situation. I think you can go either way depending on the magnitude of the benefit and expense.

Also, there's the obvious slippery slope into utilitarianism and things like killing one person to save 10 with their organs.

Blanket outlawing of utilitarianism is its own slippery slope.

Just because some long dead philosophers, mostly affluent people who avoided real work and utilitarian choice, had time to sit and cobble together some syntax and semantics doesn’t mean it’s literally possible to live by their high minded babble

And to the moral point; today the majority rely on as little labor as possible paid as little as possible to make their food and clothes; consuming the few willing to work for little for the benefit of the many is daily life for richer countries. Pretending our society is beyond such because our historical philosophy says it is pretentious wank

If your answers would be different with than they would be without this knowledge then please don't vote.

Isn't this like table stakes for being a thoughtful person who isn't a sociopath? The most influential thought experiment in contemporary philosophy is to not act like a toddler?

I watched something based on this in my debate club, so this isn't my own original thought.

There's a strong argument that the knowledge someone has from being disadvantaged contributes to their views on justice. The original position also incentivizes ignoring the rights of small groups of people since you likely aren't going to be a part of one.

One also gets into issues like reparations for past injustices. Those benefit a small group of people at the cost of the many (hard to justify with the original position), but can still be a form of justice since we want to balance past wrongs.

Right, the veil of ignorance AFAICT (Rawls may have addressed this somewhere) sidesteps the question of probability. Shouldn't you weight the interests of a group proportionally to the likelihood that you would have been born into such a group, i.e. by their relative population?

That kinda depends on your subjective risk aversion/tolerance.

I think the veil of ignorance is a great thought experiment everyone should think about, but there shouldn't be any prescribed way how to think about it.

While that's technically valid, it feels like it's going against the spirit of the "original position". That is to say, it seems to me that the original position isn't intended to literally say "run an optimization on the probability density function in order to maximize your expected happiness". Instead, it seems to me that it's intended to illustrate the idea that whatever rules society operates under need to work regardless of what your starting point in society is.

Stated another way, while that argument is probably a valid way to "win" a competitive debate, it doesn't strike me as particularly useful for exploring the concept that Rawls is presenting.

It goes against the spirit of the thought experiment because it's an attack on that spirit.

Abstractly, Rawls says society shouldn't be racially/ethnically/socioeconomically/etc prejudiced. The vast majority of people agree with this obviously.

Concretely, he says this can be achieved by ignoring your racial/ethnic/socioeconomic/etc status.

The claim is that the more you ignore your own lived experiences, the less you can use the knowledge that it gives you.

Rawls also argued that people would maximize the minimum utility behind the veil of ignorance, as they wouldn't want to risk being a persecuted minority.

This didn't come up during the debate, although it should've since it's why "whatever rules society operates under need to work regardless of what your starting point in society is".

It is actually a pretty radical idea that isn't very widely accepted today.

It is easy to agree with it if you are talking about some racial minority.

Treating murderers or child rapists with the compassion you would want in their shoes is beyond most people.

It also has a number of very easy criticisms that can be set against it

If we don’t know going into this hypothetical what sort of person we’ll be, we can still play the odds and say we should lock up child rapists and murders for life. It is very unlikely we’ll be born as one, and letting them go free will allow them to harm multiple people…

That's a very relevant thing you bring up: The way we design our society changes not only the outomes for roles of certain fixed probabilities - it changes the probabilities as well. If you lock up the rapists and murderers, there's a lower chance your role will include being the victim of a rapist or murderer.

You always have to consider all sides of every decision as well as higher order effects.

I was thinking more along the lines of compassion and rehabilitation.

I think the numbers argument is a pretty different one than the original thought experiment.

Most people - just going by observation - appear to advocate policies based on who they actually are rather than on abstract principles. You're going to have to live with them voting.

Furthermore the argument that it is a bad idea isn't even strong. The veil of ignorance is powerful and interesting but voting is about different cultures negotiating to make decisions. That all but guarantees there will be different conceptions about what is fair that are not the veil of ignorance and those need to be respected. They aren't sociopaths, they just don't agree with you.

> Isn't this like table stakes for being a thoughtful person who isn't a sociopath?

Not all thoughtful people come to the same conclusions, and it's nice to try to axiomatise these things anyway, so you have something to point at when trying to formulate new rules.

For instance, non-toddlers understand the Golden Rule, which seems good enough on its surface, but on deeper reflection can let bad behaviour through.

Hypothetically, I like bribes: I can pay others to change the rules in my favour. I also like receiving money for changing rules. So this passes the Golden Rule, but fails Kant's Categorical Imperative.

So what do you do when it turns out there are large groups of people who just can't socialize well in an environment like that where other groups are a majority?

Liberalism doesn't answer this nicely because of the belief that everyone is more or less fungible.

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