A Theory of Just Ice
OK, I haven't got very far with it, but at least I'm trying. The thing about John Rawls is that he writes like a convalescent Mantovani strung out on Valium in a Llandudno retirement home. I can just about manage two or three paragraphs of A Theory of Justice at a stretch without drifting into catalepsy, but that's about it. This looks like being a long haul. But hell - I managed Atlas Shrugged last year, so I should be able to cope. In fact, this ought to be child's play in comparison. At least Rawls doesn't try to pretend he's a novelist.
And no, don't take my word for any of this. Have I already mentioned I am in the early stages of premature senile dementia brought on by chronic oxygen depletion? I think I have. If I was a young man with a normal haemoglobin count and fewer work responsibilities, I daresay I could rip through Rawls in an afternoon. Being terminally degenerate isn't pretty. But I am resolved not to go gently into that there good night.
So far, I get that he doesn't think much of utilitarian ethics. Fair enough. I don't either. My problem with utilitarianism is it asks you to quantitatively compare my happiness with your happiness, my utility with your utility, and I don't think that's possible. I don't even think it's possible for lab rats, or for dugongs, let alone humans. Neither bliss nor misery lend themselves all that well to auditing and bookkeeping.
He seems to have more time for Social Contract Theory, though, and that's where we part company. I don't care whether you call it State of Nature or Original Position, point is, I was never in it. And I don't think you were either. It's one of the oldest sales techniques in the book, this pretending you already agreed to something you didn't agree to, and that your signature is just a formality. Rawls would have made an excellent timeshare salesman.
His shtick is to start with what he considers an ideal society, based (as far as I can guess) on the assorted dinner party chatterings of faculty fellows, then try to come up with an imaginary situation in which everyone else would agree that his ideal society definitely was an ideal society. It is, I think, rather telling that this imaginary situation involves depriving people of any self-awareness greater than that of a seven-month-old foetus, but let that pass. Point is, anyone can play at that game, and you could do it with anything. Here's Rawls, for example, in hospitable mood:
RAWLS: Like a drink?
YOU: Er, that would be nice. Whisky if you have any.
RAWLS (magisterially): Bourbon.
YOU: OK. Ice and soda, then.
RAWLS (checking in drinks cabinet. No soda.): I want you to imagine a situation in which you were asking for a Bourbon. Let's call that the Original Position. You have to choose between ice and soda, or just ice. A Veil of Ignorance prevents you from knowing for certain whether the soda is liberally laced with strychnine or not. What would a reasonable man(1) choose?
YOU: Just ice, I guess.
RAWLS (smugly, dropping the Vincent Price accent): Fair enough. Here you are, then.
(1) Note for British readers: "reasonable man" is American legal jargon. It means a man on a Clapham omnibus.
To clarify: in the variant under discussion, for "soda" read "distributive inequalities minus clever barrister", and for "strychnine", well, whatever you're scaredest of. As for the clever barrister, well, she's the one you would hire in the ideal Rawlsian society in order to justify why your greater unequal share of primary goods somehow works for the overall benefit, especially that of the less privileged. As for who she would justify it to, well, I have to admit I haven't got to that page yet.
But it certainly seems to me to be an important question.
See, I like most of what Rawls digs out of the liberal tradition and tries, in his inimitably slimy and soporific manner, to make his own. I like freedom of speech, of association, of confession, of movement. I like due process and the presumption of innocence. I like equality of all before the law. However, what I don't like is this idea of having hordes of people in uniform, armed to the teeth, whose job would consist of spying on people to find out what they have, and taking stuff from some of those people to give to other people, full time. And as Nozick pointed out, this is a sine qua non requirement of a Rawlsian society. There has to be some sort of coercive authority, let's call it a government, and it would have its work cut out intervening full time to make sure that nobody had more primary goods than anyone else, and/or listening to all the clever barristers explaining why it is perfectly all right in this particular instance (my client is a noted Ecuadorian asambleista, m'lud). The get-out about allowing some inequality "for the greater good" is why I find Rawls slippery (though he may get less slippery as the chapters tumble) but still, the fact remains that such a system would inevitably require a great deal of authoritarian micromanagement, and consequently a great many guns and uniforms and prison cells.
I don't like the idea of forcibly redistributing stuff. Maybe I should: after all, if I lived in a Rawlsian society I dare say I might get a guitar to replace the one I had that was burgled away six years ago, or at least, I might get some false teeth, even if they were the cheapo kind that had springs in them and scurried around on flat surfaces on their own. This would enable me to smile in a non-furtive and non-disgusting manner. Hell, I might even get a holiday - most other people I know actually have those. And my son, presumably, would be able to go to school in shirts that weren't a size too small. All this would be very nice. But as I say, I just can't get my head around stealing stuff, even if it's in a good cause, and even if that good cause is me or mine.
The advocates of "Social Justice" (a term that regularly brings me out in spots) tend to try to further their cause by waving their fingers at the obscenely rich, at the Bill Gateses and the Carlos Slims and the Donald Trumps of this world. Look at 'im, 'e can spare a bob or two, gnome sane? Perhaps they are right: perhaps Carlos Slim could buy me a new guitar, if he wanted to, without suffering irreversible psychological trauma. But it's the principle of the thing. Or rather two principles: one, stealing is wrong, always and everywhere and irrespective of who or why, and two, you can't ever know for certain what an individual really needs and what he or she could easily get by without - for the same reason you can't ever compare two people's diaries to find out which one has more utility, or more happiness, to their name. And this is partly because things, once owned, are not just "resources" that have been "appropriated": they are part of someone's life, of someone's experience, like a tendon or fingernail. Anyone who even thinks about forcibly separating things and people, for whatever reason, should stay away from politics. There's nothing wrong with having private fantasies, but putting them into practice is another thing entirely.
I stick by those two. No utilitarianism, please, not even by the back door.
In other words, I apply the Veil of Ignorance not at a social level but at an individual level, and not as a thought experiment but as an objective, falsifiable statement about reality. The statement goes: no folks knows enough about other folks to justify some folks interfering with other folks' freedom (including their freedom to own things). And it's falsifiable any time you like: just make me a comprehensive, detailed prediction about how your chosen individual will think and feel and react to absolutely everything that occurs in his or her life over whatever timescale your planned redistributive experiment might conceivably have had some sort of effect. Then watch. The day your prediction is right in every particular, you will have convinced me you know Sally Doe better than she knows herself, and thus maybe, just maybe, have some sort of basis on which to start taking stuff from her.
Meantime, colour me unconvinced.
And colour me even unconvinceder when (as Rawls does) someone comes along to say that the stuff people have isn't really theirs by right because they only have it by virtue of belonging to a cooperative "society". When I talk about owning things, I mean having them in such a way as to be able to actually do stuff with them, the way I used to have my guitar before it was half-inched. For me, owning a guitar is being able to pick it up and play it whenever you want, even at 2am (obviously you have to play very quietly). Now it strikes me that "society" can't own a guitar, because "society" never learned to play the guitar and being an abstraction, most likely never will. (I wouldna trust Society even on rhythm in a two-chord song like Horse with No Name). So if "society" is out of the running, seems to me you have to relegate the task of owning things to people. I don't much care what conditions you place or how you define it, but it has to be people who have things. And once they have things, they're theirs (surely?). Society can take a running jump, especially since for at least the past hundred and fifty years, it doesn't even allow us the option of opting out of it. If it was really so self-evidently beneficial to belong to society, you'd have thought society wouldn't mind people checking out the alternative of not belonging whenever they liked. Yet that seems to be the one thing no society in the world will allow us to try out. Fishy, that.
So what's the alternative to a Rawlsian society? Well, since no human society in history ever looked much like the one described by Rawls (which ought to tell us something), then the alternative is pretty much anything. The one I favour, personally, would be a society where no one cared that much what, or how much, other folks had; and the reason I favour it is that I find this obsession with comparing people's stuff depressing. It takes away from the proper study of man, from the admiration of people and the appreciation of beauty. I don't like envy, or anything founded on it. It may well be that in order for people not to care that much, you would need to have a certain level of general prosperity: after all, the less people have, below a certain threshold and ceteris paribus, the more balefully and speculatively interested they tend to be in what other folks have. However, I don't find a fixed correlation, and I think there are other social and cultural variables at work. I'll leave those to another post. Bottom line, if you think you need general prosperity for everything else to work, then you'd better make friends with some variant of free market capitalism: nothing else that's been tried has worked on the sort of scale we need in a world with 7.4 billion people in it.
Likewise, in my ideal society, people wouldn't bang on about justice (whether social or otherwise) all the friggen time, partly for the reason stated above (they would have better things to do than to daily check their wardrobe against that of Kim Kardashian as seen in the Daily Mail), and partly because they would have assimilated the above mentioned principle of interpersonal ignorance (to give it a name) well enough to understand that any kind of principle of Justice you might fish out of a book is going to be limited in practice to some sort of crusty horn-rimmed utilitarian calculus of equivalences between apples and oranges, ending in the Progressive Stack, and all the other absurdities weekly documented by the YouTube condescendi. Instead of justice, they would focus on kindness, which is like justice only without the numbers, the measuring, the meanness, the snobbery, the instant entitlement, and the endless, endless, endless tweeting.
And no, don't take my word for any of this. Have I already mentioned I am in the early stages of premature senile dementia brought on by chronic oxygen depletion? I think I have. If I was a young man with a normal haemoglobin count and fewer work responsibilities, I daresay I could rip through Rawls in an afternoon. Being terminally degenerate isn't pretty. But I am resolved not to go gently into that there good night.
So far, I get that he doesn't think much of utilitarian ethics. Fair enough. I don't either. My problem with utilitarianism is it asks you to quantitatively compare my happiness with your happiness, my utility with your utility, and I don't think that's possible. I don't even think it's possible for lab rats, or for dugongs, let alone humans. Neither bliss nor misery lend themselves all that well to auditing and bookkeeping.
He seems to have more time for Social Contract Theory, though, and that's where we part company. I don't care whether you call it State of Nature or Original Position, point is, I was never in it. And I don't think you were either. It's one of the oldest sales techniques in the book, this pretending you already agreed to something you didn't agree to, and that your signature is just a formality. Rawls would have made an excellent timeshare salesman.
His shtick is to start with what he considers an ideal society, based (as far as I can guess) on the assorted dinner party chatterings of faculty fellows, then try to come up with an imaginary situation in which everyone else would agree that his ideal society definitely was an ideal society. It is, I think, rather telling that this imaginary situation involves depriving people of any self-awareness greater than that of a seven-month-old foetus, but let that pass. Point is, anyone can play at that game, and you could do it with anything. Here's Rawls, for example, in hospitable mood:
RAWLS: Like a drink?
YOU: Er, that would be nice. Whisky if you have any.
RAWLS (magisterially): Bourbon.
YOU: OK. Ice and soda, then.
RAWLS (checking in drinks cabinet. No soda.): I want you to imagine a situation in which you were asking for a Bourbon. Let's call that the Original Position. You have to choose between ice and soda, or just ice. A Veil of Ignorance prevents you from knowing for certain whether the soda is liberally laced with strychnine or not. What would a reasonable man(1) choose?
YOU: Just ice, I guess.
RAWLS (smugly, dropping the Vincent Price accent): Fair enough. Here you are, then.
(1) Note for British readers: "reasonable man" is American legal jargon. It means a man on a Clapham omnibus.
To clarify: in the variant under discussion, for "soda" read "distributive inequalities minus clever barrister", and for "strychnine", well, whatever you're scaredest of. As for the clever barrister, well, she's the one you would hire in the ideal Rawlsian society in order to justify why your greater unequal share of primary goods somehow works for the overall benefit, especially that of the less privileged. As for who she would justify it to, well, I have to admit I haven't got to that page yet.
But it certainly seems to me to be an important question.
See, I like most of what Rawls digs out of the liberal tradition and tries, in his inimitably slimy and soporific manner, to make his own. I like freedom of speech, of association, of confession, of movement. I like due process and the presumption of innocence. I like equality of all before the law. However, what I don't like is this idea of having hordes of people in uniform, armed to the teeth, whose job would consist of spying on people to find out what they have, and taking stuff from some of those people to give to other people, full time. And as Nozick pointed out, this is a sine qua non requirement of a Rawlsian society. There has to be some sort of coercive authority, let's call it a government, and it would have its work cut out intervening full time to make sure that nobody had more primary goods than anyone else, and/or listening to all the clever barristers explaining why it is perfectly all right in this particular instance (my client is a noted Ecuadorian asambleista, m'lud). The get-out about allowing some inequality "for the greater good" is why I find Rawls slippery (though he may get less slippery as the chapters tumble) but still, the fact remains that such a system would inevitably require a great deal of authoritarian micromanagement, and consequently a great many guns and uniforms and prison cells.
I don't like the idea of forcibly redistributing stuff. Maybe I should: after all, if I lived in a Rawlsian society I dare say I might get a guitar to replace the one I had that was burgled away six years ago, or at least, I might get some false teeth, even if they were the cheapo kind that had springs in them and scurried around on flat surfaces on their own. This would enable me to smile in a non-furtive and non-disgusting manner. Hell, I might even get a holiday - most other people I know actually have those. And my son, presumably, would be able to go to school in shirts that weren't a size too small. All this would be very nice. But as I say, I just can't get my head around stealing stuff, even if it's in a good cause, and even if that good cause is me or mine.
The advocates of "Social Justice" (a term that regularly brings me out in spots) tend to try to further their cause by waving their fingers at the obscenely rich, at the Bill Gateses and the Carlos Slims and the Donald Trumps of this world. Look at 'im, 'e can spare a bob or two, gnome sane? Perhaps they are right: perhaps Carlos Slim could buy me a new guitar, if he wanted to, without suffering irreversible psychological trauma. But it's the principle of the thing. Or rather two principles: one, stealing is wrong, always and everywhere and irrespective of who or why, and two, you can't ever know for certain what an individual really needs and what he or she could easily get by without - for the same reason you can't ever compare two people's diaries to find out which one has more utility, or more happiness, to their name. And this is partly because things, once owned, are not just "resources" that have been "appropriated": they are part of someone's life, of someone's experience, like a tendon or fingernail. Anyone who even thinks about forcibly separating things and people, for whatever reason, should stay away from politics. There's nothing wrong with having private fantasies, but putting them into practice is another thing entirely.
I stick by those two. No utilitarianism, please, not even by the back door.
In other words, I apply the Veil of Ignorance not at a social level but at an individual level, and not as a thought experiment but as an objective, falsifiable statement about reality. The statement goes: no folks knows enough about other folks to justify some folks interfering with other folks' freedom (including their freedom to own things). And it's falsifiable any time you like: just make me a comprehensive, detailed prediction about how your chosen individual will think and feel and react to absolutely everything that occurs in his or her life over whatever timescale your planned redistributive experiment might conceivably have had some sort of effect. Then watch. The day your prediction is right in every particular, you will have convinced me you know Sally Doe better than she knows herself, and thus maybe, just maybe, have some sort of basis on which to start taking stuff from her.
Meantime, colour me unconvinced.
And colour me even unconvinceder when (as Rawls does) someone comes along to say that the stuff people have isn't really theirs by right because they only have it by virtue of belonging to a cooperative "society". When I talk about owning things, I mean having them in such a way as to be able to actually do stuff with them, the way I used to have my guitar before it was half-inched. For me, owning a guitar is being able to pick it up and play it whenever you want, even at 2am (obviously you have to play very quietly). Now it strikes me that "society" can't own a guitar, because "society" never learned to play the guitar and being an abstraction, most likely never will. (I wouldna trust Society even on rhythm in a two-chord song like Horse with No Name). So if "society" is out of the running, seems to me you have to relegate the task of owning things to people. I don't much care what conditions you place or how you define it, but it has to be people who have things. And once they have things, they're theirs (surely?). Society can take a running jump, especially since for at least the past hundred and fifty years, it doesn't even allow us the option of opting out of it. If it was really so self-evidently beneficial to belong to society, you'd have thought society wouldn't mind people checking out the alternative of not belonging whenever they liked. Yet that seems to be the one thing no society in the world will allow us to try out. Fishy, that.
So what's the alternative to a Rawlsian society? Well, since no human society in history ever looked much like the one described by Rawls (which ought to tell us something), then the alternative is pretty much anything. The one I favour, personally, would be a society where no one cared that much what, or how much, other folks had; and the reason I favour it is that I find this obsession with comparing people's stuff depressing. It takes away from the proper study of man, from the admiration of people and the appreciation of beauty. I don't like envy, or anything founded on it. It may well be that in order for people not to care that much, you would need to have a certain level of general prosperity: after all, the less people have, below a certain threshold and ceteris paribus, the more balefully and speculatively interested they tend to be in what other folks have. However, I don't find a fixed correlation, and I think there are other social and cultural variables at work. I'll leave those to another post. Bottom line, if you think you need general prosperity for everything else to work, then you'd better make friends with some variant of free market capitalism: nothing else that's been tried has worked on the sort of scale we need in a world with 7.4 billion people in it.
Likewise, in my ideal society, people wouldn't bang on about justice (whether social or otherwise) all the friggen time, partly for the reason stated above (they would have better things to do than to daily check their wardrobe against that of Kim Kardashian as seen in the Daily Mail), and partly because they would have assimilated the above mentioned principle of interpersonal ignorance (to give it a name) well enough to understand that any kind of principle of Justice you might fish out of a book is going to be limited in practice to some sort of crusty horn-rimmed utilitarian calculus of equivalences between apples and oranges, ending in the Progressive Stack, and all the other absurdities weekly documented by the YouTube condescendi. Instead of justice, they would focus on kindness, which is like justice only without the numbers, the measuring, the meanness, the snobbery, the instant entitlement, and the endless, endless, endless tweeting.
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