November 29, 2002
FAREWELL TO AN ENEMY OF FREEDOM:
Philosopher Rawls taught us to be thankful for luck(By Matthew Miller, 11/30/02, Boston Globe)
The way to create the rules for a just society, Rawls argues, is to first imagine everyone in an ''original position'' behind a prebirth ''veil of ignorance,'' where no one knows what their own traits will be - whether they will be rich or poor, beautiful or plain, smart or less so, talented or not, healthy or disabled. Only in this situation - where people don't know what place they are destined to occupy in society - can we see what kind of social order they would agree in advance was fair.Rawls uses this thought experiment to focus our thinking on the central role he sees luck playing in life. There's the prebirth lottery that hands out brains, beauty, talent, and inherited wealth. There's a post-birth lottery that (via family) bequeaths values and schooling. ''The institutions of society favor certain starting places over others,'' Rawls writes. ''Yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert.''
Rawls's point: The vast inequalities of wealth and position we observe stem primarily from advantages for which people can't take credit.
Having, at the time of his death, angered several people by pointing out that Stephen Jay Gould?s defense of evolution and opposition to sociobiology required him to be a hypocrite, I?m not anxious to disrespect John Rawls upon his passing. But there?s been a surprising--to me at least--amount of positive commentary about him in the past few days, even from folks who disagreed with him on ideological matters. But no matter how decent a man he may have been personally and no matter how much we may mourn his passing, I see no way around the central fact that his distributionist theory of justice sought to deny human freedom and that, to arrive at the theory, he had to deny thousands of years of Judeo-Christian understanding of human nature. Now, the preference for equal distribution (what I?ve elsewhere called economic security) over a necessarily unequal freedom, is a perfectly honorable intellectual and position to take, but it is the antithesis of what we as Americans believe in. It is the philosophy that underlies totalitarian government--else how achieve the absolutely equal redistribution? I guess I find it odd that conservatives would be so laudatory of a man who dedicated his life to an attack on freedom, who denied the intellectual tradition that gave birth to our Republic and whose utopian day-dreaming has had a pernicious effect on the American Left, causing them to believe there was a plausible basis for their egalitarianism.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 29, 2002 8:22 PM
I spent an interesting semester at Penn disecting A Theory of Justice in a course taugfht by Bruce Ackerman (!!!) A central part of Rawls' theory (and Ackerman's exegesis thereof) is the notion the the goods of the earth are "manna"--they just drop out of the sky. Thus social justice concerns itself only with distribution and not with production, because when you get up in the morning the manna will be there. Thus Rawls and his disciples make as much sense as a Melanesian cargo cult. We know from human esperience that irrational systems fail because they are unproductive. Thanks to Rawls, many of our intellectuals start with the premise that productivity does not matter. As to the "veil of ignorance," it is Rawls' way of getting around this. Since no one is supposed to know that he will not be in the "worst-off class," the just society will always favor the worst-off. This is a sick notion, as such a society will tend ever downward, becoming less and less productive, until all are "worst off." On the contrary, I Would say that the poor in a free society (tempered by charity) are better off than they would be in an unfree. Rawls wrote that envy should not be a factor in these decisions, so relative deprivation should be irrelevant. Furthermore, I would hold that even if the veil of ignorance were more than just more cargo cult nonsense, a rational person would desire freedom because even if he were to be born to the "worst-off class" his wealth and his opportunities to improve his lot would be maximized. De mortuiis, etc., eternal rest and perpetual light, but the works are still meaningless socialist blather.
Posted by: Lou Gots at November 30, 2002 6:51 AMIn the end, Rawls's biggest accomplishment was showing how weak is the theoretical case for contemporary liberalism. Rawls put forth their best effort, and he didn't do much. As Epstein says, you can argue that even the ideas Rawls put forward support libertarian-conservatism -- once you accept that a free market produces higher growth rates, or creates more opportunity, then Rawls's arguments challenge egalitarian projects.
Posted by: pj at November 30, 2002 3:45 PMLou,
I like that "manna" point. I had a pretty savage swipe at Rawls on http://jonjayray.blogspot.com
but I could have used that way of putting it.
May I put your comment up on my blog?
I blogged
that Rawls philosophy is a flop. I wasn't laudatory. Rawls is a waste of bookshelf space, like most philosophy books of the last fifty years. (I'm a philosophy professor.)