28 May 2006. Columbia University Press, 1993 (paperback edition, 1996). (9) When Native Americans saw Sacagawea carrying her baby, they took it as a tacit sign that the explorers came in peace. Indeed, one of the broad morals of Sandel's analysis is supposed to be that the difference principle is a sufficiently communitarian notion of justice that it requires a thoroughly communitarian conception of the self. They would be unwilling to take the chance that, in a society governed by utilitarian principles, a utilitarian calculation might someday provide the basis for a serious infringement of their liberties, especially since they have the more conservative option of the two principles available to them. These considerations implicate some significant general issuesabout the justificatory function of the original position and about the changes in Rawls's views over timewhich lie beyond the scope of this essay. It might recommend an extremely crowded and consequently unhappy world, like the one portrayed in the movie Soylent Green. hasContentIssue false, Rawls on the Relationship between Liberalism and Democracy, Rawls on Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law, https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651670.013, Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. For example, where Rawls says that [u]tilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons (TJ 27), Robert Nozick, explicitly citing Rawls, says that to sacrifice one individual for the greater social good does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.2 And Bernard Williams, developing a different but not entirely unrelated criticism, argues that utilitarianism makes personal integrity as a value more or less unintelligible.3 But neither Nozick nor Williams stresses the importance of providing a systematic alternative to utilitarianism. 3 0 obj There has been extensive discussion and disagreement both about the meaning and about the merits of Rawls's claim that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinctions among persons. After reviewing John Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice and then examining Michael Sandel's and Robert Nozick's criticisms of those However, the characterization of classical utilitarianism as the ethic of perfect altruists seems puzzling, given the fact that the classical view is said to conflate all persons into one. Instead, it is a constraint on the justice of distributions and institutions that they should give each individual what that individual independently deserves in virtue of the relevant facts about him or her. The principle of average utility, as its name suggests, directs society to maximize not the total but the average utility (TJ 162). In, It is worth noting that, in his earlier paper, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. As Rawls says: Teleological views have a deep intuitive appeal since they seem to embody the idea of rationality. To the extent that this is so, they can help to illuminate Rawls's complex attitude toward utilitarianism: an attitude that is marked by respect and areas of affinity as well as by sharp disagreements. First, it may seem that the criticism simply does not apply to contemporary versions of utilitarianism which do not, in general, purport to construe the good hedonistically. Rawls assumes that if the parties had to choose between plain old utilitarianism and average utilitarianism, they would prefer the latter. (1) Charbonneau was enthralled with the frontier and had learned to communicate with Native American groups, using a type of sign language. Utilitarianism, of course, achieves this aim by identifying a single principle as the ultimate standard for adjudicating among conflicting precepts. To save content items to your account, endobj These arguments appeal to what Rawls calls finality and stability. Against this line of thought, Rawls argues, first, that there simply is no dominant end: no one overarching aim for the sake of which all our other ends are pursued. <> Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. No. It is, therefore, doubly unclear how classical utilitarianism could participate in the overlapping consensus Rawls envisions; for it rejects the fundamental ideas that form the basis of the consensus, and the arguments that begin from those ideas are said to result in its own repudiation. If that happened, they would seek to change the society (contrary to the finality condition) and, of course, they would not accept its rules (contrary to the stability condition). Lewis and Clark met Charbonneau, who offered to translate for them. Web- For utilitarians justice is not an independent moral standard, distinct from their general principle, but rather they believe that maximization of happiness ultimately determines I will conclude by discussing some apparent differences between Rawls's position in A Theory of Justice and his position in Political Liberalism.4. . Rawls argues that this commitment to unrestricted aggregation can be seen as the result of extending to society as a whole the principle of rational choice for one man (TJ 267). If the conclusion that the parties would regard the principle of average utility as excessively risky depends on the claim that, under certain conditions, it would justify the sacrifice of some people's liberties in order to maintain the average level of wellbeing within the society at as high a level as possible, then Rawls's arguments against average utility are not as different from his arguments against classical utilitarianism as his talk of a surprising contrast might suggest. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. The other two involve trying to show that the parties would choose Rawlss principles of justice in order to avoid results that they would find unacceptable. Cited hereafter as TJ, with page references given parenthetically in the text. In other words, there is a prior standard of desert by reference to which the justice of individual actions and institutional arrangements is to be assessed. If libertarianism is true, which of these statements is true? Since the impartial spectator identifies with and experiences the desires of others as if these desires were his own, his function is to organize the desires of all persons into one coherent system of desire (TJ 27). Part of Rawls's point, when calling attention in Two Concepts of Rules to the interest of the classical utilitarians in social institutions, was to emphasize that the construal of utilitarianism as supplying a comprehensive standard of appraisal represents a relatively recent development of the view: one he associates, in that essay, with Moore. At this point we are simply checking whether the conception already adopted is a feasible one and not so unstable that some other choice might be better. The classical utilitarian, Rawls argues, reasons in much the same way about society as a whole, regarding it as legitimate to impose sacrifices on some people in order to achieve greater advantages for others. To be specific, in the parts we did not read, Rawls argued that the parties in the original position would choose to maximize average utility only if two conditions are met: Rawlss chief reason for denying that this makes sense is the familiar one: maximizing expected utility is too risky in this situation. In summary, Rawls argues, the classical utilitarian view of social cooperation is the consequence of extending to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflating all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator (TJ 27). However, the argument's oblique relation to the original position construction may give rise to doubts of another kind. (8) She scrutinized plants and animals, helping the explorers to describe the wildlife. Note, however, that under the index entry for average utilitarianism (606), there is a subheading that reads: as teleological theory, hedonism the tendency of. It may be enough to show non-utilitarians why they reject utilitarianism, though. Furthermore, Rawls asserts, the possibility that the society might allow some members to lose out would cause its members to lose self-esteem. Up to a point, then, Rawls and the utilitarian are engaged in a common enterprise, and it is against the background of what they have in common that Rawls takes utilitarianism as his primary target of criticism in Theory. Utilitarianism, in Rawls's view, has been the dominant systematic moral theory in the modern liberal tradition. This is presumably because the maximization of average utility could, in societies with certain features, require that the interests of some people be seriously compromised. One of these arguments seeks to undercut the main reason the parties might have for choosing average utilitarianism. They are told what is good or bad for us and then they have to choose principles that will serve the interests they are told we have. We talked about Rawlss contention that the parties in the original position would reject maximizing average utility as the fundamental principle for their society. But the parties in the original position have to make a single decision that will never be repeated and that could have calamitous implications over the course of their entire lives. In this sense, intuitionists deny that it is possible to give a general solution to what Rawls calls the priority problem, that is, the problem of how to assign weight to conflicting considerations of justice. for if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individuals happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. In Rawlss lingo, we have a highest order interest in the development of our two moral powers, the powers to have a rational plan of life and a sense of justice. Since he also believed that personal and political liberty are needed for personal and moral self-development, he thought that the parties would give priority to individual liberty over other goals, such as increasing economic opportunity or wealth. In conditions of moderate scarcity, we cannot tell whether a particular person should receive a given benefit without knowing how such an allocation would fit into the broader distribution of benefits and burdens within the society. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 79. This is the sort of argument that Samuel criticized earlier. Its not enough just to insist that its one of the features of the Original Position. He also suggests that part of the attraction of monistic accounts, and of teleological theories that incorporate such accounts, may derive from a conviction that they enable us to resolve a fundamental problem about the nature of rational deliberation. For helpful discussions of this line of criticism, see. I will explain why I do not regard this argument as persuasive, but will also indicate how it points to some genuine affinities between justiceasfairness and utilitarian ideas, affinities that I will then explore in greater depth. T or F: Libertarians involves a commitment to leaving market relations - buying,selling, and other exchanges - totally unrestricted. This is a point that he emphasizes in response to Habermas (PL 42133), and it explains what he means when he says in the index to PL (455) that justice is always substantive and never purely procedurala remark that might otherwise seem inconsistent with the role that Theory assigns to pure procedural justice. On the one hand, utilitarians will say that they wouldnt make life intolerable for anyone: that doesnt make any sense if youre trying to maximize happiness, after all. The second is his agreement with the utilitarian view that commonsense precepts of justice have only a derivative (TJ 307) status and must be viewed as subordinate (TJ 307) to a higher criterion (TJ 305). Rawls will emphasize the publicity condition in order to show that utilitarians cant give people the kind of security that his principles can. For they rely on something like a shared highest order preference function as the basis for interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing, and such a function treats citizens as subscribing to a common ranking of the relative desirability of different packages of material resources and personal qualitiesincluding traits of character, skills and abilities, attachments and loyalties, ends and aspirations. One of these is that they are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. Rawls's aim, by contrast, is to reduce our reliance on unguided intuition by formulating explicit principles for the priority problem (TJ 41), that is, by identifying constructive and recognizably ethical (TJ 39) criteria for assigning weight to competing precepts of justice. He may be correct in thinking he needs to show how a society regulated by his conception of justice could be stable despite the prevalence of diverse comprehensive doctrines. So it could be permissible to leave significant inequalities of opportunities in place. 7 0 obj The parties in the original position do not decide what is good or bad for us. And although, as I have argued, this temptation should be resisted, they help us to see that Rawls does share with utilitarianism some features that are genuinely controversial and are bound to generate some strong resistance to both views. According to Rawls, they would reject utilitarianism and endorse justice as fairness. My point is about the nature of his argument. Liam Murphy, Institutions and the Demands of Justice. (5) The men aboard desperately worked to right the boat, oblivious to the books and instruments that were floating away. In arriving at this conclusion, it is important to guard against an excessively narrow, formalistic interpretation of the maximin argument.6 As already noted, Rawls's initial account in section 26 of the reasons for relying on the maximin rule is merely an outline of what he will attempt to establish subsequently. WebQuestion: John Rawls rejects utilitarianism because: 1) that maximizing the total well-being of society could permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits. It isnt even considered by the parties. These chapters identify four, Which of the following is an accurate statement? For this very reason, Rawls suggests, utilitarianism offers a way of adapting the notion of the one rational good to the institutional requirements of a modern state and pluralistic democratic society.12 So long as the good is identified with agreeable feeling, however, the account remains monistic.13. The first is almost certainly wrong: the parties do know the chances of being any particular person are equal to the chance of being anyone else. endobj In response, he argues that a benevolent person fitting this description would actually prefer justiceasfairness to classical utilitarianism. Write the letter of the choice that gives the sentence a meaning that is closest to the original sentence. First, why are we talking about maximizing average utility? In this sense, utilitarianism takes the distinctions among persons less seriously than his principles do. For at least part of his complaint is that they exaggerate the significance of the overall distributional context and attach insufficient importance to local features of particular transactions. Of course, as Rawls recognizes, utilitarians frequently argue that, given plausible empirical assumptions, the maximization of satisfaction is unlikely to be achieved in this way. It is not clear, however, what happened to the valiant woman who added so much to Lewis and Clark's expedition. I have come to the conclusion that the wording in A Theory of Justice is misleading and that the real idea is better expressed in a different publication. Here is what that means. If hes right about that, the parties cannot perform the calculations needed to use the maximize expected utility rule. it might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits Instead, the aim is to show that choosing as if one had such as aversion is rational given the unique features of . The other two arguments against utilitarianism both turn on the following assumptions: Rawls has two ways of showing that the first condition is satisfied. Nozick suggests that Rawls can avoid this tension only by placing an implausible degree of weight on the distinction between persons and their talents.17 Michael Sandel, following up on Nozick's point, argues that Rawls has a theory of the person according to which talents are merely contingentlygiven and wholly inessential attributes rather than essential constituents of the self.18 For this reason, Sandel argues, Rawls does not see the distinctness of persons as violated by the idea of treating the distribution of talents as a common asset. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Sandel maintains that the only way out of the difficulties Nozick raises would be to argue that what underlies the difference principle is an intersubjective conception of the person, according to which the relevant description of the self may embrace more than a single empiricallyindividuated human being.20 This would enable Rawls to say that other people's benefiting from my natural talents need not violate the distinctness of persons, not because my talents aren't really part of me but rather because those people may not, in the relevant sense, be distinct from me. (Utilitarians regard this fuzzy talk of different ways of valuing things with suspicion. Heres the second question. But they agree on the need for such a criterion and on the derivative and subordinate character of commonsense precepts of justice. However, defenders of average utility have questioned whether it makes sense to suppose that there is an attitude toward risk that it is rational to have if one is ignorant of one's special attitudes toward risk. In other words, there is a difference between maximizing average utility and maximizing utility, period. endobj In other words, section 29's appeals to psychological stability, selfrespect, and the strains of commitment are all intended as contributions to the overarching enterprise of demonstrating that Rawls's principles would provide a satisfactory minimum whereas the principle of average utility might have consequences with which the parties would find it difficult to live. Rawls's desire to provide a constructive conception of justice is part of his desire to avoid intuitionism. See for example PL 1345. (Indeed, he claims that the design of the original position guarantees that only endresult principles will be chosen.) (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. The answer is that they would choose average utilitarianism if the following conditions were met: The handout shows how this combination would lead to average utilitarianism. Despite the vigor of his arguments against utilitarianism, however, some critics have contended that Rawls's own theory displays some of the very same features that he criticizes in the utilitarian position. No loss would wipe them out and they will come out ahead in the long run. please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. Indeed, whereas Rawls's assertion that the parties would reject classical utilitarianism has attracted little opposition, his claim that his conception of justice would be preferred to the principle of average utility has been quite controversial.5 Most of the controversy has focused on Rawls's argument that it would be rational for the parties to use the maximin rule for choice under uncertainty when deciding which conception of justice to select. If a radically inegalitarian distributioneither of satisfaction itself or of the means of satisfactionwill result in the greatest total satisfaction overall, the inequality of the distribution is no reason to avoid it. One of the few times he has anything substantial to say about it is when he includes classical utilitarianismthe utilitarianism of Bentham and Sidgwick, the strict classical doctrine (PL 170)among the views that might participate in an overlapping consensus converging on a liberal political conception of justice, the standard example (PL 164) of which is justiceasfairness. In other words, they turn on the possibility that the way to maximize average utility across a whole society will involve leaving some with significantly less liberty, opportunities, or wealth than others have. There are also two arguments for the second point, that some people would find it unacceptable to live under utilitarianism. Thus it would not occur to them to acknowledge the principle of utility in its hedonistic form. Any further advantages that might be won by the principle of utility . In his later writings, Rawls himself expresses misgivings about the role played in TJ by his defense of a pluralistic theory of the good. Rawls contends that people would find losing out in this way unacceptable. Since there is, accordingly, no inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his criticism of utilitarianism, there is no need for him to take drastic metaphysical measures to avoid it.21. Render date: 2023-05-01T02:24:57.324Z During the trip, Sacagawea was able to visit her original Shoshone family, when she was briefly reunited with her brother. Both views hold that commonsense precepts of justice must be subordinate to some higher principle or principles. Whereas the idea of arranging social institutions so as to maximize the good might seem attractive if there were a unique good at which all rational action aims, it makes more sense, in light of the heterogeneity of the good, to establish a fair framework of social cooperation within which individuals may pursue their diverse ends and aspirations. . Rawls believes that, of all traditional theories of justice, the contract theory is the one which best approximates our considered judgments of justice. However, even if the role of the argument against monism in Theory raises questions about the justificatory significance of the original position construction, and even if the philosophical character of the argument is in tension with the political turn taken in Rawls's later writings, I believe that the argument can stand on its own as an important challenge to utilitarian thought. (These conditions are listed in a handout.). Taken together, these three features of his view mean that, like the utilitarian, he is prepared to appeal to higher principle, without recourse to intuitionistic balancing, to provide a systematic justification for interpersonal tradeoffs that may violate commonsense maxims of justice. A particularly difficult conflict between the explorers and a group of Sioux, in South Dakota, convinced Lewis and Clark that they needed an interpreter. See The Appeal of Political Liberalism, Chapter Eight in this volume. Thoughts about God, culture, and the Real Jesus. The argument is that the parties, knowing that they exist and wishing only to advance their own interests, would have no desire to maximize the net aggregate satisfaction, especially since doing so might require growth in the size of the population even at the expense of a significant reduction in the average utility per person. The fact that Rawls agrees with utilitarianism about the desirability of identifying a clear and constructive solution to the priority problem leads more or less directly to the second point of agreement. Herein lies the problem. Despite his opposition to utilitarianism, however, it seems evident from the passages I have quoted that he also regards it as possessing theoretical virtues that he wishes to emulate. Whereas the maximin argument is presented as a reason why the parties would not choose utilitarianism, Rawls develops another important line of criticism whose ostensible relation to the original position construction is less straightforward.10 This line of criticism turns on a contrast between those views that take there to be but a single rational good for all human beings and those that conceive of the human good as heterogeneous. The basis for a valid desert claim, on this view, must always be some characteristic of or fact about the deserving person. 8 0 obj Rawls claims that these considerations favor his principles over utilitarianism because it is possible that some people would find life in a utilitarian society intolerable. Instead, he says, the [h]uman good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are heterogeneous (TJ 554). Why might the parties in the original position choose average utilitarianism? If that association is unwarranted, then the contrast between the classical and average views may be less dramatic than Rawls suggests, and the claims of the original position as an illuminating analytic device may to that extent be reduced. Thus, I believe it is misleading when Rawls says, at the end of his discussion of relative stability in section 76: These remarks are not intended as justifying reasons for the contract view. My hope is to arrive at a balanced assessment of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism. (6) Sacagawea, with the baby on her back, and seemingly heedless of danger, calmly salvaged the equipment. Rawls rejects utilitarianism because it is unstable. Thomas Pogge, Three Problems with ContractarianConsequentialist Ways of Assessing Social Institutions. The veil of ignorance assures us that people in the original position will be, inequalities are only justified if they benefit the least advantaged, In association with labor and capital, Mill had contrasting views of, Who is more likely to be sympathetic with the idea of reducing the disparities of income in society, The first principle of Nozick's entitlement theory concerns the original acquisition of, To the libertarians, their concept of liberty includes a commitment to, it might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits. Both the theories are systematic and constructive in character, both treat commonsense notions of justice as deriving from a more authoritative standard, and both are committed to distributive holism, in the sense that they regard the justice of any assignment of benefits to a particular individual as dependent on the justice of the overall distribution of benefits in society. In other words, the arguments of section 29 are intended to help show that the choice confronting the parties has features that make reliance on the maximin rule rational. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. In the end, he speculates, we are likely to settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. - Ques Two Books That Help in Understanding Culture. 12 0 obj Course Hero is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university. In this sense, classical utilitarianism gives what it regards as the aggregate good priority over what it regards as the goods of distinct individuals. Has Rawls given reasons to prefer his principles of justice over something like these? To be sure, Rawls does not claim that the political conception is deductively derivable from classical utilitarianism, only that the classical view might support the political conception as a satisfactory and perhaps the best workable approximation [to what the principle of utility would on balance require] given normal social conditions (PL 171).
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