Topics Justice

Question Is Rawls's theory of social justice reducible to rule utilitarianism? Rawls says we should adhere to rules that rational, selfish people would create if they were behind a veil of ignorance. Such people would create rules that maximize will maximize their expected utility once they are born. This means they will create rules that will maximize the total amount utility in the world, since you can expect to enjoy more utility on average in world that has more total utility. Now, rule utilitarianism says we should adhere to rules that when followed, produce the most utility. In other words, rule utilitarianism demands accordance to the exact same rules that people behind the veil of ignorance would agree to. So is Rawls effectively a rule utilitarian?

Accepted:
February 9, 2011

Comments

People have adduced something like the original position in support of rule utilitarianism. But Rawls believes that this is not the rational agreement to make behind the veil of ignorance. To see why, consider that an agreement to justify the society's institutional arrangements by reference to some standard of utility maximization does not guarantee that utility will actually be maximized. It is notoriously difficult to show in a publicly convincing way which proposed institutional design or which candidate piece of legislation would produce the most utility. So the agreement to make this the common public standard of justice would lead to a lot of division, and people with power would often deceive themselves or try to deceive others that what is best for their own will also maximize utility. Moreover, utilitarianism can notoriously justify very bad outcomes for small groups, who are likely then to lack allegiance to the society's justice standard and social institutions. All these things would be a drag on performance, so-to-speak, and a society that operates under a maximize-utility standard is then quite unlikely to maximize utility.

To protect against these problems, the contractors have reason, Rawls holds, to make a more substantial agreement, one that has more definite content and thus makes it easier for citizens to see whether or not the agreed-upon standard is being upheld. Thus Rawls's proposed first principle requires the society to secure certain basic liberties for all, without exceptions for cases where utility could be increased by infringing a liberty. Why should the parties agree to this? Because by allowing the government to make such exceptions they are likely to lose more utility from governmental mistakes and plain wrongdoing (that can be colored as an honest effort at utility maximization) than they can hope to gain from the exception being correctly used. Did politicians believe they were serving the happiness of Americans generally when they made it very hard for African-Americans to vote? Probably. And even if not, they could easily pretend sincerely to hold this belief.

Rawls had further arguments. The most important of these challenges the utilitarian assumption that all goods and ills are commensurable. Commensurability entails that for any ill, no matter how severe, there is a good and a probability p>0 such that one would be prepared to gamble, that is, to accept a probability p of the ill in exchange for a (1-p) probability of the good. Rawls holds, by contrast, that there are some really terrible ills that one has reason to avert with certainly, if this is possible. An example he gives is the suppression of one's religion. If you agree to the utilitarian standard, then you run a risk that you are religious and your religion is an unpopular minority faith that the majority suppresses by appeal to the general happiness. You can avoid running this risk by agreeing instead to a standard that (like Rawls's) explicitly requires and gives top priority to freedom of religion. If you understand what it means to be committed to a religion, would it not make sense for you to eliminate that risk even if -- the preceding paragraph notwithstanding -- this also reduced your probability-weighted expected happiness?