But an argument framed by conditions that utilitarians reject wont be enough to show utilitarians that they are wrong. Rawls and Utilitarianism | Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems But the assignment of weights is an essential and not a minor part of a conception of justice, for if two people differ about the weight to be assigned to different principles then their conceptions of justice are different (TJ 41). See Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics, Chapter One in this volume. . If we tell them that they have non-utilitarian interests, then will choose non-utilitarian principles. The problem is to explain how rational choices among apparently heterogeneous options can ever be made. 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. 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. Instead, Rawls offers a contractualist, proceduralist account of Of course, to say this would be to concede that Rawls takes the conventional distinctions among empiricallyindividuated human beings even less seriously than does utilitarianism. They help to explain why it can be tempting to think that Rawls's principles display the very faults for which he criticizes utilitarianism. It is a feature of the Original Position, of course. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive. The same, as I have already suggested, is true of Rawls's claim that utilitarianism tolerates unacceptable interpersonal tradeoffs. Rawls will emphasize the publicity condition in order to show that utilitarians cant give people the kind of security that his principles can. . Only if the basic structure is regulated by Rawls's substantive conception of justice can the determination of individual shares be handled as a matter of pure procedural justice. 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. Why is Rawls against utilitarianism? - eNotes.com No assessment of the overall distribution of benefits and burdens in society or of the institutions that produced that distribution is normally required in order to decide whether a particular individual deserves a certain benefit. 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. However, utilitarians reject Indeed, the point goes further. This is, he says, a peculiar state of affairs, which is to be explained by the fact that no constructive alternative theory has been advanced which has the comparable virtues of clarity and system and which at the same time allays these doubts (TJ 52). As Rawls says: A distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations. Thus, in looking at the two versions of utilitarianism from the standpoint of the original position, a surprising contrast (TJ 189) between them is revealed. Nonteleological forms of utilitarianism, such as the principle of average utility,11 are also monistic if they rely on a hedonistic interpretation of the good. Rawls rejects utilitarianism because it is unstable. On the one hand, he certainly didnt cut any corners in examining utilitarianism. Unless the decision facing the parties in the original position satisfies those conditions, the principle of average utility may be a better choice for the parties even if it is riskier, since it may also hold out the prospect of greater gain (TJ 1656). Its not enough just to insist that its one of the features of the Original Position. One day, their boat overturned in a sudden storm. 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. 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. d) It Rawls may well be right that we have these higher order interests and that utilitarianism is wrong about our fundamental interests in life. He and Sacagawea joined the expedition. 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. This possibility arises, Rawls suggests, because utilitarianism relies entirely on certain standard assumptions (TJ 159) to demonstrate that its calculations will not normally support severe restrictions on individual liberties. 1 0 obj The utilitarians will emphasize their ability to cope with disasters, cases where suspensions of the normal rules of justice are needed. "lew Cxn{fxK4>t:u|]OIBHXD)!&Fhv=rt,~m#k#=5717[$765-2N,oa m CQF# fC4b,Im \QZZ~7 b{"e&G4?>SC } 6Kf5~:"Zo5|$HC^'GjD!DKV^plhVClFuzP.7ihS|eUZu4K)i%o lSP-Lm:=EgUrL;M/{&.vV)=QK,%x#O.Dd]@p-SY3` g fM. Rawls denies that the parties in the original position can assign probabilities. T or F: Libertarians involves a commitment to leaving market relations - buying,selling, and other exchanges - totally unrestricted. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service. Whatever the merits of this view, however, it is not one that Rawls shares. do not know what final aims persons have, and all dominantend conceptions are rejected. In other words, neither believes that the principles of justice can appropriately be applied to a single transaction viewed in isolation (TJ 87). What is Rawls ethical theory? Rawlss theory of justice revolves around the adaptation of two fundamental principles of justice which would, in turn, guarantee a just and morally acceptable society. The second principle states that social and economic positions are to be (a) to everyones advantage and (b) open to all. T. M. Scanlon, Rawls' Theory of Justice, H. L. A. Hart, Between Utility and Rights, in. 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. And in both cases, this argument from the perspective of the parties corresponds to an independent criticism of utilitarianism as being excessively willing to sacrifice some people for the sake of others. Content may require purchase if you do not have access. Since theyre on the same scale, you could compare them and even make up for deficits in the one with an excess of the other. John Rawls (b. 1921, d. 2002) was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition. His theory of justice as fairness describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system. For instance, I suspect that most of us believe that something like the following is more plausible than Rawlss two principles (this is very rough). He thinks this is true of those teleological theories he describes as perfectionist, of certain religious views, and also of classical utilitarianism in so far as its account of the good is understood hedonistically. Although Rawls first outlines this strategy in section 26, it is important to emphasize that what he provides in that section is only a sketch of the qualitative structure of the argument that needs to be made if the case for these principles is to be conclusive (TJ 150). Moreover, if there is indeed a dominant end at which all rational human action aims, then it is but a short step to construing that end as the sole intrinsic good (TJ 556) for human beings. Any further advantages that might be won by the principle of utility . 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. Doing this would achieve greater satisfaction for a greater number of people. In summary, then, Rawls agrees with utilitarianism about the desirability of providing a systematic account of justice that reduces the scope for intuitionistic balancing and offers a clear and constructive solution to the priority problem; about the need to subordinate commonsense precepts of justice to a higher criterion; and about the holistic character of distributive justice. We have to ask how, on Utilitarian principles, this influence is to be exercised. However, Sandel believes that the underlying theory of the person suffers from incoherence19 and cannot, therefore, provide Rawls with a satisfactory response to the charge that he too is guilty of neglecting the distinctness of persons. As Rawls says: Teleological views have a deep intuitive appeal since they seem to embody the idea of rationality. Third, they have questioned whether Rawls's principles can truly be said to guarantee the parties a satisfactory minimum and whether the parties, who are ignorant of their conceptions of the good, can truly be said to care little for gains above such a minimum. Admittedly, hedonistic forms of utilitarianism recognize that different individuals will take pleasure in very different sorts of pursuits, and so they are superficially hospitable to pluralism in a way that other monistic views are not. After characterizing classical utilitarianism as the ethic of perfect altruists, moreover, Rawls goes on in the next several pages to ask what theory of justice would be preferred by an impartial, sympathetic spectator who did not conflate all systems of desires into one. Herein lies the problem. Scheffler also suggests that the complexity of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism in A Theory of Justice may help to explain his willingness, in Political Liberalism, to treat utilitarianism as a candidate for inclusion in an overlapping consensus. In particular, he admires utilitarianism's systematic and constructive character, and thinks it unfortunate that the views advanced by critics of utilitarianism have not been comparably systematic or constructive. What social problems contributed to the decline of the Roman empire? First, since the parties agreement in the Original Position is final, they know that they cant go back on it once they get to the real world. In that book, of course, Rawls's aims are different from his aims in A Theory of Justice. 7 0 obj This extension to society as a whole of the principle of choice for a single individual is facilitated, Rawls believes, by treating the approval of a perfectly sympathetic and ideally rational and impartial spectator as the standard of what is just. The justice or injustice of assigning a particular benefit to a given individual will depend, for utilitarians, on whether there is any other way of allocating it that would lead to an overall distribution with greater (total or average) utility.