1 JOHN RAWLS'S THEORY OF JUSTICE NOTES FOR PHILOSOPHY 167 Dick Arneson SPRING, 2008 CHAPTER ONE. Rawls and the Social Contract Tradition Rawls aims to develop a theory of justice that will be superior to utilitarianism and that will supplant what he calls "intuitionism" (the No Theory theory). According to Rawls, a moral theory is a set of principles that (1) stipulates what information we need in order to decide what to do and (2) determines what should be done in any circumstances, provided we have the information regarding those circumstances that the principles themselves specify to be relevant. In other words, no further evaluation is required; the principles embody the evaluation needed to identify morally right policies. With a theory, given a specification of the relevant facts and a statement of the principles, one can derive as conclusion what should be done. But if one's morality includes more than one value, how can one avoid the need to weigh these plural values against each other intuitively on a case by case basis? This is what Rawls calls the "priority problem." To solve it we need to build in a weighting or priority ranking of the different values we accept as relevant into the formulation of our principles. Rawls favors what he calls "lexical priority rankings." If one value has lexical priority over another, the first one trumps the second, we should do everything we can to achieve the top-ranked value to the greatest degree possible and devote resources to achieving the lower-ranked value only when doing so does not lessen even in the slightest degree the extent to which we achieve the top-ranked value. Rawls proposes to develop a theory of justice by revising the social contract tradition of theorizing about justice associated with the 17th and 18th century writers John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Locke sees legitimate political authority as deriving from the free and voluntary consent of the governed, from a contract or agreement between governor and governed person. Rawls says he will take the social contract idea to a higher level of abstraction. According to Rawls, justice is what free and equal persons would agree to as basic terms of social cooperation in conditions that are fair for this purpose. This idea he calls "justice as fairness." The conditions that Rawls takes to be most appropriate for the choice of principles of justice constitute what he calls the "original position." Rawls construes the task to be choosing principles for a "well-ordered society," a society that is (a) effectively regulated by a public conception of justice and (b) whose members understand and give allegiance to this public conception. Moreover, a third condition, (c), holds: it is common knowledge among all members of society that a and b hold. Why this idealization? Rawls thinks we need to get clear about first-best theory before we can be in a position to think through problems that arise when institutions are not just and some persons are not disposed to comply with requirements of justice. The Basic Structure of Society as the Primary Subject of Justice. Rawls writes, "For us the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. By major institutions I understand the political constitution and the principal economic and social arrangements. Thus the legal protection of freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, competitive markets, private property in the means of production, and the monogamous family are examples of major social institutions" (p. 6). Why focus on the basic structure? Rawls: "Because its effects are so profound and present from the start." He says that the basic structure2 brings it about that people are born into different social positions with different and unequal life prospects. These initial inequalities are "especially deep," says Rawls. They make a big difference to our lives but lie beyond our power to control-a baby cannot choose her parents or their social position. Rawls is implicitly contrasting deep inequalities of this sort with shallow inequalities, the kind that arise via the choices and actions of individuals, for which they might be deemed responsible. Rawls concludes: "It is these [deep] inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply" (p. 7). {Criticism: Deep inequalities as characterized by Rawls do not all have their origin in the basic structure of society. The differences in native talent or talent potential between people are also present at birth and fundamentally shape peoples life prospect~ but these arise from different genetic endowments not from the basic structure of society.} Rawls versus utilitarianism. Rawls writes, "Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override" (p. 3). He also writes, somewhat cryptically, "Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons" (p. 24). What is he saying? Utilitarianism says, one morally ought always to choose the act or policy that maximizes utility. Utility is a measure of individual good. Rawls considers the measure to be informed desire satisfaction. So if one faces a choice between actions, for each action, determine the impact that action would have on the utility of every person who would be affected by it, sum the results, and pick the action that would lead to the highest utility total (the lowest negative sum if all choices lead to negative utility). If the actions one might take will affect the number of people who shall live, then two versions of utilitarianism may disagree. Average utilitarianism says choose the act that maximizes utility per person; aggregate utilitarianism says choose the act that maximizes the sum of utility across persons. Given constant population, utilitarianism says we should pick the act that leads to the highest sum of utility regardless of how this utility is distributed across persons. So in the example, utilitarianism is indifferent between policy 1 and policy 2. From the utilitarian standpoint, one is as good as the other. Policy 1 Policy 2 Utility outcomes for the individual given choice of the policy Sam