I think that there is a clear relation to risk preference. Most people prefer gambles where you have 100% chance of winning $5 than a 50% chance of $0 and 50% chance of $10, even thought he expected value of each of those gambles is the same. Would you rather a world where you are born guaranteed 5 wealth units, or one where you might be born with nothing or with 10 wealth units with equal chance.
But most people tolerate some risk. So I'd expect that behind the veil of ignorance, a lot of people would tolerate some inequality for the chance of the better life. So, for example, instead of 100% chance of $5, they'd take 50% chance of $4 and 50% of $6.
People behave this way even in one-shot choices.
I know that there are arguments about what a purely rational agent would do (though I am suspicious that the concept of purely rational is ultimately incoherent), but I am not sure how relevant a theory of justice is that relies on what such a purely rational agent would do and what no actual agent would ever do.
For a full overview of John Rawls theory including the veil of ignorance and the original position, I recommend consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[0].
This resource was invaluable to me during my philosophy and politics studies.
The problem with Rawls is simple: Behind the veil of ignorance, "maximizing the preferences of the worst off" has many appealing properties.
However, in the real world, where both one's own actions and events out of one's control exert influence in one's outcomes, it creates a huge incentive problem as it slowly turns into the "dictatorship of the worst off."
> it creates a huge incentive problem as it slowly turns into the "dictatorship of the worst off."
Where is the dictatorship, precisely? The veil of ignorance challenges us to select those principles that we'd find agreeable to us given the kind of lives we wish for and no other prior information about ourselves. Commonly observed consequences of this are the elimination of homelessness and basic privation, both of which are achievable today in every developed nation. But there's no dictatorship involved in that -- it's just boring domestic policy.
In Social Choice Theory, "dictatorship" is defined by the "social" choice always matching the most preferred alternative of an individual (or, sometimes, as "social preferences" always matching the preferences of an individual.
Sure, but just to be clear: the "dictator" in SCT is a particular mathematical model for preference selection. It doesn't imply a political dictator, and it isn't a necessary condition for SCT -- there are plenty of non-dictatorial preference selection systems.
It's not clear from his actual positions that Rawls would favor a dictatorial model, or that he even accepts SCT (which predates his academic output by ~40 years) as a decision substrate. Put another way: "worst off" isn't a blindly overriding position for Rawls; we can all recognize ways in which we would be the "worst off" but also not entitled to preferential treatment via the Original Position (Eichmann at the gallows being an intuitive example for most people).
Practical problems with it don't really matter (unless you are a pragmatist :)
There is no reason to suppose that, given an unknown position in that society, someone would choose to max-min. Someone might choose rather to maximize justice, for example. That's what most western philosophers did for a few thousands of years.
Rawls' argument assumes his own preferences are axioms without presenting them as such.
Oh, but they do because people's half-baked understanding of the philosophy get warmed up and served in all sorts of ways that affect our quality of life.
The problem with Rawls's philosophy is simple. His veil of ignorance and original position have the trappings of the state of nature and social contract theory, but his approach is radically different. He is not claiming anything fundamental about human nature or human existence.
Rawls is proposing a small set of principles to use to build a model that we can use for moral reasoning. But the key difference is that the model's legitimacy (and usefulness) comes from the fact that the conclusions arrived at from using it seem to conform to our moral intuitions.
By our moral intuitions he means, the sense of right and wrong that he and other elites share. Rawls never claimed universality. He argued that different societies would have different conceptions of justice. The purpose of his model was to act as a heuristic device for reasoning about the "hard" questions. In other words, if the model conforms to 99.9 percent of our moral sense, then when we get to the margins and have trouble deciding, the model becomes our guide.
The important thing to keep in mind is that he and his likeminded sophisticates have already made up their minds about what "decent" people think, and use that to make the model. But most people don't realize that that's what's going on, because on the surface—meaning, before you wrestle with his impenetrable prose—his method seems to resemble the Enlightenment approach of Hobbes and Locke (and, arguably, Rousseau).
Rawls says nothing about right and wrong, or even justice. Instead, he says what the "smartest people in the room" have already decided.
If laws are made behind the veil, then, by definition, they are neutral to the worst off and the best off.
Edit: lots of talk about "if" and "best" and "worst" below. I don't think they're the point. It's about right and wrong regardless of if / best / worst. Sure people have agendas, the aim (which may sometimes / often fail) is to work beyond those agendas.
That's actually the more specific criticism of Rawls: he argues behind the veil of ignorance people generally would promote the interests of the worst off above all else, and critics (including those who think the veil of ignorance is a great concept) disagree with this conclusion (which depends on an additional assumption we are extremely risk averse)
This critique comes from utilitarians like Harsanyi and misses Rawls's point. (He's not a utilitarian anyway.) You can be extremely risk prone and nevertheless come to the conclusion that society ought to help you in the unlikely event that you have to endure extreme hardships. There is a difference between personal risk taking behaviour and the more abstract, general considerations behind the veil of ignorance.
The laws we live with are never made behind the veil.
Relatedly, I have done some classroom experiments where the laws were indeed made behind the veil. Students overwhelmingly chose minimum guaranteed income from experiment to equalizing everyone's incomes (which is what is required by maximizing the preferences of the worst off) from the experiment before the task and their specific earning potentials were revealed.
Rawls have a core problem that his "veil" theory, though it is good, is making an idea of "justice" more "fairness" than anything else. There exist principles I would advocate from behind these veil that would be in most likelihood disfavorable against me. Indeed, Rawls write his principles as "Justice as Fairness" for a reason.
I think of it more as minimizing the worst harm a system is causing—the human cost of the best the system delivers. The Veil discourages one from letting those get too out-of-whack.
I was thinking more along the lines of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (Le Guin). One person tortured for their entire life, non-stop, to keep an entire city of people basically content? A behind-the-veil designer of systems might be OK with that. Maybe. Half of the city so-tortured, so the rest can live not just content lives, but like billionaires? The designer will almost certainly ask to tweak things to modify that deal. Half the city lives alright, but kinda poor, and the other half like billionaires? The designer might take that one.
It's about odds and exactly how bad the worst case is.
My points are that fairness is not justice. Fairness having some measure of equal distribution, or at least minimum goods. Justice I call more like Nozick, that each have property from own earnings.
John Rawls made a mind-blowing mistake of not considering people outside of one's society as worthy of consideration.
His "veil of ignorance" (original idea by John Harsanyi not by Rawls) is great - but it focuses on one's society, ignoring the plight of the worst-off in other countries. Shame.
> John Rawls made a mind-blowing mistake of not considering people outside of one's society as worthy of consideration.
I think this is a shortsighted reading of Rawls. AToJ refers specifically to societies and states because (some of) Rawls' ethical foundations begin in Piaget's tradition of social moral education, but nothing about either the Original Position or Veil of Ignorance is itself bound to a particular state or society.
Indeed, there's a thriving field of International Distributive Justice[1] that directly traces its lineage back to Rawls. No particular societal reference point is necessary.
(As a complete note, I'd actually argue an even stronger point: that Rawls is fundamentally a cosmopolitan ethicist, in the same tradition as (and building off of) Kant's thought in Perpetual Peace. But that's an entire tangent.)
Can you provide a reference or quote that substantiates this? The word "society" is polysemous, so its not obvious to me that he meant any particular nation, or political unit, and not humanity as a whole.
But most people tolerate some risk. So I'd expect that behind the veil of ignorance, a lot of people would tolerate some inequality for the chance of the better life. So, for example, instead of 100% chance of $5, they'd take 50% chance of $4 and 50% of $6.
People behave this way even in one-shot choices.
I know that there are arguments about what a purely rational agent would do (though I am suspicious that the concept of purely rational is ultimately incoherent), but I am not sure how relevant a theory of justice is that relies on what such a purely rational agent would do and what no actual agent would ever do.