Can't Pull the Veil Over My Eyes
There is something I've never understood about John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance/Original Position idea. Here's my understanding of it (more here):

Our town decides to form a perfectly just government as follows: you hire a Vulcan who knows nothing about you. I hire one, too. So does everybody else in our town. We are each paying our Vulcans to get us the best deal possible, but they don't know anything "morally irrelevant" about our lives (rich/poor, male/female, old/young, etc.) - this is the Veil of Ignorance. The Vulcans aren't allowed to learn anything about us, except for some very general idea of what "justice" means to humans in our culture - this is the Original Position. From there, the Vulcans hash out a distribution of resources that they can all agree on, and send it back to us. If they can't agree, we all hire new Vulcans who know even less about us and try again, stripping them of "morally irrelevant" data until we get a unanimous solution back. We adopt the measure without further debate. Bam! Perfectly equitable society - everybody fights for their own advantage, without the confusing knowledge of who we actually are. So, e.g. Vulcan agents of parents don't argue that parents should control their children's resources out of simple selfishness - they don't know that they're working for parents, so the argument must be from pure conviction.

The idea seems to be that we only fail to reach a perfectly equitable society because of parochialism.

I can't say I agree with that, but it doesn't matter - that's not what I find confusing. The confusing bit is, what do we do tomorrow? And next year? And so on? Surely the equitable society is only a metastable State - wait a moment, and it will drift.

We can reject the metastable assertion, and say human beings will stay on the right course once put there. This idea seems unlikely - so unlikely that I'd bet the economists can kill it outright with a well-turned proof. But I could be wrong there.

We can keep going back to the Vulcans for more advice. The frequency with which we do so will be new, relevant information about the best distribution of resources, unless you want to claim that the stability of the solution is not a factor in its correctness. But the cost of asking the Vulcans has got to be pretty steep, and how useful is a society that's truly just for only a second?

The Vulcans can incorporate the future in their debate - but we don't know which or how many resources will be available, what the average lifespan or population is at any moment, or how long a future to account for. Quick question: which are there more of today, living humans, or dead humans (counting every Homo Sapiens that's ever existed)? Which will there be more of in 500 years? It depends on the population-doubling time and the average lifespan of people, both of which are changing. But how can those numbers be "morally relevant" to the treatment of individual people?

Perhaps the Vulcans give us a whole system of policy choices, to be implemented when certain conditions hold in the future. That exposes the redistribution process to politicized social measurements and endless debates on what the situation really calls for. Looks kinda like our current system.

So I don't understand how Rawls accounts for the ticking clock. Suggestions and more expertise welcome.....




- posted by Scott @ 12:23 AM