Surely, though, this is not why rape is wrong; the pleasure the rapist gets shouldnt be counted at all, and the whole thing sounds ridiculous. Yet is probably fair to say that it has been less influential, as an argument against classical utilitarianism, than the argument offered independently of the original position construction. In response, he argues that a benevolent person fitting this description would actually prefer justiceasfairness to classical utilitarianism. So if they choose rules that allow slavery in their society, they do not know how likely it is that they will wind up as slaves. Nor, to those who find holism compelling, does the project of identifying a putatively natural, presocial baseline distribution of advantages, and assessing the justice of all subsequent distributions solely by reference to the legitimacy of each move away from the baseline, seem either conceptually sound or ethically appropriate. It is not clear, however, what happened to the valiant woman who added so much to Lewis and Clark's expedition. This does not mean that just institutions must give people what they independently deserve, but rather that, if just institutions have announced that they will allocate rewards in accordance with certain standards, then individuals who meet those standards can be said to deserve the advertised rewards. Having a thriving child makes us happy and so does watching TV. No. 1 0 obj Samuel Freeman, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right. Part of Rawls's point, when calling attention in Two Concepts of Rules to the interest of the classical utilitarians in social institutions, was to emphasize that the construal of utilitarianism as supplying a comprehensive standard of appraisal represents a relatively recent development of the view: one he associates, in that essay, with Moore. Kenneth Arrow, Some OrdinalistUtilitarian Notes on Rawls's Theory of Justice, Holly Smith Goldman, Rawls and Utilitarianism, in, R. M. Hare, Rawls' Theory of Justice, in, John Harsanyi, Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their expedition through the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, from 1803 to 1806. For they rely on something like a shared highest order preference function as the basis for interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing, and such a function treats citizens as subscribing to a common ranking of the relative desirability of different packages of material resources and personal qualitiesincluding traits of character, skills and abilities, attachments and loyalties, ends and aspirations. Mill argued for the desirability of breaking down the sharp and hostile division between the producers or workers, on the one hand, and the capitalists or owners, on the other hand, T or F: According to libertarianism, liberty is the prime value, and justice consists in being free from the interference of others. Since there is, accordingly, no inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his criticism of utilitarianism, there is no need for him to take drastic metaphysical measures to avoid it.21. Instead, it is a constraint on the justice of distributions and institutions that they should give each individual what that individual independently deserves in virtue of the relevant facts about him or her. Both views hold that commonsense precepts of justice must be subordinate to some higher principle or principles. Any further advantages that might be won by the principle of utility . Do you feel that capitalism is fair across the board for small business owners as, Corporations differ from partnerships and other forms of business association in two ways. It is rational for them to maximize their expected utility. For this very reason, Rawls suggests, utilitarianism offers a way of adapting the notion of the one rational good to the institutional requirements of a modern state and pluralistic democratic society.12 So long as the good is identified with agreeable feeling, however, the account remains monistic.13. 10 0 obj No loss would wipe them out and they will come out ahead in the long run. 12 0 obj They can assign probabilities to outcomes in the society they belong to. Thus, Rawls believes, there is a chain of argument that begins with a worry about the possibility of rational decision and concludes with an endorsement of hedonistic utilitarianism. And the third is the fact that both the Rawlsian and the utilitarian accounts of distributive justice are, in a sense to be explained, holistic in character. In arriving at this conclusion, it is important to guard against an excessively narrow, formalistic interpretation of the maximin argument.6 As already noted, Rawls's initial account in section 26 of the reasons for relying on the maximin rule is merely an outline of what he will attempt to establish subsequently. (2) Their vigilant observations and careful recordings of the geography and wildlife helped open the area for settlement. Rawls seems to be proposing that the putatively less plausible of the two versions of the very theory which, in A Theory of Justice, he had treated as his primary target of criticism, and as the primary rival for his own principles of justice, might actually join in an overlapping consensus affirming those principles. Thus it would not occur to them to acknowledge the principle of utility in its hedonistic form. The parties have to avoid choosing principles that they might find unacceptable in the real world, outside the original position. Accordingly, what he proposes to do is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Rawls believes that, of all traditional theories of justice, the contract theory is the one which best approximates our considered judgments of justice. His aim is to develop this theory in such a way as to offer an alternative systematic account of justice that is superior . Rawls's aim, by contrast, is to reduce our reliance on unguided intuition by formulating explicit principles for the priority problem (TJ 41), that is, by identifying constructive and recognizably ethical (TJ 39) criteria for assigning weight to competing precepts of justice. The most important of these ideas is the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation. They can also help us to see that some people may be troubled by Rawls's arguments against utilitarianism, not because they sympathize with those aspects of the view that he criticizes, but rather because they are critical of those aspects of the view with which he sympathizes. If, however, there is some dominant end to which all of our other ends are subordinated, then a rational decision is always in principle possible, since only difficulties of computation and lack of information remain (TJ 552). This drains away much of the motivation for a teleological view. On the one hand, utilitarians will say that they wouldnt make life intolerable for anyone: that doesnt make any sense if youre trying to maximize happiness, after all. 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. Second, they regard what Rawls calls stability as an important criterion for choosing principles. Rawls's strategy is to try to establish that the choice between average utility and his two principles satisfies these conditions because (1) the parties have no basis for confidence in the type of probabilistic reasoning that would support a choice of average utility, (2) his two principles would assure the parties of a satisfactory minimum, and (3) the principle of average utility might have consequences that the parties could not accept. Course Hero is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university. . We are in the second part of the argument in which we ask if the acknowledgment previously made should be reconsidered (TJ 504). In effect, then, an intuitionist conception of justice is but half a conception (TJ 41). In Political Liberalism (xviixx and xliixliv) Rawls says that the account of stability given in Part III of the Theory is defective, because it tests the rival conceptions of justice by asking whether the wellordered society associated with each such conception would continue to generate its own support over time and, in so doing, this account implicitly assumes that in a wellordered society everyone endorses the conception on the basis of a shared comprehensive moral doctrine. These three points of agreement, taken together, have implications that are rather farreaching. He also suggests that part of the attraction of monistic accounts, and of teleological theories that incorporate such accounts, may derive from a conviction that they enable us to resolve a fundamental problem about the nature of rational deliberation. 11 0 obj If that association is unwarranted, then the contrast between the classical and average views may be less dramatic than Rawls suggests, and the claims of the original position as an illuminating analytic device may to that extent be reduced. In this sense, utilitarianism takes the distinctions among persons less seriously than his principles do. . The first, which I have already mentioned, is Rawls's aspiration to produce a theory that shares utilitarianism's systematic and constructive character. Rawls believes that, of all traditional theories of justice, the contract theory is the one which best approximates our considered judgments of justice. Cited hereafter as PL, with page references to the paperback edition given parenthetically in the text. And since there is no dominant end of all rational human action, Rawls continues, it is implausible to suppose that the good is monistic. However, it directs us to arrange social and political institutions in such a way as to maximize the aggregate satisfaction or good, even if this means that some individuals' ability to have good livesin utilitarian termswill be seriously compromised, and even though there is no sentient being who experiences the aggregate satisfaction or whose good is identified with that aggregate. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. <> In my opinion, they mostly boil down to one point: the parties would not be willing to run the risk of being the big losers in a utilitarian society. <>/Font<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 960 540] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> After all, he had said in section 29 a) that the stability argument is one of the main arguments for the two principles (TJ 175), b) that it fits under the heuristic schema suggested by the reasons for following the maximin rule (TJ 175), and c) that it depends on the laws of moral psychology and the availability of human motives, which are only discussed later on (sections 7576) (TJ 177). Rawls has three reasons why parties in the Original Position would prefer his two principles of justice over average utilitarianism, a principle that would require the society to maximize average utility or happiness. Classical utilitarianism, as he understands it, holds that society is rightly ordered, and therefore just, when its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it (TJ 22). This is not to say that their concern is insignificant. 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. The main grounds for the principles of justice have already been presented. Instead, Rawls offers a contractualist, proceduralist account of In theory, one or more of the commonsense precepts could themselves be elevated (TJ 305) to this status, but Rawls does not believe that they are plausible candidates. <> This suggests to Rawls that even if the concept of the original position served no other purpose, it would be a useful analytic device (TJ 189), enabling us to see the different complex[es] of ideas (TJ 189) underlying the two versions of utilitarianism. 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. He added an argument to the effect that the parties are incapable of estimating probabilities; this is the second point above. 7 0 obj Because the explorers could not communicate with the Native Americans they encountered, it was difficult to maintain peaceful relationships. Will Kymlicka, Rawls on Teleology and Deontology, Samuel Freeman, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right.

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