John Rawls: 'Justice as Fairness' (1958)

The 1958 article where Rawls lays out an embryonic version of his version of the social contract which would be reworked later in A Theory of Justice

[mr.kind_stranger]

I’m Studying Rawls in no depth at sixth form and I have wanted for a while a more thorough but clearly explained (without excessive jargon) look at his ideas. The algorithm works in mysterious ways. Thank you!

[sbnwnc]

Oooh. Jeffrey Kaplan has competition!!
Great work 🎉🎉🎉

[danwylie-sears]

My impression before watching: the original position behind the veil of ignorance is a useful way of thinking about it, but the absolute maximin conclusion commonly associated with Rawls is not a reasonable conclusion. If a reasonable mind contemplates various possible social orders from the original position, they'll prefer the prospect of having things be worse in some completely trivial way if the one-in-a-billion risk of being worst off materializes, paired with massive gains the other 99.99 etc. percent of the time, over the reverse. For that matter, even if they know they're going to be worst off, any reasonable person would accept an absolutely trivial additional bit of suffering in order to spare others from similar (but trivially lesser) suffering. People aren't pure selfless utilitarians, or anywhere close. But neither are they pure selfish minmaxers. The point is that the original position is a useful way of framing the question.

I don't share Rawls's particular set of premises, though, so I don't feel bound by his particular conclusions.