[HN Gopher] John Rawls and the "Veil of Ignorance" (2020)
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John Rawls and the "Veil of Ignorance" (2020)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-05-30 10:16 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (open.library.okstate.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (open.library.okstate.edu)
| yboris wrote:
| The "Veil of Ignorance" is an idea initially developed by John
| Harsanyi
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harsanyi
|
| Rawls for some reason focused only on "within a country" so he
| failed to recognize that the true application of veil of
| ignorance should push us towards open borders and more aid to
| developing nations.
|
| ps - "veil of ignorance" is probably the best perspective to take
| when thinking about all the "trolley problems" - because it leads
| you to recognize the correct (utilitarian) solution (of saving
| more people).
| lapcat wrote:
| > Rawls for some reason focused only on "within a country" so
| he failed to recognize that the true application of veil of
| ignorance should push us towards open borders and more aid to
| developing nations.
|
| Rawls discussed this in the later work "The Law of Peoples".
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Excuse me, I wasn't aware all the philosophers got together and
| voted utilitarianism as being correct? In fact, Rawls
| suggestion for maximin helps deal more elegantly with a major
| problem in utilitarianism which is downwards facing risk often
| being more important than just expected value.
|
| While the standard trolley problem lends itself to utilitarian
| analysis, things get far more complicated with variations such
| as involuntary organ donation while the donor is still living
| (i.e. kill one person to get a heart, lungs, kidneys, etc.
| which can save multiple lives).
| tylerhou wrote:
| Utilitarianism can easily deal with downside risk by adding a
| discounting factor to the moral worth of higher utilities.
| (E.g. Instead of aggregating utilities by summing them all
| up, sum their logs, and pick the action that leads to the
| highest log-sum.)
|
| The real problem that Rawls's theory (and other alternatives)
| solves is the issue of aggregation in itself. If you could
| save one life at the cost of many, many headaches, a
| utilitarianist must say that, given sufficiently many minor
| headache sufferers, you must prevent the headaches. This
| seems implausible -- some believe that no matter how many
| headaches occur, you must save the person's life instead.
|
| Also, this is a nitpick, but it is a common misconception
| that trolley problems are problems on whether you should turn
| the trolley or not. In most trolley scenarios that
| philosophers study, the correct answer (to turn or not) is
| really quite clear, and ethical theories tend to arrive at
| the same answer. The real trolley problem is a _meta-
| problem:_ why is it in situation X we think it acceptable to
| turn the trolley, but in situation Y which is very similar,
| we think it not acceptable? What is the morally
| distinguishing factor between X and Y?
|
| For example, we think that it is appropriate for a bystander
| to turn a trolley to kill one, saving five lives. But most
| philosophers also think it inappropriate for a doctor to kill
| one healthy patient, harvesting her organs to transplant into
| five sick people, saving their lives (your example). In both
| circumstances we kill one to save five, but the second seems
| unacceptable. What is the morally distinguishing factor? And
| what are the morally distinguishing factors in more
| complicated trolley scenarios?
| guerrilla wrote:
| To support your point, there was actually a vote[1] and
| consequentialism in general only came out at 24.1% (of which
| utilitarianism only makes up a portion.)
|
| > Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue
| ethics?
|
| > Other 558 / 1803 (30.9%)
|
| > Accept or lean toward: consequentialism 435 / 1803 (24.1%)
|
| > Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics 406 / 1803 (22.5%)
|
| > Accept or lean toward: deontology 404 / 1803 (22.4%)
|
| 1. https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Philosophy
| +f...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > for some reason
|
| Rawls himself extensively discussed the so-called
| 'cosmopolitan' critique and it not as if this objection was
| unanticipated.
| mistermann wrote:
| To be fair, open borders being necessarily beneficial is a bit
| of a presumption though. Some people are open to foreign aid,
| but not all of those people are open to open borders, and that
| being imposed could also affect their stance on aid.
|
| Humans are very complex.
| yboris wrote:
| Humans generally don't think hard about big issues (perhaps
| because) in general they have very little they can do about
| them anyway. Humans consistently feel overconfident (and are
| incorrect) about many things. On the topic of ethics, many
| seem to go with gut feelings (an evolutionary kludge to get
| small groups of people to cooperate, and to cohere as a
| tribe).
|
| People consistently overestimate (by many orders of
| magnitude) the amount of their taxes that goes to foreign
| aid. Many people in the US are reluctant to have open borders
| because of racism. But most moral frameworks would endorse
| open borders - and there is tremendous economic benefit to
| open borders as well. Consider https://openborders.info/
| mistermann wrote:
| > Many people in the US are reluctant to have open borders
| because of racism.
|
| And most people tend to speak in forms where their
| statements can be technically correct yet misinformative,
| potentially missing out on the opportunity to improve upon
| the tendencies you point out.
|
| For example, if you were to convert "many" to a
| quantitative term such as "% of people in the US reluctant
| to have open borders because of racism" or "% of people in
| the US reluctant to have open borders, by reason (of which
| one is racism)", it would be much more difficult to be
| correct.
|
| I doubt you speak this way with malicious intent, but the
| _unknown_ effects remain. And this is just one bug among
| thousands.
| wyager wrote:
| One of the most harmful and anti-utilitarian legal theories to
| ever become popular. It's baby's first attempt at first-order
| anthropic utilitarianism, with disastrous entailments.
| mrwh wrote:
| I'm curious, care to elaborate?
| wyager wrote:
| Rawls' proposed social optimization strategy is basically,
| implicitly, minimaxing (although I doubt he would describe it
| in similar terms), which is terrible for social outcomes. The
| return/variance pareto frontier for societal optimization is
| super sharp, so minimaxing makes almost everyone way worse
| off than expected utility maximization. Even if you're
| critical of EV maximization in general, it's really hard to
| claim that minimaxing performs acceptably at society-scale.
| mrwh wrote:
| So for a specific example, in a world in which (say) 50% of
| people earn a dollar a day, and 50% a hundred dollars a
| day, and we are judging two potential policies: 1), that
| reduces the number of people on a dollar a day to 25%, so
| that now 75% of people earn a hundred dollars a day; or 2)
| that means that no one is an a dollar a day, but that
| everyone is now on 50 dollars a day. Rawls would say go to
| option 2, where plenty of people are worse off, but now no
| one is terribly off. Is that a fair example? Net, the
| situation is worse; but now no one is destitute.
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| Sure, the values you picked for your example make the
| Minimax strategy look reasonable. You can just as easily
| choose values which make it look silly:
|
| 1) 1% of people earn $1 per day, and 99% of people earn
| $100 per day 2) Everyone earns $1.01 per day
|
| I think most people, myself included, would take their
| chances with the first option. The Veil of Ignorance is a
| useful thought experiment, but I don't think many people
| would consider a simple Minimax algorithm to be
| reasonable, and would take into account the well-being of
| the average person as well.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Net, the situation is worse; but now no one is
| destitute.
|
| How do you measure this? I think if you could measure
| subjective suffering, the situation may be better. Did
| you assume that people needed the extra $50 for
| something?
| wyager wrote:
| Rawls would definitely pick the second option, but
| utilitarianism may or may not favor the first option
| (depends e.g. on dollar-utility mapping).
| mrwh wrote:
| To be clear, personally I think a world in which everyone
| has less but no one has none is, on a moral level, a
| better world. If this is a fair example of Rawls'
| thought, then I'm with Rawls, and am not a utilitarian.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Uh, source for your claim? I think that diminishing
| marginal utility of wealth probably means that EV
| maximization and so-called "maximin" overlap a considerable
| amount of the time.
| wyager wrote:
| The source is common sense, experience, and original
| thought. I don't copy every thought I have from an NYT
| article or whatever you're looking for.
|
| Minimax is emphatically not even remotely close to EV
| maximization, especially for high-dimensional
| optimization spaces with sharp risk/return curves as I
| described.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You're making empirical claims about the world as if they
| are obvious, so I expected you would have a shred of
| evidence backing what you were saying, but I guess I
| forgot we were on HN.
|
| Unsure why you would think I was expecting a NYT article
| (except as some weird cultural signaling point?), I was
| thinking more along the lines of a welfare economics or
| econometrics journal article.
| wyager wrote:
| The two likely possibilities are that you have enough
| background in utility/optimization/portfolio/whatever
| theory to reverse-engineer my thought process, or you
| need a lot of additional background that I can't feasibly
| provide in a single HN comment. Either way, linking to
| some random economics journal article is unlikely to
| help. I might as well link to a bunch of textbook pages
| defining all the words I used. As I said, this is an
| original thought of mine, so if an article reiterating
| what I said exists, I am in not much better a position to
| find it than anyone else on here.
|
| Apologies if this seems harsh, but people's habit of
| asking for a source on every original or propositional
| claim on this website really bugs me. Sometimes people
| are sharing new observations!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I have a background in economics and optimization and
| have not seen a claim as strong as the one you are
| making. Again, given that you are making an empirical
| claim about the world as we find it, I would expect you
| would be basing that on something you could point to -
| but I guess not.
|
| Not going to keep responding, I've said all I wanted to.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I agree, but only to the extent that we need to consider a
| cutoff somewhere for extraordinary bad luck. Maybe we only
| consider maximizing the well-being of the 99.9% or the
| 99.99% of people like how we mostly ignore the maximum
| response time for a server in favor of looking at 95th
| percentile.
|
| Do you have any evidence for the claim that minmaxing
| causes a steep drop off in overall expected utility? I'm
| not sure if research has been done about this with traffic
| lights, but I think that could be a good case study about
| this. Minmax for traffic light timings would mean
| minimizing the maximum wait time at a traffic light, though
| I could see how such a strategy might hurt the overall
| throughput of the intersection. In the extreme case, you
| have one granny trying to cross a 6-lane stroad during rush
| hour; in the pure throughput model, the road would never
| stop for granny and in the minmax model, she would only
| need to wait about as long as it takes her to cross the
| road. Obviously, different models would still allow granny
| to cross the road eventually and maybe with less of a
| throughput hit than pure minmax. All of this is speculation
| though and I'm curious what the throughput hit would be for
| minmax.
| wyager wrote:
| > Do you have any evidence for the claim that minmaxing
| causes a steep drop off in overall expected utility?
|
| My evidence is just experience with optimization/utility
| theory. If you're looking for a paper describing this one
| takeaway out of thousands from this body of theory, I'm
| not sure what it's called.
|
| In general, any strategic constraint reduces EV, unless
| the constraint happens to already be a component of the
| optimal strategy. That doesn't tell you how steep the
| dropoff is, just that it exists. Determining the
| variance/EV tradeoff precisely depends entirely on the
| structure of the optimization space.
|
| However, any complex optimization space exhibits
| essentially the same behavior; crushing the outcome
| distribution to be super narrow (latency, wealth, ROI,
| test scores, etc.) is typically only possible at great
| cost to the median and average cases.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| Rawls is the guy who is probably most responsible for corruption
| of the word "justice", which used to mostly mean "the proper
| administration of law".
|
| The Orwellian trick Rawls pulled was to effectively reduce it to
| "social justice", which is how to word is most commonly used
| today.
| uplifter wrote:
| Wittgenstein's had a poignant and simple conception of words as
| bags for meaning. We can put meaning into them, and take it
| out, and put different meanings instead, again and again.
| They've always been variable in meaning, and its difficult to
| say any two people, let alone cultures from different eras,
| will impart the same meaning to a term.
| lapcat wrote:
| > its difficult to say any two people, let alone cultures
| from different eras, will impart the same meaning to a term
|
| This actually sounds like the exact opposite of Wittgenstein,
| who argued against the idea of a "private language".
| routerl wrote:
| > "justice", which used to mostly mean "the proper
| administration of law".
|
| _Citation needed_.
|
| That isn't what that word has meant since, at least, Socrates.
| Read academic works of jurisprudence from the past 3 centuries,
| and you'll see that most people are concerned with defining
| "law" as subsidiary to "justice", just as Rawls does, rather
| than the other way around (as suggested by you).
|
| Rawls didn't suddenly come out of nowhere and change the game
| completely. He's just another voice in a conversation that is
| thousands of years old. Namely, how can we say with confidence
| that a set of laws is just?
|
| You may not like his answer, but Rawls is certainly not the
| first (nor the last) to pose the question.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Small aside but their is something particularly humorous to me
| in this relatively recent phenomena where people who worry
| about "wokeness" start pointing to fairly vanilla and
| historical Western philosophers as the authors of contemporary
| social ills. Foucault and Derrida? I can understand the way
| that thought process went, but now increasingly its figures
| like Kant and Rawls. How far will it go? In a few months people
| will say Kierkegaard was a SJW and Husserl was responsible for
| decadent Liberal introspection and pronouns in the bio.
|
| Idk, nobody is going to be talking about these people in a
| year, but it is very interesting to see this now.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I agree largely with what you are saying, although (as a fan
| of Rawls) I don't really think linking Rawls to "social
| justice" as a concept is as far-fetched as you seem to think.
| Kant? Yes.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Yes I guess you are right about that, and I don't know
| enough about Rawls to say much more.. But if an analytic
| 20th century social philosopher is going to be a "woke" guy
| now, I don't know who is not vulnerable to that charge
| anymore. But I guess thats the point.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| I think you have a point, and generally the influence of
| these guys is overstated.
|
| But maybe if you're very charitable, you could see that as
| steelmanning the contemporary positions, instead of merely
| assigning blame.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Rawls is the guy who is probably most responsible for
| corruption of the word "justice", which used to mostly mean
| "the proper administration of law".
|
| Oh, you mean before Aristotle? Yeah, those Orwellian Greeks...
| and Buddhists, and Muslims and that damned Confucius. Plato
| should have died with Socrates, I agree. Down with the
| gadflies!
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| > Oh, you mean before Aristotle? Yeah, those Orwellian Greeks
|
| The word "justice" comes from Latin, not Greek.
|
| > Muslims
|
| Muslims have their own vocabulary for these things, related
| words include "Adl", "Insaf", and "Qada".
| guerrilla wrote:
| > The word "justice" comes from Latin, not Greek.
|
| And here I thought it came from English and that the Romans
| would have used iustitia for the same universally debated
| concept. You learn something new every day.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Rawls is the guy who is probably most responsible for
| corruption of the word "justice", which used to mostly mean
| "the proper administration of law".
|
| The definition of justice has been debated since at least
| Plato's "Republic" more than 2000 years ago.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Words mean different things to different people. Your premise
| that "justice" had some universally agreed upon meaning prior
| to Rawls' "orwellian" corruption is silly.
| stewbrew wrote:
| You cannot blame him for shortcomings of the English language.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| I think one big problem with Rawls's position is that it has no
| room for desert (as in, the idea that people can _deserve_ their
| fates). His thought experiment wants me to consider the risk that
| I be born a very bad man. But why should I want to design my
| society for the benefit of the dishonest, the slothful, and the
| wicked?
|
| I want a society designed for the benefit of the good, of the
| excellent, of the virtuous. We should of course have humanity and
| mercy for everyone.
| lapcat wrote:
| > But why should I want to design my society for the benefit of
| the dishonest, the slothful, and the wicked?
|
| It's not designed to benefit them, it's designed to benefit the
| least fortunate.
|
| Put it this way: what's the "harm" of dishonesty? If a
| dishonest person ends up being the worst off in society, then
| dishonesty has no advantage. Can you even say in that case that
| dishonesty causes harm? Whereas if someone uses dishonesty to
| gain personal advantage, then that person is _not_ the worst
| off in society, and so the society is not designed to benefit
| them. You might even say that the society is designed to
| benefit the _victims_ of dishonesty, not the perpetrators.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, Rawls' position is explicitly anti-'desert' and
| entitlement. I find his critique relatively compelling.
|
| Nothing about his position is saying that you must design a
| society specifically for the benefit of "the dishonest, the
| slothful, and the wicked," if such a design would be worse off
| under the difference principle. Indeed, many societies would
| benefit from punishing or disincentivizing such behavior.
|
| What Rawls critiques is the (Christian) notion that the
| slothful are apriori deserving of punishment or the hard-
| working _apriori_ deserving of reward, if such a reward
| structure is not one that would benefit a society of free
| individuals.
| dmead wrote:
| that is literally the point of the veil. you're not supposed to
| assume the worst about others, lest they also assume the worst
| about you.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| It's not assuming the worst. The whole point of the veil is
| that you don't know the circumstances of your birth and what
| traits you are blessed or cursed with.
| gringoDan wrote:
| For a related application of this concept, highly recommend The
| Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula LeGuin (10 min read).
|
| http://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
| routerl wrote:
| Great recommendation, and has the same moral premise as
| _Snowpiercer_ (for a more recent take on this concept).
| intrepidhero wrote:
| That was beautiful and poinant, typical of Le Guin. Thank you.
|
| I read once about a young man who wanted to give away
| everything he had and go live with the poor and destitute. His
| uncle told him it would be much more compassionate if he got a
| job, made alot of money and have that away. I've thought about
| that alot. His uncle wasn't wrong. If we want to improve
| humanity as a whole we need alot more people working hard
| making a lot of money to improve things for everyone. But if no
| one gives everything away and goes to live in poverty...
| Something good is lost.
|
| Someone down thread mentioned the obvious solution to the
| trolley problem being saving more lives. I agree, and also,
| someone has got to rail against the injustice of whole trolley
| situation to begin with.
|
| Maybe what I'm trying to say is ethical utility can be good,
| and we should strain to be better.
|
| Just my random thoughts after reading above.
| hydrok9 wrote:
| *poignant
| slothtrop wrote:
| you first
| shuntress wrote:
| I think you are missing the point...
|
| "Give away what you can" is obviously the optimal middle
| ground between "give away nothing" and "give away
| everything".
| sonofhans wrote:
| What a nice recommendation in this context! This is a great
| story. My first encounter with it was LeGuin herself reading it
| as a guest in a PSU science fiction class, 25 years ago.
| nootropicat wrote:
| >You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your
| personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or
| physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally
| arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but
| simply have them by luck.
|
| That's what makes the whole concept nonsensical. This implicitly
| assumes the existence of a soul. If 'you' were born as someone
| else, you wouldn't be you! The only actually coherent thought
| experiment is being born the same, just in a different
| environment, but that leads to completely different conclusions.
| Wealth is an external property, but intelligence, race, gender -
| aren't.
| [deleted]
| setgree wrote:
| For a much more critical take on Rawls, see Michael Huemer's
| "John Rawls is an Awful Reasoner" [0]
|
| Huemer is definitely writing in a polemical style that might turn
| some folks off, but I think the basic point -- that Rawls
| contorts himself to avoid a framework that just boils down to
| 'maximize utility' -- is more or less on point.
|
| [0] https://fakenous.net/?p=1824
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| This is a horrible take. Huemer dismisses the risk way too
| quickly despite risk being a tremendous, possibly most
| important, concern in microeconomics. The goal is still to
| maximize utility, but subject to certain constraints within a
| certain level of risk tolerance. I'm not sure why this would be
| so controversial within the realm of ethics when it is widely
| accepted in economics.
|
| Maximin is also pretty widely accepted in software engineering
| (though modified to use percentiles) since the 99th percentile
| response time is much more important than the average response
| time.
| notahacker wrote:
| Id argue the framework is more interesting than Rawls'
| conclusion.
|
| I don't agree with Rawls that it tends to imply maximin (most
| humans aren't _that_ risk averse) but it doesn 't imply
| maximising expected utility either (it's pretty rational to
| prefer 'levelling down' to an incredibly unequal society with a
| low chance of elite status). And whilst the implied risk of the
| "veil of ignorance" is a hypothetical thing (as are _many_
| utilitarian arguments and arguments against utilitarianism) it
| underlines the fact humans reason differently about value when
| downside risks are significant.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > that Rawls contorts himself to avoid a framework that just
| boils down to 'maximize utility' -- is more or less on point.
|
| It clearly doesn't though and is specifically constructed to
| avoid overfeeding utility monsters.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I have no problem with the idea of the veil of ignorance, but
| what's wrong with the discussion is the fundamental idea that you
| can use your imagination to design a society.
|
| Itself is supposed to be a thought experiment, it has no
| pretention or suggestion that the imagined design could work.
| Buuuuuuut, tons of people confuse the two and they start think
| the society can work as how they imagined.
|
| It's like when someone designs a machine, he/she begins with:
| let's assume there is no gravity. Well, in science actually you
| can do a thought experiment like that, but that's not how you
| design a machine! You need to know what the reality is and work
| with the reality!
|
| If you want to design a society, you need to start with knowledge
| about the human nature and the nature of a society. You can't
| just assume everyone is selfless, or assume nobody is going to
| kill/rob anybody, or assume everyone will work hard, or assume
| everyone has the same capabilities, or assume a community of a
| hundred will work like a community of a thousand. There are lots
| of fundamental knowledge you need to learn. While you are
| learning more and more about human nature and societies, you will
| find out there are lot of common features across cultures and
| societies, and you will find out the whole idea of imagining a
| society with your simple rule of justice is just so superficial
| that it's totally laughable.
| reality_inspctr wrote:
| For a predecessor that makes more sense but includes many of the
| same underpinnings, Amartya Sen's notion of a Human Development
| Index is a great thought exercise and tool.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't really see how this is relevant tbph, except in the
| standard utilitarian sense.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I've never read _A Theory of Justice_ , but a few years ago I
| read a short book by Rawls called _The Law of Peoples_ , which is
| basically an attempt to apply his theory to international
| relations, and he suggests that if one country is governed by a
| state that clearly violates the international consensus of how to
| treat people then the other nations should get together, invade,
| overthrow that government and replace it with a new one. And it
| seems like...we tried that about ten years after the book came
| out, with not-such-great results.
|
| Seems like there should be a lesson in that, but I'm not quite
| sure what it is.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think there's a better way of thinking about this subject which
| leads you to similar conclusions using less imagination. You can
| actually end up in most people's positions, so it's irrational to
| promote norms that harm others and benefit you
| disproportionately. War, economic collapse, disease, disability,
| climate change, natural disaster, etc. all happen. You can bet on
| the probabilities all you want, but black swan events do happen
| and you can become the minority, the immigrant, the homeless, the
| disabled, etc. in a flash. It's always in your own self-interest
| to maximize the minimum.
|
| As far as Nozick goes, I think Proudhon addressed that a century
| earlier.
| ReaLNero wrote:
| Important fyi is that in Rawls's conception of justice, you do
| not have knowledge of the likelihood of characteristics like
| handicap, immigrants etc. Otherwise an enslaved minority would
| be worthwhile enough to make a just society, which is clearly
| incorrect.
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| I know and that's captured in what I said. You have no idea
| what could happen to you. This actual fact replaces (or
| supplements) the need for the Veil of Ignorance. Maximizing
| the minimum actually reduces the worst case scenario you
| could end up in and there's nothing hypothetical about that.
| mistermann wrote:
| > You have no idea what could happen to you. This actual
| fact...
|
| Sometimes beliefs are more important than facts though.
| People in general may not have the depth of understanding
| you do.
| eckmLJE wrote:
| Some people feel in control of their life, have a support
| system, etc. and believe that such things could never
| happen to them.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Right, many of those people are much less likely to be at
| the receiving end of enslavement and torture and go on
| the make generalization errors from that position.
| ruined wrote:
| are you sure it's a generalization error? you forget that
| people experiencing enslavement and torture also have
| some amount of agency, and historically, have
| periodically organized to inflict terror upon people who
| seem to be immune to or supported by the pains of the
| momentary status quo.
|
| it seems silly to believe that outcome to be impossible
| and erroneous to consider, when there are people out
| there actively working towards that objective.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Sorry, just really not convinced by this rebuttal. I
| don't think the enslavers and torturers today are
| concerned with Spartacus-type events and that makes them
| not assume their experiences are generalizable.
| nickff wrote:
| You are assuming that everyone shares your risk aversion,
| which is rather similar to one of Rawls' logical errors.
| freen wrote:
| You are assuming that behind the veil of ignorance, you
| are still _you_ , with your memories, risk tolerance,
| education, etc.
|
| That is false. You are a random person, with all of those
| characteristics decided by the proverbial roll of the
| dice.
| tylerhou wrote:
| Well maximin is exactly what Rawls proposes, so it's the
| same logical error (if you can even call it that).
| guerrilla wrote:
| I can't help you if you're not averse to being enslaved
| and tortured.
| nickff wrote:
| I think enslavement and torture aversion are widespread,
| but some people are likely more tolerant of enslavement
| and torture risk. The fact that people volunteer for
| military service and combat duties is some evidence of
| this.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Okay, I see your point. We should probably be aware that
| such risk tolerances can change though.
| nickff wrote:
| All preferences change over time; this is one of many
| problems with Rawls' logic.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > All preferences change over time; this is one of many
| problems with Rawls' logic.
|
| No, not even close. Aversion to torture and torture
| doesn't. Need for air, water, food, hygiene, clothes,
| shelter, etc. doesn't.
| billfruit wrote:
| Do you mean Proudhomme?
| wwweston wrote:
| This is one of the most important ways to think about
| accessibility, FWIW.
|
| Even if you've been lucky enough to have full baseline sensory
| & motor capabilities for most of your life, on a lifetime
| horizon chances are pretty good you will eventually develop
| issues with one or another and who knows what else.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Proudhon (IMO) is not nearly as compelling as either Rawls or
| Nozick, although he is popular among the younger generation of
| 'professional-class' capitalists.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Have you read "What is property?" or Nozick?
|
| > although he is popular among the younger generation of
| 'professional-class' capitalists.
|
| This seems like an attempted _ad hominem_ but makes me
| suspect you might not know who Proudhon is.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I've actually read both, although it's been a while since
| "What is property?". I have not read any other Proudhon.
|
| > makes me suspect you might not know who Proudhon is.
|
| No, I know exactly who he is. Left libertarianism is
| ironically very popular among rich millenials & Gen Z,
| probably because it allows them to be cynical about all
| institutions when in reality governmental, collective
| action is the only realistic counter to capitalism.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > governmental, collective action is the only realistic
| counter to capitalism
|
| I feel like it's not either-or, and that we ought to
| acknowledge that there's a very real information
| gathering / decision making problem that is _in some
| cases but not others_ very neatly solved by markets. I
| don 't see why market based systems that don't lead to
| systematic wealth accumulation are seen as unrealistic.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Exactly. It's the positive feedback loops we need to get
| rid of.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > No, I know exactly who he is. Left libertarianism is
| ironically very popular among rich millenials & Gen Z,
| probably because it allows them to be cynical about all
| institutions when in reality governmental, collective
| action is the only realistic counter to capitalism.
|
| What you said originally is that Proudhon is popular
| among a subclass of capitalists, which is a
| contradiction, being that he was an anti-capitalist. Now
| you're saying libertarian socialism is popular among a
| subset of rich people, which also seems pretty suspect at
| this point in time. Then you're giving an explanation of
| why this is the case but that also seems implausible and
| you give no argument or evidence for it (and honestly it
| just sounds like dismissive hand-waving)... Then you say
| collective action, exactly what Proudhon (and almost all
| libertarian socialists, including mutualists) argued for,
| is the alternative, which is also a contradiction: It
| can't be the alternative if it was part of the original
| position. What you're saying isn't making any sense to
| me...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > which is a contradiction
|
| Being a capitalist who thinks they believe in anti-
| capitalism may be hypocritical but it is not a logical
| impossibility.
|
| > libertarian socialism is popular among a subset of rich
| people, which also seems pretty suspect at this point in
| time
|
| What do you think is the median income of someone who
| knows who Proudhon even is? I will confess that I am
| absolutely speaking from anecdata, not from some income
| survey of Proudhon supporters, but anybody I have ever
| discussed him with has been quite well off.
|
| Even most libertarian socialists seem to have been aware
| of this themselves. Straying from Proudhon, consider this
| essay (Appeal to the Young) [0] by Peter Kropotkin. Look
| at the audience he is writing to - it is precisely young,
| rich professionals!
|
| > collective action, exactly what Proudhon (and almost
| all libertarian socialists, including mutualists) argued
| for, is the alternative, which is also a contradiction
|
| That's fair enough, I should have been clearer - I was
| referring to hierarchical, centralized action as in the
| form of the state. The "governmental" was modifying the
| "collective," the comma was not operating as an "or"
| there.
|
| [0]: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropot
| kin/appe...
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Being a capitalist who thinks they believe in anti-
| capitalism may be hypocritical but it is not a logical
| impossibility.
|
| I don't think it's hypocritical to not want to live in
| the system you have to live in.
|
| > Even most libertarian socialists seem to have been
| aware of this themselves. Straying from Proudhon,
| consider this essay (Appeal to the Young) [0] by Peter
| Kropotkin. Look at the audience he is writing to - it is
| precisely young, rich professionals!
|
| Kropotkin wasn't talking to Gen Z and millennials, which
| was your claim.
|
| I mean I wish what you were saying were true, but I don't
| think you're going to find any polls that come even close
| to supporting popularity among those demographics right
| now. Maybe in the future.
|
| > I was referring to hierarchical, centralized action as
| in the form of the state.
|
| So, the opposite of collective action, just dominance by
| one group over the rest like we already have.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > I don't think it's hypocritical to not want to live in
| the system you have to live in.
|
| You were the one suggesting it was a contradiction,
| although I disagree that you _have_ to be a capitalist
| (ie. have substantial ownership stakes in MOP, like many
| tech workers do) in our society.
|
| > find any polls that come even close to supporting
| popularity
|
| My claim is not that most affluent young people are
| Proudhon lovers (obviously that would be ridiculous, and
| I understand your ire if you thought that is what I am
| saying), but rather that _most Proudhon lovers_ are
| affluent young people.
|
| > the opposite of collective action, just dominance by
| one group over the rest like we already have.
|
| Yes, that would be the (in my view naive) left
| libertarian view. I disagree that collective
| intrinsically means decentralized or non-hierarchical.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > You were the one suggesting it was a contradiction,
| although I disagree that you have to be a capitalist (ie.
| have substantial ownership stakes in MOP, like many tech
| workers do) in our society.
|
| It is and then you equivocated on "capitalist." To
| ideologically be a capitalist and socialist is a literal
| contradiction. To own capital and be a socialist is not a
| literal contradiction, but could be hypocritical or not
| depending on other actions (Engels usually being
| considered not hypocritical, for example.) To participate
| in capitalism because one has no choice and be a
| socialist is never a contradiction or hypocritical.
|
| > My claim is not that most affluent young people are
| Proudhon lovers (obviously that would be ridiculous, and
| I understand your ire if you thought that is what I am
| saying), but rather that most Proudhon lovers are
| affluent young people.
|
| I see. My anecdata is quite different.. I see it mostly
| in blue collar jobs in the reunionization movements.
| Right now Starbucks is the big one, but a lot of burger
| flippers, clerks, mechanics, etc. I don't think you'd
| consider any of them rich or capitalists... I should
| mention that I actively follow these movements.
|
| > I disagree that collective intrinsically means
| decentralized or non-hierarchical.
|
| It's not really the will of the collective if it's not
| democratic and it can't be democratic if its
| hierarchical, wouldn't you say? Like maybe if you had
| arbitrary right of recall you could argue that, but even
| then I don't think so because the hierarchy can both
| manipulate wills of the subordinates (e.g. media) and
| also just ignore them. That's not very "collective." I
| mean I'd say hierarchy is definitively domination.
| Abandoning that is abandoning the meaning of the word...
| I guess you're right, people in political science do use
| the word like that, like how natioanlism can be a
| collectivism, but again I think that's equivocation or
| we're just talking about two different concepts using the
| same word.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| Am I understanding this correctly? The idea of the veil of
| ignorance is we do a thought experiment where we pretend there
| are no societal standards and then imagine what proper justice
| may look like? If this is the correct understanding, what an
| asinine and inane idea that as an individual I can do better at
| imagining how justice should work then the thousands of years of
| cultural development that have gone before me.
|
| I don't care how smart you are, if you literally throw out all of
| our societal standards and think you can do better using your
| imagination, you're a fool. Don't throw out the baby with the
| bath water, our justice today has a lot of good ideas. If we want
| reform, that involves extracting the good ideas and getting rid
| of the bad ones. Otherwise we're not reforming justice, instead
| we're coming up with our own standards that we pulled out of our
| arse.
| bitwize wrote:
| The veil of ignorance is where we pretend we're gods designing
| a society and putting social rules and standards in place, and
| we will be incarnated as humans within that society -- but we
| don't know specifics about what kind of humans we'll be, what
| race or gender or class or whatever (the "ignorance" part). So
| if you put in place rules that favor one group of people over
| another, you might get screwed when you are incarnated into
| this society.
|
| Rawls wasn't proposing throwing anything out. He was asking the
| question, if a bunch of gods got together and set down some
| social rules under these conditions, what would the society
| they created look like if they didn't want to end up screwing
| themselves? His answer was "something like liberal democracy".
| I don't know if he'd be right, or even if we should pattern our
| society in the manner of these hypothetical gods. It may be
| asking the wrong question entirely. Current trends in social
| justice, for instance, favor rules oriented toward payback for
| past injustices toward real groups.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I prefer the way my ethics professor explained what I believe
| is the same, or at least similar, topic.
|
| Imagine you are not born yet. You do not yet exist. You can be
| born at any location, of any race, with any birth defect, of
| any gender, of any societal class. Now, what kind of societal
| structure would you like to exist if you had to be born into
| such world? Would you be ok with large wealth/social inequality
| if you could be born into the bottom rung? Or about survival of
| the fittest without collective support with the chance you
| might be born with a inhibiting birth defect?
|
| There was a lot I didn't like about how that class was taught,
| but this thought experiment alone made it worth taking.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Under the veil of ignorance I fail to see how people, unaware
| of their own race, would agree that certain races were inferior
| and should be subject to slavery, such as that of the early
| United States. This is because they would know that they might
| end up being part of the subjected underclass. Societal
| standards on the other hand, brought us the institution of
| slavery. The veil of ignorance is a lens for viewing society
| through and arguing whether or not someone that came from
| societal standards is just.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| One major problem is "what's included/removed in this veil of
| ignorance?"
|
| Rawls likely would have excluded sexual orientation and
| gender identity.
|
| It also requires imagination some people don't have: "I'm a
| member of the elite caste, but if I were a member of the
| lower caste I would accept my position." And perhaps they
| would have.
| jrm4 wrote:
| It's not that at all? It's simply "We live in a society in
| which everyone is born with different RPG loadouts, and so we
| should set it up from the POV of, 'What if I didn't know what
| my loadout was going to be?'"
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is just the appeal to tradition fallacy in long-form as a
| comment.
| yboris wrote:
| Please consider _steelmanning_ (as opposed to _strawmanning_ )
| ideas you come across. To call an idea considered by numerous
| people as important "inane" seems inappropriate. You _do_
| suggest you may be misunderstanding the idea, but rather than
| inquisitively asking for an elaboration, you call it stupid.
|
| You should try to think of a more charitable interpretation of
| the idea. Here's a thought: in a society as unequal as ours,
| with many people in power satisfied with the status quo, what
| Rawls is asking them to do is to imagine that they could have
| been born randomly into any of the families in our society.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/steelmanning
| adammarples wrote:
| The past few thousand years of the history of justice have been
| full of such great ideas as the divinity of Kings and suttee.
| The norms which you live in and are familiar with on the other
| hand, are quite heavily based on Rawls.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The Veil seems nice and useful in theory. But someone wrote once
| (don't remember who) that people who advocate for it still end up
| defending the liberal status quo, where the lottery of life still
| plays a big part.
| routerl wrote:
| There's a lot more to say there. For instance, many[0] have
| argued that the things Rawls places behind the veil are
| _precisely_ the things that make us human, and ignoring them to
| make a procedural argument therefore begs the question: his
| conclusion (i.e. liberal democracy) is built-in to the
| premises.
|
| Then there are purely distributive arguments: if everyone wants
| to pay a bunch of money to go see Lewis Hamilton race, thereby
| enriching Lewis and producing an unequal distribution of goods,
| can we reasonably say this situation is unjust?[1]
|
| The literature on replies to Rawls is extremely rich, and Rawls
| himself went on to respond to critics and amend his views in
| 1993's _Political Liberalism_. The influence of his earlier
| work has been longer lived in the public mind than in his own.
|
| [0] Usually communitarians, especially Charles Taylor.
|
| [1] This is a variation of Robert Nozick's "Wilt Chamberlain
| argument", updated to use my preferred sports star.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > if everyone wants to pay a bunch of money to go see Lewis
| Hamilton race, thereby enriching Lewis and producing an
| unequal distribution of goods, can we reasonably say this
| situation is unjust?
|
| I think we can. The individuals involved in the transaction
| all consent to it, but they are not the only ones affected.
| Lewis Hamilton being rich (beyond a certain level) has a
| detrimental affect on all in society as it undermines the
| market system we rely on to drive our economy towards
| productive ends.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| What can I say. A Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article
| I am not.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I consider myself a socialist-leaning individual who favors the
| abolition of large portions of inherited wealth and I am very
| sympathetic to Rawls' arguments.
|
| I think you are reasoning backwards (from the preferred
| social/political outcome, rather than starting with the ethical
| principles that make one social/political outcome preferred
| over another).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Why?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Because you are saying that Rawls' argument is flawed
| because the people who believe it tend to support the
| liberal status quo, supposing apriori that the liberal
| status quo is bad and then reasoning that therefore Rawls'
| arguments must be bad if they provide some ethical mooring
| for that status quo.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Not a priori. A posteori the lottery of life plays a big
| part in liberal praxis.
|
| Dunno why my reasoning is "backwards". Politics from
| first principles is fruitless and I don't intend to play
| that game. But he can play it if he wishes.
| adamc wrote:
| There's a pretty good "Talking Politics" podcast on Rawls:
| https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/rawlsonjustice
|
| Sadly, that series has ended, but there's a lot of good stuff:
| https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas-seri...
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