by Joe Miller
If you’re a parent of more than one kid – or if you had siblings growing up – you’ve almost certainly encountered the problem of “more kids than remaining pieces of dessert. I know my brother and I did, more than once.
Most moms converge on the solution – mine did. One kid would cut the dessert into two pieces. The other kid got to choose which piece to take. For Josh and me, that solution resulted in extremely meticulous measuring to ensure that the pieces were the same size.
The idea is simple, but profound. The kid cutting the dessert knows that she will inevitably get the smaller piece. So, she acts in such a way as to ensure that the smallest piece is as large as possible. When we’re dividing something of a fixed size, that means dividing it equally.
John Rawls, a 20th century American political philosopher, describes this strategy as maximizing the minimum, or maximin. The maximin solution to a dessert-cutting problem is the central thesis of Rawls’ 1971 masterpiece, A Theory of Justice.
In that work, Rawls asks us to imagine that we’re deciding upon the principles that we will use to govern society. Only, he asks us to imagine selecting those rules from behind what he calls “a veil of ignorance.”
Now a “veil of ignorance” might sound a little off-putting, but all it really means is that you don’t know anything about your particular place in the society whose rules you are choosing. That means you don’t know if you’ll be rich or poor, smart or dumb, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim or atheist. In short, you don’t know anything about the characteristics you’ll have or the characteristics your society will value.
Rawls suggests that the set of rules that we would select behind the veil of ignorance is the just set of rules.
Last week, we talked about a dilemma for Western liberal democracies. Liberal democracy is a system that rests upon the consent of the governed. But it’s also hard to make a case that most citizens have expressly consented to the government. And we saw that tacit consent doesn’t really help us much either.
Rawls offers a third option. The veil of ignorance is a strategy for generating what philosophers call hypothetical consent.
We say that someone has granted hypothetical consent when that person would have consented had they (a) known all the morally relevant facts and (b) been in possession of ideal rationality.
For example, a paramedic might perform CPR on an unconscious accident victim. The victim hasn’t consented (they are, after all, unconscious). But it’s reasonable to think that they would have consented had they been able to do so.
The veil of ignorance works the same way. Rawls says that if we were to choose principles that govern society without knowing our place in that society, we’d end up with two basic rules.
1. Everyone should have equal freedom under the law. After all, you wouldn’t give one group fewer freedoms if you might belong to that group!
2. Economic goods should be distributed equally, except insofar as unequal distributions make the worst-off person better off.
That second point is really important. The Rawlsian maximin strategy doesn’t commit us to any sort of radical egalitarianism.
Economies aren’t like desserts, where the size is fixed. Economies can get bigger (or smaller!) depending on the rules we set in place around them. We know, for example, that capitalist economies create more total wealth than Marxist-Leninist versions of communism. The poorest Americans are wealthier than the poorest Cubans or Venezuelans today.
Capitalism does produce greater inequalities in wealth than socialist systems. But for Rawls, inequalities in wealth are fine, so long as those inequalities lead to the poorest person being better off than they would have been in a more equal distribution.
Rawls takes a simple intuition – that the fair way to distribute things is by ensuring that the person doing the deciding doesn’t know what part they will get—and uses it to establish principles of justice. In fact, Rawls sometimes calls this justice as fairness.
In doing so, he solves two problems at once. He shows us what governments ought to look like—namely that they should aspire to sets of rules that are consistent with principles chosen from behind the veil of ignorance. And he provides a model for obtaining the consent of the governed. It need not be actual consent; it need only be something that people would consent to from behind the veil.
It’s a pretty powerful argument for the Western liberal principle of treating everyone equally under the law.
It was good enough for Mom, anyway.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
