I learn interesting things when Mrs H is doing her crosswords. Obviously because she knows stuff that I don't but also where I think I might know the answer but then have to check it. "John Somebody, American political philosopher" she said. "Got any letters?" "Blank - Blank - W - Blank S". I said I had a feeling it was Rawls but then thought I was mixing him up with the singer and producer, Lou Rawls (Loo Rolls, we always said, haha).
Turned out it was John Rawls and it also turns out that Rawls enunciated rather more clearly than me some of the points that come up when I chat about fairness and justice with Democracy Man and others of the liberal left. Which Rawls himself was (at least as defined in America).
Rawls set out his theory of "justice as fairness" in a book called A Theory of Justice in 1971. In it he recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the "original position", in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. He called this concept the "veil of ignorance". By being ignorant of our own circumstances, we can more objectively consider how societies should operate. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned to the question of how political power could be made legitimate given reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life.
The "original position" is a useful contrivance to test views on many situations, generalising the argument "you wouldn't think that if you were....". But there are limitations in a democratic society. For example, what we think about tax levels. Responses to questions can appear to show that a majority favour spending more on public services and agree that taxes might have to be higher to pay for it. But when asked if they personally think they should pay higher taxes the answers are often rather different. In other words higher taxes are ok as long as it's others ("high earners" or "big business") who would have to pay it. Imagine you have no idea whether you would be paying the tax or desperately needing the benefit from the spending and you might see things differently. But then when you are in a booth with a ballot paper....
There are other limitations flowing from individual behaviours. Higher taxes might not produce the expected revenue as people's behaviour might change. I read a piece recently which said don't kid yourself, Scandis don't like high taxes as much as we think. (Their high rollers go and live abroad for a bit just like anyone else's). Decisions have to take account of the fact that the country isn't a closed system and is part of a bigger world economy.
So tax rates need to take account of their impact on the economy as the biggest single way for a government to have more money to spend on good causes is to have a flourishing economy.
Of course these bits of punk economics I'm spouting might actually driven by a desire on my own part not to pay more tax.
Various authors and philosophers have made criticisms of the Rawls approach, among them for encouraging people to think about justice while divorced from the values and aspirations that define who they are as persons and that allow people to determine what justice is and, rather more bizarrely, for being "inherently white" by having nothing to explicitly say about racial justice (which is logical tosh as one could use the "original position" to put oneself in the shoes of disadvantaged victims of any persecution or prejudice).
The approach has been criticised (as I was doing above) for ignoring real world behaviours and because ideas about a perfectly just world do not necessarily help redress actual existing inequality, understate the difficulty in getting everyone in society to adhere to the norms of a just society and that multiple conflicting, yet just, principles may arise, which undermines the multistep processes that Rawls laid out as leading to a perfectly just society.
So the "original position" concept has its limitations. Nevertheless it's an interesting way of making one look through the other end of the telescope, as it were in considering fairness in our society.
Lou Rawls, on the other hand, sang "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine".
Rawls's original book A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. It was challenged and then refined in a 1985 essay Justice and Fairness and a 2001 book Justice and Fairness: A Restatement. Or you could do what I did and read the summary in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice (which is also summarises the critical views mentioned above)
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