John Rawls doesn't care about your peanut butter sandwich, you jerk.

Just so I don't lose them when the semester ends, here's more of the posts I'm proud of in my freedom and equality class.  In this particular instance, I responded to a not-so-well-thought-out post by a colleague.

Author: Wesley Callahan
Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2009 8:59:46 PM EST
Subject: Rawls and Ketchup on PB&J 

As far as Rawls devaluing democracy I see a few problems. He would propose that a group of highly educated individual make the most important choices regarding equal liberty in our society. If that is true then we must look to decisions that were made by the Supreme Court. For example Plessey v Ferguson, is not want I would call the ideal of democracy. During the reconstruction period following the civil war, the Legislature was more likely to propose legislation with more equal liberties, than the Supreme Court taking an activist roll. Although that does change over time, as we look to Brown vs. Board, I think that it would be dangerous to allow either the legislature or people behind a veil of ignorance to answer questions alone. I believe that a society will not change overnight and in some cases it would be prudent for the veil of ignorance to win out, however at some point you must look to reality and realize that I don’t want ketchup on my PB and J.

Author: Laura Westman
Posted date: Thursday, March 5, 2009 11:28:39 AM EST
Last modified date: Thursday, March 5, 2009 11:39:06 AM EST

Then I would recommend either changing your mind and starting to like ketchup on PB&J - since there must be some reason why it's there - or adjust the process by which the ketchup seemed acceptable to give you on your sandwich.  Here we're kind of talking about Reflective Equilibrium.  If we extrapolate your ketchup situation onto a social or moral issue about which we make rules, and we don't like the results of the rules we made, we adjust whatever brought us to make that rule that had that effect.  We are "altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances" to "find a condition that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles that match with our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted" (20).  

  Sometimes this incorporates the Original Position, so we ignore our own interpretation of ourselves relative to society and use both risk-aversion and the difference principle to come up with new ways of seeing the operation of ketchup.  Sometimes this results in a new social contract with a more desirable outcome.  Regardless, the idea of "justice as fairness" means we should honor the contracts (hypothetical agreements) we've built upon our intuition about what is right; our obligations are "self-imposed" (12).  So you've got your anti-ketchup work cut out for you if you want to change them.  

  Maybe the reason the ketchup showed up is that you elected someone into Congress who saw an incentive in increasing funding for ketchup in your district?  Perhaps this member of Congress assessed the outcomes of his decisions using the "maximin" rule and this decision had the least undesirable of outcomes from his standpoint (Section 26).  You might say the problem comes when this intersects with the institution of legislature, in which we "elect" people to make these decisions for us.  We like to think there is another social contract operating in the link between the representative and the voter, but we get into trouble when we try to figure out which means of increasing efficiency and social cooperation is the best.  Rawls addresses the danger and benefits in finding efficiency in representation, and offers a remedy for these institutional infringements within equality of opportunity (Section 12).  Since "careers open to talents" perpetuate the inequalities within those institutions, the veil of ignorance becomes important yet again (73).

 Reflective equilibrium is almost suggestive of legislatures.  There is an old question in political science, whether the electorate change their minds because of legislation or whether legislation occurs because of demands from the electorate.  If we interpret bills and laws as means to establishing a new outcome, the legislative process is almost a manifestation of reflective equilibrium, since we alter policies to reflect "ideal" outcomes, whatever they may be.  It gets complicated when we have to think about who is within these legislatures and how they get there.

  The importance of legislature comes with the electorate's perception of (a) their influence on the institution through a vote, and (b) the idea that the person(s) they stick into office to make these decisions will be capable of doing so, from different moral standpoints or perhaps from the original position if we'd like to be idealistic.  The institution creates norms and expectations, fostering a sense of individual participation for individual gain instead of the societal cooperation and series of agreements that would emanate from structuring society the way Rawls explains.  The institutionalization of majorities through "democratic" voting and representation is what ultimately fails us.  The veil of ignorance is brilliant, but it is lost in the need to be reelected.  I don't see this as a question of whether democracy is good or bad for rights, but whether the mechanisms behind structuring our republic create an environment conducive to cooperation.