That may well be a joke-comment. I don’t know you well enough, mrz.

SEVEN SCHOOL BUSSES!!!! Rawls has nothing on that kind of action.

We are in a place where guidance is needed, and Rawls’s “dry academic prose”, for all its faults, is a masterful attempt to provide that guidance.

Eh. It’s still dry academic prose. I think what Steve is ultimately saying is that he’s now read so many dry academic papers that he’s had enough. He wants to relax on the beach with a good novel about guys with stubble that drive muscle cars and have the tenacity, grit, and just plain giant balls to jump those cars over 6 or 7 school busses. That’s way better than reading 2400 pages of dry smack talk about “Social” “Justice” from guys wearing suit jackets with leather pads on the elbows.

As for how to understand Rawls, I think Chris has done an admirable job here. It really is important to keep the phrase “device of representation” in mind here. And the early chapters, indeed the early pages, of Rawls are crystal clear here. See the last paragraph of section 4 for a respresentative passage. (Or google “A final comment. We shall want to say”…and a few books that quote this passage should pop up.)

Chris is also correct that the job of the original position is to try to give a number of distinct and secure intuitions of fairness and justice their proper place in the derivation of final principles of justice. And in fact, your invocation of the golden rule shows us why we might want something like Rawls’s procedure. Rawls had surely read and absorbed Kant’s criticism of the golden rule, namely that it’s moral authority is only as strong as the authority embodied in the follower’s contingent desires. That is, if I have a quite Hobbesian approach to life, if I am happy to kill and be killed, then following the golden rule won’t transform my aims into worthy ones. If I do unto others what I would have them do unto me, and if I won’t begrudge anyone’s trying to kill and plunder–perhaps I find it admirable and an expression of honor!–then, well, you get the picture. So we’re already in need of something else, some that can supplement what the golden rule does capture about fairness. But where do these supplementing elements come from?

Rawls answers that they come from other of our pre-theoretical convictions about fairness and fair choice. Chris’s car salesman example is apt here. —But, when we have a collection of intuitions about fairness, each compelling in its own right but without a clear understanding of how they should be combined, then we might well wish for something like the original position, which is designed to model each of these intuitions in a clear way, but also in a way where the whole construct can be then used to see what principles of justice would emerge. So Chris is correct again to say that Rawls is not trying to justify being good to the Hobbesian man who cares not all all about this. Rather, he is addressing the rest of us, those who have rough ideas about what is fair or good, but who seek for, as he puts it, guidance where guidance is needed. —And this connects up with your question, “if you need to travel to a notional world in which you could be less fortunate than you are, in order to justify helping out the impoverished, will reading a few hundred dry academic pages really sway you?” Rawls’s answer would be that he is trying to show you what your commitment to justice and fairness comes to. Sure, you should be interseted in helping the less fortunate. But how much help are you obligated to give them? Are you obligated to give and give until you impoverish yourself? Should you be prepared to sacrifice some of your (or someone else’s) basic liberties if that would contribute to a system that more efficiently meets serious needs in your society? If person A needs a kidney to survive and if you could do without one of yours, does A have a right to your kidney?

Or here’s one: Bowles wrote a short paper in the 1970s arguing that the capitalist hierarchies needed for capitalist efficiencies render equality of opportunity a myth. The traits of character needed in order to excel in such societies are likely to be developed and then transmitted by those on the top, thus ensuring that their offspring are more suited for those jobs. But if capitalist efficiencies make life better for all, including for the least advantaged, then are we allowed to sacrifice equality of opportunity in order to maximize the prospects of the least advantaged?

Now, one may quibble with Rawls’s answers to these questions, but the fact is that he sought to develop a decision procedure that could answer them. I think we clearly need answers to them, and that we would be hard-pressed to rely on simple intuition in cases as complex as this. We are in a place where guidance is needed, and Rawls’s “dry academic prose”, for all its faults, is a masterful attempt to provide that guidance.

I confess it’s been a long time since I read ATOJ, but one place to look is Chapter VIII (The Sense of Justice), especially sections 73 and 75. There Rawls tells a story about how we might come to be attached to justice that doesn’t at all rely on the original position or anything like that. Rather, the story is about how we’re constituted as social creatures, and how we respond to institutions we tend to judge are just. So, Rawls tells two entirely different stories: one to figure out WHAT justice is and another to figure out WHY we might care about justice. Only the first story focuses on us as rational agents behind the veil of ignorance.

So I think, at any rate. I confess I don’t know much about this. I do know, however, that many people have interpreted him the way you do. M. Sandel, for example, wrote a whole book complaining about how thin and bloodless Rawls’ conception of human choice is and how the choices that we would make in the original position can have no significance for us since we’re not in the original position and there are certain things we can’t set aside. But I think that’s just a serious misreading of Rawls.

mrz: as for the translation I chose: I just like King James. I also like the New Revised Standard. I own both. James has more poetry, seems to me.

I think that gets Rawls wrong in a really important way. As I will never, ever tire of pointing out, the original position is a device that allows us to capture and formalize certain intuitions about what a fair outcome would be. It’s not a device for justifying our attachment to that outcome or motivating us to bring it about.

Suppose you’re selling me a car. We want to arrive at a fair price. What is that? Well, it’s what we arrive at as a result of a process of rational bargaining. But wait! You have big muscles, and I feel intimidated. It’s pretty clear that my intimidation is distorting the results of our rational bargaining process, leading me to accept a worse deal than I otherwise would. So we imagine a hypothetical case: What would we agree to if I wasn’t intimidated? And we go through the other distorting factors (say, I’m in the middle of a desert, and need the car to survive) to remove them and make sure that the rational bargaining process is giving us an intuitively plausible result.

Now. We’re applying in this case to a hypothetical situation, one in which I’m not intimidated by your bulging muscles. But is it far-fetched and unrealistic? No! It’s entirely reasonable to ask what we would have agreed to in the absence of factors that would shake our faith that rational bargaining will give us a fair result. Perhaps it helps us see that I would have come out $100 richer if I hadn’t been intimidated.

And here’s the thing: This thought experiment is only a way of modeling some of our intuitions about fairness. It does not, and is not intended to, justify our basic attachment to fairness itself. Something else entirely must justify that.

This is a much simplified presentation of what I think is a pretty basic distinction in Rawls’ theory. He was clear about it even in early writings, like for example his 1963 paper “The Sense of Justice.”

On the other hand, you are entirely correct that Rawls’ prose sucks.

And I would blog about this, but I’m embarrassed to say anything about Rawls in front of my Rawls-expert co-blogger Paul.

For that matter I feel the same way about John Rawls: if you need to travel to a notional world in which you could be less fortunate than you are, in order to justify helping out the impoverished, will reading a few hundred dry academic pages really sway you?

Maybe not but I don’t think papers like the one you’re describing are designed to sway the man on the street in some casual big picture kind of way. They are laying dry, academic, conceptual foundations to more rigorously understand our intuitive notions.

The Bible attempts to inspire. Rawls, not so much.

Also, King James? We can do better. Go to here. There are many more translations to choose from, including non-English ones. Sorry, no Turkish, though.