Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Brad: "And perhaps the most interesting question is the following: why do so many of us--including me--think that the devices of the original position, the veil of ignorance, and hypothetical consent have moral force?"

Perhaps these "devices" are in accord with our true natures: meme-balls temporarily colonizing hapless human hosts. Who knows where we'll end up next time?

You're killing me with this one, Brad. Of course Rawl's devices speak to us: his explicit aim in using them is to help us articulate our liberal democratic beliefs. If "Rawls" and "philosophy" were identical, you might have a point about sociology trumping, but Rawls isn't engaged in the same kind of "first principles" inquiry as, say, Kant, or Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, etc.

So, a denial of the original position would be just an objection to a particular thought experiment, not necessarily a rejection of the underlying principle. That's why Matt and Julian are right to focus on luck, which is what's at issue.

Well, look, he said

**I'm only speculating here**, but perhaps guilt lies at the bottom of liberalism. Liberals feel guilty for having undeserved advantages.

Isn't that what philosphers are supposed to do -speculate about stuff?

I spend a lot of time on a farm when I was a kid and saw the sun come up and go down while working outside many days that went over 100 F, and spent the whole time digging or carrying or picking. And then there was the fun of going out to check the irrigation at 3 AM and having to fix a spill until dawn. What went wrong with me?

Our host is more serious and brings up an interesting question about what consent means and the persuasiveness of reasoning from the original position.

But why does he focus on the liberal side. Don't all political philosophies at some point resort to this kind of reasoning? Take Hobbesian conservatives. Don't they say that allegience to a coercive government is justified because it provides a better life than the state of nature. Well, that is pretty hypothetical too. Who is judge the relative welfare of the subjects under the government versus the state of nature? And even in a state of nature there will be winners whose lives are not so short nasty and brutal (for themselves, at least). Why not let winners win and losers lose in the state of nature? Can you show a Pareto improvement? Does it make a difference if the compensation to distribute any hypothetical Pareto improvement is itself hypothetical or real?

And what about those whose lives under the government seem as short nasty and brutal as they would be in a state of nature? What happens to the argument that they should obey the government?

The point is that these puzzles are not limited to the liberal side. You sounded like a self-hating liberal at the end of your post and that bothered me.

But on second thought, if your point is that all these arguments are nonsense and different people believe different ones because of brain chemistry (inherited or developmentally modifed by the environment), then, OK, I'll go with that.

Some researchers have done brain scan research on liberals and conservatives and claim to find significant differences between the two groups. The group that has claims to have the most definitive results are in SF Bay Area and have announced that they are Democrats and hope to use the results for political ads. I don't have a link but it has been in the news. Hmmm... not sure I like that idea. But if this research pans out, what will happen to the job market for politcal philosphers?

Maybe that's why I'm a conservative - I don't feel guilty about having more than other people, just if I do something stupid. It seems to me awkward to attribute guilt to a state of being. One is not guilty. One may be guilty of performing various acts, or of crimes of ommission, or various sins of neglect, but one cannot *be* guilty any more than one can *be* innocent.

We have wealth because without it, and one can check out indigenous cultures, we'd have never gotten any where. Post facto grand utilitarianism. The ends does justify the means. This is the logic that we use everyday, for as something as simple as dieting and exercising to get thin to picking our friends and lovers.

The problem comes in discriminating means that appear to produce the ends, and means that actually deliver. Brad has noted that there is no profit in doing evil incompetently. But is there any profit in doing good incompetently? I would say there is none either - but there is one advantage. If you are good and well liked, people may overlook your mistake.

On the other hand if you are wicked and harsh, people will pounce on your smallest misstep. This is why Machiavelli rates Respect, love, and fear as the proper tools of the statesman - in that order.

It also explains why everyone is attempting to look good while privately often engaging in contradictory behavior - the source of hypocrisy and its universal presence in all cultures. We want the ends we want at any costs, but we don't want to look nasty doing it. Hence the Machiavellian appearance of morality.

What is my point? I think Brad had it right with his argument regarding the peasant whose wealth was taken by the French Lord. He who has main force may use it, but God help him if he uses it and screws things up because the only justification of such force is if indeed the ends did justify the means.

Oldman:
"We have wealth because without it, check out indigenous cultures, we'd never have gotten anywhere?" That might be better phrased as "some have wealth, in every society, because they can better command the means of production and reproduction: whether that is women's work, young men's labor, other people's labor, or just the results of other people's labor, or, of course, inheritance."

"Indigenous cultures" whatever that means given that it would span, of course, Iraq (cradle of civ), Benin, Japan, China, and, of course, the amerinds are as various as anything else in their production and use of excess capacity to form "wealth."

And as for JML and the farm story:

I think the idea that liberalism springs from some form of "guilt" is just a right wing absurdity. I don't see that it relates at all. Sure, some worked hard on farms and did not experience guilt. Others worked hard elsewhere and didn't experience guilt. What has that got to do with the facts of the matter? Your situation as a farmer working hard in your fields is offered as some story indicating original virtue (because work is virtuous) as opposed, presumably, to some other person's position (holding down four jobs to live in a fourth floor walkup to send one's children to dangerous public schools?) which is represented as non-virtuous. Or, alternately, some person working in an ivory tower who, performing somehow non serious work, feels guilty about taking what from who?

If I threw in farm subsidies harvested from the states with the urban poor, how would it change the virtue or non virtue of your own situation? If you were a migrant worker working someone else's field as opposed to a son of the farmer anticipating an inheritance how would it change the virtue or non virtue of your situation? It wouldn't change your situation and your virtue, but it would certainly impact my evaluation of it.

(This comes to mind because of a pathetic (and I mean that sincerely) story of a woman struggling to keep her family farm while her reservist husband is away in Iraq. My heart was in my mouth every second as the incredibly hard, grinding work of the farm was described--until it wound up that the worst and most dangerous thing for the farm was that she was unable to fill out the complex papers for their various subsidies.)

At any rate, I disagree totally that liberalism relates to, or springs from, guilt. It might more properly be seen as springing from some serious notions of justice (tzeddekah) , of honor, of love--each of which could produce a 'liberal' world view (whatever that means). Right wing people, perhaps, need to experience guilt vis a vis others before they can enter into a generous social compact with them, but liberals? perhaps we just need to identify their humanity with ours. Its John Donne, for me.

Serious, serious, blast from the past, Brad! Do you remember that Sue and I did not agree that the original state could/would necessarily exclude gamblers, and that we wouldn't agree that everyone would agree on a fair sharing system as a result of original ingorance? About all I can remember is our professor shaking his head and saying, mournfully, "I wouldn't want to be on a desert island with you two."

Kate

I think there is a pretty good handhold for redistributionists, even if we never had a Rawls, even if we deny his argument. After the fact of being born to wealth (or poverty), there is still the culture that supported that wealth (for some). It was only possible for Bill Gates to accumulate his vast wealth because of the behavior of others. Not just those in his employ, not just those whose behavior was in quest of pay or profit in the wider economy. Our day-to-day behavior, behavior in which no money changes hands, is non-dstructive, efficient, broadly supportive of commerce. Our governmental institutions and their functions are based in large measure on general consent. The rule of law isn't something the top 1% paid for. It is something we all (to some extent) support.

There would be concentrations of wealth in the absence of such good behavior among the masses, but it would be far smaller, and would result from brigandry rather than software marketing. I doubt Gates would be among the big winners in a world in which bluster and savvy need to be matched with brawn to do much good.

Rawls' argument is that we all would consent to redistribution to allow greater equality of wealth, under the right conditions. Maybe. It can never be tried. The argument in this world is that Gates intelligence and hard work didn't earn all that money. He just created a conduit to funnel wealth into his own hands that was generated in signigicant measure by conditions that we create among us in society. Luck certainly was a part of it, too. There were other geeky entrepreneurs tinkering with code back in the early days. IMB apparently didn't really set out to find the best. Gates was second on the list, was good enough, and got the job.

Why do the rest of us stand for it? Because Gates (and many others like him) have the resources to nail down distribution favorable to themselves through the political system, a political system that is part of that culture we all (mostly) support.

We got ourselves some positive externalities, some political manipulation, some luck. We know there is a certain advantage to being born well off. I don't need a Rawlsian thought experiment to convince me that making the lives at the low end of the scale materially better at the expense of those at the high end is fair - wildly, urgently fair.

--Serious, serious, blast from the past, Brad! Do you remember that Sue and I did not agree that the original state could/would necessarily exclude gamblers, and that we wouldn't agree that everyone would agree on a fair sharing system as a result of original ingorance?--

Indeed I do. And it's a good point--Richard Musgrave also thought that there was nothing in the specification of the original position that implied the extreme risk aversion that appears necessary to make Rawls's setup work.

The tug exerted by Rawl's thought experiment isn't hard to understand: it's a formalization of the "golden rule"; little different in fundamentals from the Kantian categorial imperative (not to be confused with the Prime Directive); and a primitive sense of "fairness" is hard-wired into us as a specicies.

The problem with thinking of traits such as diligence as owing to "luck" is that personal identity--and thus the possiblity of moral judgement--dissolves. Of course, I'm not responsible for my dispositions or other personal traits: I wasn't around to choose my genes or my parents. But to treat all individual attributes as contingencies for which one merits neither benefit not praise not blame is to deny the concept of personhood.

There is simply an irreconcilable tension between the idea of perfect fairness (and the recognition that, at some remove, impersonal causal laws govern who we are and what we do) and the idea of personal choice and free will. (I'm sure there is a string theoretic reconcilation out there somewhere.)

At the practical sphere, there is another irreconcilable tension. Do I desire a just and fair world? Yes. Do I desire one in which my son and daughter are smarter, faster, better than the rest? Yes. John Rawls, meet Adam Smith.

May the auditor in the back row who hasn't even read Rawls ask a question, please? Do those fellows in the white robes in Original Positionland accept, for starters, notions of class distinctions (that one can be in charge of or innately superior to another) and ownership? Or are these post-OP concepts -- overlays -- not unlike the overlay of linear time?

Bean, the thumbnail sketch of Rawl's gedankenexperiment is that you have all the "souls" of humanity sitting around in the Transcendent, arguing about how best to create a society. The catch is that none of the souls know *who* they're going to be in the next life: rich, poor, smart, dumb, athletic, handicapped, Christian, Yazidi, whatever ("the veil of ignorance"). So Rawls goes on to outline what he believes to be the logical form of a society people in that position would create, which unsurprisingly turns out to be an egalitarian liberal society like the kind Rawls defends.

Of course, Rawls doesn't believe there ever was an Original Position, but he argues that it's a reasonably good guide for us, since liberal philosophers shouldn't reason from the conceptual baggage that comes from accidents of birth. This, and the extreme risk-aversion that appears in his experiment (evidently denuded souls aren't much for gambling), have been targets of attack from both the left and the right (from Fish to Nozick). Rawls backed away from a lot of his positions in AToJ in his later works, but it's still a seminal work in political philosophy that demands serious consideration from students.

Conservatives don't really need to reject the construct of the original position, they just need to reject a veil as "thick" as Rawls's is. (Gauthier, with a somewhat thinner veil, gets rather different results.) Which is why the question of luck is relevant: Whether people behind the veil should be characterized as ignorant of even their own capacities and dispositions will depend on whether there's a strong case to be made for the exclusion of any "lucky" endowments as morally arbitrary. Also, I think there's a "moral arbitrariness" argument for redistribution that can bypass the veil/OP apparatus altogether.

"The problem with thinking of traits such as diligence as owing to "luck" is that personal identity--and thus the possiblity of moral judgement--dissolves. Of course, I'm not responsible for my dispositions or other personal traits: I wasn't around to choose my genes or my parents. But to treat all individual attributes as contingencies for which one merits neither benefit not praise not blame is to deny the concept of personhood."

Is personhood really the product of the moral/ethical content of personal traits? What about someone who's born with the trait of high basic intelligence? Does this trait merit blame? Praise?

Why the veil of ignorance? You need to go one deeper beyond "sociology ultimately trumps philosophy": biology.

Donald Brown's list of "Human Universals" (discussed and reprinted in Pinker's "Blank Slate") includes inequality of wealth, consciousness of inequalities of wealth, and fairness (equity). We are hard-wired to demand fairness, especially as regards the distribution of resources in our society.

Rememeber that experiment last year with the monkeys and the grapes?

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000C3167-BADB-1F68-905980A84189EEDF

Scientific American: News
September 18, 2003

Monkey Business Is Fair Play

Getting the short end of the stick tends to tick people off. It turns out the same is true for monkeys. Scientists report today in the journal Nature that capuchin monkeys become upset when they feel they've been treated unfairly. The findings suggest that the animals have an innate sense of justice, a trait previously thought to be unique to humans.

Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal of Emory University studied the responses of captive brown capuchin monkeys to rewards from their human handlers. The researchers first trained the animals to swap tokens in exchange for food. Initially, the monkeys were happy to trade a token for a slice of cucumber. But when one monkey in a pair received a more sought-after grape reward instead, the animal offered the cucumber was often less than impressed. Sometimes the slighted animals refused to give up their tokens; on other occasions they took the cucumber but refused to eat it or tossed it out of the cage entirely. "We showed the subjects compared their rewards with those of their partners and refused to accept a lower-value reward if their partners received a higher-value reward," Brosnan says. "This effect is amplified when the partner does not have to work for the reward." Only females were selected for this study, because previous work had shown males to be less attuned to inequality than females.

When I was TA'ing a class on ethics and technology, I had my section divide up in to small groups and try Rawls' experiment for themselves. The result were pretty diverse and interesting, but my favorite was the group that started down the line of a meritocracy.

[Remember, this was like the only liberal arts class these soon to be engineers and chemists/physicists were required to take at Tech, so they truly had 'fresh' minds when approaching the subject matter.]

But, I really liked the meritocracy idea. too bad we didn't have enough class time to really pursue it and flesh it out. I mean, these kids didn't know enough about sociology, philosphy or economics to even know there was a box, much less confining their thinking to it.

As for redistribution? Well, if you ever watch a drop of water slowly form on the end of your tap, you'll notice at first, there is a great deal of movement in the droplet. Water seems to cycle around the forming bubble. As the droplet gets bigger and heavier, more of the water seems trapped in the bottom part of the droplet, and very little of the water at the bottom of the drop cycles up to the tap at the top. The bottom becomes so heavy, that the bond holding the droplet to the tap fails, and the whole droplet falls into the basin and breaks into many little droplets.

That's how I see the economy, anyway. If there's too much weight at the bottom, the top can't maintain a stable bond, and the whole thing collapses.

I just hope I start at the top in the next drop.

Thanks, Watchful, for your meaty, swift exegesis! More later...

The follow-on question is, why, if you think the original position has moral force, do you conclude it pushes in a single direction? (toward a democratically determined pattern of wealth redistribution, presumbably.)

You do not know whether, in the realm you choose, you will reign from the loftiest heights or serve as the lowliest minion. (Or, at what points between.) But you may be given the choice of two realms: one heavenly, one hellish. In Hell the Dark Lord is no more than 7 finite tiers away from the ranks of the other damned. While in Heaven the Lord of Light sits in glory infinitely above his arch-angels, who in turn sit infinitely above the angels ... all the way down.

"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven", okay. But if you must choose from behind the veil of ignorance? Who would choose to be ANYWHERE below the top of Hell's Pecking Order, scrambling for Lucifer's leftovers?

And so we make the choice, by enlightened self-interest, to chance serving in the wholly inegalitarian realms of infinite abundence. To risk, at worse, becoming the dogs feasting on the scraps that fall from the table, to sip from where the cups runneth over, all that rot.

To return to mortal realms ... we see that the most egalitarian of social communities are stone-age tribes which eke out a subsistence day by day from their shared effort to graze uncultivated plains. We see that the most economically stratified societies in which the heirs of fortunes apply themselves toward increasing those fortunes -- and yet even the "poor" have material things the tribes could not imagine. (and sometimes a grocery cart to collect it and move it with.)

What makes the moral force push toward "equality"?

IMHO, conservative social thought is premised on the assumption that the social order approximates a meritocracy. The conservative believes that the free market will assure that the best succeed. That luck, or even worse, sheer ruthlessness, determines many market outcomes, undermines conservative thought.

A libertarian coworker demonstrated a remarkable example of circular reasoning the other day:

Those who are wealthy are wealthy because they are the most productive.

How do you know that they are the most productive? Because...they are wealthy.

Pouncer: Rawls' argument allows for inequality, if that inequality makes the poorest better off. He does not argue for total equality. His argument is closer to "Imagine that you could design a society, but that you would be the worst-off member of that society. What kind of society would you design?"

"And perhaps the most interesting question is the following: why do so many of us--including me--think that the devices of the original position, the veil of ignorance, and hypothetical consent have moral force?"

Because you don't like the counterintuitive implications of just reasoning from a straightforward principle like "everybody's wellbeing is equally valuable?"

Rawls' ridiculous "original position" argument is really just a layer of obscurity that makes people miss the sleight of hand he uses to avoid being a utilitarian. Ask yourself this simple question - what do you get if you put the conventional concept of rational self-interest - a utility maximizer - behind the veil of ignorance? Utilitarianism, of course. But that's not Rawls' conclusion. The focus on the "veil of ignorance" as an argumentative device distracts attention from the fact that his "rationally self interested" agents behind the veil aren't that at all. They have to be risk-minimizers - focused on avoiding the worst possible outcome no matter how unlikely it is, rather than giving themselves the best expected outcome. In this way the strange beings behind the Rawlsian veil meet neither any standard conception of rational self-interest, nor do they at all resemble actual human beings.

Now if you don't want to tie yourself into knots trying to justify this odd sort of egalitarianism (which isn't liberal democracy - only a tiny, tiny minority of people actually buy into the practical implications of Rawlsian egalitarianism), you can just be a utilitarian and avoid the whole fracas. Everybody's wellbeing matters equally, full stop. No need for "veils of ignorance".

" Luck " - is a shorthand term for a set of causal relationships that we are not bright enough to either recognize or explain.

You could just as easily extend the " luck " thesis to life as well as wealth - why not kill John Doe as his being alive is no more than a matter of pure chance anyway ?

We always want to place reasonable limits on our absurd arguments.

Nice point, Ian, & one of the better expressions of the problem with Rawls &, I guess, hypotheticals in general -- claiming to reduce a problem to a kind of first principle & instead stacking the deck in its own favor....

Mark S,

As a logical matter, one cannot place reasonable limits on absurd arguments. As a practical matter, economic thought in the US imposes considerable limits on our arguments to avoid allowing those arguments to become absurd. Allowing marginal tax rates on the best earning 5% of the publc that are above 35%, but below 50%, seems reasonable, especially when the revenues are used to provide better education to the childred of the 5% earning the least.

There seem to be hints in this conversation that any redistribution might mean less for everybody. In the world of placing "reasonable limits on our absurd arguments," we must admit that such an extreme position is not true. What we need to be considering is the approriate type and magnitude of redistribution.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Rawls (not that it makes me an expert!) so this is pretty interesting stuff. A couple points:

First, Rawls basic argument relies on two premises: a) what I called the ‘moral arbitrariness assumption,’ which is that outcomes stemming from unchosen acts or attributes are morally arbitrary and fair game for government correction; and b) that all acts and attributes are unchosen, even including personal effort, character, etc. For the logic to work, Rawls has to assume a pretty hard behaviorism of the BF Skinner variety. But assume those things and the basic argument works.

But second, here’s the interesting thing for policy wonks. Given the above argument, Rawls favors a ‘maximin’ solution that maximizes the ‘primary goods’ of the least advantaged in society. This maximization is in absolute not relative terms, so Rawls doesn’t favor redistribution for equality’s sake.

So here’s the empirical question: What set-up maximizes real outcomes for the least advantaged? Let’s assume that the US and the EU have the same potential output (in terms of resources, technology, and so on). Given that, compare the real standards of living and political rights of the least advantaged (let’s say, the bottom quintile). Some (like Cox at the Dallas Fed) argue that the US poor are better off than the EU’s in absolute terms, comparing income, housing, etc. If that’s the case (and I don’t know for sure whether it is), then the US system satisfies the maximin criterion and therefore is more just.

This depends on a lot of empirical assumptions, but it at least gets you thinking about whether justice is based on absolute or relative levels of income, rights, or whatever. Libertarians would reject the whole argument, but for the center/left it raises New/Old Democrat types of questions.

Much of this has already been said, but there are at least three approaches a conservative can take in criticizing Rawls:

1. Endowed characteristics are not morally meaningless or arbitrary, and the original position is not a useful construct;

2. Different asumptions about the functioning of society (things such as transaction & communication costs, for instance) alter Rawls' own application of moral principles under the original position. Richard Posner has argued that the ease of forming private insurance schemes allows the risk averse to individually satisfy their preferences, obviating the need for structural protections.

3. Rawls' principles, including the difference principle and the maximin principle, are not the principles that should (or need) to be drawn from the original position.

I’ve always thought that Rawls assumes a degree of extreme risk aversion that real people don’t have. I suppose professional philosophers have grappled with this problem and solved it to their satisfaction. I like to hear what they give as a solution. In real life, we reward people for taking risks. This seems to say that “lucky wealth” is ok. Go play the lottery, or go invest in things with uncertain outcomes, and many people do just that. So would it not seem reasonable that many people, if they could somehow roll the dice before they were born, do just that?

A. Zarkov wrote, "So would it not seem [un]reasonable that many people, if they could somehow roll the dice before they were born, do just that?"

It's not unreasonable, but it's wrong empirically. While Rawls' "maximin" principle isn't right, I think Harsanyi proposed that people would prefer a system that simply maximized average "fortune." Turns out that's not right, either. People who've studied what actual humans think have shown that typical humans want to maximize the expectation, *subject to a constraint* on the minimum.

K. Harris wrote, "Rawls' argument is that we all would consent to redistribution to allow greater equality of wealth, under the right conditions."

That's not really the maximin principle. Depending on economic dynamics, one might allow *more* inequality if it results in the minimum being maximized.

"Maybe. It can never be tried. The argument in this world is that Gates intelligence and hard work didn't earn all that money. He just created a conduit to funnel wealth into his own hands that was generated in signigicant measure by conditions that we create among us in society."

Right. And one condition in particular: government-sponsored and -enforced intellectual property rights.

“People who've studied what actual humans think have shown that typical humans want to maximize the expectation, *subject to a constraint* on the minimum.”

First I have to ask: “the expectation of what?” We know from gambling theory that if a player has finite capital (and favorable odds) then he should not try to maximize expectation. That strategy leads to ruin because it says bet everything on each play. Of course, the constraint on the minimum would take care of that problem. Lots of people have worked on this problem. Kelly says that the player should seek optimize the expected log of capital. Breiman advocates maximizing capital growth. Thorp and Cover have extended their work. But what about real gamblers? What do they do? Real players who go to the racetrack seem to actually be risk seeking. They tend overbet the long shots and underbet the favorites, so much so they create an inefficient system. See the book by Asch and Quandt “Racetrack Betting.” Ziemba and Hausch have also published on this. A collection of articles appears in the book “Efficiency of Racetrack Betting Markets.” I don’t know how this relates to Rawls’ “originalists.” But they don’t exist, gamblers do. In any case, it seems to me that Rawls’ metric for comparing economic systems is not grounded in reality. But as I said, perhaps the pros have fixed these difficulties.

A. Zarkov wrote, "First I have to ask: 'the expectation of what?' "

Clearly the expected welfare of an individual in the society.

"But what about real gamblers? What do they do? Real players who go to the racetrack seem to actually be risk seeking."

How is the behavior of "real gamblers" relevant to the behavior of a typical human?

"In any case, it seems to me that Rawls’ metric for comparing economic systems is not grounded in reality."

Huh? While clearly there's no crisp algorithm for creating a socioeconomic system which attains the maximin (or any other optimization condition, for that matter), Rawls' and related principles (e.g., optimize expectations subject to a minimum) obviously lay the groundwork for a vision of a just society.

liberal:

“How is the behavior of "real gamblers" relevant to the behavior of a typical human?”

It’s relevant because it tells us something about the nature of the typical human with regard to risk. From what I understand about Rawls, he assumes the typical person is so risk averse that he wants to be born into a society that would maximize the welfare of the worst off person. Or maximize the total welfare with a constraint on the worst case. Naturally such a system reduces the welfare of the best off. I don’t think most people would elect the Rawls system, or even the modified Rawls system if the reduction of welfare of the best off were too great. It’s a tradeoff between fear and greed. Rawls seems to think that fear absolutely dominates greed. But we know otherwise from the behavior of gamblers and investors. And we see extreme non-Rawlsian behavior in other aspects of human behavior such as career choice. Otherwise no one would ever go into show biz because your chances of success are very small. Yet LA is full of people pumping gas and waiting on tables while struggling to make the big time. It fact it almost seems that about every other person you meet in the LA retail trade sector is an aspiring actor. In summary it seems to me that most people reject Rawls’ notion of a “just” society by their very behavior in the real world.

A. Zarkov wrote, "It’s relevant because it tells us something about the nature of the typical human with regard to risk."

I don't gamblers are at all typical of the average person.

"Or maximize the total welfare with a constraint on the worst case. Naturally such a system reduces the welfare of the best off."

So what? I don't think the claim about maximizing the expectation is correct, but it's not implausible. The claim that someone behind the veil of ignorance would desire to maximize the maximum is flat-out implausible.

"Rawls seems to think that fear absolutely dominates greed. But we know otherwise from the behavior of gamblers and investors." Again, gamblers, as well as people who spend a lot of time playing with money, are not typical.

"And we see extreme non-Rawlsian behavior in other aspects of human behavior such as career choice. Otherwise no one would ever go into show biz because your chances of success are very small. Yet LA is full of people pumping gas and waiting on tables while struggling to make the big time." You commit two errors there. First, LA is full of apsiring actors because that (with NY) is where aspiring actors go; it's not a random population sample. Second, people don't aspire to be actors because they want to make lots of money; rather, they like acting.

"In summary it seems to me that most people reject Rawls’ notion of a 'just' society by their very behavior in the real world."

Wrong. The fact that government-supported welfare is as old as capitalism itself shows that people support some kind of lower bound, if not Rawls' maximin condition exactly. Furthermore, as I've mentioned, people who've actually done experiments have shown that what's favored is roughly maximizing the expectation with a constraint on the lower bound.

K Harris wrote:

"As a logical matter, one cannot place reasonable limits on absurd arguments"

You make my point better than I do ;o)

My point is that rectifying the inequities of " luck " is a dangerous moral premise with which to begin an argument. It can literally justify anything you propose to do; so while practical realities put real limits on the application of absurd arguments, it's useful to remember that those practical realities are not fixed.

Ex: Germany 1902
Germany 1942

Some differences in the application of absurd arguments here, yes ?

liberal:

You wrote: “I don't gamblers are at all typical of the average person.”

I think more people gamble than not. And I don’t limit gambling to what goes on in casinos, racetracks, lotteries, sports betting etc. It includes all human activities where the outcome is uncertain and the loss is significant. Getting married is a gamble. Approximately half of all marriages fail, yet people still do it.

You also wrote: “So what? I don't think the claim about maximizing the expectation is correct, but it's not implausible. The claim that someone behind the veil of ignorance would desire to maximize the maximum is flat-out implausible.”

The negation of Rawls’ argument does not require that people want to maximize the maximum, only that they don’t want to maximize the minimum.

You go on to say: “You commit two errors there. First, LA is full of apsiring actors because that (with NY) is where aspiring actors go; it's not a random population sample. Second, people don't aspire to be actors because they want to make lots of money; rather, they like acting.”

I do not claim that the aspiring actors one finds in NY and LA necessarily typical. I only hold these people out as yet another vivid example of people who don’t show risk aversion in their decisions. They are gamblers. Yes they like acting, and that’s the problem; they usually don’t get to do it. It’s not that acting jobs pay so little, it’s so few come along. People elect that profession anyway in the hope that they will be one of the very few who “make it.” Here “make it” means getting to act at all. Extremely non-Rawlsian.

Finally you wrote:

“Wrong. The fact that government-supported welfare is as old as capitalism itself shows that people support some kind of lower bound, if not Rawls' maximin (sic) condition exactly. Furthermore, as I've mentioned, people who've actually done experiments have shown that what's favored is roughly maximizing the expectation with a constraint on the lower bound.”

I didn’t say that people reject the notion of welfare, or aid to the poor. The charitable impulse long predates capitalism. I said they would reject Rawls’ specific argument for it. Rawls’ argument is a sufficient condition, not a necessary condition. As for the experiments, it would be useful to have a reference. I don’t know that the experiments were done correctly or that the experimental subjects gave answers that really represent what they would select as an “originalist.” Remember Rhine had lots of experiments, which seemed to show the existence of ESP. Rhine was honest although somewhat self-delusional. His binomial model for the outcomes was not quite right. The accurate model gives slightly different answers, enough to account for the apparent (but not real) departure from randomness. See the book “Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic” by Epstein.

A. Zarkov wrote, "Getting married is a gamble. Approximately half of all marriages fail, yet people still do it."

Strange example. Marriage is more driven by biological and cultural imperatives. And in terms of outcomes, not getting married might be seen by most people as a greater gamble.

"The negation of Rawls’ argument does not require that people want to maximize the maximum, only that they don’t want to maximize the minimum."

Red herring. You had written, "Naturally such a system reduces the welfare of the best off. I don’t think most people would elect the Rawls system, or even the modified Rawls system if the reduction of welfare of the best off were too great." Clearly you're referring here to reducing the maximum, not the average.

"People elect that profession anyway in the hope that they will be one of the very few who 'make it.' Here 'make it' means getting to act at all. Extremely non-Rawlsian."

I disagree. You have to ask what the opportunity cost is.

"The charitable impulse long predates capitalism."

But I'm referring to state-mandated schemes that nominally redistribute welfare in the context of nascent capitalism.

"As for the experiments, it would be useful to have a reference. I don’t know that the experiments were done correctly or that the experimental subjects gave answers that really represent what they would select as an 'originalist.'"

http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2003_03_09_angrybear_archive.html#90395425

Do you have any references for your claims, or just observations about gamblers and actors?

Liberal wrote:
"Strange example. Marriage is more driven by biological and cultural imperatives. And in terms of outcomes, not getting married might be seen by most people as a greater gamble"

It's actually a good example.

Human beings are calculators of risk -i.e. we speculate on the probability of outcomes and shoot for positive results. Now this might be an " instinctive " or hard-wired intellectual capacity of homo sapiens or it may be learned behavior ( many of us get better at risk assessment with practice).

To artificially wall off " gambling " to the tables of Vegas is to not understand the behavior and it's role in human activity.

Absent China, the martial economy, and India, the economy of starve or strive, the United States is the largest gulag economy on earth,
and anyone who gets rich from that is either
lucky (in on the con game) or a slave master
(providing the con's motivating labor force),
or in rare cases, both clever and hard working.

Sure there are rich folks who deserve their
wealth, but really, count your own fingers.
How many people do you know who scrabbled
their way to wealth, vs how many conned it?
We know one rich guy who worked his ass off,
the rest were con-artists, won fat lawsuits,
inherited money and pyramided it, or took
down some other rich old f&*k.

Everybody else is working their ass off for
the pension and maybe some SS and MediCare,
a high-wire slavery act with no safety net,
their pension subject to final arbitrage by
a team of Wall Street bankrupcy attorneys,
and their SS being eyed by the Republicans.

Should George W keep his wealth unredistributed
from conning the citizens of Texas into building
him a stadium, so he could sell the franchise?
Should Cheney keep all of his $0.6 BILLION from
pimping Halliburton stock while he was selling
his own out the back door, ala Kenny Boy Lay?
Should Chalabi keep his $340,000 a month for
being a cleverer con-man that the Neo-Con's?

In our democracy, everybody votes, everybody does their time in the military, and everybody pays taxes, so that those at the bottom aren't ground into human hamburger and bone dust.

I remember walking down Wall Street so hungry I could feel my spine through my abdomen wall. None of the fat stock traders even looked at me. I hit the jackpot later that night, stumbling across an old lady sitting with her grocery cart outside a locked Manhattan store, dead. They'd pushed her out the door, and gone home to eat.
So I helped myself to her groceries. Lucky me!

Macabre? Wake up and smell the crematoria all around you. Somewhere in between the Carter and Reagan eras, this country really went to hell.
Are we no better than Saddam's House of Pain?

At least with dividend taxes plus stock & bond sales transaction tariffs (!), we could provide the tent cities and prisons they're building all over the country for homeless unemployed's lost to the corporate global economic "engine".

Heck, at least the Pharoahs fed, clothed and sheltered their slaves!

Harry P:" Heck, at least the Pharoahs fed, clothed and sheltered their slaves!"

Good point. Not to mention the benefits of fresh air, sunshine, and vigorous exercise.

And the Soviets got their gulag-guests into arts-and-crafts shops ...

It does seem the U.S. prison system is failing to provide convicts with useful chores suitable to both the left-ish vision of developing better marketable work skills and habits, and the right-ish notion of paying a debt to society.

And, in an original state, bodiless souls might prefer to design a system that, should one happen by bad luck to wind up incarcerated, nevertheless allows one to exert one's force and talents toward some greater good.

Quite right.

Let's get the prisoners out there picking up litter along the highways, for openers, shall we?

Just to be cranky for a moment:

It seems to me that the conservative position is absolutely predicated on the idea that our current society is more or less meritocratic, and that those who have have because they deserve it. If the system rewards hard work and ingenuity, then all that is needed is equality of opportunity. For Cons, this means a lack of legal impediments to individual freedom. The reason this is BS is that it ignores society and economics and history in favor of a purely political outlook. If the last 50 years of intellectual inquiry have taught us anything, it has taught us that these concepts are interconnected: that politics is economics by other means, so to speak. Once one considers historical context, it becomes impossible to believe that our sustem is meritocratic: one can work 80 hours a week and raise a child or two for decades and remain firmly in poverty. The fact that people at the bottom work harder than people at the top (in terms of number of hours, physical strenuousness, etc.) and are paid much less for it is pretty much proof positive that (personal) wealth is not merely a product of work. Furthermore, I can work all day and not get paid a cent if nobody is willing to hire me. All the industriousness in the world will not help me if I don't have either a job, or some means of production. Hard work and industriousness, far from being pre-natal 'gifts' or what have you, are a reaction to a given situation: who will vacuum a rented car, after all?

It astounds me that Conservatives who recognize the dangers of concentrated political power don't see any danger in concentrated economic power. It's hard not to be cynical about that when one sees wealthy men talk up the joy of democracy while having enough money themselves to disproportionally affect the democratic system. Money 'buys' votes in that sense: how can there be political without economic democracy?

padraig

Breaking rocks with a sledgehammer and then pounding each tiny piece into powder would certainly be hard work.

However I'm not sure that somebody who does that should be paid more than a pediatric neurosurgeon or a computer programmer just because you think the guy with the sledgehammer is working harder. Effort does not mean value. Incompetent people at a trade often worker harder than more skilled people do at the same job, not less.

While it is true that all concepts of value are ultimately decided by human opinion I think there's merit in letting all people choose value for themselves rather than imposing a single opinion on everyone by fiat, which is what you are proposing to do.

Padraig is not, in my reading, claiming to impose a single opinion. He claims that economic power goes against democratic power.

DSW

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It seems that a person (such as Ian Montomerie) who calls Rawls's setup "ridiculous" and "just a layer of obscurity" and "sleight of hand" is doing little more than name calling, and perhaps is unable to appreciate some of the issues involved.

Also, Rawls can probably accept the vague idea, allegedly an expression of utilitarianism, that everybody's wellbeing is of equal value" (from an "impersonal" standpoint). But he can also take the separateness of people seriously, as he puts it, unlike utilitarians or other pure consequentialists, who are forced to assume that whatever intuitive convictions we have about such things can be replaced with ersatz replicas derived from their own basic principle, although such derivations have never been given in detail, and often amount to little more than handwaving and possibly wishful thinking.

As for Brad's question, he seems to accord real consent more moral force than hypothetical consent, which seems strange to me. What is real consent, anyway? If it is actual real world agreement, the problem is that such agreement can occur when one party is under duress, and consequently it will lack real moral force. But to determine what is not duress, we need to invoke hypothetical conditions and see how the real conditions match them. And if one can get around this claim, we probably still need to invoke hypothetical conditions to get around the fact that there are no actual agreements between all people at once (not to mention future generations). Pointwise agreements are going to generate all sorts of externalities that may or may not be agreed to.

Two cheers for Rawls and his followers.

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