), Find out more about saving to your Kindle, Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651670.013. No. It is an alternative to utilitarianism. endobj WebAbstract. Of course, utilitarians believe that the principle of utility provides the requisite higher standard, whereas Rawls believes that his two principles are the correct higher criterion (TJ 305). In other words, they turn on the possibility that the way to maximize average utility across a whole society will involve leaving some with significantly less liberty, opportunities, or wealth than others have. Rawls's objection to utilitarianism is not to its holism but rather to the particular criterion it uses for assessing the legitimacy of interpersonal tradeoffs. I have come to the conclusion that the wording in A Theory of Justice is misleading and that the real idea is better expressed in a different publication. Nor can the justice of an overall allocation of goods be assessed independently of the institutions that produced it. WebQuestion 4 Rawls rejects utilitarianism because: a) He saw it as a threat. The argument is not presented to the parties in the original position as a reason for rejecting utilitarianism or teleological views in general. please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. At the same time, it is a measure of Rawls's achievement that utilitarianism's predominant status has been open to serious question ever since A Theory of Justice set forth his powerful alternative vision. Since the parties regard stability as important, they want to avoid principles that people would find unacceptable. Instead, the thought is that a system that treats the distribution of talents as a collective asset under the terms of the difference principle, is actually required if each person is to have a chance of leading a good life. This argument is straightforward and appears decisive. Within contemporary political philosophy, this tendency receives what is perhaps its most forceful expression in Nozick's work, and it is noteworthy that a resistance to distributive holism appears to be part of what lies behind his objection to endresult principles.30 These principles are said to assess the justice of a given distribution or sequence of distributions, solely by seeing whether the associated distributional matrix satisfies some structural criterion, rather than by taking into account historical information about how the distribution came to pass. This means that, in a society whose basic structure was regulated by the two principles, allegiance to those principles would, under favorable conditions, develop naturally out of preexisting psychological materials. Rawls will emphasize the publicity condition in order to show that utilitarians cant give people the kind of security that his principles can. Against this line of thought, Rawls argues, first, that there simply is no dominant end: no one overarching aim for the sake of which all our other ends are pursued. The force of this challenge, moreover, is largely independent of Rawls's claims about the justificatory significance of the original position construction. One possibility is utilitarianism. My discussion follows those of Steven Strasnick, in his review of. We know that Jean Baptiste grew into an accomplished and successful man. Formally, his aim is to show is that the parties in the original position would prefer his own conception of justicejustice as fairnessto a utilitarian conception. I have said that Rawls's appreciation for utilitarianism's systematic and constructive character has attracted less comment than his claim to have identified a theory of justice that is preferable to utilitarianism. hasContentIssue false, Rawls on the Relationship between Liberalism and Democracy, Rawls on Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law, https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651670.013, Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. "A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution." of your Kindle email address below. Sacagawea's knowledge of the region helped guide the expedition. In the Preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls observes that [d]uring much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some formof utilitarianism (TJ, p. vii/xvii rev.). Rawls produced a number of arguments for this conclusion, some of which are quite technical. In Political Liberalism (xviixx and xliixliv) Rawls says that the account of stability given in Part III of the Theory is defective, because it tests the rival conceptions of justice by asking whether the wellordered society associated with each such conception would continue to generate its own support over time and, in so doing, this account implicitly assumes that in a wellordered society everyone endorses the conception on the basis of a shared comprehensive moral doctrine. In making such determinations, we may do well to employ deliberative rationalityto reflect carefully, under favourable conditions, in light of all the relevant facts available to usbut there is no formal procedure that will routinely select the rational course of action. Even if utilitarians reject the original position as a device for adjudicating among rival conceptions of justice, in other words, this challenge is not one they can easily ignore. Nozick suggests that Rawls can avoid this tension only by placing an implausible degree of weight on the distinction between persons and their talents.17 Michael Sandel, following up on Nozick's point, argues that Rawls has a theory of the person according to which talents are merely contingentlygiven and wholly inessential attributes rather than essential constituents of the self.18 For this reason, Sandel argues, Rawls does not see the distinctness of persons as violated by the idea of treating the distribution of talents as a common asset. Harvard University Press, 1971. Since the impartial spectator identifies with and experiences the desires of others as if these desires were his own, his function is to organize the desires of all persons into one coherent system of desire (TJ 27). In this context, utilitarianism, with its prominent place in the traditions of liberal thought and its various more specific affinities with Rawls's own view, presents itself as a natural ally. The argument is that the parties, knowing that they exist and wishing only to advance their own interests, would have no desire to maximize the net aggregate satisfaction, especially since doing so might require growth in the size of the population even at the expense of a significant reduction in the average utility per person.
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