rawls rejects utilitarianism because

Surely, though, this is not why rape is wrong; the pleasure the rapist gets shouldnt be counted at all, and the whole thing sounds ridiculous. In short, utilitarianism gives the aggregative good precedence over the goods of distinct individuals whereas Rawls's principles do not. 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. It is an alternative to utilitarianism. WebPhysicians and janitors earn more because they help to keep society well and sanitary. The other two involve trying to show that the parties would choose Rawlss principles of justice in order to avoid results that they would find unacceptable. 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). This is a point that he emphasizes in response to Habermas (PL 42133), and it explains what he means when he says in the index to PL (455) that justice is always substantive and never purely procedurala remark that might otherwise seem inconsistent with the role that Theory assigns to pure procedural justice. 11 0 obj Whereas the idea of arranging social institutions so as to maximize the good might seem attractive if there were a unique good at which all rational action aims, it makes more sense, in light of the heterogeneity of the good, to establish a fair framework of social cooperation within which individuals may pursue their diverse ends and aspirations. The classical utilitarian, Rawls argues, reasons in much the same way about society as a whole, regarding it as legitimate to impose sacrifices on some people in order to achieve greater advantages for others. And if all or many precepts are treated as first principles, there is no gain in systematic clarity. In Rawlss lingo, we have a highest order interest in the development of our two moral powers, the powers to have a rational plan of life and a sense of justice. Since he also believed that personal and political liberty are needed for personal and moral self-development, he thought that the parties would give priority to individual liberty over other goals, such as increasing economic opportunity or wealth. Rawls may well be right that we have these higher order interests and that utilitarianism is wrong about our fundamental interests in life. This is the flaw in Brian Barry's response to my earlier discussion (in The Appeal of Political Liberalism) of utilitarian participation in an overlapping consensus. The inevitable effect of such an interpretation is to make Rawls's argument seem both more formal and less plausible than it really is. A particularly difficult conflict between the explorers and a group of Sioux, in South Dakota, convinced Lewis and Clark that they needed an interpreter. In Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical he describes it as one of the faults of TJ that the account of goodness developed in Part III often reads as an account of the complete good for a comprehensive moral conception.15 And in Political Liberalism, he recasts the argument against monistic conceptions of the good; the point is no longer that they are mistaken but rather that no such conception can serve as the basis for an adequate conception of justice in a pluralistic society.16. Thus he hopes to produce a solution to the priority problem that offers an alternative to the utilitarian solution but remains a constructive solution nonetheless. . Rawls argues there that because his principles embody an idea of reciprocity or mutual benefit, and because reciprocity is the fundamental psychological mechanism implicated in the development of moral motivation, the motives that would lead people to internalize and uphold his principles are psychologically continuous with developmentally more primitive mechanisms of moral motivation. Or, if TV isn't enough, do something else pleasurable: go to the opera, drink beer, master the piano, read Jeremy Bentham, etc. However, the argument's oblique relation to the original position construction may give rise to doubts of another kind. No. These are important differences between the two theories. To the extent that this is so, they can help to illuminate Rawls's complex attitude toward utilitarianism: an attitude that is marked by respect and areas of affinity as well as by sharp disagreements. Nor, to those who find holism compelling, does the project of identifying a putatively natural, presocial baseline distribution of advantages, and assessing the justice of all subsequent distributions solely by reference to the legitimacy of each move away from the baseline, seem either conceptually sound or ethically appropriate. The principle of average utility, as its name suggests, directs society to maximize not the total but the average utility (TJ 162). <> As we know, Rawls thinks that leaves the maximin rule as the one that they should use. Utilitarians are all about increasing happiness, after all, and assaulting peoples self-esteem or pushing them to regard social life as unacceptable are very strange ways of maximizing happiness. My hope is to arrive at a balanced assessment of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism. Yet these differences, important as they are, should not be allowed to obscure an important point of agreement, namely, that neither view is willing to assess the justice or injustice of a particular assignment of benefits in isolation from the larger distributional context. Furthermore, the argument from the fundamental ideas to the political conception is envisioned in Political Liberalism as proceeding via the original position, which is said to model the relevant ideas (PL Lecture I.4). 9 0 obj Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service. WebRawls rejects utilitarianism because a. he saw it as a threat b. it might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits c. governments wanted it d. it values moral purity it Unless there is some one ultimate end at which all human action aims, this problem may seem insoluble. He also suggests that part of the attraction of monistic accounts, and of teleological theories that incorporate such accounts, may derive from a conviction that they enable us to resolve a fundamental problem about the nature of rational deliberation. Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. Defenders of the principle of average utility have challenged Rawls's arguments in a variety of ways. However, as Rawls acknowledges, the maximin rule is very conservative, and its employment will seem rational only under certain conditions. Rights are certain moral rules whose observance is of the utmost importance for the long-run, overall maximization of happiness, it would be unjust to coerce people to give food or money to the starving, According to John Rawls, people in "the original position" choose the principles of justice on the basis of. That being the case, it is not clear what could reasonably count as the natural baseline or what the ethical credentials of any such baseline might plausibly be thought to be.26 Moreover, as the size of the human population keeps growing, as the scale and complexity of modern institutions and economies keep increasing, and as an ever more sophisticated technological and communications infrastructure keeps expanding the possibilities of human interaction, the obstacles in the way of a satisfactory account of the presocial baseline loom larger, and the pressure to take a holistic view of distributive justice grows greater.27 In their different ways, the Rawlsian and utilitarian accounts of justice are both responsive to this pressure.28. Rawls gives distinct arguments against two forms of utilitarianism: the classical version and the principle of average utility. The aim now is to show how liberal institutions can achieve stability in conditions of pluralism by drawing on diverse sources of moral support. No assessment of the overall distribution of benefits and burdens in society or of the institutions that produced that distribution is normally required in order to decide whether a particular individual deserves a certain benefit. Holism about distributive justice draws support from two convictions. Harvard University Press, 1971. These considerations implicate some significant general issuesabout the justificatory function of the original position and about the changes in Rawls's views over timewhich lie beyond the scope of this essay. For criticism of this emphasis, see, The proviso is essential. One day, their boat overturned in a sudden storm. However, utilitarians reject the publicity condition. Moreover, if there is indeed a dominant end at which all rational human action aims, then it is but a short step to construing that end as the sole intrinsic good (TJ 556) for human beings. b. Adam Smith denies that human beings are, by, According to Locke, a. individuals are morally entitled to take others property b. property is a moral right c. individuals are not morally entitled to the products of their labor d. property, How do these four features of capitalism relate to you as an individual residing in the "land of free enterprise.?" In this sense, desert as traditionally understood is individualistic rather then holistic. 3 0 obj We saw this when talking about libertarianism. They both turn on the possibility that some people would lose out when everyones interests are aggregated together. In other words, we normally think that it is reasonable for a single individual to seek to maximize satisfaction over the course of a lifetime. Whether or not these arguments are successful, they may be seen in part as responses to the emphasis on system that is a feature both of Rawls's theory and of utilitarianism. 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. The first is almost certainly wrong: the parties do know the chances of being any particular person are equal to the chance of being anyone else. These points imply that the discussion in section 76 is an indispensable part of the presentation of the main grounds for the principles of justice. In the Preface to A Theory of Justice,1 Rawls observes that [d]uring much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some form of utilitarianism (TJ vii). Intuitionists do not believe that there are any priority rules that can enable us to resolve such conflicts; instead, we have no choice but to rely on our intuitive judgment to strike an appropriate balance in each case. <> for if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individuals happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. After characterizing classical utilitarianism as the ethic of perfect altruists, moreover, Rawls goes on in the next several pages to ask what theory of justice would be preferred by an impartial, sympathetic spectator who did not conflate all systems of desires into one. Part of Rawls's point, when calling attention in Two Concepts of Rules to the interest of the classical utilitarians in social institutions, was to emphasize that the construal of utilitarianism as supplying a comprehensive standard of appraisal represents a relatively recent development of the view: one he associates, in that essay, with Moore. As Rawls emphasizes, utilitarianism does not share his view that special first principles are required for the basic structure (PL 262), notwithstanding its broad institutional emphasis, nor does it agree that the question of distributive shares should be treated as a matter of pure procedural justice (TJ 889). The Fine Tuning Argument for God's Existence, Freedom from Self-Abuse (Cutting) - Sermon, The Lemonade-Twaddle of the Consumer Church, Five Views On the Destiny of the Unevangelized. For these precepts conflict and, at the level of common sense, no reconciliation is possible, since there is no determinate way of weighing them against each other. It is, therefore, doubly unclear how classical utilitarianism could participate in the overlapping consensus Rawls envisions; for it rejects the fundamental ideas that form the basis of the consensus, and the arguments that begin from those ideas are said to result in its own repudiation. He and Sacagawea joined the expedition. Samuel Freeman, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right. This is not the way most of us think about what is valuable in our lives. endobj This is, he says, a peculiar state of affairs, which is to be explained by the fact that no constructive alternative theory has been advanced which has the comparable virtues of clarity and system and which at the same time allays these doubts (TJ 52). In 1803, the Lewis and Clark Expedition left from St. Louis, Missouri, to begin an 8,000 -mile journey, during which the explorers would gather information about the huge territory of the Louisiana Purchase. In this way, many persons are fused into one (TJ 27). Executing a few Danish cartoonists may bring pleasure to a Muslim mob. For two years, the boy was carried on his mother's back. T or F: Libertarians involves a commitment to leaving market relations - buying,selling, and other exchanges - totally unrestricted. But the parties in the original position have to make a single decision that will never be repeated and that could have calamitous implications over the course of their entire lives. If people are to be stably motivated to uphold utilitarian principles and institutions, even when those principles and institutions have not worked to their advantage, the capacity for sympathetic identification will have to be the operative psychological mechanism. Thus, they have maintained, there is less of a difference than Rawls indicates between average utility and his own view in respect of their riskiness. <> ), Find out more about saving to your Kindle, Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651670.013. "As Rawls says, there is a sense in which classical utilitarianism fails to take seriously Rawls argues that this commitment to unrestricted aggregation can be seen as the result of extending to society as a whole the principle of rational choice for one man (TJ 267). Yet that capacity is, as a rule, not strong enough nor securely enough situated within the human motivational repertoire to be a reliable source of support for utilitarian principles and institutions. It should not be interpreted, as it sometimes has been, as the selfcontained presentation of a formal decisiontheoretic argument which is independent, for example, of the appeals to stability, selfrespect, and the strains of commitment in section 29. In other words, there is a prior standard of desert by reference to which the justice of individual actions and institutional arrangements is to be assessed. "A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution." This is partly because Rawls's formulation has appeared to some readers to straddle two or more of the following claims: 1) a claim of metaphysical error, to the effect that utilitarianism simply fails to notice that persons are ontologically distinct, 2) a claim of moral error, to the effect that utilitarianism tolerates unacceptable interpersonal tradeoffs, and thereby fails to attach sufficient moral significance to the ontological distinctions among persons, and 3) an explanatory claim, to the effect that utilitarianism fails to attach sufficient moral significance to the ontological distinctions among persons because it extends to society as a whole the principle of choice for one person. <> In that book, of course, Rawls's aims are different from his aims in A Theory of Justice. I will then examine an argument by Nozick and by Michael Sandel to the effect that there is a tension between certain aspects of Rawls's theory and his criticisms of utilitarianism. This is not to say that their concern is insignificant. 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. . So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible,as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthusbut that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.** The Methods of Ethics, IV.1.2, 34. My discussion follows those of Steven Strasnick, in his review of. It is not clear, however, what happened to the valiant woman who added so much to Lewis and Clark's expedition. They assume the probability of being any particular person (outside the Original Position, in the real world) is equal to the probability of being any other person. WebRawls and utilitarianism Main points A Theory of Justice tackles many things. Yet the most important of those arguments can also be formulated independently of the original position construction and, in addition, there are some arguments that are not offered from the vantage point of the original position at all. Yet Rawls's willingness to treat it as a candidate for inclusion, which initially seemed startling, may appear more understandable if one keeps in mind the complexity of his attitude toward utilitarianism in Theory. If he did not himself agree that we need a need a clear, systematic theory to reduce our reliance on unguided intuition and provide an adequate basis for liberal, democratic institutions, he would not be so concerned to emphasize utilitarianism's deficiencies or to produce a theory that remedies those deficiencies while preserving the view's virtues. - Ques Two Books That Help in Understanding Culture. Heres the second question. In both cases, the parties are said to fear that their own interests might be sacrificed for the sake of the larger utilitarian goal. Lewis and Clark met Charbonneau, who offered to translate for them. In his later work, however, it is the comprehensive version of utilitarianism that he himself treats as standard, and with which he contrasts his own institutional approach to justice. This assumption, Rawls argues, implies the dissolution of the person as leading a life expressive of character and of devotion to specific final ends, and it is only psychologically intelligible14 if one thinks of pleasure as a dominant end for the sake of which a rational person is willing to revise or abandon any of his other ends or commitments. (Utilitarians regard this fuzzy talk of different ways of valuing things with suspicion. This drains away much of the motivation for a teleological view. For helpful discussions of this line of criticism, see. "useRatesEcommerce": false 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. They can assign probabilities to outcomes in the society they belong to. As Rawls says: A distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations. We also know that the maximin rule would not lead them to choose utilitarianism. As a result, Rawls writes, we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. In the end, he speculates, we are likely to settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view, he adds, is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. The argument between Rawls and the utilitarians thus ultimately comes down to some pretty fine points. It might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits. The main grounds for the principles of justice have already been presented. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. A Critique of John Rawls's Theory, in, David Lyons, Nature and Soundness of the Contract and Coherence Arguments, in, Jan Narveson, Rawls and Utilitarianism, in, Justice and the Problem of Stability, (. Each sentence below refers to a numbered sentence in the passage. <> Of course, as Rawls recognizes, utilitarians frequently argue that, given plausible empirical assumptions, the maximization of satisfaction is unlikely to be achieved in this way. Accordingly, what he proposes to do is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. The possibility of such a consensus lies at the heart of his answer to the question of how a just and stable liberal society is possible in conditions of reasonable pluralism. Often, for example, we seem prepared to say that an individual deserves or has a right to some benefit, and that it is therefore just that he should get it, without inquiring into the larger distributional context. If so, however, then their ultimate concern is not the same as his, even if it can be expressed in the same words. But utilitarianism has some problems. Eventually he married Sacagawea. Yet, as noted above, Rawls explicitly states that an overlapping consensus is deep enough to include such fundamental ideas as the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation (PL 149, 15860, 1646), and the suggestion that classical utilitarianism might support the political conception as a workable approximation does not explain what attitude the utilitarian is now supposed to have toward that idea.32.

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