But the assignment of weights is an essential and not a minor part of a conception of justice, for if two people differ about the weight to be assigned to different principles then their conceptions of justice are different (TJ 41). There was a handout for this class: 24.RawlsVsUtilitiarianism.handout.pdf. So Rawls needs to show theyre wrong to do so. For Rawls, by contrast, the good life for an individual consists in the successful execution of a rational plan of life, and his principles of justice direct us to arrange social institutions in such a way as to protect the capacity of each individual to lead such a life. All it means is that formal principles play a limited role in determining such choices. So that is the version of utilitarianism that he has the parties compare with his two principles of justice. 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. Perhaps one might even say that it is precisely because he agrees with utilitarianism about so much that Rawls is determined to provide an alternative that improves upon it in the respects in which it is deficient. 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. There has been extensive discussion and disagreement both about the meaning and about the merits of Rawls's claim that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinctions among persons. Around the year 1788, a Shoshone girl named Sacagawea, also known as Bird Woman, was born. Thus his official arguments against utilitarianism take the form of arguments purporting to show that it would be rejected by the parties. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 79. Taken together, these three features of his view mean that, like the utilitarian, he is prepared to appeal to higher principle, without recourse to intuitionistic balancing, to provide a systematic justification for interpersonal tradeoffs that may violate commonsense maxims of justice. If it is asked in the abstract whether one distribution of a given stock of things to definite individuals with known desires and preferences is better than another, then there is simply no answer to this question. On the one hand, utilitarians will say that they wouldnt make life intolerable for anyone: that doesnt make any sense if youre trying to maximize happiness, after all. The Veil of Ignorance is a way of working out the basic institutions and structures of a just society. According to Rawls, [1], working out what justice requires demands that we think as if we are building society from the ground up, in a way that everyone who is reasonable can accept. These arguments appeal to what Rawls calls finality and stability. - Ques Two Books That Help in Understanding Culture. 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. In this sense, utilitarianism takes the distinctions among persons less seriously than his principles do. To be sure, Rawls does not claim that the political conception is deductively derivable from classical utilitarianism, only that the classical view might support the political conception as a satisfactory and perhaps the best workable approximation [to what the principle of utility would on balance require] given normal social conditions (PL 171). Yet both the Rawlsian and the utilitarian accounts are indeed holistic, and this may be part of what Nozick finds objectionable about them. are highly problematical, whereas the hardship if things turn out badly are [sic] intolerable (TJ 175). To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] Utilitarianism, in Rawls's view, has been the dominant systematic moral theory in the modern liberal tradition. As I have indicated, substantial portions of Part III are devoted to the detailed elaboration of this contrast along with its implications for the relative stability of the two rival conceptions of justice and their relative success in encouraging the selfrespect of citizens.7 Furthermore, Rawls says explicitly that much of the argument of Part II, which applies his principles to institutions, is intended to help establish that they constitute a workable conception of justice and provide a satisfactory minimum (TJ 156). 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. 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. If libertarianism is true, which of these statements is true? Rawls will emphasize the publicity condition in order to show that utilitarians cant give people the kind of security that his principles can.

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