Monday, March 11, 2019
WORLD FAMOUS IN POLAND
Well, the Rawls lecture has now hit 1000 views, which is nice and cozy in a small way. I should explain something that was more or less obvious in the lecture but may not be noticed by those who really care about Rawls. What interests me about Rawls' argument is that he claims, with all his hedges and caveats and hemming and hawing, that it is a theorem in bargaining theory. That is, in my estimation, an excting claim. It turns out to be false, which is also interesting. Beyond that, I find Rawls rather boring. That may put me on the wrong side of history, but there it is.
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Professor Wolff, I suspect you would find Rawls' use of the linguistic analogy in the original edition of A Theory of Justice and its use in cognitive science known as Universal Moral Grammar to be very interesting, as I have. I tend to agree that much of Rawls' later work is uninteresting and tedious, but some of his early-mid career ideas are highly stimulating, at least in my opinion.
The original position is a rational-choice situation but it is not a bargaining game. Since the original position is not a bargaining game, Rawls's argument cannot be a theorem in bargaining theory. (It could be a theorem in rational-choice theory, but I don't think that's quite the same thing.)
Rawls, TJ, p. 139: "...there follows [from the veil-of-ignorance assumption] the very important consequence that the parties have no basis for bargaining in the usual sense." (You make this point yourself in the lecture.)
So I assume that what you mean to say is that R. is claiming to prove or demonstrate, at least "ideally," a "deductive" argument in rational-choice theory, and that is the claim you argue is false.
LFC, as I indicate in my lecture, the first statement was of a bargaining game, and I think he never let go of that, even though [as I indicated in my lecture] the veil of ignorance converted it into a rational choice problem. Note that in TJ he invokes Maximin, which makes no sense at all in a rational choice context. This is in the lecture,
Yes, it is in the lecture. I guess your specific point about Maximin did not resonate that much with me because I am not that familiar with the literature on game theory and bargaining theory. But that particular shortcoming of mine is not your fault, obviously.
[I do know about the prisoner's dilemma and all that, because my grad-school training (such as it was) was in International Relations. But I didn't have to go all that deeply or all that far back into the lit. on bargaining theory, and since it had relatively little to do w my particular interests, I didn't.]
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