It is just past 3 o’clock in the afternoon on the very last day of the year. The sun is shining, it is 69° here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and the Omicron variant is raging uncontrolled throughout this part of the country as well as every other part. I have just learned that surgery my wife was scheduled to have a week from today to alleviate the great pain she is suffering from a torn rotator cuff in her right shoulder has been postponed, along with all other elective surgeries, because of the pressure the virus is putting on the local hospital system. She and I are again hunkered down, not going to local supermarkets or local restaurants and not seeing people who do not live in this protected continuing care retirement community or CCRC. Rather than beweep my outcast state, as Shakespeare put it, I thought to spend a little time expanding on a very lovely and important idea that I had years ago in response to the arguments of John Rawls. But a certain innate caution led me to check whether I had talked about the idea before on this blog. Well, of course I have, most recently less than three months ago! In fact, thanks to one of the utilities provided by Google, I was able to find that I had explained at length on July 12, 2015, again on September 24, 2017, then again a year and half later on January 30, 2019 and finally on October 11, 2020. I even made reference to the idea without expanding on it, as I say, on September 28, 2021.
For faithful readers who will recall these events, I am of
course talking about my analysis of what I call the Inequality Surplus, as it
plays a role in the foundation of Rawls’s theory of justice.
I believe my analysis is actually rather important and I
have never seen any coherent and persuasive response to my exposition of it,
but I live in horror of turning into an ancient mariner who stoppeth one of
three, so I must content myself merely with alluding to my oft repeated analysis.
12 comments:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne.
CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne.
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
Happy New Year!
GO BLUE!
I don't see anything wrong with you (Professor Wolff) explaining once again your analysis of Rawls.
First of all, you have new readers all the time.
Second, those of us who have been reading your blog for several years tend to forget what you've said in many cases. In today's world one faces so many new ideas and concepts daily that one or at least someone like myself tends to quickly forget what one read yesterday. Unless one is a specialist in Rawls or has some particular interest in him, one forgets what you said about him as quickly as one forgets what the statistic for inflation was last month. Today I started to look at a video in Youtube by the Chilean philosopher Martin Hopenhayn about Marx and I wasn't sure at all if I had seen it previously and it is from only 3 years ago.
Third, I note that people like Chomsky who are successful mass communicators repeat and repeat the same ideas, at times in exactly the same words, with the same jokes, in
who knows how many talks and interviews available in Youtube. You (Professor Wolff) are used to facing a class of students who are especially motivated to assimilate what you have to say, often because they will be graded or because it is part of their major subject or future professional career, but here that is not the case.
There's usually some audience official or informal, a court of opinion, that adjudicates debates; who would be the audience that would decide your argument correct and brilliant? Who would be the students to study your brilliant argument?
That would be me.
Just wanted to check in one more time. What more could one ask of a blogger than a consistently engaging series of thought and prose. Your book on Kant put me in mind of philosophy, doubtless as it did for countless others. Wishing you and your wife a Happy New Year.
I discovered that back in 2015 there were some interesting exchanges between RPW and some commenters on Rawls.
For instance, this exchange with Marcus Arvan:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-response-to-one-philosophers-musings.html
I agree with Arvan's statement (in the comments) that one shouldn't interpret a philosopher based on the first thing he wrote -- meaning, in this context, the 1958 article in which Rawls said he was proving a theorem in bargaining theory.
On a separate point, whatever one thinks of ToJ and Rawls's other work (and I happen to have a somewhat more favorable view of it than Prof. Wolff does), I'm not sure R. ever satisfactorily addressed the issue of implementation of his principles in "the real world," or more precisely the likely difficulty of implementing the difference principle (in a way that takes it seriously, as I believe R. intended it to be taken) in a society, esp one that also gives priority to the equal liberties, as R. says it should. R. does say in ToJ (1st ed.) that "in practice" it may well be a matter of choosing between second-best arrangements, i.e., ones that don't (fully) satisfy the principles, but he doesn't elaborate, at least not in that passage, except to say it falls in the realm of "nonideal theory" and that "the best available arrangement may contain a balance of imperfections, an adjustment of compensating injustices." (ToJ 1st ed. p.279, emphasis added)
I'm neither a Rawls expert nor closely familiar w a lot of his later work (or much besides ToJ), so wd be interested in hearing other views on some of this. Though my sense is that Rawls scholars, for the most part, stopped commenting here quite a while ago, for whatever reason(s).
LFC
I’ve chimed in at times in defense of Rawls, but my view is not that of a Rawls scholar. My undistinguished undergraduate major in philosophy (no one in the Department suggested I consider graduate school) hardly qualifies me. But I am a fan and have read TJ and much of his later work (the unfinished Justice as Fairness) as well as some of his other work, in particular The Law of Peoples, which appealed to me no doubt because my own career was in international trade law.
I can’t now point you to where in his writings he addressed the “real world” point, but I’m certain that he did. My recollection is that his answer was simple: he is talking about the ideal world; only when we know what that would be can we then talk about the measures that we need to take us closer to it that we are now.
To me the core of Rawls is in the veil of ignorance. That’s the point that could make its way in the “real world.” I’ve lead a couple of discussion groups at OLLI in DC on Rawls, using JaF and not TJ. The members of the group were all far from naïve politically. Most either had government careers or careers dealing with the government, or were married to someone in those categories. When they would argue that no X,Y, or Z would agree with that, they were stumped by the response of “But what would you chose if you didn’t know whether you’d be an X,Y, or Z?”
Rawls was trying to find what Justice really is—not what you or I would say is just, but what really IS just. Only when we know what that is can we talk about how to get there.
My major criticism: Rawls desperately needed a good editor. I think he could have said what he had to say much more clearly than he did in half the pages. I forget who it was, but one of his colleagues, who admired Rawls, said that TJ reads as if it were transliterated from the original German.
I have a movie recommendation for the political pundits and election critics who read this blog. The movie is “Irresistible,” and was written and directed by Jon Stewart. released in 2020. I borrowed it at my library, thinking it would be a pleasant romantic comedy to watch on New Year’s Day. It is anything but a romantic comedy. It is Jon Stewart’s satire about elections in the U.S. Steve Carrell plays a Democratic political campaign strategist devastated by Trump’s election. He is intent on finding a Trump-like candidate from the Midwest who actually favors progressive values. He discovers a retired Colonel who owns a farm in Wisconsin (played by Chris Cooper) whom he decides to groom to become a standard bearer in the Democratic party. The movie has a twist ending that you will not see coming. There is an epilogue by Trevor Potter, a former Commissioner and Chairman of the Federal Election Commission, who is critical of the decision in Citizens United. It can be rented on DVD com.
@ D. Palmeter
I know he's doing "ideal theory" rather than "nonideal theory" (btw there's a fairly recent book advertised on the Leiter site that addresses these issues -- looks interesting, I forget the author's name though I bookmarked it, am not on my computer -- publisher is Harvard Univ. Press. When back on computer later, I will get the title.)
Anyway, the entire second part of ToJ is called Institutions, so he did feel some obligation, to some extent, to sketch how the theory might play out in 'practical' albeit still fairly abstract terms in a nearly just or just society. What I was trying to get at is that, apart from that passage I quoted, I'm not sure he acknowledged how *difficult* it wd be to implement the difference principle and the other principles in "the real world". Of course it's important to know which principles would or should ground a just or nearly just society, but if the prospects for their actual implementation are v slim then that is a problem -- one that I wonder if Rawls thought about toward the end of his career, as the prospects for achieving the kind of 'property-owning democracy' that would satisfy the principles receded, if anything.
RPW argues (and I'm not saying I agree w this) that R's theory fails because he fails to show or "prove" that the parties to the original position would choose the two principles, but I wonder whether there's a more fundamental, in a way, objection: namely, assuming for the sake of argument that the parties *would* choose the principles, they couldn't be implemented, or it would be v difficult to implement them, in the actual world (for reasons that it would take too long to spell out in any detail rt now). What this amounts to suggesting is that a Rawlsian just society cannot come into existence today, either in a liberal capitalist democracy or social-democratic welfare state or anywhere else, partly bc the political conditions of possibility for its realization don't exist. And while there's still some point to doing ideal theory in terms of sketching a goal that shd orient one's views and efforts, a *complete* or *very* substantial disconnect betw ideal theory and the nonideal world is perhaps not what one wants, I would suggest. There has to be some disconnect, otherwise it wouldn't be ideal theory, but one doesn't want the disconnect to be chasm-like. Not everyone will agree on that, I know.
Then there's the problem or issue of what the parties behind the veil of ignorance are taken to know and not know. They're assumed to know some general facts. RPW argues this means they shd know that capitalism is exploitative. But putting that for the moment to one side, what if anything shd they be taken to know about actually existing polities and politics? W.o going back to check, I think R says: not much. (My impression is they do know their "location in history", roughly, and contrary to what RPW says in one of those old posts, but I cd be wrong about that. Again, not going back to check.)
On December 14, 2021, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous 3-judge decision, rejected Trump’s request for an injunction to prevent the disclosure of documents which he claims are protected by executive privilege. The Court stated:
“In cases concerning a claim of executive privilege, the bottom-line question has been whether a sufficient showing of need for disclosure has been made so that the claim of presidential privilege ‘must yield[.]’ …
“In this case, President Biden, as the head of the Executive Branch, has specifically found that Congress has demonstrated a compelling need for these very documents and that disclosure is in the best interests of the Nation. Congress, which has engaged in a course of negotiation and accommodation with the President over these documents, agrees. So the tests that courts have historically used to police document disputes between the Political Branches seem a poor fit when the Executive and Congress together have already determined that the ‘demonstrated and specific’ need for disclosure that former President Trump would require. … A court would be hard-pressed under these circumstances to tell the President that he has miscalculated the interests of the United States, and to start an interbranch conflict that the President and Congress have averted.
“But we need no conclusively resolve whether and to what extent a court could second guess the sitting President’s judgment that it is not in the interests of the United States to invoke privilege. Under any of the tests advocated by former President Trump, the profound interests in disclosure advanced by President Biden and the January 6th Committee far exceed his generalized concerns for Executive Branch confidentiality.”
If you are interest in reading the entire opinion, you can find it here:
https://e.casetext.com/api/print/document/trump-v-thompson-1?includeHighlights=false&includeKeyPassages=false&isTwoColumn=true&concat=Trump%20v.%20Thompson.pdf
I am confident that not even the three Supreme Court justices Trump appointed will save him from an affirmance by the Supreme Court.
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