I’m still wondering if reason is a sense. Some things feel wrong. Is that nature or nurture? (I’m sure this is baby talk to a real philosopher.)

Have you tried wearing a universally-scaled pair of beer goggles ?

Er, well, it’s a “thought experiment”. By definition, that’s speculation. But of the constructive sort.

You seem to criticize it as being a priori as opposed to a posteriori, as though “logic” would lead us astray when “experience” would get us to the goal.

But in this thought experience you’re asked to use your a posteriori experience about life (your knowledge of poverty, or of somebody falsely accused, etc) to imagine a priori what it would be like if life doled you out one of these fates.

So the thought experiment is fine, I feel. How sophisticated one reasons through it is another matter.

There is no objection to attempting a theory, or theorem of justice, but success depends on the careful choice of axioms. “The Veil of Ignorance” is, I submit, an arbitrary assumption, based neither on observation nor experiment but on speculation.

We speak of a “Sense” of injustice. Thus the purpose of any system of justice is to avoid wrong, but it will never be perfect. There is some right and some wrong in all issues. It is the extreme wrongs we seek to avoid and it is just those that escape the Veil of Ignorance.
I may do Rawls an injustice, for I have not read him in the raw, but I have learned to rely on your reporting, Andreas.

I venture to suggest that reason is a sense. It belongs to Jung’s higher faculties such as intuition. Logic is simply a tool to test its accuracy. Individual cases deserve individual assumptions. Is it right to allow The Veil of Ignorance to restrict the choice?

I came to this blog as a layman trying to grasp Godelian incompleteness. What is remarkable about Godel is that he confounded logicians by the use of “Metamathematics” – the expression of mathematics by means of ordinary language. Language (and I include music and mathematics in that term) is without axiom yet operates to convey meaning by our common human awareness of the unattainable. And what do we find? Yes: perfect justice is unattainable in this world, but the search for it is hampered by this thought experiment.

Lord Denning (a very controversial hero of our time) spoke of the judiciary as a priesthood. I mention this to create an artificial link to another post. Was Socrates a monolatrist? I hope I have got the term right: I have only just discovered it. It seems Moses was.

I feel an urge to retire again, having re-read the draft of this comment, and finding myself with doubts, both in its substance and in its relevance, especially as the nature of democracy features. But I’ll hit the “Submit” button and take a chance!

We seem to be broaching the unmentionable divide between the radical and the conservative. Yet there is a latent paradox. The radical seeks to fix notions of change this side of the Veil of Ignorance, whilst the conservative is content that the current flow of change should continue on the other side.

I find this thought experiment altogether too difficult even to identify. How do the original position and the Veil of Ignorance relate to the causes of inequality? I’m lost.

Don’t let this ball you’ve started rolling go over the cliff, Andreas.

Gladwell, in Outliers, has recently weighed in on this one, arguing essentially with Jeff that success is the result of luck and hard work, not genes: whose family you are born into in what place at what time when what opportunities present themselves in what order. If we are lucky enough (as Bill Gates was in the 1960s) to practice for 100,00 hours (or was it 10,000?) to attain a skill (computer coding) which then suddenly (in the 1970s) turns out to be the ticket to success, we make it. Others don’t.

I can’t unravel my thoughts on this in this comment. Perhaps I’ll blog on it.

But perhaps we can resolve something else first: Even if we could figure out what (ie, innate talent, hard work or luck) causes inequality, would it make a difference?

Ie, in a hypothetical world where success were purely the result of superior genes, would fairness dictate that we impose Marxist-style equality?

In a world where success were the result of hard work (and failure of sloth) would we allow unlimited inequality?

Am I to understand from what you said, Jeff, that we are all born with roughly the same inborn mental stuff, from which spring intelligence or talent? Thus if we were all born and raised under fortunate circumstances, we could all potentially achieve great things in life if only we put our minds to it?

I’m not so sure. I have this feeling that if I, for instance, had been born into the same circumstances as Sergey or Larry, or Wolfgang Amadeus, or Barack, and had worked as hard as did they, I still wouldn’t be much more than the mediocrity I turned out to be.

But then, it could just be me………..

I’m sorry I did not make it clear that I was not challenging Rawls’ conclusions within his own parameters. I was saying rather clumsily that the needs of justice prevail over any desire to create a system, however sophisticated, or even practical. I had to adopt this approach because I had never heard of Rawls and knew nothing of his work. Thank you again for educating me.

Philip S. Phogg’s approach has, with great respect to him, the same shortcoming. The legal and the moral are not to be confused. A code of morals is individual and subjective. A legal system overrides individual morality, by its very nature. It is itself amoral. All we can ask is that individual lawmakers, or interpreters of the law, are moral people following, say the principles in the Sermon on the Mount or their own honest construct. Rawls’ ideas may, indeed, be one, but only one.

Anglo-Saxon “Doing things up with string” is not “Muddling through”. It demands constant self-questioning and self-discipline. It is very hard work because there is no underlying principle, or opt-out for responsibility when a new question arises. I suspect it is Rawls’ object to provide such an opt-out. The adversarial tradition, on the other hand, assists rather than impedes. A pre-defined code is incompatible with the interests of justice and lacks the required humility and emblematic blindfold.

It is over forty years since I read The Laws and The Republic, Cheri, and so remember no detail. I do however remember feeling stifled by the notion of an ideal state imposed by an elite according to certain preconceptions. Probably because I didn’t understand.

I am tempted to draw comparisons with Evolution by Natural Selection as against creation by Design. This is difficult, however, because evolution of the law in a natural way involves a human hypothetical “God” in the shape of the responsible person. This was the inbuilt inequality to which I was alluding in my first post, again clumsily, and which will apply in any legal system, with or without a Veil of Ignorance.

You have to forgive me. I always have a great struggle trying to understand things. I have studiously avoided brackets in this post in order to follow your prescriptive requirement, but I find I need more words and punctuation and even then I deprive myself of shades of meaning.

(I’m planning, at some point, a post on adversarial (= common law) vs inquisitorial (= continental) legal traditions.)

You’re interested in a different question than Rawls raised.

Rawls tried to get us to clarify in our own minds, via an experiment, what we consider fair.

You are interested in whether real-world legal systems are better designed, via a written constitution, or left to evolve, via an unwritten constitution composed of the accumulation of precedents.

I’ve always been a fan of the Anglo-Saxon “muddling-through” approach, which, as you say, is incredible flexible and moderate and durable. But there are drawbacks with the adversarial nature that it implies. That’s a lot to get into. Feel free to opine yourself. In due course I promise to clarify my thinking on that.

I think you would also have a just society, if all human actions, and all legislation, were infused with the spirit of two sayings from the biblical New Testament:

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

2. What you do to the least of men, you do unto me (this is God talking).

When I assert that these two sayings are essential to creating a just society, I do so as someone totally secular ie with no religious beliefs. In any case they are far better and clearer than the inane: In God we trust.

To have these two sayings as the essential criteria for all actions by wielders of of power, whether in government or business, and by individuals, would require flexibilty, which the law often hinders.

Therefore I sort of like what Richard Manchester said in one of his comments: “……an unwritten constitution provides the flexibility that justice requires. ……..”.

Are you saying, Jag, that you already have a manuscript of your second book (the one criticizing the Enlightenment, presumably)?

If so, are you planning to blog on your site about it? If not, do you want to write a guest post/teaser on the HB?

A key follow up point is that while the ‘veil of ignorance’ thought experiment is very worthwhile – we now have at our disposal some related non-thought experiments, from the field of experimental ethics (or behavioral economics) e.g. the Ultimatum Game

(the following is a short extract from my book)

“The Ultimatum Game has a Proposer and a Responder. In the simplest version, each has perfect information and plays a single game. The Proposer is given a sum of money; the Responder knows how much. The Proposer then has to offer the Responder a piece of the pie. The Responder can either accept or reject it. If the Responder accepts, each of the players gets a share and they both go on their merry ways. However, if the Responder rejects, neither gets to keep any of the money. Classical economics predicts that whatever is offered will likely be accepted. After all, the Responder is getting something for nothing, so accepting is the “rational” choice. However, that’s not what happens. On average, the typical offer is less than half, in line with the homo economicus predictions. There is always a point, however, below which Responders behave in a way that doesn’t fit the homo economicus model (i.e., supposedly “irrationally”). If the offer is considered too low, Responders reject. The prevailing opinion as to why this occurs is that Responders are viewing a low offer as being unfair or humiliating. In any case, by rejecting, Responders incur real costs (the foregone share) to punish Proposers. This study has been replicated many times in many cultures. It seems that we humans have a built-in mechanism telling us that we should disrupt a situation in which we feel unjustly treated—and that we should incur costs to enforce our preference for being treated justly. Much other research has shown that evolution has equipped us to use our brains in ways that aren’t simply what would be thought of as purely logical. The logic of survival of our deep ancestors hunting and gathering on the African savannah didn’t equip us to be only self-interestedly rational. The Ultimatum Game also has confirmed that classical economists have been trying to make monkeys of us all. Scientists are trying to present animals with the closest thing they can come up with to economic choices. For monkeys, it’s all about marshmallows or raisins. When simplified versions of the Ultimatum Game are run with chimpanzees, they always behave rationally.”

For another description and view (bringing in some cultural and linguistic

nuances) see http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/01/fairs_fair.php

“These observations have deep implications for our understanding of this social concept, particularly as it relates to economics. Let me be clear: I am not claiming that Anglophones are the only fair people on the planet. It’s just that fair doesn’t have an exact equivalent in any other language. Other languages either directly import the English word, as in the German exclamation, “Das ist nicht fair!”, or fail altogether to have a comparable word, as is the case for French.”

Rawls’ thought experiment would require us to contemplate precisely this possibility: that we might, in the hypothetical world, be unjustly accused (or the victim of a crime, or the accuser…). And that thought would compel us to design a justice system that protects those who are accused, in the eventuality that they are innocent.

Re the Google guys: The inequality may be, as you said, “grotesque” but it is not necessarily unfair. And fairness, remember, is what we are after in this thought experiment. Furthermore, I do think that the people who use Google are “interdependent” with its creators.

Many people are better off because they can google their disease symptoms, read books that used to be unavailable or unaffordable to them, communicate at little or no cost, et cetera et cetera. The total value accruing to the large number of people slightly better off almost certainly surpasses the huge wealth of the two founders. In our thought experiment, THAT is why we–without knowing whether we are founders or users in the hypothetical next world–would allow the grotesque inequality. We want more Google guys and more Googles. We are ready to reward them grotesquely because–but only as long as–they make the least advantaged of us better off too.

If you change the logic subtly, so that the grotesqueness of the inequality, as opposed to the gain of the least advantaged, becomes the measure, you tip over the edge of “fairness” and into socialism, which, as Churchill remarked, is ultimately based on envy.

Following on from that, I take exception to your observation about justifying the earnings of Google execs because of the benefit the mother receives for two reasons. First, it is a rationalization of a grotesque inequality, second, there is no logical correlation between the benefits accruing to each of the parties–they are not necessarily interdependent and therefore under the experiment the justification might not be apparent.

Thanks for a very stimulating post.

Let’s do a thought experiment about justice.
Can justice and mercy exist in the same realm?

What is justice?
Plato had his thoughts for sure.