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John Rawls famously argued that the Difference Principle would be chosen by any rational agent in the original position. Derek Parfit and Philippe Van Parijs have claimed, contra Rawls, that it is not the Difference Principle which is implied by Rawls’ original position argument, but rather the more refined Lexical Difference Principle. In this paper, we study both principles in the context of social choice under ignorance. First, we present a general format for evaluating original position arguments in this context. (...) |
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The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles of justice. It will be shown that when (...) |
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One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’s worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls’s main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the (...) |
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Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. I will argue that, once prospect utilitarianism is on the (...) |
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Social contract theorists often take the ideal contract to be the agreement or bargain individuals would make in some privileged choice situation. Recently, experimental philosophers have explored this kind of decision-making in the lab. One rather robust finding is that the exact circumstances of choice significantly affect the kinds of social arrangements experimental subjects unanimously endorse. Yet prior work has largely ignored the question of which of the many competing descriptions of the original position subjects find most compelling. This paper (...) |
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The abstract individual is a model that represents real human beings in moral and political philosophy. It occupies a central role in individualist theories such as political liberalism and mainstream Western medical ethics. This article presents two methodological standards for assessing competing models. Taken together, the standards form an objective yardstick against which different constructions of the abstract individual can be evaluated. Thereby, the article introduces a new level of abstraction, and a new set of normative principles, to individualist moral (...) |
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In this article, I address a controversial aspect of Rawls’s treatment of the question of justice between generations: how the parties in the original position could be motivated to select Rawls’s preferred principle of intergenerational savings, which he dubs the just savings principle. I focus on the explanation found in his later work, where he proposes that the correct savings principle is the principle that any generation would have wanted preceding generations to have followed. By expanding upon this explanation, I (...) |
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You and I lead different lives. While we share a society and a world, our existence is separate from one another. You and I matter individually, by ourselves. My dissertation is about this simple thought. I argue that this simple insight, the separateness of persons, tells us something fundamental about morality. My dissertation seeks to answer how the separateness of persons matters. I develop a precise view of the demands of the separateness of persons. The separateness of persons imposes both (...) |
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Social decisions are often made under great uncertainty – in situations where political principles, and even standard subjective expected utility, do not apply smoothly. In the first section, we argue that the core of this problem lies in decision theory itself – it is about how to act when we do not have an adequate representation of the context of the action and of its possible consequences. Thus, we distinguish two criteria to complement decision theory under ignorance – Laplace’s principle (...) |
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