Letter to Anwei Read online

  In essence, Rawls says that the source of our sense of justice is the feeling that other individuals are special in some way. Because of this feeling, we should not harm people or deprive them of their freedom for simple utilitarian gains, even if many people would benefit. And because everyone possesses this “inviolability” in equal measure, we are all morally equal with each other. The absolute inviolability of an individual is the source of the intensity of our convictions about justice.

  However, Rawls observed that most political systems designed to dispense justice just so happened to benefit those who advocated for them. The King would advocate for a political system with a single, all-powerful figurehead and ruler; the priest might prefer a political system in which religious piety was the predominant value, and political power was held by the teachers of religious doctrine; the laborer, for a political system that elevates the common man, where everything is decided by vote, and “experts” are regarded with suspicion. This tendency of personal bias makes it difficult to objectively judge whether a political system is fair or unfair, and a biased system of justice will not respect the inviolability of the individual. To get around this problem of motivated reasoning, Rawls introduced a thought experiment known as the veil of ignorance, also known as the “original position.” This thought-experiment invites you to imagine that you are looking down on Earth, as though from the moon or from another dimension, through the eyes of a disembodied spirit. Looking down at the cities and towns of the planet, you have the power to choose which society you would like to live in, but without knowledge of which body within that society you will inhabit. Without knowledge of who you will become, you can decide if a society is fair objectively, free from the problem of motivated reasoning:

  This original position is not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

  This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain. For given the circumstances of the original position, the symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other, this initial situation is fair between individuals as moral persons, that is, as rational beings with their own ends and capable, I shall assume, of a sense of justice. The original position is, one might say, the appropriate initial status quo, and thus the fundamental agreements reached in it are fair.[16]

  Rawls believed that two conclusions followed from this perspective. The first conclusion is that a just society will maximize liberty for all of its members. What does Rawls mean by “liberty?” The answer is not as obvious as it may sound, because “liberty” is as much a feeling as it is a legal concept. It can refer to either the ability of a group to act in its own interests, or it can mean the freedom of an individual from constraints, including constraints that may be imposed by the Anwei. I have included a relevant essay at the end of this letter specifically addressing the modern misuses of “liberty,” which often mistakenly claim to speak on behalf of the American founding fathers by confusing these two meanings[17]. From the context in this instance, I believe Rawls is referring to the freedom of the individual, rather than the freedom of the group. Based on what I have described to you so far about the Anwei, this may be a little troubling. It is fairly common in academic circles to hear family and tradition described as “oppressive” to the individual because of the obligations they impose. We usually believe that justice includes paying what we owe, and if our very existence was the result of other people’s choices and sacrifices, then freeing ourselves from any obligations we may have to those people is not particularly just. But this view is not uncommon among academics and intellectuals, and was not unique to Rawls.

  The second conclusion is that the just society will only tolerate social and economic inequality to the degree that the worst off are made better off than they would have been under absolute equality. By this, Rawls means that sometimes, inequality drives advancement in progress and social welfare for all. If some degree of economic and social inequality coincides with improvements in the lives of the poorest and most socially isolated members of society, then in his view, this inequality—and only this inequality—is permissible. This idea that inequality should be rejected as unjust by default may sound familiar from the previous chapter. It is the primary contribution of Rawls to political philosophy, and the keystone of modern “social justice” movements that aim for equality.

  As I have shown you, there are already good reasons to take issue with this conclusion. Neglecting the responsibility of others for the outcomes in our own lives is its own kind of injustice—namely, ungratefulness. To expect equality by default in our social, economic, and political strengths and weaknesses is to misunderstand what a human being is, and how we come to exist. But there are other consequences to this belief as well.

  Think about a society that only tolerated inequality to the degree that it benefits the least well-off. Such a society has an established expectation of equality by default, rather than the more natural default of inequality. This is exactly the default you would expect if your starting point for seeking an objective theory of justice presumes equality, as the veil of ignorance does. But if his conclusion is accepted, it marks a change of legal importance. Up until the past few decades, those who demanded equality were required to prove some grievance or unlawful manipulation to justify a corrective redistribution. Under the moral and metaphysical presumption of equality, however, the burden of proof is lifted up from the resentful, and placed firmly on the shoulders of those who must now ask permission to be different. Beneath this standard, the alleged victim does not need to prove an act of injustice has been committed; he has only to assert that there is a difference, which implies—by default—a state of injustice. The beneficiaries of a unique legacy must prove a greater social good in order to justify their differentiation.

  Under Rawls’ veil of ignorance, a father’s desire to leave an inheritance for his son is not admitted by default because inheritance often results in social and economic inequalities. This inheritance must be justified, and the justification cannot be grounded in the father’s love for his own son. Love by itself is not a valid motivation under the veil of ignorance. Rather, it must be grounded in the benefit that his preferences for his own child might have for those who are the least well-off in society. In this way, “justice” as implemented through the veil of ignorance makes us impersonal and inhuman to those closest to us.

  We can see this effect at work in the examples from the previous chapter. If your child could have been any other child, then it is unfair—and unjust—to put the wellbeing of your own child’s education over the education system as a whole. As a platonic form of a person, you do not truly have any attachments to anyone else, so why should you care about your own child more than the child of a stranger? It is rational, even logical, to send your child to a public school, even at the risk of bullying and of hurting your child’s social and educational development. Never mind what effect that may have on your child’s thoughts about you as a parent, and their certainty about your love for them. They too—if they are being “fair”—will recognize that they could have been born into any family, and that there is no real reason to care more about you and your opinions than about any other adult. There is no reason to presume a commonality of likeness, interest, affection, inheritance, or destiny, because that has been defined off the table.

  If it truly is an accident of birth that you happened to be an American citizen, rather than a citizen of Nicaragua, Algeria, or Japan, then it is morally indefensible to stand by the arbitrary privileges of citizenship, should citizens from those countries wish to come to the United States. The fact that the shared historical experiences, civic inheritances, languages, habits, traditions, infrastructural benefits, geographic interests, and genetics group certain populations together into natural nations is of no moral or legal significance if anyone could have been anyone else.

  And if your race happens to have created an integrated system of law, culture, and language designed to make life better for you, then that system must be torn down, and your race condemned for the injustice inherent in such a project. Because it is only by arbitrary luck that you happened to be Anglo-American, and not some other race. As President Barack Obama once said, you didn’t build that.

  Under the veil of ignorance, the Anwei is inconceivable. Suicide can only be imagined as a byproduct of mental disorder and depression. Death is a horrible demon lurking on the margins, to be exorcised with transhumanism, distractions, and anti-aging products. Happiness is a product of socio-economic status, bought with stuff, and achieved on a grand scale with proper macro-economic policy. We are all valuable as individuals, to all individuals, despite there being more than seven billion of us.

  This destruction of intimacy is bad enough, but I don’t believe it is the only cost to accepting this dehumanizing perspective. People are willing to build legacies because they are personally motivated to do so. If the personal attachments which compel us to work for the future are categorized as morally invalid, then the engine of legacy itself is undermined. Pulling at the thread of equality unravels the long and beautiful tapestry that is civilization. In misunderstanding what a human being is, and designing a framework of objective justice for a sort of being that is not human, Rawls’ veil of ignorance has sown the seeds of inhuman and unjust ideas which violently oppose our most basic moral instincts.

  §

  I hope I have been successful in showing you not only that Rawls was wrong in his conclusion, but also why Rawls was wrong. This is usually sufficient to reject an idea. However, if you are to go anywhere in your own intellectual journey, it will serve you best to seek out how a claim was wrong—how was the idea arrived at? What circumstances and other ideas led to its formation? Only by understanding the how can you fully comprehend anything. Where ideas are concerned, understanding its history and origins will help you discern whether it is partially wrong, or fundamentally wrong. No idea that becomes popular is ever entirely wrong, and it is important to give credit where credit is due, so as to avoid becoming an ideologue and missing out on something valuable.

  So let me start with the argument itself. There are two places that an argument can go wrong: its premises, and its logic. We have seen that the two conclusions of Rawls’ argument are actually unjust, especially his second conclusion in which he proposed that equality ought to be the social and economic default. Therefore, either his premises must be wrong, or somewhere on the line between his premises and his conclusion, there was a confusion or a mistake.

  Rawls begins with the premise that justice and fairness are synonymous. I believe this seemingly obvious observation is actually a rather brilliant and accurate starting point, because we often think of justice as something lofty and abstract. Fairness, however, is no abstract philosophical construct. I have learned this in part from watching toddlers; one of their first and favorite phrases is “that’s not fair!” Even monkeys possess a sense of fairness, and will reject food if another monkey receives a better food reward for performing the same task[18]. What is fair in a certain context may be learned, but we seem to come with the concept of “fairness” built into us. If it were otherwise, monkeys would not be able to demonstrate the intuitive sense of fairness which they possess, since they lack abstract theories on the nature of justice.

  Entire books have been written on the origins, nature, and essence of justice. They discuss natural law, social contracts, utilitarianism, categorical imperatives, and other abstract theories, but ultimately, these are all just expansions upon what people like you and me intuitively feel is just. To understand the basics of justice, all of these theories are unnecessary. Most people have a good understanding of what justice is intuitively, and do not need complicated moral and ethical philosophies to know that it is wrong to lie, cheat, steal, rape, or murder, that we ought to give people the benefit of the doubt, to reciprocate the behaviors of others, and to reject unwarranted double-standards. These core principles make up the foundation of “justice.” Most of the disagreements beyond that are about applications. This is not to say that these theories are worthless. They are established so that when dealing with problems where our intuitions give us no clear answers, the theory may show us a fair solution. In new or complicated situations, these theories can be quite useful. In most cases, however, the complicated theories are unnecessary to determine what is or is not just in a particular situation. Rawls’ starting premise is correct: justice is fairness. The error must be somewhere else.

  After defining justice as fairness, Rawls observed that our sense of fairness has an absolute quality that does not allow for bartering or compromise. For instance, we tend to grimace at the idea of sacrificing someone’s life for a “general good,” or at sacrificing a little bit of justice in order to gain a lot of wealth. Rawls infers that this sense of absoluteness comes from a natural belief that individuals are special, or “inviolable.” If personal inviolability is the source of the absoluteness of our sense of justice, he argues that the best way to respect individual inviolability is to act as if we could have been anyone else—the veil of ignorance. And from the veil of ignorance, he believes that his two conclusions about liberty and equality are what everyone would choose.

  We could summarize his argument in the following manner:

  Justice is fairness

  Justice is a universal, intuitive emotion

  Intuitive emotion says that justice is absolute

  The absolute quality of justice comes from individual inviolability

  Individual inviolability is maximized through veil of ignorance

  The just society is a society that people would choose to live in from the veil of ignorance

  The just society maximizes individual liberty and permits no inequality which does not benefit the least well off

  If point (1) is correct, and point (7) is wrong, then the error must be somewhere in between. Point (2) is correct if point (1) is accepted, because fairness is a universal, intuitive emotion. Point (3) is slightly more contentious, but I believe to be correct.

  Point (4) is where I believe the error rests—the idea that we believe individuals to be in some sense sacred or “inviolable.” Remember:

  …Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

  This description does capture the absolute quality that most people have of the concept of justice. But the explanation Rawls posits—a sense of individual “inviolability”—does not hold up. If justice was derived from respect for the inviolability of the individual, then societies which did not respect individual rights would not be able to produce just societies, but this is not the case.

  Most all of human history was dominated by “honor cultures.” In an honor-culture, individuals are not thought of as having intrinsic worth. They are seen as members of a group, and of having value based upon the value which they provide to the group. The modern Western world is a “dignity culture,” where individuals are assumed to have intrinsic worth, and it is easy to believe that this dignity culture is the basis of justice because it has become the popularly held foundation for justice, but honor can also serve as a foundation. The individualism beneath our dignity culture is the product of the Enlightenment, only a few centuries ago. Justice has been discussed by philosophers, poets, and statesmen since the days of Ancient Greece. In fact, one of the earliest allusions to a higher concept of justice was in Sophocles’ play Antigone, in which the female protagonist chooses to bury her dead brother, even though she knew that doing so was a crime punishable by death. When asked why she defied the king’s orders, she said that there was a higher law than that of the king, a natural order which obliged her to properly bury the dead. This assertion of a higher law, which forms part of the basis of the Western common law tradition, does not require any particular respect for individuality. The concept is never mentioned, and simply is not needed.

  Philosopher Tamler Sommers even argues that honor cultures can be more just than dignity cultures because they respect the care we have for our own sense of honor, a value which is grounded in the same intuitions as justice itself. Honor cultures can also allow conflicts to be resolved in a more personal and satisfying fashion, whereas dignity cultures will ultimately require a “Leviathan”—a powerful and impartial state—to intervene and resolve our conflicts on our behalf[19]. This intervention is not only less satisfying than a more personal resolution, but can even deprive us of the chance to make amends with those who have wronged us. I have included an elaborative essay I have written on the subject of conflict, resolution, and relationships at the end of this letter, which explains in more detail why third-party intervention can actually rob us of deeper relationships[20]. Suffice to say, the fact that just societies can exist which do not respect the concept of “individual inviolability” proves that Rawls’ foundation for justice is wrong.