Justice as fairness: we can do better than we are

[dreadgeek]

I want to introduce a concept to folks who may not be familiar with what I think is one of the most important ideas in Western political and social philosophy--namely the idea of justice as fairness, introduced by my favorite 20th century philosopher, John Rawls. In 1971, he wrote a book "A Theory of Justice" in which he had one of the best thought experiments anyone *ever* devised. I'll explain the thought experiment and then get into how I think this applies to Occupy Wall Street.

Imagine that we here have a chance to design a society from scratch. We're starting with an absolutely clean slate. We get a group of people together to hash out what kinds of rules and laws we are going to have. Now, here's the truly clever bit. Everyone is negotiating from what Rawls calls the 'original position' behind a 'veil of ignorance'. What this means is that no one knows whether they will be born into this society rich or poor, the ethnic majority or the ethnic minority, gay or straight, male or female, etc. Rawls posits that from that position there would be two broad principles by which to structure their society:

1) Equality in the way that basic rights and duties are assigned. If, for instance, there's a draft you don't get out of it by paying someone to take your place (which benefits the rich but not the poor). The son of the bank head and the daughter of the teller both get drafted (or the son of the teller if you prefer).

2) Arrange any social or economic inequalities so that they are both A) to the greatest benefit for the least advantaged and B) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

So, let's take Affirmative Action. In a Rawlsian society, it would not be based upon race but upon class. The reason being is that let's take two women--one we'll call Jacqueline and one we'll call Lynn. Lynn grew up poor. Have to leave in the middle of the night because the landlord is going to show up with the sheriff first thing in the morning to evict you poor. Jacqueline grew up, not necessarily rich but well-heeled. There was no robbing Peter to pay Paul in Jacqueline's childhood. Now, Jacqueline is black and Lynn is white. However, Jacqueline has a parent who teaches in the university system and she wants to attend a sister school and, as it turns out, one of her parents is an alum of that system as well. So she has two legs up. Lynn, on the other hand, has no such advantages. So Lynn, needs some kind of affirmative action while Jacqueline does not. Now, this might mean that Lynn is going to get into, say, UC Berkeley on a 3.75 cumulative GPA and 1800 SAT while Jacqueline is going to need a 4.0 and 2200 SAT. Is this unfair? Yes, it is! But the unfairness is directed toward the person who needs it most.

The second part of this is that *provided* that both Lynn and Jacqueline get into UCB but only Jacqueline can *pay* for it (because her parents had the money to set aside excess money for a college fund) then Lynn gets financial assistance. All of the good grades and stellar SAT scores mean nothing if you can't pay tuition and buy books. We would also want to make certain that even if Lynn went to school in a poor neighborhood and Jacqueline went to school in an upper-middle class neighborhood the schools were *equal* in terms of books, competency of teachers, facilities, extra-curricular activities and programs, music and arts.

Now, I personally think that although this is only a thought experiment it is a *useful* one. We need not scrap either capitalism or democratic governance in order to achieve this NOR is the Rawlsian society a utopia. Since regulated, well-functioning, entrepreneurial capitalism does a reasonable job distributing goods and services to the greatest number we need not get rid of capitalism, we need only *regulate* it properly and put in firewalls to prevent, for instance, monopolies and to allow labor to organize into unions. We need not do away with democracy just make it so that it isn't only the rich who can be elected to office.

There is potential in these ideas which, again, are not mine. I think that as we have to come up with both Capitalism 3.0 and Democracy 2.0 (or maybe even 3.0) it is useful to think about how we go about it and how we sell it so that we get the largest possible majoritarian buy-in. One of the reasons why I like the Rawlsian approach to social democracy is that it tries very hard to be fair, it tries to meet people where they are, and it does not call for radical solutions of the 'in order to save the village, we had to destroy it'. As a Rawlsian conservative my focus is on social stability. Society is not made up of eggs but of people and so the idea that we can only make an omelet (a better society) at the cost of breaking eggs is distasteful. So the solutions that attract me are ones that expand opportunity and maintain some level of stability.

I got the idea to throw these ideas out there based upon this piece in today's WaPo by Matt Miller.

Cheers
Aj