rawls rejects utilitarianism because

• 8 September 2023

Since the impartial spectator identifies with and experiences the desires of others as if these desires were his own, his function is to organize the desires of all persons into one coherent system of desire (TJ 27). 28 May 2006. Consequently, Rawls reasons, it makes no sense to take the riskier rather than the safer option. However, it directs us to arrange social and political institutions in such a way as to maximize the aggregate satisfaction or good, even if this means that some individuals' ability to have good livesin utilitarian termswill be seriously compromised, and even though there is no sentient being who experiences the aggregate satisfaction or whose good is identified with that aggregate. . (7) Raised to appreciate the value of nature, she paid rapt attention to sounds and sights, enabling her not only to locate food but to warn the others of possible danger. And if all or many precepts are treated as first principles, there is no gain in systematic clarity. to the dominant utilitarianism of the tradition (TJ, p. viii/xviii rev.). Herein lies the problem. The principle of utility, as it has come to be interpreted at least, is a comprehensive standard that is used to assess actions, institutions, and the distribution of resources within a society.25 Rawls's concentration on the basic structure and his use of pure procedural justice to assess distributions give his theory a greater institutional focus. The classical utilitarian, Rawls argues, reasons in much the same way about society as a whole, regarding it as legitimate to impose sacrifices on some people in order to achieve greater advantages for others. Rawlss single-minded focus on presenting an alternative to utilitarianism is a blessing and a curse. Feature Flags: { We also know that the maximin rule would not lead them to choose utilitarianism. This possibility arises, Rawls suggests, because utilitarianism relies entirely on certain standard assumptions (TJ 159) to demonstrate that its calculations will not normally support severe restrictions on individual liberties. They were among the leading economists and political theorists of their day, and they were not infrequently reformers interested in practical affairs.22 In the Preface to A Theory of Justice, similarly, he deplores our tendency to forget that the great utilitarians, Hume and Adam Smith, Bentham and Mill, were social theorists and economists of the first rank; and the moral doctrine they worked out was framed to meet the needs of their wider interests and to fit into a comprehensive scheme (TJ vii). We have to ask how, on Utilitarian principles, this influence is to be exercised. One of these is that they are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. But, once again, these are not the same faults that he sees in utilitarianism, whether or not they can be expressed in the same words. This extension to society as a whole of the principle of choice for a single individual is facilitated, Rawls believes, by treating the approval of a perfectly sympathetic and ideally rational and impartial spectator as the standard of what is just. As Rawls says: Teleological views have a deep intuitive appeal since they seem to embody the idea of rationality. Despite the vigor of his arguments against utilitarianism, however, some critics have contended that Rawls's own theory displays some of the very same features that he criticizes in the utilitarian position. . For they rely on something like a shared highest order preference function as the basis for interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing, and such a function treats citizens as subscribing to a common ranking of the relative desirability of different packages of material resources and personal qualitiesincluding traits of character, skills and abilities, attachments and loyalties, ends and aspirations. Each sentence below refers to a numbered sentence in the passage. Rawls rejects utilitarianism because it might permit Thus, Rawls's reliance on pure procedural justice does not mean that his theory is procedural rather than substantive. <>/Metadata 864 0 R/ViewerPreferences 865 0 R>> Second, however, they have wondered why, if Rawls believes that it would be unduly risky for the parties to rely on probabilities that are not grounded in information about their society, he fails to provide them with that information. This is partly because Rawls's formulation has appeared to some readers to straddle two or more of the following claims: 1) a claim of metaphysical error, to the effect that utilitarianism simply fails to notice that persons are ontologically distinct, 2) a claim of moral error, to the effect that utilitarianism tolerates unacceptable interpersonal tradeoffs, and thereby fails to attach sufficient moral significance to the ontological distinctions among persons, and 3) an explanatory claim, to the effect that utilitarianism fails to attach sufficient moral significance to the ontological distinctions among persons because it extends to society as a whole the principle of choice for one person. Rights are certain moral rules whose observance is of the utmost importance for the long-run, overall maximization of happiness, it would be unjust to coerce people to give food or money to the starving, According to John Rawls, people in "the original position" choose the principles of justice on the basis of. These similarities may make it seem that Rawls's theory fails to remedy utilitarianism's neglect of the distinctness of persons. Rawls rejects utilitarianism because it is unstable. Often, for example, we seem prepared to say that an individual deserves or has a right to some benefit, and that it is therefore just that he should get it, without inquiring into the larger distributional context. Thus he hopes to produce a solution to the priority problem that offers an alternative to the utilitarian solution but remains a constructive solution nonetheless. Instead, he says, the [h]uman good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are heterogeneous (TJ 554). To be specific, in the parts we did not read, Rawls argued that the parties in the original position would choose to maximize average utility only if two conditions are met: Rawlss chief reason for denying that this makes sense is the familiar one: maximizing expected utility is too risky in this situation. She \rule {2cm}{0.15mm} plants and animals, helping the explorers to describe the wildlife. Instead, the aim is to show that choosing as if one had such as aversion is rational given the unique features of . WebPhysicians and janitors earn more because they help to keep society well and sanitary. Critics of utilitarianism, he says, have pointed out that many of its implications run counter to our moral convictions and sentiments, but they have failed to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it ( TJ, p. viii/xvii rev. In his later work, however, it is the comprehensive version of utilitarianism that he himself treats as standard, and with which he contrasts his own institutional approach to justice. Yet that capacity is, as a rule, not strong enough nor securely enough situated within the human motivational repertoire to be a reliable source of support for utilitarian principles and institutions. ). To save content items to your account, However, the characterization of classical utilitarianism as the ethic of perfect altruists seems puzzling, given the fact that the classical view is said to conflate all persons into one. G. A. Cohen, Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice. However, as Rawls acknowledges, the maximin rule is very conservative, and its employment will seem rational only under certain conditions. Holism about distributive justice draws support from two convictions. It is noteworthy that this argument against classical utilitarianism is developed without reference to the apparatus of the original position and is not dependent on that apparatus. This aspect of Rawls's attitude toward utilitarianism has attracted less attention. Doing this would achieve greater satisfaction for a greater number of people. T. M. Scanlon, Rawls' Theory of Justice, H. L. A. Hart, Between Utility and Rights, in. b) It might permit an unfair distribution of burdens and benefits. Rawls may well be right that we have these higher order interests and that utilitarianism is wrong about our fundamental interests in life. This is the flaw in Brian Barry's response to my earlier discussion (in The Appeal of Political Liberalism) of utilitarian participation in an overlapping consensus. Chapter 3 - Justice and Economic Distribution Flashcards Whereas the idea of arranging social institutions so as to maximize the good might seem attractive if there were a unique good at which all rational action aims, it makes more sense, in light of the heterogeneity of the good, to establish a fair framework of social cooperation within which individuals may pursue their diverse ends and aspirations. Not surprisingly, Sacagawea actually did much of the translating her husband had been hired to do. The problem is to explain how rational choices among apparently heterogeneous options can ever be made. Yet these differences, important as they are, should not be allowed to obscure an important point of agreement, namely, that neither view is willing to assess the justice or injustice of a particular assignment of benefits in isolation from the larger distributional context. Or, if TV isn't enough, do something else pleasurable: go to the opera, drink beer, master the piano, read Jeremy Bentham, etc. T or F: Libertarians would find it immoral and unjust to coerce people to give food or money to the starving, T or F: John Rawls's second principle of justice states that insofar as inequalities are permitted -- that is insofar as it is compatible with justice for some jobs or positions to bring greater rewards than others -- these positions must be all open, Chapter 3- Justice and Economic Distribution, AICE Thinking Skills Midterm 2022 - Fallacies, John Lund, Paul S. Vickery, P. Scott Corbett, Todd Pfannestiel, Volker Janssen, The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric, Lawrence Scanlon, Renee H. Shea, Robin Dissin Aufses, Byron Almen, Dorothy Payne, Stefan Kostka, T3L18: Primary and Secondary Dyslipidaemias:. "A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution." are highly problematical, whereas the hardship if things turn out badly are [sic] intolerable (TJ 175). Perhaps one might even say that it is precisely because he agrees with utilitarianism about so much that Rawls is determined to provide an alternative that improves upon it in the respects in which it is deficient. 10 0 obj Reply: Rawls: Rejecting Utilitarianism and Animals - Cal Poly See Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics, Chapter One in this volume. As Rawls emphasizes, utilitarianism does not share his view that special first principles are required for the basic structure (PL 262), notwithstanding its broad institutional emphasis, nor does it agree that the question of distributive shares should be treated as a matter of pure procedural justice (TJ 889).

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