Rawlsian Justice

[BrutusBobcat]

"Katrina". Civilized society is a thin veneer that collapses at the first stress.

Hitting this late, I realize. I will call your Katrina and raise you the Iowa floods.

Impersonal societies dependent on remote governmental structures are a thin veneer that collapses at the first stress, but closely-knit communities can endure and thrive through severely trying events. The key issue is what sorts of ties and bonds people have with one another, and what sorts of individual values they possess.

Heroism and altruism are as real as venality and selfishness, and all exist in all people and societies to varying degrees.

 

[BuckeyeParalgl]

I used Rawls as an advantage in High School Debate my freshman year. Through all that I memorized this:

"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is to systems of thought. Likewise laws and institutions, no matter how efficient or well arranged they may be must be abolished if they are unjust."

Now this raises eyebrows for many regarding exactly how one arrives at justice. I can't get nearly as intellectual as Clarity about this because I am no philosophy expert, but basically Rawls is operating out of the framework that the only way policy can be justly created is by operating from the maxim that injustice comes from bias. If the people that created laws created them completely free of bias, then all laws would by default, be just. He's essentially trying to ensure that as we create law we are not unfavorably creating a disadvantage for a particular group as the end result of policy.

He's contrasting utilitarianism here. Think of utilitarianism as a philosophy that emphasises the sacrifice of the intrest of a small minority group for the overall good of the others. Rawls would say that utilitarianism is totally unjust because it relies on that sacrifice to make the philosophy hold water. The inevitable maxim is, for every policy there are winners and losers. The goal would be to reduce the number of "losers" to a low number, but that low number would do good things for the fate of the group. Rawls throws that out the window and challenges the idea that there have to be losers in policy.

Rawls would say: Why should anyone be required to sacrifice anything? Why should one group be disadvantaged so the others can succeed? It doesn't have to be that way, and shouldn't. Rawls takes it a step farther in saying that if a policy were to harm just one person, the policy should be rejected as unjust.

Those are the nuts and bolts of Rawls, as I understand/remember them.