If you ever thought that philosophers were all harmless scribblers, then think again. One of them turned out not to be, and it wasn't Nietzsche. It was a boring political philosopher at Harvard called John Rawls.
Ever wondered where all those Social Justice Warriors and their ideology came from? The money may come from all sorts of sources that scuttle away at the approach of investigative sunlight, but the idea comes from John Rawls.
In 1971 he published A Theory of Justice . I was a philosophy student at the time, and I bought a copy. I started to read it, and soon ran out of energy wading upstream against the awful syntax and the endless digressions and discussion of counter-arguments I wasn't even interested in. Even without getting too far in, I had the feeling that Rawls was pulling a fast one. In fact I was sure of it.
Justice is the application and enforcement of the laws. It can be done well or badly. Amongst the ways it can be done well is that it is `blind': it treats everyone the same.
That has now become controversial: mere `blindness' to the individual is not enough. Now we have to take into account their exact degree of victim status. Race blindness is racism. Gender blindness is sexism. Anything that does not allow the victims compensatory privilege is oppression.
For all that, you can thank John Rawls.
In his 1971 book, Rawls was pushing a particular conception of justice - he called it Justice as fairness. Rawls' idea of fairness was that a society is fair if it was arranged in such a way that the least-advantaged were better off than they would be under any other arrangement. Which is not what you and I mean at all. Justice for Rawls is not something procedural about the law, but about the distribution of the resources of an economy and society.
Rawls claimed that this was a conclusion we would reach if we were making the rules of justice from scratch, but without knowing what position we held in society, if we were rich or poor, or even if we had marketable skills. If we treat this as a test - would you approve of that law if you were poor? - it has a use, but as the moral equivalent of Cartesian doubt, it just won't work. And he never explained why rules made by a bunch of people with serious psychoses (they do not even know if they are able-bodied, intelligent, have social skills, friends, children, jobs; they know how society and the economy work but not how they got that knowledge; the list of impossibilities goes on a while) should be superior to those made by people who know who they are, and also know they are lucky to be so fortunate.
The idea of distributive justice (aka 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs') sounds attractive. But the flaw is built right into the idea. For people to be `disadvantaged', there has to be a norm, which is also the norm for being `advantaged'. If the reason for the disadvantage cannot be overcome with hard work, social skills, education or a trade, if it is held to be structural or innate, then it is insurmountable, and that justifies a massive State bureaucracy dispensing welfare and administering hiring quotas, positive discrimination, and unrestricted immigration (because distributive justice knows no national boundaries).
For all that, you can thank John Rawls.
In his 1971 book, Rawls was pushing a particular conception of justice - he called it Justice as fairness. Rawls' idea of fairness was that a society is fair if it was arranged in such a way that the least-advantaged were better off than they would be under any other arrangement. Which is not what you and I mean at all. Justice for Rawls is not something procedural about the law, but about the distribution of the resources of an economy and society.
Rawls claimed that this was a conclusion we would reach if we were making the rules of justice from scratch, but without knowing what position we held in society, if we were rich or poor, or even if we had marketable skills. If we treat this as a test - would you approve of that law if you were poor? - it has a use, but as the moral equivalent of Cartesian doubt, it just won't work. And he never explained why rules made by a bunch of people with serious psychoses (they do not even know if they are able-bodied, intelligent, have social skills, friends, children, jobs; they know how society and the economy work but not how they got that knowledge; the list of impossibilities goes on a while) should be superior to those made by people who know who they are, and also know they are lucky to be so fortunate.
The idea of distributive justice (aka 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs') sounds attractive. But the flaw is built right into the idea. For people to be `disadvantaged', there has to be a norm, which is also the norm for being `advantaged'. If the reason for the disadvantage cannot be overcome with hard work, social skills, education or a trade, if it is held to be structural or innate, then it is insurmountable, and that justifies a massive State bureaucracy dispensing welfare and administering hiring quotas, positive discrimination, and unrestricted immigration (because distributive justice knows no national boundaries).
If that sounds like America today, that's because America for the last forty years has been the world's experiment in really existing distributive justice. Just as Russia was for really existing socialism. An idea that can be hi-jacked so easily by apparatchiks and political grifters is a bad idea.
And what does one say to someone who takes the taxpayers' money for his salary, and then tells those taxpayer they have to wait in line for a vaccine so they can pay for the rest of the world to get it first?
Voila, monsieur, la madame Guillotine perhaps?
