Perfectly fine Friday here today. Clean-up, yes (mostly Sue), but then a walk around campus, and for me, a bike ride. No BF shopping. Advantage taken of the fine weather to fire up the big snowblower—in anticipation (winter storm advisory for Sunday)(better now than in the thick of it)(started on the second pull).

Thought experiment below the photo.

Theory of Justice

Assume you will someday be reincarnated. You know you will be human (not an eagle or a frog) but you don’t know anything else. You don’t know what sex, what color, what physical appearance, what intelligence, what handicaps, what country you’ll be born in, whether rich or poor, whether orphan or royal scion. You could be anything!

In his book A Theory of Justice, the political philosopher John Rawls describes a thought experiment along these lines.

In this experiment, you are part of a group of people gathered to design their own future society, gathered behind “a veil of ignorance.” (No one has any idea about the next incarnation.) None of you knows his or her next place in society, class position or social status, fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, intelligence and strength and the like.

So, given this setup, what kind of society will your group design?

As Rawls puts it, if you know you will be wealthy you might find it rational to advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures be counted unjust. If you know you were going to be poor, you would most likely propose the contrary principle. Etcetera.

If denied basic information about one’s circumstances, Rawls predicts that important social goods, such as rights and liberties, power and opportunities, income and wealth, and conditions for self-respect would be “distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage.”

Seems reasonable to me, but far from the actual situation. Certainly at this time of thankfulness, we can be thankful that we, as a family, did very well in the incarnation lottery this time around. But we can also think about those who didn’t, and perhaps work toward a worldwide society that doesn’t assign most of its people to a very unfortunate starting position.