Rawls' Theory of Justice

Tämä bibiittessess Elena Parkk costohj rozpokreista estan unpleasantank Sanossa. Täällä on tullut, että se on tullut. Tysymä sitten omasta tai kaverin projektiista. Tämä on tullut, että se on tullut. Tämä on tullut. Tämä on tullut. His father was quite a successful lawyer. He was one of five boys. And I suppose that perhaps the most notable incident of his childhood was that two of his younger brothers died in childhood from infection - that they'd actually contracted from rules himself. So it seems as if with this form of experience very early in his life - he had this sense of the shear-obtriness of good or bad luck - and the way that so many features of our lives really just come down to factors - well beyond our control. He then went on to Princeton where he studied. He did an accelerated degree given the US entry into World War II - and he joined the US Army as a private. So he didn't take the route that some of his fellow Princeton men were doing - of looking for officer commissions. He joined up as an ordinary soldier and fought in the Pacific during World War II - in the Philippines and in New Guinea and ended up actually at one point on a - troop train going through Hiroshima just after the bombing. The war I think had a completely. Was he able to continue studying while he was in the war? So he just finished his Princeton degree that had been accelerated - and his plan actually after the war was that he would enter the Episcopalian priesthood - that's what he thought he was going to do. But the experience of the war completely changed his life. He lost his faith over the course of the war. Both I think the sense that the sheer difficulty of seeing - that some of his friends and comrades killed when he survived - I think was very difficult for him, but also learning of the full evil - of the Holocaust and the evil of the Nazi regime. I think made him lose his faith that there was any divine plan in history - or that divine providence was going to work its way in the world. So I think by the end of the war, rules had this very vivid sense - that the church wasn't going to be for him - and instead he had to think about the project of justice - as something that human beings themselves would have to make in the world. We couldn't trust in divine providence, but instead it had to be something - that people together created. Well, the rules are working mainly in the USA. Now here's a big one for you. Can you tell us the four or five major political and social events - that were going on in the USA? I'm sure you can do that. They got it very straightforward question. Well, after the war, so what role does he go back on the thanks to the GI Bill - he goes back to the PhD then at Princeton. So that's one big thing that's happening that you get back. When you're in society, what are the big things? Well, so you get that experience - so I suppose with the New Deal, you get this period where the US is heading towards - a somewhat more equal society. When you get that expansion of opportunity, at the time that he's teaching - then through the 60s, I don't know about four or five issues - but I suppose two things that loom very large of the Vietnam War - obviously is going on in the background. Also, the civil rights movement and issues around the treatments of African Americans - and how the US can become a more inclusive society. That's all going on in the background at the time that rules is writing - in the academic register about justice. Could you be described as turbulent and rather confused society - that was looking for a clear way through? I think there's certainly a large amount of turbulence. I think there's also underlying that sense of progress. There's some sense of confidence. There's a thought that in the wake of the war and the wake of the New Deal - that this is a society that's actually facing up to some of its domestic problems - at least and might be moving towards becoming a more equal society. I think there's a kind of confidence at that stage that maybe disappears later on. Thank you. Joe Wolf, let's go through aspects of his work now - starting with you to the tyrannism. What place did that have in the development of his ideas? First of all, tell people what it is - and then say what place it had in his views. Utilitarianism is a theory really systematized or infused by Jeremy Bentham - and the thought from Bentham is that the juicy of governments and you as an individual - is to pursue the action that will bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. So that is the utilitarian slogan - society should bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number. And the way that is cashed out in a bit more detail - is that we need to do a type of cost-benefit analysis of the good and the bad - in fact the happiness and unhappiness or pleasure and pain that any action will bring about. And our juicy as an individual or as a society - is to bring about the state of affairs that has the greatest balance of pleasure over pain or happiness over unhappiness. So it's a maximizing view that says we should, in a sense, make society as happy as possible. And on that basis you can see it's a very appealing theory - that you might think what else should government do other than - How do you measure this? Well that is a question that every great utilitarian has managed to duck rather than address directly - Are you going to be part of the docus? Well it's not my theory so thankfully - so it is a very difficult question about how you measure and it's very important - because if you're aggregating something and maximizing it you have to quantify it - and this is a problem that one has a modern economics to some degree - as well and there are technical solutions around preference satisfaction and measuring the gambles that people would take. But for Bentham and John Stuart Mill they really didn't address that in any detail. So just because the start of this conversation about his work - we've got utilitarianism as well - we've called it a pillar or a step - whatever it is - and the other is intuitionism - lots of isms about this morning - what do we know about his view of intuitionism? In the early sections of a theory of justice - rules sets up this type of opposition between utilitarianism and intuitionism - so as we've seen utilitarianism as a highly principle view - it gives you really a decision procedure for public policy - and it allows different people to try to calculate and come up with the same or different results - and gives a type of principle of public accountability. The problem with utilitarianism though - is that in rules' phrase it ignores the separateness of persons - that is if one person suffers - and another benefits more - than the other person suffers - if we can measure this - then we should go ahead. So it doesn't pay any attention to individual rights - and so if society will maximize happiness in a way that is - detrimental to one group's interests - that's just bad luck. So although utilitarianism is very principled - it can give us counterintuitive consequences. - And intuitionism. - is a mere image. So intuitionism is the view - roughly speaking that you should do whatever seems right to you - that we all have moral intuitions - we have judgments about states of events. - Some of us are very biased - ja näistä distruksissa. thoughts. Well we do. So an intuitionist would say you've been brought up badly if you have those thoughts. And that we have to rely on the intuitions of those who know best, who turn out to be the people who have written the theory, and are from the finest Oxbridge colleges on the whole. So this is a problem with intuitionism. And what we've got here, what rules is done, whether it serve something going on in its own mind or a type of historical development, is replaying something that comes up time and time again in public policy. Because on the one hand, we want rules, we want accountability, we want something that is public and transparent. But the problem with any system of rules is that very often it will give us judgments outcomes we don't like very much. In my reading of rules and others, it may differ. What I see rules as doing is trying to get the advantages of both of these theories and ignore overcome the disadvantages. So what he wants is a principle that only ever gives us the right answers, rather than the tab utilitarian principle that will sometimes give us unjust outcomes. If I may own Peter, there's an element of the social contracting or also approach. Can you tell us what that is and what part of it he was drawing on, please? Yes, of course. Indeed, the social contract tradition, which was particularly influential in the 18th century, played a huge part in how rules thought about the principles of justice. So as Joe and Martin explained, rules were trying to figure out what a just society would look like and the way he thought about this was what are the principles of justice that could govern the basic structure or the basic social institutions of a society. So the theory of justice, the book we're discussing starts with this wonderful sentence saying that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. And in thinking about the justice of social institutions, rules thought that it will help if we go back to these influential 18th century social contract thinkers, especially John Locke, Jean-Jacques Oso, and Emmanuel Kant. Now these are very diverse thinkers, as I'm sure you know better than most, but what United them in rules view and in the views of many is that they thought about a just social contract, a system of principles of justice that define a just society, that define a system that everyone's so-so strive to, would start from a commitment to the equal freedom of all citizens. So a just society is one that all citizens, all persons understood as free and equal could agree to. They could sign up to that sort of society. And rules thought that that was an important idea and he built his justice on that idea of what principles of justice could persons understood as free and equal all agree to. Now as I mentioned this, this kind of thinking about the just society, so peaked in the 18th century and then with the ascent of utilitarianism that Joe mentioned, it lost influence. It lost influence in part because Jeremy Bentham, the influential utilitarian thinker, ridiculed the idea, and particularly he ridiculed the idea of people are somehow naturally equal and equally free. So he ridiculed the idea of natural rights. Everyone would have equal rights. He called that nonsense upon stilts. So when rules that are out in the 20th century to think about justice, he thought well utilitarianism has, he's advantageous, but one big problem is it doesn't actually give us the right answers on justice. So to make progress and thinking about what the just society looks like, we should go back to these earlier thinkers and start again from this thought as if we are understand each other as equals. What could we all agree to would a just society look like? So what did he think if it's possible to brief about this? If it is, if it isn't, it isn't. Overall, was his view, was his theory of justice? His theory of justice, he calls his justice as fairness, is a theory that is based on two main principles of justice. A first principle, the principle of equal liberties holds that just society, all members of society enjoy an equal set of basic rights and liberties. So that's the first principle. The second principle of justice that he thought defined the just society is the sort of principle everyone could agree to, like the first one, is a principle of justice. It has two components. One is a principle of fair equality of opportunity, such a society would give everyone fair opportunities. And the second part of the second principle of justice is a difference principle, which says that a just society works to the benefit of the least well off in that society. That's the radical part, isn't it? That's the radical part. I mean, there are other radical elements because even the first part, the first principle, the principle of equal rights and liberties says that of those rights and liberties, so one aspect is the political rights and liberties. And there he thought everyone should enjoy a fair value, which is a very demanding idea that it's not enough that everyone has a right to vote. Everyone should, in fact, have an equal, say, and society be in a position to be an equal contributing member to society. That's already very radical, but then the difference principle, the thought that society should not work to the advantage of the already better off, but benefit the worst off. That was certainly also very radical. Well, thank you, but that's a very, very good starting point. Martin, so let's take this. There's three really. Yeah. One and two and two parts, so let's call it three. Can you tell us, first of all, about liberty and then about fair opportunity? What his view of liberty was? So I think you get the easy question. Well Fabian's done a very good job of introducing that. Now, I think one thing to say to you're absolutely right that this is three principles. Rolls-Always says that he's got two, but actually given that the second divides into two halves, it's much easier to think of it as three. So, Rolls says there should be, as Fabian has said, the system of equal basic liberties. And that's really the familiar liberal freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, political rights. Wow, I mean, maybe not yet freedom from fear, just the basic constitutional rights that we'd have in the democratic society. But to that, Rolls adds this really quite radical rider to that idea. So he says it's not enough simply, if you think about the various liberties that we have as democratic citizens, it's not enough that those are merely formal protections. We need what he calls the fair value of the political liberties. So what that means for Rolls is that for people with a similar motivation and similar ability to intervene in the political process, there should be roughly equal prospects of getting to influence political outcomes. So a political system where the interests of the rich or privileged gets much more weight than the interests of others or where certain groups get to become members of parliament and other groups don't, that's a society that fails to realize the fair value of the political liberties, even if informal terms everyone has got the same same rights. Now, to move to the second principle then, when Rolls talks about this idea of fair equality of opportunity, as Fabian has said, that's also a surprisingly radical idea, because it's not merely the idea that all jobs in the economy should be formally open to everyone, that there shouldn't be discrimination on grounds of race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever it might be. It's the much stronger thought that those who with similar motivation and ability should have the same prospects of success in the economic realm, just as the earlier principle wants to guarantee a fair chance at success in the political realm. So those two principles together really, in visitor society, where none of the social facts about people's backgrounds, their social class, their race, none of that would actually have the material influence on their chances of success, whether in the political domain or whether in the economic domain. Did you work out in any way how this could be achievable? Does it remain a sort of idealistic vision? So he does talk about some of what would be involved there. I suppose the two main things that come up there, on the one hand he talks a little bit about the education system. So what he envisages there is an education system that tries to act to overturn background inequalities. So the thought would be that if you've got a society where some groups have advantages that others don't, you'd try and design an education system that actually targeted more resources at those coming into it from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds to try to equalise life chances. Another big part of that would then be the tax system. So rules, because he's so interested in these two different kinds of fair equality of opportunity in the political domain and the economic domain, he's very worried about the intergenerational transmission of advantage, the way that wealth in one generation turns into one fair opportunity in the next generation. And he thinks that what we need to do is design a tax system that tries to fight against that. So he endorses high levels of inheritance taxation or capital transfer taxation. He thinks what what we need is a fiscal structure that stops this kind of build up of enormous wealth across generations that turns into unfair levels of advantage from generation to generation. Thank you. Joe, what do we know about the Difference Principle? Well one thing I think we know is that it is a highly original principle. Rawls was a very modest man and if you look through a theory of justice, virtually every idea he has, he tries to find someone who had it before. So the book is just peppered. He just wanted to see me showing off. He didn't want to show off. He was a very modest man but he can't find anyone to pin the Difference Principle on as far as I can see. There are one or two shadows for shadowings of it and maybe one way of introducing it is that in the British Labour Party in the 1940s, there was a debate about equality and some people wanted complete equality of income and wealth but that lays you open to an easy critique that equality takes away incentives. So if we divide everything equally who is going to go to work, where is the juice that run society going to come from? So these simple theories of equality were not really in favour but the Labour Party said inequality is justifiable as long as it works to everyone's advantage. So it has to be inequality for the sake of everyone. And what I think Rawls did was just, we're still under the difference principle. We're on the difference principle. In the qualities of income and wealth are to be through the advantage of everyone but Rawls I think ratchets up a notch and says it's not just that they've got to be to the advantage of everyone. They've got to make the worst off as well off as possible. So if we're trying to judge the justice of our society, we should look to the income and wealth, not of the worst off individual because that could give us quite arbitrary results but identify the worst off group. Whoever they may be, the lowest paid workers, unemployed people and if we could improve their position without making anyone else fall below where those people were then our society is unjust. The justice requires us to make the worst off group as well off as possible. And as far as I know, no society has ever achieved anything even close to that. So it's not just about redistribution, it's not just about high tax but arranging a formal society where the worst off can flourish as much as is possible. What do you think of it as an idea? Well it's a lovely idea. I think I'm putting it. What do you think would be on that? Is it achievable? Well I would love to live in that society. There are several ways in which it might not be achievable. One is whether it's not economically achievable. And I don't see any reason to think that it couldn't be achievable. It may be not through tax and transfer, maybe we would have to completely reorganize society in his later work, Rawls, use the idea of a property owning democracy. So the idea that we disperse wealth. So it's not about redistribution, it's allowing everyone to live their own lives to the best of their abilities. So I think economically it's a feasible idea for as much as I know about it. Politically it hasn't got a chance. And I think this goes back to the point Martin was making about the fair value of political liberties. Because for as long as we've got a system which allows wealthy people to spend a lot of money getting elected, then we're not going to have policies that redistribute wealth in the way that Rawls would want. Thank you. Paviyan Pitek, there's this theory rather ambiguous called the original position. Now can you tell us about that? Indeed. So the original position is one of the many long-lasting ideas that we find in the theory of justice. The theory of justice is really a treasure trove, I would say, of novel ideas, ideas that have caught on and influenced philosophy a great deal. The original position is one of them. It's a thought experiment that helps us to illustrate the social contract approach to thinking about a justice society. So as I explained earlier, the social contract approach that Rawls takes is what is the set of principles that persons understood as free and equal can agree to? Now what's this sort of agreement that we're talking about here? The problem is if we think about the agreement starting from everyone's actual position in society, they might be biased towards their privilege, that's one problem. Or the better off might try to buy off the worse off to an overall agreement that ends up benefiting the better off. So we can't really take our actual starting points because that there's too much inequality baked in the actual society as we know it. So the original position is a thought experiment that helps us illustrate what would an agreement look like if it was reached from a starting point of equality and the way in which Rawls thought experiment works, he thinks we can imagine ourselves in a position of equality if we imagine that we're thinking about the justice society from behind a veil of ignorance. This veil of ignorance lets through information about our society in general how it works, how the economy works, what social dynamics are, but it doesn't let through any information about who we are in that society. Hold on. So we're all behind this veil. That's right. Everybody. Everybody. Or a set of representatives charged with finding justice. So how does the thing operate? Do we take off the veil? Can you just take us out? So in the first instance it helps us illustrate a position of equality. So if you don't know whether you're rich or poor, whether you're what your gender identity is, what your race is, then Rawls hoped you'd be more inclined to think about what justice requires in a way that's not biased by your current position and that would be helpful in reaching an overall agreement. However, of course, being behind this veil of ignorance is not helpful if you're trying to make these principles of justice that we just heard about more concrete. So the way in which Rawls thought about it is that there's a four-stage sequence. The first stage is what would a just society even look like? That deliberation happens behind the veil of ignorance. But when we then try to make it more concrete than workout principles that can be implemented in society, this veil is gradually lifted in the end at the stage of making laws. All information is available. But the thought is still the deliberation about what should our laws be like? It's constrained by an idea of justice reached in a deliberative process where we're less influenced by our, ideally not influenced by our biases or thinking about our advantages given our actual positions in society. Thank you. Martin, do you want to take that on? Yeah, so I suppose one way of thinking about how the veil of ignorance functions, it's a sort of radicalisation of the social contract tradition. It's thinking not what you and I would agree to if you've got some threat advantage over me, if I'm sort of worried about what you can do to me, if we could strip away anything that makes an agreement unfair. So the fact that we have different starting points and we can get abstract away from all of that and then think, well, what would we agree to in general terms about the construction of our society? That's a way of capturing through an idea of choice or bargaining under conditions of ignorance. It's a way of capturing an idea of impartiality. And so if you like, it's a kind of the original position behind the veil of ignorance. It's something that we could enter any of us at any time. It's a thought experiment. It's a way of trying to give some sort of, I mean, Joe was talking earlier about the ambition in rules for some sort of going beyond mere intuitionism. What the original position does is it gives you a kind of imaginative mechanism for turning what might be sort of inco-ate moral intuitions and sort of fumbling them towards a definite set of a definite procedure for getting a set of principles for how a society ought to be governed and that in a way that takes away all the kind of the impurities of real world agreements that often reflect, as Fabian was saying, background inequalities. Joe? There's one thing Royl says, I think, which helps bring the idea to life. And he says, imagine how you would design society if you knew that your enemy was going to assign you your place in it. And then if I remember correctly, he says, immediately after that, but we shouldn't reason from false premises. So, you know, this is just a type of heuristic. But the idea is, it's rather sweet to think you have an enemy, but you know, assume you have an enemy and that person was assigning you a place, you would want to make the worst place in society as good as possible. And this is Royl's idea. If you're looking at this in a completely impartial way, not knowing where you're going to end up in society, then you would design a just society, he thinks. I mean, to put it in its simplest terms, if you're dividing up birthday cake among some children, you don't want someone to be choosing the slice that they've cut. Right? So if you get one child to cut the cake and the other child to choose which slice they get, that's a way of it. They're going to cut them as equally as possible. And really, it's just that very simple thoughts about how if you don't get to choose which place you occupy in society, but you are choosing what the distribution of those places look like. You're going to be as fair as possible. Can I come back to you, Joe? What's the distinction between justice and fairness? Well, I'm glad you asked that question, because the Rawls described his views justice as fairness. It has left people scratching their heads, particularly translaces, because in many languages there actually isn't a distinction as far as I know between justice and fairness. But in the English language there is a difference between these terms. One way of thinking about is thinking about the Infant School. So children in their infancy have a very strong sense of fairness. That's unfair. So a four-year-old might say that's unfair. But if the same four-year-old said that's unjust, we'd be a bit surprised. There is a parent, a high court, judge or a philosopher. Justice seems to have a type of depth to it, and maybe formalism that fairness doesn't. So fairness is for Rawls' largely procedural matter. So as I understand it, I think by justice as fairness he simply means that the way that we get to a just outcome is through fair procedures. And the original position is a way in the veil of ignorance, is a way of having a fair procedure. And if we get the procedure right, then we will get a just outcome at the other end. You're nodding away. Yes, so the idea of procedural justice is an essential contribution of Rawls, and it links back to what we said earlier about his focus being on the justice of the basic structure of society, that is the set of societies basic institutions, because we could also think about justice as the justice of person. Or we could think about justice as what do we owe each to each other individually. But Rawls thought these were all questions that we can't really resolve at the social level, but we can make progress in thinking about justice. So we can focus on if we adopt the procedural idea of justice where we get the basic institutions of society right, have them been governed by some small set of principles of justice, and then whatever outcome results is just. And the criticisms of the theory. Oh, the theory of the veil of ignorance, sorry. So one influential set of criticisms against the original position and the veil of ignorance came from a set of social philosophers which were known as the communitarians at the time. The issue they had with Rawls' thought experiment was that one feature of the original position as Rawls described it is he thought of people behind the veil of ignorance as mutually disinterested. And he did that because he thought well one of the circumstances of justice is that we're not all maximally altruistic. So it'd be misleading to think about a theory of justice that could actually be implemented if we imagine that we're all moral saints. We're all concerned about each other and all trying to do the best for each other. He thought the problem of justice is one that we're not like that, but we're not enemies either right. So he thought assuming the people behind the veil of ignorance as mutually disinterested is a good starting point. But these social philosophers, these communitarians thought that this is a misleading characterization of persons. We are inherently social beings. We are born throughout connections with others and we live good lives throughout connections with others. So mutual disinterested which they thought boils down to us just being self-interested and atomistic beings is the wrong starting point for thinking about justice. I think that's a sort of miss-consrule of rules. He did not think of us as atomistic, self-interested being. And this sort of process of rational justification he was interested in was not one where we tried to satisfy our self-interest. He was very much one that's driven by our sense of justice. I wanted to mention more recent criticism of the veil of ignorance which is that it has in a way too much ignorance. We talked before about the political events going on at the time rules was rising and one of them is a civil rights movement. Recently rules has come under a lot of criticism for not really having a discussion of racial justice in the United States. I suppose as a graduate student in this country I never noticed this but now when it's brought to your attention it's rather staggering that he writes as if one of the greatest transformations in his society hadn't taken place. One way in which this criticism has been made in recent years was from the Jamaican philosopher who worked in North America, Charles Mills. One way of putting it is that Mills thinks we need to know some facts about history in order to come up with the right theory of justice. One way of trying to explain this is to say suppose American society tomorrow implemented rules as principles of justice. Would it be a just society? And Mills says well no it wouldn't because if we're all we're doing is making the worst off as well as possible and racial minorities are the worst off they will still be the worst off after the transformation. That is the order won't be changed it will just be the absolute position of the people at the bottom. Mills thinks that it's necessary to have more knowledge in the original position so that steps can be taken to redress historical injustice. One rejoinder to the interesting challenge from Mills comes from an African American philosopher Tommy Shelby, the same name as the character in Peaky Blinders but a different person. Shelby says well look bear in mind so rules talks about the lexical priority of his principle so first of all equal basic liberties then fair equality of opportunity then the difference principle. Now think of the work that would be done by fair equality of opportunity or fair value of the political liberties that says try to get rid of whatever the the influence of whatever background conditions it might be that stopping people from having a fair set of opportunities within that society. Now rules they've talked about people having the same opportunity to regardless of their social class of origin but class there is a placeholder really for whatever it is in that society that structuring people's opportunities. So a society that was marked by racial injustice as actually existing societies are that look to implement roles as principles would first of all look to and to address those those existing injustices and that's all mandated there in the theory. The reason that rules doesn't want to build that in to the version of the theory in the book one might think is because this is a work of philosophy that's aspiring to a certain sort of generality but as soon as one would then think about its application then of course the relevant historical and sociological facts would come in. So I think that this is a really interesting issue but there's certainly two two different kinds of views that one might have. Yes, well there's a related set of criticisms that rules as idea of the veil of ignorance faced from feminist philosophers and so I agree with Martin that class is a placeholder it is feminist philosophers who have like some philosophers of race argued that the veil of ignorance obscures too much it shields us from important experiences of injustice. For example, injustice in the family. So the more open for example argued that one problem with the theory of justice that it's completely unclear how justice in the family is supposed to figure and that should be a concern for us given that one source of injustice comes within the family with a very with very unequal divisions of labor women doing the share of the maximum share of unpaid labor caring for children and so on. Rules then respond to that to some extent along similar lines that when he comes to problems of gender justice for example as they might arise in patterns of family life they could be addressed by the theory of justice and the sort of thinking of the veil of ignorance could be helpful here because the thought is if you don't know whether you're going to end up as your children's father or mother what would you think just society requires. But he also saw their limits roles thought for example that the principles of justice are not designed to apply to family life itself only to the background conditions in which people might then form their families and conduct their family lives and some feminist philosophers thought that's not good enough so I think we this these issues are still I think today on resolve whether it comes to race or gender the theory of justice struggles. We're coming near the end of Martin he's been criticized heavily and constantly and yet he survives more than survived is read the most read by your students and all right why does it come to that. continue in a position of such importance when he attracts so much like criticism. That's a great question. I think it's because the project is so ambitious and it's so well executed. The level of ambition is to give you know a general account of what it would be for human beings considered as free and equal individuals to live together under terms that they could all accept. So it's an absolutely central foundational question and it's one that he then approaches with with a enormous theoretical firepower sophistication and moral seriousness. And he gives you both a method for thinking about this problem and he gives you an account of of the content of an answer his two or three principles. Now what that does really is to set up a huge sort of target for people thinking about about those issues. So you might be convinced by rules in which case you'd have one sort of reaction or there might be various things in that project that you that you disagree with but where you find yourself then articulating that disagreement with reference to rules is rules is attempt to do this. So I think it's on surprising given given the sort of magnitude of the achievement this really is someone who's managed to write something that will be a classic in political philosophy that's read for hundreds of years. I would confidently bet and it creates them something to push against something to argue with and even if you disagree with it engaging with it I think helps to to make your thinking about matters of justice more richer and fuller. So I would agree with all of that. It's just one additional comment so Martin said there are two parts that the method and the theory. I would suggest as a third which is an argument as well so that rule says that the way to think about justice is in this new form of social contract. If you do that you will get my theory so that is the argument and then you can separately assess the theory. So there are people who disagree with the method the people who agree with the method but say you would get a different theory and there are people who don't care about the method or the argument and say let's just look at the theory. So people would completely different philosophical temperaments that are drawn to the same thing and there's been nothing since anything like it. So it has a level of ambition and there was nothing before it since probably John Stuart Mill or Henry Sidgewick. So we go for decades without a work of that achievement we might be waiting another 50 years, 100 years for the next one so it really is a magnificent piece and it is characteristic of works of philosophy that many more people disagree with them than agree with them. I couldn't think of a better ending thank you very much. Thank you and thank you very much for Fabian Peter, for the huge award for Martin O'Neil and our studio engineer Michael Millum. Next week the chance to discover that electrical resistance can disappear at very low temperatures and why this matters. Superconductivity thanks for listening. And the in our time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So can I start by asking you how does he say we assess moral claims? Here we have another one of Rolls-A's main innovations really and that's the idea of reflective equilibrium. It's a new hugely influential idea but it's obviously not a household name so even when I introduce the idea of reflective equilibrium to my students it's usually blank faces at first. So what is this? Why is reflective equilibrium important for Rolls? Well it's a method of justification, it's a method for assessing who has a claim when it comes to thinking about the principles of a just society. Philosophers often think about justification in ways connected to truth and knowledge. So for example when we ask whether you should believe something we might suggest that well you're justifying in believing this thing as long as it's true or you have enough evidence that it's true or something along the way. Rolls thought that's not the right way of thinking about justification in the moral domain so when it comes to thinking about moral claims he thought that truth can divide us. He was worried about people's religious commitments that if they thought so if we ask him to think about justice from within their same religious understandings of moral claims we end up fighting. We end up fighting about moral truth. We end up fighting about religious truth and that goes back to what Martin was saying earlier about his experiences of society. So he devised a different method one that again sort of captures the social contract idea that what justifies a set of principles of justice is an agreement between persons understood as equal. So what's the connection between agreement and justification? That's the key question. And Rolls thought that we can think about justification not in relation to a search for truth but instead of achieving coherence between our moral ideas at different levels of generality. So we might think that to use an example from current society the current levels of poverty are morally wrong. That would be a particular moral judgment and we might feel quite strongly about that. That might be something we don't easily want to give up. At the more general level we might think a society should offer equal opportunities or we might think that a society should be married or critic. There's sort of mid-level principles and then there's a further level of abstractions in general theories. Rolls thought that the right way of thinking about what is the right side of principles, what moral claims should count is by trying to reach coherence across these judgments that we think are the right ones at different levels of generality. In addition he thought reflective equilibrium isn't just something we can achieve individually by going back and forth without anything being a given, trying to create a consistent moral view. We can't just do that individually, we also do this interpersonally. So the way he labeled this is a full reflective equilibrium. That's a reflective equilibrium reached by a set of people. So if we agree across people that a certain set of principles justice is the right one, that's a full reflective equilibrium. That defines which moral claims we should honor in society. I suppose one thing it might be useful to mention is the degree to which rules is or isn't a critic of capitalism. I think this is something that's perhaps come to be better understood more recently. In part because rules rules his view over the course of his life actually seem to harden somewhat and become a bit more disappointed about the direction of travel of the world he was in. So we talked at the outset about the context in the 1960s and 70s about society that in some ways was making strides towards greater equality. And where one might have seen rules his theory as just a call for an acceleration of tendencies that were already there. But I think in the world that we've seen in the last 40 years in the neo-liberal period, if you like, we've moved further and further away from something like a just society by rules his lights. And I think in response to that rules his own view became more explicitly critical of capitalism. So as Joe mentioned earlier, he came to emphasize more the fact that familiar kinds of redistributive capitalist welfare states. Even if they do quite a good job of looking after the least well off, aren't really getting it close enough to adjust society. So he talked on the one hand about what's he called a property owning democracy, which would be a kind of market economy with a very broad distribution of holdings of wealth and capital. Or on the other hand, he also talked about the idea of a liberal socialist regime, which would be more of an economy with more public and collective ownership, but with the same kind of protections of individual liberties that he thought were needed for adjust society. So when rules actually turn towards thinking about institutions and thinking about really existing sets of economic and political regimes, he interestingly was very critical both of sort of Soviet style command economies, but also of his own country, of the US as a kind of market society that simply wasn't doing enough to move towards the realization of his principles and actually given various of its structural features, maybe couldn't do enough to move towards adjust society. So I think while while rules is ubiquitous in the sin in academic discussions has maybe made him like quite a familiar intellectual figure, I think it would be a mistake to think of him as a theorist of the status quo. He's actually someone with quite a radical critique of the kind of societies we're in, and he's someone who's really pointing towards a very different kind of economics settlement and a much more equal kind of of society than the ones that we're in at the moment. Joe, Joe? I agree with what has been said, there's another question, of course, about rules as influence on policy outside the academy, and whether rules and ideas have been taken up. And of course in some ways we've gone in the other direction. So when rules was writing, in marginal tax rates, in the UK and the US at some points were in the 90s, 90% it's hard to reconstruct that particularly for the US, but it was true after the war. marginal tax rates were very high, they've come down and down and down. So in some ways it looks like the legacy is the opposite of what one would have hoped if one was Rawls. But on the other hand, I think there are ways in which we can see a type of Rawlsian influence in public policy to some extent. Because many, many people have read Theor of Justice and have gone into public life and gone into the civil service or similar roles around the world. And I think there's a shift, whether it's caused by Rawls or just more generally, moving away from a type of utilitarian maximisation approach. The idea that what we should do is create the greatest benefit. But rather think about how policies affect the worst off. So in this country, political parties right and left want to pay attention, special attention to the people who are the least advantaged in society. So I see this as a slight shift in a Rawlsian direction. I mean, no one is saying we should make the worst off as well off as possible. But every party wants to improve the position of the worst off, even if it's not cost-effective in utilitarian terms. So I think we have seen a small bit significant movement there. Well, I suppose one idea that hasn't come up yet, but we were as absolutely essential in Rawls' thinking, was the idea of democracy. We talked about the social contract tradition and the idea of natural rights. But Rawls actually, in his thinking, especially also as he's thinking, developed later on, thought that all we need is a commitment to democracy. Because of key feature of democracy is that everyone is seen as an equal. So that's all we need. We don't need more baggage here. The radical baggage in terms of who we are as persons is enough that we think of our society as committed to democracy and to the idea of equality that comes with that. Now of course that raises a difficult question today. Are we still equally committed to democracy? And if not, how does that affect the chances of the sort of project that Rawls pursued? So are we as committed to democracy as Rawls? Well, I think there's a lot of evidence now, particularly from the United States that younger people are not so concerned about democracy. And given the qualities of the democracies they've been experiencing, you can see why disillusion may come in. I mean, the Rawlsian response would be to try to improve democracy rather than to move on. But democracy is very important for Rawls, but it does give a dilemma. There was a type of criticism we haven't talked about that Rawls is setting out his principles of justice for the justice society. So that raises a question about what would democracy be doing if Rawls has already given us the answers. So Rawls has told us what a justice society is. So what are we voting about? Now is it is democracy just about the most efficient way of achieving Rawls's goals? Well, if so, then that does seem rather boring. So there was a line of criticism probably from the 1970s and 80s. I think Benjamin Barber wrote a book called The Conquest of Democracy. I think it was quite interesting to say that the goal of the major political philosophers is more or less to solve problems once and for all. Whereas there's a more democratic tradition that says the world is changing, issues are changing, nothing is the final answer to anything. And so we constantly need to refresh politics. So I think we see in some interpretations of Rawls both of those ideas, yes, you have a theory and you have democracy. And I don't think they sit brilliantly well together. I suppose an opposing view to Joe's worry there might be that actually the importance of democracy is there right at the centre of the whole Rawlsian project. So it's a way of thinking about how do you have a set of institutions for free and equal people who are going to live together on terms that they can all agree to. Now it's going to be absolutely foundational to that. That's going to be a democratic society where everyone gets to participate in the development of that society over time and to think together about how it's going to evolve. And so the kind of democratic protection that are built into the first principle of a very sort of central to what Rawls is doing is really sort of foundational to his project. And I think in response to Joe's worry and the issue that E-Rodes is about, you know, I'll read a point where there's a sort of decline of confidence in democracy. There's a very interesting discussion of that by the American philosopher, Samuel Sheffler, from New York University, where he has a paper where he talks about the Rawlsian diagnosis of Donald Trump. And the thought there is, well, if liberal democracy looks like it's in trouble, is that in some way a kind of disproof of our best theories of what a just liberal society might look like? And Sheffler says, well, no, it's really the opposite. What Rawls gives you is an account of what a society in its main institutions, I mean Fabian was emphasizing, you know, the idea of the basic structure, the main institutions of your society. What do they owe to the members of that society? Well, what they owe, says Rawls, is something quite close to his principles. And that embodies a sort of attitude of reciprocity. You look at your fellow citizens, you look at the institutions, you live under. You think, yeah, I'm being treated here in a kind of reciprocal way, and I can affirm my allegiance to these institutions, because they're realising something really valuable among me and my fellow citizens. Now, when those institutions have broken down to the point where there's runaway levels of inequality, where there's terrible inequalities in regard to who has political influence and who doesn't. When you're so far away from the main commitment to the theory, that idea that you're actually living with others under terms of reciprocity is gone. And it's on surprising them in a way that that would lead to a certain kind of dissolution. So, I think there's a kind of democratic ambition in Rawls for what's valuable about having institutions that embody that idea of people as free and equal living under fair and reciprocal terms. And really, a lot of the pathologies of our current societies are ones that really start to happen when you move so far away from that kind of idea of justice. Yeah, just do add to the points that Joe and Martin were making that indeed, I also think that the conundrum that Joe raised about how is this idea that justice is the result of an agreement between people on the one hand, while based on democracy really compatible with democracy, because after all, democracy is there to resolve some of our problems, right? I'd say yes, the solution here is also to think about the principles of justice and applying to the basic structure of society, but that still leaves quite a lot for democracy to decide and indeed leaves us in need of a vibrant democratic society to tackle these problems for all sorts of reasons. So I do think that is the right answer. The level that Rawls thinks of the principles of justice applying to is as if we're about to have a constitutional consensus. So these are principles that are even deeper than the constitution. So once we've got the principles, actually there's a lot of work to work out what our day-to-day life would be like. Do you want to come in? So one thing that hasn't come up yet in terms of his legacy, we were just talking about how hugely influential Rawls' theory of justice was within political philosophy and how to some extent Rawls became a victim of his own success, right? Because it's all successful, people pushed back against it. But there's a further thing Rawls was also incredibly influential through his brilliant students. And this influence wasn't just in political philosophy, even though some of his brilliant students were in political philosophy, but others were in more philosophy. And one thing that's really remarkable about Rawls' brilliant students, that so many of them were women. That is remarkable because philosophy is one of those fields still now where there aren't a lot of women is still a field quite dominated by men. But Rawls, however he did, managed to have exceptionally successful students who were women. So in political philosophy, philosophers who went on to work sort of broadly in the Rawls' tradition, but pursuing a gender is very much of their own where Elizabeth Anderson, who worked on equality, Michel, Moody Allen, Adams, who worked on political movements, social justice, including on race. And then Jean Hampton, who worked on the social contract tradition, unfortunately she'd tried quite early. But then in more philosophy, quite a large number of Rawls' students developed his sort of Kantian ideas. I mentioned Kant earlier as one of his influences. And philosophers like Christine Korskard, Barbara Herman, and Onor Anil, who was a philosopher at Cambridge, which is still a philosopher who was no longer active at Cambridge. They all went on to develop the Kantian aspects of Rawls' work again, put forward their own moral theories and had a really sort of invigorating effect on moral philosophy and on Kantian ethics in particular. You spoke to Rawls, what happened then, by me? Yes, well I had the fortune of being supervised by him in my doctoral work when I was a visiting student at Harvard, I was in '94, '95, and he was still active then. And so one of the conversations we had concerned the impact his theory of justice had on American society. And it was interesting how. to see how disappointed he was, that relates back to things both Joe and Martin said earlier, not disappointed in a sort of egomaniac sense and why did people not take my theory of justice more seriously, but rather he really dedicated his life to try and come up with a theory of justice that could be implemented and he thought that precisely because the initial commitments are so minimal, all you need is be committed to a democracy and look what follows, and attractive set are principles of justice and yet society if anything had moved further away from the tendency towards equality that we saw after the Second World War when we all started thinking about these issues, so that was a major disappointment to him which was yeah that's it's that. Did you make him think about emending his theory? I think it was more hoping that society would somehow mend. Here's a producer, Sarah Zorlstraid. Would anyone like to your coffee? Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tilletson. My name is Jonathan Mayerson and two years ago we produced Nuremberg, a dramatized reconstruction of the trial of the major Nazi war criminals. Their crimes were indisputable, but one mystery remained. How did this group of unremarkable men come to rule all of Germany? Our new podcast, Nazis, the road to power and raffles this improbable story in 16 episodes, starring Tom Motherstale, Derek Jacobi, Alexander VlaHos, Toby Stevens and Laura Donnelly. It remains a lesson for us all. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is not the future we were promised. Like hell that out for a tagline for the show. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.