Rawls and Rational Choice

I think it’s important to note the different reasons Locke, Hobbes, and Rawls give for entering society (or for Rawls, having a certain system), while understanding their common driver – rational choice. For Hobbes, the goal of the system is self-preservation, so people enter society in order to preserve themselves. This is an idea of rational choice at its most basic, where a decision is made for a person’s survival. For Locke, he is concerned about property, but broadly defined to include “life, liberty, and estate.” People enter society in order to protect their rights and prevent the chaos that occurs in the absence of a common authority. In both cases, society occurs because it is in the greater interest for those individual people, as they are situated, to enter into society.

Rawls, when applying his ideas of the original position and the veil of ignorance, also uses rational choice. As he notes, there “are principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.” (10). By decontextualizing people from the environment where they make their decisions, however, he subtly changes the idea of rational choice. Under Hobbes and Locke, it seems to coalesce around the individual and what is good for him, but with Rawls it becomes about the community. As he puts it, “principles of justice [chosen by rational persons] deal with conflicting claims upon the advantages won by social cooperation; they apply to the relations among several persons or groups.” (15). In a certain way, Rawls is using rational choice to correct for the excesses that can result from rational choice (unequal distribution, capture of the state by certain interests/classes, etc.). Moreover, he is expanding a circle, previously focused on just the individual, to draw an eye toward society. In that way, his idea of justice is fundamentally different than that of Locke especially. Locke is concerned in the sense that they safeguard the individual and his rights, as is Rawls. The next step is expanding the idea of rational choice to include the community as well. Nevertheless, this seems to raise questions over the scope of rational choice, if there are any, and the effects of rational choice on Rawls’s theory.