Two things I’d like to talk about in this blog post: (in)equality and the different definitions of justice from Hobbes through to Rawls.

I’m a soc major who’s always been very interested in socio-economic inequality, so I was pretty excited to read what Rawls had to say on this. I find liberal equality very intuitively appealing — it is most fair, after all; arbitrariness of birth and favor really gets to me — but I’d be silly to ignore the arguments against it. Rawls puts up a very convincing case against it (the fight for equality never ends, can never end.) For those of you who were at the Ath talk this Monday, there was another case against liberal equality (however polemic): that efforts (affirmative action, say) spent towards that end could even be pareto sub-optimal. 

Rawls doesn’t hold that strict liberal interpretation of equality. His idea of equality depends on what he calls the difference principle. My reading of what he says: inequality is okay as long as the difference principle is obeyed, which says that the actions/policies that benefit the favored in society are acceptable as long as the least-favored benefit in some way from it. The chain connection is a transmission mechanism in this process: if the least-favored benefit, then those adjacent to them on the socio-economic ladder will benefit slightly as well (magnitude depends on close-knittedness.) [How well do I represent Rawls’ here? Feel free to come at this if I’m off-base!]

Francesca mentioned Hobbes, Locke et al in reference to Rawls, and I thought it’d be cool to see the different way Rawls handles justice compared to the British pair. Rawls’ conception of justice as a virtue, as something that with a moral core, is much closer to our contemporary (and my personal intuitive understanding) of justice in my opinion. Hobbes and Locke only consider it within the institution of society — this Rawls calls formal justice. Rawls begins with justice as a first principle: society, which itself is a gestalt of institutions, can be judged as just or unjust. I find this to be a lot more relatable an understanding, anyone else feel the same way?