I’ve noticed that a lot of people who only have a fairly passing familiarity with political philosophy think that John Rawls is a lot more radically egalitarian than he actually is (For example, here‘s the first crazy looking misrepresentation of Rawls I found in a Google search [the author claims to have an MA and Ph.D; I think it’s safe to assume that neither of those are in philosophy]). Perhaps the cause of this distortion is the way Rawls and Nozick are commonly put forth as representing the two main sides in the modern distributive justice debate, with Rawls on the left and Nozick on the right.
In light of this confusion, it’s important to emphasize how un-radical Rawls’s view is (a fact that gets Rawls a lot of heat from philosophers who are actually leftist). It’s the second half of Rawls’s second principle of justice, the Difference Principle, that is at the root of a lot of confusion about his views: “Social and economic inequalities are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society” (JF, 42-43). As I was just reading the Rawls entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I came across this helpful chart:
| Economy | Least-Advantaged Group | Middle Group | Most-Advantaged Group |
| A | 10,000 | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| B | 12,000 | 15,000 | 20,000 |
| C | 20,000 | 30,000 | 50,000 |
| D | 17,000 | 50,000 | 100,000 |
The difference principle, according to the article, “selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best”. In fact, to find out which distribution the difference principle would choose, you don’t even have to be able to see the last two columns. The difference principle focuses only on the disadvantaged, and does not make any judgment at all about how much the wealthy should have compared to the least well off. The are plenty of interesting and legitimate objections that one can make to the difference principle, of course, but I think that most people tend to greatly overestimate the extent to which it is egalitarian.
January 25, 2010 at 9:58 pm
I like this post, good point. The perceived form of the difference principle somewhat belies the real content: it’s not quite the sort of radical redistribution some cast it as.
January 25, 2010 at 10:06 pm
And a favorite line from that misrepresentation:
“ANY theoretical edifice is of only passing interest to conservatives. Conservatives go by what works.”
I assume the Laffer curve falls into the category of conservative ideas with solid and demonstrable real-world grounding. Not that liberals don’t hold their own sacred cows, but please attend to the beam in thine own eye, Dr. Ray.