In this paper I will present one argument John Rawls makes in support of his difference principle and provide an objection to it. The difference principle is Rawls’s theory that any inequalities within a society should only exist if they benefit the people in the worst position in society. Rawls proposes that people should not be given the probabilities of their potential societal positions. The framework of this argument is given by the original position, which will also be discussed in this paper.
The original position is what leads Rawls to conclude that society must be built around benefiting the people on the bottom of the society. When discussing policy, the only way for a person to remove bias and selfishness is to ignore their own characteristics. The person must ignore their natural abilities, race, wealth, class, and general social status. It must be assumed that they could take form with any combination of these different factors. They also must assume complete self interest, only caring about their position in this society. If everyone were to do this, societal decisions would all be unanimous because everyone would be in the same position trying to accomplish the same thing. The key component to this original position is that the person does not know the likelihood of having one characteristic over another, or being in one societal position as opposed to another. This specification by Rawls about the lack of knowledge of probability is the key component to justifying the difference principle.
Rawls states that not knowing the probability of where anyone would end up would lead everyone to make decisions ultimately raising the lowest possible position. Rawls argues this would happen because the risk of being at this lowest possible position is entirely unknown.
This unknown probability is important to Rawls’ argument because from the original position, a person’s position in society is completely based on luck. This implies that nobody is rightfully deserving of their position in society, therefore we should be focused on assuaging the pain of the people with the worst luck. Given the wide range of other unknowns included in Rawls’ veil of ignorance, he thought it made sense to include the probabilities in this.
I fully agree that when placed into the original position given by Rawls, people would unanimously agree to work to improve the worst situation possible. The problem I have is with the original position itself, and the decision to include likelihood as an unknown. If people were to be aware of the likelihood of being in each position of the society they create, decisions would still be unanimous, but people would not strive to improve the worst situation. This is because it is easy to predict one’s likely position in society with a simple calculation. The success of many should not be sacrificed to preserve the welfare of few.
The reason it is important to know the probabilities of each possible outcome is because the correlation between certain personal attributes and societal position is relevant. To have unknown probabilities of being intelligent or successful is to have no knowledge of the correlation between the two. If there is no correlation between them, there is no incentive for people to improve their intelligence or any other ability. By proposing to ignore the correlation, Rawls is asserting that the correlation does not matter; since people’s positions are entirely based on luck, there is nothing one can decide to do to improve his position. If Rawls were to acknowledge that people could have some control over their future success, he would be implying the possibility for an improved position in society. The choices would be incentivized by a universal understanding of the correlation between choices and position. For this correlation to exist, probabilities would have to be known, or at least partly known, in the original position.
To prove that the difference principle would not be satisfied if these probabilities were known I will use the following example. Ten equal people are collected and told that nine of them will be randomly selected to win a million dollars. The tenth person, however, will be assigned to give up one dollar and receive no money for themselves. This offer would be accepted unanimously by the ten people, despite the position of one person being made worse off. All the people in this scenario will on average make nine hundred thousand dollars, which would lead them to unanimously agree to the circumstances. If the people did not know the chances of one possibility over another, they could not reasonably accept this offer.
People would still make decisions unanimously if the likelihood of being in each position were known. The likelihood of being in each position would be the same for everyone. Everyone would still be in the same situation with the one goal of giving themselves the best possible outcome. Now, however, people would build society to have the best average position rather than the best lowest position. This removes the difference principle from Rawls’s theory.