How he wants to get us there is through his conception of the veil of ignorance. Okay. Based on what I've said so far what do you think the veil of ignorance might be? >> Depends how we look at it. If something positive or negative. So if it's negative then the veil of ignorance means that you're basically blinded by some idea or ideology. >> Okay. >> And you follow through that. >> So one professor I know made a slip of the tongue and referred it to, to it as the cloak of invisibility. >> [LAUGH] >> It's not the cloak of invisibility, okay? So, the veil of ignorance, he wants to say, is exactly what you were just intimating. That it's, it's what principles you would affirm if you didn't know the answer to all those moral, morally arbitrary things we were talking about earlier. If you didn't know whether you were going to be, going to have a high IQ or a low IQ. If you didn't know whether you're going to be a jock, or a nerd. If you didn't know whether you were going to be male or female. If you didn't know whether you'd be black or white. If you didn't know any particular facts about your circumstances that, that we'd think are morally arbitrary. And given what roles are set about moral arbitrariness that's a lot, right? That's a lot of stuff you don't know. And so by saying what principles would you choose if you didn't know any of those things about yourself? He's trying to get you to obey the Kantian dictum of universal liability. 'Cause he's saying pick things you would pick regardless of your IQ, of your gender, of your race, of your disposition, of your particular conception of the good life. You just don't know any of those things. What principles your going to agree to. So that's choosing behind the veil of ignorance, okay. And it's not, it's not pre-political people. It's not people in the state of nature. It's you, here, now, right, doing the hypothetical thought experiment to figure that out. And he thinks that that way can generate principals that that we can then use as a kind of yardstick for evaluating existing political institutions. Yeah? >> Well so, in that sense right there, it's the sort of intentional aversion to bias that our judicial system should have. >> That's right. It's, it's the idea is exactly that you cannot bias things towards your personal that thinks that you, you're a good athlete judging from the way your built. So, but you couldn't bias things to be well, to treat athletes better than others. Right, okay, so that's exactly why the notion is an unbiased an unbiased principle is one that, that doesn't support any particular conception of the good. He sometimes describes his method as reflective equilibrium. What do you think that might be? Reflective equilibrium, what comes to mind when we say reflective equilibrium? >> Maybe. [LAUGH] >> Not, not fair. >> This is a German full metal band. >> Yeah, so that's, that's not it. Okay, so what, what Rawls means by reflective equilibrium is something different. Remember when I said, when we talked about Hobbes. I said, Hobbes starts from the assumption that people are muddled as to what their interests are. Because they've listened to to much Aristotelian nonsense in the universities. Or they've been deceived by merchants, who have their own ideological agendas but if they were thinking really clearly. They would see that I, Thomas Hobbes, am right. So in that sense, for Hobbes there was no social contract. But rather, he's saying what is the rational contract for people to make? If they weren't, if their heads weren't full of sawdust, and they were thinking straight, what would they agree to? So it's not strictly a contract, as you indicate. There's no legal contract. And really it's not about agreement at all. It's about what it's rational to agree to. So if even though these are all theories of, that are based on consent, all these social contract theories. Really it's reason rather than agreement that's doing the heavy lifting here. Because we're not saying what do people agree to. But you, he's saying what's a rational for them to agree to? And in that, and some people would say well if they couldn't choose anything else, then it's not clear that agreement's doing any work. Right? It's all being done by this econ, so it's a very string rash, rationalist enterprise. And in this sense, though Rawls is often compared to Locke, he's methodologically, he's more like Hobbes. Because he wants to convince you this is the idea of reflective equilibrium. That if you start with your, your priors, your initial believes, your assumptions about human nature, about justice, about what you want to do with your life, about everything that's going through your head. And you then read his book really carefully and understand it and play the game that he asks you to play, this hypothetical thought experiment. You will come, through this process of back and forth between this experiment and your prior judgements, you will come to see that he is right. So in that sense, it's very as I said, methodologically very similar to Hobbes. And what he's going to say is I'm going to convince you by reading this book. First of all, of a general conception of justice and he's, he, this is just the, I'll just give you the summary statement of it which we'll dig into next time. But he says, everything of social value, these, you might think of these as what I was calling primary goods, social values, this means primary goods. Liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and what he refers to as the social bases of self-respect, should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all of them works to everybody's advantage. So, that's, probably looks pretty opaque and it should look pretty opaque. I just wanted to get it out there before we finish for today. But next time I'm going to unpack that. And explain how it leads in his estimation to two principles of justice. Which as I said will pass this kind of Hobbesian methodological test that after you've gone back and forth in this condition of reflective equilibrium between Rawls's exposition of these principles and your own assumptions. You will find that you agree with him. And we'll start with that next time.
