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Sprachspiele's avatar

I agree with your post, though I think there are further problems with the "original position." It seems to me the thought experiment involves asking "what kind of society would you like if you didn't know anything about yourself?" to which there is no answer because if I don't know anything about myself, I don't have any preferences and so have no basis to make the choice. Rawls simply posits certain universal values ad hoc (like "freedom") which we're supposed to hold "behind the veil of ignorance" which amounts to begging the question. More generally, any aggregation of utility functions involves a *value judgement*, it is not an objectively well-defined operation. Pretending utility functions can be objectively aggregated amounts to assuming that there's really only one individual, and so it's no surprise all social questions are "solved" -- they're solved because the problem has been assumed away.

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STEPHEN A BLOCH's avatar

I'm trying to imagine what Rawls may have been thinking (based on your summary, not having actually read Rawls myself), and I can come up with a few reasons that one might use the utility of the poorest member of society rather than the "average-utility" member of society as a stand-in for the desirability of the whole society.

1) The person asking the question (e.g. Rawls) and the person being asked (with the education and leisure to read about economic philosophy) are probably both well above "average utility" in the current society. And people's expectations about utility are anchored to their present situations. So the unattractive prospect of being in a worse state in the hypothetical society probably outweighs the attractive prospect of being in a better state in that hypothetical society. This doesn't imply using the literal poorest member of society as a representative, but it does imply a bias below the mean.

2) Most societies in human history have been pyramidal, with a very few people near the top and an enormous number near the bottom. In such a society, "the poorest member of society" is a reasonable approximation of the average-utility member, and a whole lot easier to compute. Particularly since utility is easier to compare than to add, subtract, multiply, or divide.

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