John Rawls · Philosophy
Rawls’s deepest objection to the theory he set out to replace: utilitarianism, by summing satisfactions across a whole society, treats many distinct people as if they were one, and so ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ - which is why it can justify sacrificing some for the greater sum of others.
To understand A Theory of Justice, you have to see what Rawls was arguing against. For a century and more, the dominant moral and political theory in the English-speaking world was utilitarianism: the view, descended from Bentham and Mill, that the right action or institution is the one that produces the greatest balance of satisfaction, summed across everyone affected. It is a powerful and humane doctrine - it counts everyone equally, it is rational and this-worldly, it explains why suffering matters. Rawls admired its systematic ambition and spent much of his book measuring himself against it. But he became convinced it harboured a fundamental flaw, one that no refinement could fix. The utilitarian asks a society to maximize a sum, and a sum can always, in principle, be increased by making some people worse off so long as others gain more. Rawls’s whole theory is built to honour a conviction utilitarianism cannot secure: that there are things you may not do to a person, however much good it would do the total.
Rawls traces the utilitarian error to a specific intellectual move. For a single rational individual, the correct principle is to maximize the satisfaction of their own system of desires over a whole life, trading off present against future. The utilitarian arrives at their social principle, Rawls says, by taking this principle of choice for one person and applying it to society - imagining all the desires of all the members fused into one comprehensive system, and then maximizing that. The device that makes this seem natural is the figure of the impartial sympathetic spectator: an ideal observer who sympathetically identifies with every person’s desires at once, feels them all as if they were their own, and then chooses so as to maximize the total. But look at what this does. It ‘conflates’ all persons into one through the imagination of a single spectator, dissolving the plurality of distinct individuals into one vast subject of experience. The separateness of persons - the plain fact that your pain is not cancelled by my pleasure, because we are two, not one - is exactly what gets lost.
Rawls’s alternative is to make justice, not aggregate welfare, the first virtue of institutions - and to give individuals a claim that the calculation of social advantage cannot override. This is the positive counterpart of the separateness objection. Because persons are separate and each has one inviolable life, a just society secures for every person a set of basic rights and liberties that are simply not up for trade against the general welfare. The parties in the original position, precisely because each must live their own single life under the principles chosen and cannot count on being in the favoured majority, would never agree to a principle that permits their own sacrifice for a larger social sum. They would instead insist on equal basic liberties and on the difference principle, which improves the position of the worst-off rather than maximizing an aggregate that might be swollen by crushing them. Where utilitarianism starts from the good (maximize satisfaction) and derives the right from it, Rawls reverses the order: the right, grounded in the separateness and equality of persons, constrains the pursuit of the good. Certain things you may not do to a person, no matter the sum.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Rawls’s central charge against utilitarianism is that it extends to a whole society the principle of choice appropriate for one person, ‘conflating’ many persons into one, and so does not take seriously the distinction between persons. Explain the objection, and what Rawls put in utilitarianism’s plac…
Leads to John Stuart Mill.
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