Our John Rawls For The Day

In a post in his blog, Paul Krugman channels John Bordley Rawls –

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

From Jomelgamba’s Blog  from his post, John Rawls: A theory of Justice

The author (Rawls) appeals to the social contract. Justice as fairness is thus offered to people who are neither saintly altruists nor greedy egoists. Human beings are, as Rawls puts it, both rational and reasonable. Because we are rational we have ends we want to achieve, but we are reasonable insofar as we are happy to achieve these ends together if we can, in accord with mutually acceptable regulative principles. Rawls gives us a model of a fair situation for making this choice (his argument from the original position and the famous veil of ignorance), and he argues that two principles of justice would be especially attractive.

And from the University of Sydney –

I ran into the name John Rawls while exploring philosophy long before I began blogging. I saw an article in which he was mentioned a few months ago and the next thing you know it’s six degree of John Rawls. He was everywhere. Since then, I have read much more about him and have concluded that he well deserves to be everywhere.

I am at the beginning of my work with Rawls’ theories and I’ll mention interesting steps in the journey as I go along.

James Pilant