Huang-Blog Post 4

In Jonathan Rawls’ Theory of Justice, he explains the necessary role of justice in establishing a fair society, a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage” but there exists a distributional conflict because people are differential as to how the “benefits produced from their collaboration are distributed” (4). From the beginning of this book, Rawls’ anti-utilitarian argument is made clear because he denies that the “loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others” (3). Under utilitarianism, the most important thing is to maximize the overall good in a society, regardless of how that utility is distributed. Then this is capitalism: a society in which people have the freedom to choose what they spend their money (a proxy for utility) on, and people as rational beings will always choose to spend their money such that they are maximizing their own utility. In sum, there will be maximized utility, but Rawls disputes this factor as the most important value used to judge and form a society. Instead, we should focus on justice, which necessarily concerns all people. 

Justice is important because if we believe that our rights secured to us by justice and inherent in our existence as human beings should be inalienable, then we must believe that these rights are inalienable to everyone. Accepting these rights for the majority of people, which is justifiable under utilitarianism, alone is not enough. This is an advanced, systematic analysis of the age-old Biblical and Confucian (likely among other religions and ancient philosophies too) idea of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Through this rule, we must deny social atomism, the idea that society is mostly made up of individual beings operating as self-interested, separate atoms. On the contrary, society is not justifiable without prioritizing justice above all for every individual in it because it would be favored by the “original position.”

Marx and Rawls both offer criticisms of capitalism but through different avenues. (For instance, they might disagree on the idea of what Rawls calls “original position” in justifying social contracts. Unlike Marx, Rawls argues that the “original position would not choose the principle of utility to define the terms of social cooperation,” so any previous stages are not justifiable in some social contract (25). On the other hand, Marx takes this engagement in society when we enter the contract to protect our individual liberties as a means to rationalize oppression.) How does the idea of the "original position" change views on others' theories of property?