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Unit Code PHI320 Unit Name Political Philosophy
COE USE ONLY
Date Received
Assignment No. 1
Assignment Title Comparitive Analysis
Due Date 8/10/2014
Contact Info Phone:0403424484 Email:joseph.zizys@gmail.com
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Student Name: Family Name Zizys Given Name Joseph
Student Number: 42351979
Date: 12/10/2014
Utility and Liberty.
by Joseph Zizys
Rawls critiques Utilitarianism by arguing that in a just society the basic liberties are taken
for granted and the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the
calculus of social interests (TJ, 1.6). Critically contrast and compare Rawls account of the
role of the basic liberties in a just society with the Utilitarian account (as it is presented in
chapter 2 of Kymlicka, CPP).
The fundamental critique levelled at utilitarianism by Rawls is simple. the utilitarian position
claims that it is legitimate to cruelly rape, torture, and kill an innocent child if it brings more
joy to a stadium full of assholes than it causes pain to the hapless orphan. (Kymlicka pp29-
30)
Rawls asserts that we have an intuition that justice is not like this, and that it is wrong to kill
orphans for fun, no matter how much fun it is to how many fun-seekers. (ibid) So Rawls
says that there is something more to justice than a simple calculus of interests or
pleasures. Rawls argument for this is that we already know that that is not what our real
idea of justice is.
Rawls is secretly saying that the freedom, the autonomy, the mind of the orphan is
somehow sacrosanct, that it cannot be bargained with, that it is not for sale or
commodifcation, that it is free. Rawls probably does not draw attention to this because it
smells too much of Kant, and Rousseu and lets face it, religion. Though Rawls openly
states at the very beginning of A Theory Of Justice (Rawls 1971 pp viii) that his project is a
continuation of these very fgures, so its not like he didnt know what they believed.
Anglophone philosophy is weird like that.
Rawls fundamental criticism of utilitarianism is that it is a poor ft of clothing, a poor
collection of ideas and words to describe what we already know justice to be.
Rawls presents an alternative that is based on the idea of liberal equality, that is the idea
that we are all equally free. His formulation of that idea goes like this: that all social goods
should be distributed equally, except where other distributions advantage the least
favoured. (Kymlicka 2002 p55)
So Rawls asserts that some notion of equality underlies our notion of justice, and that
utilitarianism does not capture what that underlying ideal really looks like. Rawls is not
done yet though. he also asserts we have a native notion or idea of equality, and that this
idea, already distinct from utilitarianism, is that everyone deserves a fair shot at the prize,
and to keep their winnings if they hit the bullseye. Rawls thinks that if we can reform the
naive, native idiom of equality of opportunity it might bear the weight of our concept of
justice in a way that utility cannot. This prevailing ideology of equality of opportunity, used
to justify the diference in the distribution of social goods is already incompatible with
Utilitarianism in the following way. It seems plausible that more could be made happier if
poverty was eradicated, even if the poor did not deserve their elevation due to their hard
work and free choice. So Utilitarianism critiques liberalism. But the liberal responds that
they should be free to choose to work hard and elevate themselves from poverty and
should not be arbitrarily punished by the taxation of their labours for the beneft of
strangers. So Rawls inherits both a prevailing philosophy of utilitarianism as a working
progressive political/public policy rubric but also a prevailing philosophy of libertarianism as
a working distrust of government that is already and permanently opposed to to
utilitarianism.
Rawls revision to the naive liberalist position is to point out that diferences in natural
capacities or talents are just as arbitrary a product of ones birth as race, gender and
inheritance are. People with natural gifts will win the prize and hit the bullseye says Rawls,
and those lacking natural gifts, through no fault of their own, will miss. So the same instinct
that told us that utilitarianism wasnt really just now tells us that equality of opportunity that
ignores natural gifts or accidental paucity is also unjust. neither ft with our intuition of
justice, at least as Rawls would have us see the native, english-language-ideology version
of justice.
Rawls suggests it would be unfair or perhaps impossible to obliterate natural gift
diferences without arbitrarily depriving people who where lucky enough to be born with a
natural talent, but that if we set up society so that the possessors of natural talents or good
luck provide beneft to the less fortunate, then that could work: If there is an uneven
distribution, say of IQ, then we need to arrange society so that the very smart use their
good fortune to beneft the intellectually disabled. (Kymlicka 2002 p59)
Rawls also invokes a concept called lexical order, which basically means we arrange the
social goods in order of priority, like words in the dictionary, Liberty is A and comes frst,
Justice is B and comes next, then Efciency and Welfare. You cant put C before B or A
etc, so no destruction of liberty for the sake of efciency, etc. (Kymlicka 2002 pp56).
Rawls more or less presents us with a picture of justice as a kind of modifed and
chastened belief in equality of opportunity, and presents the idea as more successful than
either pre-existing english language attempts at progressive, re-distributionist thought:
utilitarianism and more successful than pre-existing english language/ thought/
ideological/ traditional attempts at conservative, individualistic, liberal thought.
To Critically contrast and compare Rawls account of the role of the basic liberties in a just
society with the Utilitarian account is to compare something with nothing. Rawls entire
point is that utilitarianism ignores the basic liberties that we all take for granted are in some
sense part of what we consider a just society. Rawls point is that utilitarianism is ultimately
cruel to individuals, and his point about (old) liberalism, is that it is precisely by being only
concerned to protect the basic liberties of individuals, that it can be blind to the cruelty that
individuals can infict, by virtue of their natural gifts or arbitrary privilege, on disadvantaged
groups.
His solution is to endorse liberalism with the caveat that it must be so arranged that lucky
individuals are deployed so as to lift up the whole of society from the bottom.
By addressing himself to the basic liberties, as an institution of our culture and its justice,
Rawls wants to mobilise the power in a conception of human beings as autonomous,
rational, in a Kantian sense, persons at liberty to choose one way or another, against a
conception of society as a calculus to be optimised. It is always the problem when
something is calculated, who decided what to calculate? what to measure? who chose the
unit of utility? Rawls critique is to remind us that we choose, that we are playing the game
and making the rules, and the basic liberties, already present in the institutions of our
culture, in the very frmament of our fundamental intuitions about what is just and unjust,
already exist, are real, that we are really, basically at liberty.
Then Rawls asks, what should we do? how should we organise society so that it is just?
and he answers, by arranging it so those most disadvantaged are better of, but limited by
the constraint that we do no violate or do violence to the notion that human beings are
possessors of basic liberties, that is that in some sense, they are at liberty, they are free.
Rawls instincts are mercy and freedom, and Rawls reminds the utilitarian, that even the
idea of perfecting mercy should not blind us to freedom. because to be blind to freedom
means one cannot truly be just, and to be unjust is to be cruel and to be cruel is to be
unmerciful.
I am aware that in pursuing this line of thought I have strayed from the analysis of Rawls
thought as political philosophy qua political philosophy as a discipline in the university.
Strayed perhaps into a kind of psychological analysis, or, worse, some kind of continental
thinking. I think that it is impossible to compare and contrast thoughts in the way the essay
question asks except by actually thinking about them though, so all I can do is mobilise the
resources of thought at my disposal, and these are them.
Utilitarianism, if it recognises liberty at all, recognises it only as a kind of fction, a place
holder for the maximising of something, like pleasure, or interests, or utility that exists in
bodies. Rawls puts liberty at the centre of any conception of a just society.
Bibliography.
Kymlicka, Will (2002) Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd Edition, Oxford University
Press.
Rawls, John (1971) A theory of Justice, Oxford University Press.