Reviews for A theory of rights

The average rating for A theory of rights based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-06 00:00:00 Corey Mroz It took me a while to understand what this famous book was about - I am still far from up to speed with moral philosophy - but once I'd figured out where Rawls was heading it made good sense and was very illuminating. The central question, if I may practice my still unfluent moral philosophyspeak for a moment, concerns the relationship between the Right and the Good, and how they should inform our choice of social structures: in particular, which of the two should take precedence. This may sound like medieval angels-on-the-point-of-a-pin hairsplitting, and I am sure I would once have dismissed it in those terms, but to my surprise I found it has a precise meaning. The Good, roughly, is what we want to do, or what will benefit us; the Right is what we are allowed to do, when our desires come into conflict with other people's. The Good will in general be a private notion: what makes me happy need not concern anyone but me. But the Right has to be a public notion. If it's going to determine who gets their way when my pursuit of my Good conflicts with your pursuit of yours, then there has to be a set of agreements we have both agreed to honour, otherwise there's no point in having a notion of Right in the first place. Now if we're thinking about how to organise a society, which is what this book is about, should we start with the Right or the Good? Rawls says the standard answer is the one provided by utilitarianism. We start with the Good, we add up or average the amount of Good that everyone manages to accumulate, and we organise society so as to maximize that. ("The greatest good of the greatest number"). The upside is that, on average, people will by definition come out ahead. The downside is that some people will end up gaining at other people's expense. Unless they're very selfless, the people who came out behind may not be prepared to support the scheme. But suppose instead, says Rawls, that we start with the Right instead of the Good, and make our starting point the question of how we would need to set up the rules so that everyone did feel they would want to support the resulting society? He does this using a hypothetical scenario called the Original Position. Imagine that everyone had to agree on rules for how society would be run without knowing in advance which role they would end up getting; you wouldn't know if you were going to end up rich or poor, male or female, straight or gay, smart or dumb, whatever. (A friend who's read the book points out that Buddhists will find it particularly easy to accept this hypothesis). What rules would you advocate? Rawls's basic argument is that if we did things this way we'd end up with an egalitarian society that was both fairer and more stable. Since we wouldn't know who we'd end up being, we'd want to make sure that everything we did benefited the least well-off people as well as the average and above-average people; we might end up being one of those least well-off people, so we'd want to cover that eventuality. The book is written in an abstract, impersonal way, but it's not hard to think of concrete examples to test the ideas. I wonder if Ursula Le Guin was a fan. Her short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", which came out two years after Rawls's book, is pretty much a thought experiment designed to explore the core hypothesis. (Would you want to live in a society which was a paradise in every respect except that it involved slowly torturing a child to death?) And her masterpiece The Dispossessed, published the year after that, is a novel-length treatment of a planet organised along Rawlsian principles. Everyone on Anarres is equal, everyone is equally valued. As we see in the book, this doesn't make life perfect; people aren't perfect, so how could it? But Le Guin convincingly shows how this kind of society furthers what what Rawls considers the most important good, people's self-respect. It's hard not to love the Anarresti. Moving from literature to the real world, covid has given us a distressingly graphic taste of the difference between utilitarianism and egalitarianism. Some countries, like New Zealand under Ardern, have adopted an egalitarian approach: it is unacceptable to adopt policies which we know will allow vulnerable people to die, we have to think first about keeping everyone as safe as possible even if there's a cost. The US, under Trump, has taken the converse approach: it is better to allow hundreds of thousands of people to die than weaken the economy and reduce the average level of well-being. In this context, it's interesting to see that Ardern was reelected with a substantial majority, while Trump lost his reelection bid despite frantic efforts to game the system. These examples arguably support the claim that a democratic society will tend to favour egalitarian ideas ahead of utilitarian ones. The book is a strange mixture of academic distance and real passion, and you never know what you'll find when you start a section. Rawls's usual style is, alas, extraordinarily soporific, and I'm not sure I've ever fallen asleep so many times in the middle of a paragraph; I think his editor was too lenient, and when I posted quotes as reading updates I almost always found myself shortening them by a good 50%. But mixed in with the dry, overqualified philosophical language there are some extraordinary lyrical passages, and the ending is inspiring and uplifting. He believes in what he's saying, and he's effective at making you think you need to consider his ideas and revise your own. If you haven't read The Dispossessed, I'd recommend that instead. But if you've already read The Dispossessed twice and you keep wondering what Odo's books were like, check out Rawls. It's probably as close as you're going to get.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-10 00:00:00 Peter Giambalvo What strikes me most as a non-philosopher reading this book is what Rawls doesn’t talk about. Libertarian ideas, the staple of American political and social discourse, receive no attention as such in this book. To the extent that libertarianism factors in at all, Rawls dismisses it so peremptorily he practically laughs at it. Yet his oblique approach does take on its precepts, as I‘ll mention later. A Theory of Justice takes up a problem that goes back to the Enlightenment: If rights inure to individual persons, what role can society really play in our lives? Key to this paradox, it is argued, are the concepts of the good and of the right. There can be no meaningful notion of the good independent of a concept of what’s right, or just. A good society, then, cannot let its moral structure be dictated by its economic practices. The author construes justice from a Kantian standpoint and employs principles such as universalizability to make Rawls’s theory one that guarantees justice at the start, as opposed to one in which justice arises contingently from later developments. The author dials us back to the state of nature, the famous theoretical starting point of Locke and Rousseau from which a society somehow must emerge. His unique angle is that he finds the state of nature inadequate as a starting point, so he modifies it into an “original position,” a point from which individuals can reason more effectively about the kind of social contract they ought to agree to. Here Rawls’s distinctive concept of the veil of ignorance comes into play. Rawls advocates an objective and rational social contract theory. His book takes aim at two alternatives, utilitarianism and perfectionism. Outside dictatorships, he says, these are the two principles that actually do drive social and government policies in the rest of the world -- hence an example of the oblique swatdown of libertarian ideas. He takes apart both theories and proposes his own, based on a notion of equal liberties. Justice entails equal liberty for each person, and this principle has priority over other concepts. Of special note, too, is Rawls’s discussion of justification. It is misguided, he argues, to justify any system on the basis of deduction or induction from starting principles. Starting principles alone will prove unable to account for a social system in its entirety. Justification for a system of social organization must come from a judgment of the system as a totality. That is, justification comes from within that system, taken as a whole. Here the critique of other ideals is less oblique, and the disagreement more contentious. Libertarianism, this text implies, relies on principles common to many viewpoints. It’s these grounding principles that come under scrutiny throughout the book. He attacks the conflation of a self with one’s own self, dismissing theories that fail to reason objectively. Late in the book (by which I mean to say: You cannot get by reading just part of it) he critiques the idea of private society. He uses Kant to contrast people treated as ends with people treated as means, repudiating notions that derive the value of a human life from an individual’s social function. He asks what‘s really meant by “deserving“ something. Through Kant, too, he links natural rights with natural duties. Altruism he denies as a duty of justice: His original position is one of rational self-interest. Rawls stresses the ideal nature of his theory, not its practical applications. The implication of his reasoning is that, rather than using ideals as the basis of some sort of revolution, whoever understands this theory will be able to apply it in small ways throughout society. It can also be applied piecemeal by people in authority within a society or government without having suddenly to rewrite the entire existing social arragement. The ideal theory empowers people to act on practical problems rather than dream of a perfect but unattainable future utopia. I rate this book highly and recommend it to everyone. It is a work of philosophy that is accessible to non-philosophers, giving it a great advantage over philosophical works destined to remain within the confines of academia. It is a complete work, covering every aspect of society. It is highly innovative in its conception, a thought experiment laid out by a compelling and provocative line of reasoning. It carves out a specific niche in political thought. The proposal Rawls lays out has explanatory and predictive power. The book is perfect for people who love to read about ideas; but best of all, it satisfies the need of individuals to find some way to insert themselves into today's dramatically depersonalized social structure, a system that has arisen in our world through a mixture of complex technology and simple cruelty.