Do individuals in John Rawls’s original position take into account the fallibility of human nature? Some notable commentators on Rawls say that they do or that they should. But this enables us to say that individuals in the original position would not come to an agreement at all

Edward, Terence Rajivan

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The fallibility objection to the original position  Author: ​Terence Rajivan Edward Abstract. Do individuals in John Rawls’s original position take into account the fallibility of              human nature? Some notable commentators on Rawls say that they do or that they should.               But this enables us to say that individuals in the original position would not come to an                 agreement at all.  Different people have different views about what the rules of society should be, at              least in the country where I live. Some people think that the rules should preserve tradition;                other people think that the rules should give people as much liberty as possible; yet other                people have other views. John Rawls thinks the rules should be fair (1971: 3-4). But when are                 the rules fair? Rawls has devised a method for evaluating sets of rules, in order to determine when               one set is fairer than another. The underlying idea behind Rawls’s method is that one set of                 rules would be fairer if self-interested individuals would prefer that set, so long as each               individual does not rely on information about their own specific situation (1971: 136). To              illustrate this possibility: a person with a university degree may, if given the opportunity, try               to ensure that the rules of society favour people with this qualification, e.g. by recommending               the rule that only people who have this qualification are allowed to be members of               government. If self-interested individuals come to an agreement about the societal rules             1  without any individual relying on information about their own specific case, the result would              be a fair agreement, Rawls thinks. On the basis of this idea, Rawls asks us to imagine some self-interested individuals              coming together and forming an agreement on the rules of society, but each individual lacks               information about their own specific case. Amongst other things, they do not know their              occupation, gender, class position, natural endowments, or conception of what a good life             would be (1971: 137).  Rawls calls the conditions these individuals are in “the original position.” In these             conditions, there are some things they do know. They know that they are human beings and                they know facts about human nature (1971: 137). They also know that some agreements are               harder to keep than others. They are not to make an agreement that, given appropriate               circumstances, they would not keep. A further thing that they know is that the agreement they                make will be final. Finality is a special condition that Rawls incorporates into the original               position. He writes: They cannot enter into agreements that may have consequences they cannot           accept. They will avoid those that they can adhere to only with great difficulty.              Since the original agreement is final and made in perpetuity, there is no second              chance. (1971: 176) However, what Rawls says here leads to a contradiction. Rawls thinks that it is possible for                individuals in the conditions he proposes to come to an agreement. But they know facts about                human nature. One fact about human nature is that human beings are fallible. There is a                chance of making mistakes. In which case, individuals in the original position may be making                2  a mistake when agreeing on certain rules. In which case, given that any agreement they enter                into is final, a consequence of any agreement is that they may have to live under a mistaken                  agreement, with no opportunity to revise it. Or at least they must be open to this possibility.                 In which case, because they will not enter into agreements with consequences that they              cannot accept, they will not enter into any agreement. The question of whether individuals in the original position take into account the             fallibility of human nature has been addressed before. To my knowledge, Allen Buchanan             was the first to explicitly address the question. He proposes that that they will take fallibility                into account. He thinks that this proposal blocks certain objections to Rawls (1975: 182-183).              He does not notice the argument above. Joseph Raz says that if they do not take human                 fallibility into account, then the original position will justify a constitution with no room for               revision if a mistake is uncovered (1986: 126). He implies that they should take it into                1account. If humans are indeed fallible, Rawls implies this as well (1971: 137-138). But then               they will not form any agreement at all.  References Buchanan, A. 1975. Revisability and Rational Choice. ​Canadian Journal of Philosophy 5:            179-192. Rawls, J. 1971. ​A Theory of Justice. ​Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press. Raz, J. 1986. ​The Morality of Freedom​. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1 Raz makes this point in a footnote. I originally tried to provide a more detailed interpretation of his concern                    about fallibility and eventually arrived at the argument made in this paper.  3  

The fallibility objection to the original position

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The fallibility objection to the original position

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