This is gonna be a big, long, rambling post that tries to put together some ideas — often poorly grasped on my part — about philosophy, economics, and class. I hope you’ll bear with me, and I hope you’ll tell me where I’ve got it profoundly wrong.
Some problems with Rawls and the veil of ignorance: first, and perhaps most obviously, “we cannot liberate ourselves from the norms and prejudices which have formed our being simply by convincing ourselves that our social role (and even body) could have been different” (Varoufakis 270). In other words, despite the notion of an original position and a veil of ignorance, the fact is that a bigot who performs the thought experiment Rawls offers will still likely say, “Well, even if I’m somehow born the wrong color, I’ll just have to know my place.” An intellectual experiment can’t entirely overcome the values into which we’ve been socialized, and so it will still be difficult — or impossible — for a society to imagine what a more just society might look like.
Second, and more seriously, the intellectual experiment Rawls offers is synchronic rather than diachronic: in attempting to offer a rational argument for a just society which a group of people at any given time might agree on, Rawls ignores history and change. Varoufakis suggests that we “consider a society 1000 years ago (or even 300 years ago) trying to devise the best social distribution of roles, privilege and money based on Rawls’ scheme. All the options they would consider would involve some sort of slavery!” Ultimately, Varoufakis suggests, “alternatives to the current social arrangements are created by historical change and cannot be anticipated in advance” (271). I don’t agree with this last part — I think that imagining change is what opens up the possibility for change — but his point regarding the historical situatedness of values is well-taken. He also points out, quite rightly, that Rawls’s construction of the appropriate and just distribution of privilege in a society according to the original position and the veil of ignorance fails to answer the question: what happens after that distribution? What happens when the distribution changes?
But isn’t that asking a utilitarian question of a philosophy that critiques utilitarianism?
Well, maybe not. The way neoclassical economics constructs utility is that if everybody is satisfied, then that is what’s right, and the functioning of the economy is an ongoing maximisation of what’s satisfactory or good for everybody. Rawls, on the other hand, says that what is right is what will lead to what’s good for everybody, rather than the other way around. But Rawls, as noted above, doesn’t seem to allow for changes in what’s right. I’ll readily admit, however, that these suppositions I’m making are based largely on secondhand knowledge of Rawls; as usual, I’m the furthest thing from an expert here.
But it’s interesting, the contrast between the individualistically oriented utilitarianism of neoclassical economics and Rawl’s notions of societal good. Maybe this is part of the big difficulties I’ve been having with individualistic conceptions of class — what I’ve been calling the rhetoric of authenticity and class as lived experience — as opposed to sociological or Marxian conceptions of class. Much of the discourse in class and composition that foregrounds a rhetoric of authenticity and an understanding of class as lived experience, or an individualistic construction of class, seems to me to run the risk of being politically isolating: such an understanding can function as an understanding of positional difference (“I’m working class because I’m not like these other people”), but without the understanding of relational identification in a group (“I’m working class because of the culture and power disparities between those who have much more money than me and those who have as much or less money than me”), it can be isolating in terms of the potential for political action. If you don’t talk about groups, it’s hard to talk about what is good or just or beneficial except in an individualistic and utility-maximising way. (Recall here that neoclassical economics forbids interpersonal comparisons of utility.)
This is why a too-heavy reliance on self-identifications of class sometimes makes me uncomfortable. Such a reliance seems to rely on what philosophers call an aretaic (yes, as in Arete) construction of ethics and what it means to be a virtuous individual, with the focus on individual experience, character, and actions (if I recall correctly, this is how Aristotle posed matters in the Nicomachean Ethics, but it’s been a long, long time since I read that book). Now: the aretaic construction is usually opposed to utilitarian (isn’t there another word for ‘utilitarian’, though?) and deontological positions, both of which deal more with what it means to construct a just and equitable society. Well, sort of: I know I just got done saying how utilitarianism is all supremely individualistic, but it came originally out of Bentham (who was inspired by Hume, who Kant the deontologist argued against): “Bentham’s aim was to create a theory of the good society as the happy society in which utility maximising individuals would work out ways in which maximum utility would be possible for as large a majority as possible” (Varoufakis 84). But the neoclassical economists refused Bentham’s assumption “that utility can be measured across individuals” or, more specifically, “that my utility from an orange can be compared to your utility from the same orange” (84).
Rawl’s critique of utilitarianism, and Kant’s critique of Bentham’s intellectual antecedent Hume, are deontological: they presume that there is a universal moral imperative, certain ways in which we must act, no matter what our individual desires or needs or utility might be. Jon Williams nicely sums up the conflict between the utilitarian and deontological perspectives: “Utilitarianism is a teleological theory, defining the right as that which maximizes the good, and defining the good as the satisfaction of desire, or utility. Rawls’s view, Justice as Fairness, is a deontological theory in which the right is prior to the good. In other words, a thing can not be good if it is not first right.” Now, I’m not sure how to work my desire for a more just and egalitarian society into this framework: is it utility-maximising, or is it right?
In any case, we know that neoclassical economics has shown how bankrupt utilitarianism is in constructing a just or egalitarian society (or is it vice versa?), with the assertions that we need to give corporations breaks for the good of the economy and so for the overall health of the nation, never mind that people are going hungry. To me, the deontological notions of Kant and Rawls seem — despite all their problems — to be the be the best hope we have of constructing a more just society, with their ideas of common moral imperatives.
Those common moral imperatives apply to everyone, after all, not just those in the working class. I think we have to imagine the possibilities of change as extending beyond the authentic experiences of the working-class individual. Thinking about the ethical practices of groups (which is to say, classes) of all sorts across our society might be one way to do so.
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