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Utilitarianism with a Difference: Rawls's Position in Ethics

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RawlsJohnA Theory of justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 607 pp. + xvi.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Braybrooke
David Braybrooke*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1973 , pp. 303 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1973

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References

* Including one led by me at Dalhousie University during the academic year 1972-73, of whose collective effort this notice is a report—from my point of view, no doubt not fully freed from my personal prejudices. Everyone who attended the seminar, students and colleagues, made a significant contribution; but I think everyone will consider it fair that I should mention by name, as having made especially significant contributions reflected in this notice, Florian Bail, John Devlin, and Kenneth Smith, among the students; and Richmond M. Campbell, among my colleagues. I have had the benefit of reading impressive papers by Bail and Smith; and, before its publication in Dalhousie Law Journal, Vol. I, No. 1, Professor Campbell's own excellent review of Rawls's book. I have also profited from reading, in Professor E. F. McClennen's unpublished doctoral dissertation, his treatment of Rawls's equal liberty principle in an earlier form in which liberty is generalized.

1 Tawney, R. H. Equality, 4th ed., (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), p. 118;Google Scholar Wootton, Barbara The Social Foundations of Wage Policy, (London: George Allen & Unwin), 1955, pp. 178, 180.Google Scholar

2 Strictly speaking, one should perhaps not say, “A point on the efficiency frontier,” but “A point on the frontier approximating efficiency as closely as respect for the equal liberty principle and the fair opportunity principle allows”.

3 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1777 ed., Section V, Part I, at the end. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1823 ed., Chap. I, footnote 1.

4 Rawls follows Mill, Utilitarianism, Chap. V, in citing Bentham.

5 Edgeworth, F. Y. “The Hedonical Calculus”, Mind, Vol. IV (1879), pp. 394–408,Google Scholar at p. 404. The article was reprinted as pp. 56–82 of the same author's Mathematical Psychics (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), where the passage in question appears on p. 74.

6 “Hedonical Calculus”, pp. 402–403; Mathematical Psychics, pp. 72–73.

7 Mill, op. cit., especially Chaps. II and Ill.

8 Bentham, Principles, Chap. II.

9 Cf. Finer, S. E. The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952)Google Scholar on Chadwick's utilitarian milieu and on his vigorous pursuit of sanitary reform.

10 Hart, H. L. A. “Are There Natural Rights?”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXIV, No.2 (April 1955), pp. 175–191.Google Scholar

11 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, Section II, toward the end.

12 Wicksteed, P. H. The Common Sense of Political Economy, ed. Robbins, L. (London: Routledge, 1933), Vol. I, p. 173ff;Google Scholar cited by Buchanan, J. M. and Tullock, G. in The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 18.Google Scholar

13 Lyons, D. “Rawls versus Utilitarianism,” The journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXIX, No. 18 (5 October 1972), pp. 535–545CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 541–543.

14 Cf. Edgeworth, “Hedonical Calculus”, p. 398; Mathematical Psychics, p. 64, cf. p. vii.

15 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 417,Google Scholar footnote.

16 During the quarter century that followed the publication of “The Hedonical Calculus” in 1879 no one took issue with Edgeworth ori this point, either in the pages of Mind, or in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. No one, at least in those places, raised the point against Sidgwick either, whose Methods first appeared in 1874. In a careful and searching discussion of Methods on the occasion of a later edition, Rashdall, H. not an obtuse man, came nowhere near even mentioning the point (Mind, Vol. IX (1885), pp. 200–226).Google Scholar

17 “Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies,” Mind, Vol. XIV (1889), pp. 473–487 at p.483.

18 “Silly” is not a word strong enough to describe the passage in which Edgeworth effervesces in praise of “the privilege of man above brute, of civilized above savage, of birth, of talent, and of the male sex” (“The Hedonical Calculus,” pp. 405–406; reprinted without second thoughts and without change in Mathematical Psychics, pp. 77–78).

19 In fact, in a footnote, though he approaches stating the principle in a later passage, op. cit., p. 432. The principle-which he calls in the footnote “an obvious and incontrovertible deduction from the Utilitarian principle”—is directly contradicted by another later passage, p. 447, in which Sidgwick, mixing means and ends, says that “in any distribution of pleasures and privileges, or of pains and burdens” where “considerations of desert do not properly come in” … “the Utilitarian” will fall back with “Common Sense” on “Equality” as “the principle of just apportionment”. I cite the contradiction not in the way of belittling Sidgwick's logical powers, but as evidence of his remarkable inattention to the point at issue.

20 The first formula was uttered in A Fragment of Government (1776), Preface, par. 2; the second, in Chap. I, footnote 1 (added 1822), of Principles. As has often been noted (see, for example, Edgeworth's very apt comment, Mathematical Psychics, pp. 117–118) the use of the phrase “the greatest number” renders the first formula ambiguous; the phrase nevertheless unambiguously expresses a concern for distribution.

21 Utilitarianism, Chap. II.

22 Rawls does not say “median money income”; he says “median income”. He must mean money income, however; the median of real income (goods and services in various combinations) will vary as the index for measuring it varies—one index, because one ordering of combinations, according to preference, if it is founded on one person's tastes; possibly a very different index, because a different ordering, if it is founded on the tastes of any other person. The indeterminacies exposed in the following arguments would not be removed by turning to real income for an index; they would be aggravated.

23 Rawls's generality condition (131) would not be violated; the agents in the original position need not be supposed to know which of them would be in (say) the 111th and 112th positions in any ordering; nor would a definite description of the form “the person in the 111th position” suffice to identify the person beforehand.

24 Acts 4: 34-37. (I presume that the language “distribution unto every man according as he has need” would have applied to any current production as well as to the fixed stock of lands and houses mentioned.) Cf. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Part I, Section 3.

25 At a time when 11 of the 18 highest paid men in U.S. industry were officers of one company-Bethlehem Steel-and Homer himself got $670,000 a year in salary, A. B. Homer, the president of the company, told a Senate committee that it was questionable whether he or the others would .have the incentive to do all that they did for the company without the full amount of their current salaries. See Study of Administered Prices in the Steel Industry, 85th Congress, 2d Session, U.S. Senate Report No. 1387 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958) and detailed testimony in associated publications.

26 It is written and St. Paul commanded that “If any would not work, neither should he eat”. II Thessalonians 3: 10.

27 von Wright holds that something very much like the principle of fairness is not only central enough to be called “the Principle of Justice”, but is the very “cornerstone of morality”: “No man shall have his share in the greater good of a community of which he is a member, without paying his due”. Wright, G. H. von The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 208.Google Scholar But this approach to justice seems to overstress justice on the side of production as much as Rawls overstresses it on the side of consumption.

28 Everyone is familiar with some cases, e.g., those of some managers in British industry, who prefer long weekends to keeping up with world competition; of some skiing enthusiasts, who sojourn at Banff on the strength of unemployment insurance; of some university professors, who dropped anchor when they gained tenure.

29 How close the society can be brought to the efficiency frontier, or even to the point at which everyone's needs are satisfied, may depend on the path taken, i.e., on the sequence of reorganizations initiated. An improving move on a dead-end path is not to be recommended without question. In a forthcoming article on the difference principle by Professor Douglas Rae, which I have seen in draft, this objection is raised against the difference principle, as applied to moves short of the efficiency frontier; the objection holds against my formula, too, as it stands.