A Theory of Justice

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Summary: A Theory of Liberty, Not "Justice" Police State. Liberty 1st
Review: It's been several years since I read the book. Saw it recently, the book seems to be a favorite, of the coffee-house, talky, chattering, left, Marx-Freud-Rousseau crowd.

However, all this at talk of a "just society" and the "underprivileged" can and does mean only one thing: A POLICE STATE.

Anytime, a so-called "theory" attempts to create a utopian state, there will be coercion. Anytime, there is coercion, you will infringe upon individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom to govern one's own life.

Instead of a "police state" in the form of a theory of justice. He should have written a book titled "A Theory of Liberty" Any society without liberty as the foundation will have coercion and hence the destruction of liberty. However, this book remains the coffee-house favorite.

Rawls was an "Ivory Tower Pinhead". A brief bio states that he was a professor all his adult life. What kind of adults spend their whole life having fake, phony, welfare for intellectual, make-believe jobs like being a professor of political theory. What dat????? Oh, Please get a real job.

#1. THOSE CANNOT DO WILL TEACH.....

So much for the ivory tower pinhead. A theory of justice will lead to a police state, a state of coercion. What we need is theory of LIBERTY.

Rating:
Summary: Deeply Disappointing
Review: It's hard to write clearly about ideas, so it's no surprise that Rawls fails. His book is worse than dense, it's nearly impenetrable, and does not do justice (ahem) to his subject. Far better books exist, and I recommend any of them before this one. Only buy it if it's required for a class -- otherwise you'll feel that you wasted your money.

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Summary: The John Locke of the XX century
Review: John Rawls is one of the great giants of political theory of the twentieth century. His builds on the liberal tradition of social contract theories and on the rational quest for universal imperatives that could provide a solid structure for a free and democratic society in a world divided by different world views and conception of the good. In my view, this places Rawls in the lockean and kantian tradition. It is a typical "right prior to good theory", that is premissed on the equal dignity and on rational and moral competence of individuals. It is with these traits that individuals are idealized and placed in an original position behind a veil of ignorance. In this situation, where they don't know what their real position in society will be, they chose the principles that will form a just society. These principles, concerning equal rights, access to positions in government and a concern for the improvement of those worst off even when inequality increases, are the principles of justice. Much has been said about the ideal character of the original position, the ideal character of its subjects, of the assumptions of equal concern and respect that lie behind this model and about the difference principle. The thing is that Rawl's theory of justice retains its appeal, because it is ultimately premissed in the equal dignity and freedom of individuals. It is interesting that this modern liberal understanding has a strong christian element that predates Locke himself. For instance, I remenber that one of the english levellers (Walwyn of Lilburne, I'm not sure now) a contemporary of Oliver Cromwell, has a writting in which he deffends that since there are so many different opinions in matters of religion, the power in the commonwealth should rest not so much in one given interpretation of christian ortodoxy, but on a sense of justice that derives from the consideration of all individuals as equal before God, worthy of equal concern and respect even when they disagree in matters of religion. In my opinion, only a theory of justice premissed in the equal dignity and freedom of every individual can provide a strong foundation for a free, open, fair and democratic society, based on the rule of law and on human rights.

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Summary: AN AMAZING PIECE OF WORK
Review: John Rawls offers a theory that not only refutes utility, but offers a profound alternative. The veil of ignorance is an amazing concept and ensures true fairness with in a distrubutive system. Rawls has created an sound argument with little room for error.

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Summary: Poetic Review of an Irrelevant View of Justice
Review: John Rawls would feign profess

That over power his does not obsess,

And that his first principle,

(if he is to have principles at all)

Is most exstensive equal liberty for all.

But I doubt this is really true.

For what he wants for me and you

Is to be veiled, simple bots

And see ourselves as just have-nots.

For in that placid state of "dumb"

Ambition

(Pink Floyd, forgive me)

Would grow comfortably numb.

We all would cheerfully choose

The beating of the socialist drum.

The welfare state would grow immense

And cradle us in its kind hands.

And if you missed this poet's brew,

I will explain in prose for you:

Rawls imagines that all of us have to imagine ourselves being both ignorant and have nots. And having imagined ourselves as such we would adopt a socialist public policy. His philosophizing is absurd and irrelevant. "A Theory of Justice" is one of the most overrated books of the twentieth century.

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Summary: Read the Book, Not the Reviews (Except This One)
Review: John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is almost universally regarded as the most important work of political philosophy in the 20th century. It's been translated into tons of foreign languages, is taught at hundreds of universities around the world, and has generated a huge library of academic and non-academic comment. Although the book's core conclusions are broadly social democratic, even right-wing scholars like Robert Nozick, Richard Epstein, and Friedrich Hayek have hailed its brilliance.

But now Mr. Walt Byars, a libertarian economist and philosopher in Tampa, Florida, has discovered that the book is "blatantly shoddy, contradictory, and confused." Mr. Byars' review can be found immediately below. His criticism is focused on a short section (in a very long book) where Rawls discusses time preference. Briefly put, Rawls contends that people in the "original position" won't choose principles of justice that discriminate between people living at different periods of time.

For reasons that aren't given, Mr. Byars claims that this move destroys the argument of A Theory of Justice since people in the real world -- ah ha! -- do have time preference. This claim is curious: as anyone who has actually read the book knows, Rawls imposes all sorts of "unreal" conditions on persons in the "original position" in order to remove the influence of bias and arbitrariness on the selection of principles of justice.

Mr. Byars is a good sport, checks his reviews, and is never shy about offering his opinions, so Amazon readers may be interested in seeing how he responds. In the meantime, they should ignore his negative comments and read A Theory of Justice. The book is long and often boring, but it offers a wealth of sophisticated philosophical and political arguments that have engaged thinkers all over the world. People who read it carefully and think about the arguments -- rather than peruse it to find areas where it contradicts their pet theories -- will find their worldview transformed and deepened, even if they reject many of Rawls' conclusions.

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Summary: Misreading Rawls
Review: John Rawls' masterful "A Theory of Justice" doesn't need to be defended by me, but I honestly doubt whether many of the far-right Amazon reviewers who attack the book have actually read it. They certainly misunderstand or willfully misrepresent its arguments. Take Mr. Walt Byars of Tampa, for example, who dismisses Rawls as a "bad philosopher" and then writes: "Much of the veil of ignorance relates to getting the person in the original position to choose what is best for the average man." As anyone who has actually read "A Theory of Justice" knows, the original position rules out utilitarian results and generates principles of justice that protect the worst off members of society, not the average members. How someone could read the book yet get this fundamental point wrong is amazing (unbelievable, in fact). To paraphrase Amazon reviewer C.T. Dreyer (who has read and understood Rawls), "Just read the book!"

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Summary: Utopianism
Review: John Rawls' problem is the basic problem of liberalism: total disregard for human nature.

Rawls ignores Jefferson's warning to Adams that "Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean that it can be so".

Rawls constructs a fantistical set of assumptions and conditions that have no regard for modern anthropological or psychological evidence that man is an instinctive animal superior to other animals because he has more, not less, instincts in the form of cognitive subsystems finely tuned for dealing with his immediate world. For an inkling of this fundamental human nature Rawls is so blind to see Donald Brown's "Human Universals".

Rawls' book is another attempt to justify what is essentially communism. It fails the same way collectivist theory and practice always does, by assuming that people are infinitely maleable creatures. When this turns out not to be the case, as it always will, the last resort of such theories must be totalitarianism to force the citizens to do what is "right".

We have here a perfect example of the disconnected academic lost in a fantasy of what he wants to be so, but never can if humans are the objects in question.

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Summary: inordinately influential and just plain godawful
Review: John Rawls' Theory of Justice is the single most important philosophical work of the Left since Marx. As even a brief search of the Internet will reveal, it is one of the most widely discussed topics in political philosophy. I fondly recall arguing about Rawls' theories in John Singer's Values and Institutions class at Colgate, so it was interesting to finally try reading it. It turns out, the revolution that Rawls created was based on a simple but totally specious change in the assumptions about human nature, and upon this rotten foundation he built up a shaky edifice to justify Liberal yearnings. The book is reminiscent of a treatise by a Medieval scientist, working out the elaborate orbital patterns that planets would require if the Universe actually were geocentric.

In order to accomplish his revolution, Rawls posited a counterintuitive and antihistorical starting point for the discussion of political theory. The great political philosophers, Hobbes, Locke, etc., had used the "state of nature" as the starting point for their theories. In this state of nature, men were assumed to be completely self-centered and dedicated only to their own interests, with the result that life was "nasty, brutish and short" and only the strongest survived. But gradually men tired of this blood sport and entered into a social contract wherein they surrendered some personal sovereignty to a central governing entity, which, in whatever form, would enforce a set of impartial laws in order to protect men from one another. This is a pretty minimalist position, the social contract and the government that it creates serve only to provide a certain level of physical security, leaving men free to pursue their own fortunes and taking no interest in the degree to which they succeed. But it conforms with our intuitive understanding of human nature, our observations of our fellow man and, most importantly, it has proven a workable basis for understanding politics for some 300 years.

The essential change that Rawls made was to replace the State of Nature with his "Original Position", wherein, when it came time for primordial man to enter into a social contract, because he would be ignorant of his own capacities (the "veil of ignorance"), he would pursue a low risk strategy and choose a social contract based on egalitarianism; he would seek the most equal distribution of wealth and power possible, just in case it turned out that he was the least fit of the species.

If Rawls is right, if men acted on the assumption that they would be one of the ones left behind once the race of life begins, then the rest of his theory might be worth examining. But, of course, this assumption runs counter to everything we understand about ourselves and our fellow human beings. It is a fuzzy headed liberal's view of the appropriate strategy for life's losers--make political decisions on the basis of the likelihood that you are a loser and need help. But look around a casino or a Lottery Ticket line and you will see that the losers think that they too are winners. Look at polls about taxation levels and you find that the lower class does not want the upper class taxed too heavily, because they assume that they, or their children, are headed for that bracket eventually. It turns out that people act very much as the great philosophers expected them to; they act out of naked self interest and the belief that they are capable and deserve whatever they can achieve. The justice that men seek is in fact little more than an impartial application of a set of laws that are fair to all, not an equal distribution of goods and power, which would necessarily impinge on the freedom of all.

Rawls' great error is to try to base his theory on a generalized yearning for "happiness". Rawls was seeking a positive definition of Man's aspiration in the "original position", but the inevitable result, because we will all define happiness differently, is to create a foundational quagmire for his theories. After all, you may define happiness as having a lot of stuff, but I may define it as spiritual enlightenment. The classic understanding, basing the social contract on the avoidance of death, is obviously universal, we are all agreed that our own deaths are to be avoided, and, therefore, more sound. .

Finding the basic supposition that props up Rawls' whole theory to be fundamentally incorrect, it behooves us little to examine the superstructure he seeks to construct upon this error. Suffice it to say, no system of government has ever achieved a more equal distribution of wealth and power than has the American Constitutional Republic and it is based on the classic understanding of human nature found in Hobbes and Locke. 'Nuff said.

GRADE: F

Rating:
Summary: Good but for one fatal flaw
Review: My feelings about Rawls are similar to those that I have about Immanual Kant. Clearly, I cannot slag the guy completely- I intuitively agree with his conclusions and its seriosu that he has given a lot of balanced thought to what he has written. Nevertheless, like Kant, he misses and error so basic that thier respective failures to take cognizance of it must have something to do with the rootedness of their world view- it is not that I think Rawls is stupid, jsut that he literally cannot see the problem.

Wich is this- the veil of ignorance is a complete sham. In order for the veil to work, the people or person in the origianl position must have NO information, in order to posit justice as fairness without factoring in your self-interest. The problem is that fairness is a concept, furthermore it is a concept dealing with practical ethics- it therefore constitutes "information." A lot of people beleive that, though it is impossible for us to get to the original position, given that we have knowledge of our place in society, if we were there we could do as Rawls suggest- thus the veil of ignorance is a practical impossibility. Unfortunately, its worse than that- it is not only impossible to get to the original position, it is impossible for any individual, even a theoretical one, to be in that position. The structure of language itself, and thus thinking, constitutes information that is inherently prejudicial. Only a non thinking nonentity could thus stand behind Rawls' veil.