1/ A recent exchange with @dmarusic has reinforced a recent habit of thinking about John Rawls - not the value-policing "folk Rawls" enthusiasts (as Damir dubs them) - but the guy who wrote "The Green Book," as we called it in the '70s. #Rawls
2/ My copy of 'A Theory of Justice' (1973) is a fifth-printing 1973 paperback. The first third or so is full of my not-very-insightful, guy-in-his-twenties, marginal notes. I see no sign that I understood Rawls' detailed arguments.
3/ But rereading the "Justice as Fairness" chapter today, I can certainly remember reading it in 1973 (the year I started graduate school) and I absorbed enough of it to have remembered and used the "original position" argument many times since.
4/ But I missed a lot. There is no way I could have understood Rawls' use of indifference curves or picked up from his use of "rational choice" terminology that he was linking ethics to economics in a novel way.
5/ Frankly, I think "state of nature", social contract-type theories attracted me in my 20s because at that age I lived for the summers where I could lead long canoe trips.
6/ My conceit was that a bunch of friends in the woods could figure out where society had gone wrong and use this intensely cooperative experience to imagine a new starting point. My (rather Rousseauean) version of "wilderness education".
7/ Rereading Rawls today I wish I had done it earlier. Note: I think there is a valid "Rawls-lite" characterization out there - some economists like Robert Frank (@econnaturalist) have done wonderful things with it - but it's good to get back to the source.
8/ But does this 1971 book fly? Yes, but with questions. It's hard to read the word "fairness" troday without thinking of Jonathon Haidt's categories. It's fascinating how Rawls' "veil of ignorance" condition boxes out the competitors to "fairness."
9/ In one sense this is OK, Rawls is talking about justice, not morality. But one has to ask whether a solution can be stable if it ignores important moral buttons like loyalty, sanctity, etc.
10/ The other missing piece is time. The book does have an intergenerational section - and Rawls gets it - but this is 1971 and it's not front and center.
11/ To redo Rawls (or Rousseau) today would be to add the present/future tradeoff to his freedom/equality tradeoff. Rousseau hated the idea of representation, but writing today I have to think Rawls would introduce the idea of trusteeship-for-the-future into the justice mix. /e
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