There was an interview in the New York Times a few weeks back of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, in which O’Neill poised this basic resolution: if you had ten bottles of water, and one of them had poison in it but you didn’t know which one, you probably wouldn’t drink from any of them. It seems to me that this is very much Rawls reasoning for why one would, in the Original Position, arrive at the Second Principle of Justice. He presumes that we are incredibly, perhaps unbelievably, risk averse. I don’t doubt that in O’Neill’s hypothetical most people would not drink any of the bottles, as long as the poison was assuredly deadly. But what if it wasn’t deadly? What if it would just make you dreadfully sick, but you’d get better after a month? A week? A day? An hour? The less drastic the worse case scenario is the more people will be willing to gamble.
There’s no question that there is terrible suffering in the world, but is there terrible suffering in the United States? People don’t die of starvation in the U.S. (or any other wealthy western country, for that matter). The contemporary West is almost a-historical in this regard: the worst off in our society are still basically guaranteed subsistence. Given that, I don’t believe people under the veil of ignorance would arrive at the Difference Principle.
So let us say that John, Jane and Jim are in the Original Position. They are faced with a decision the effect of which will determine whether they live in a society where the three economic classes are essentially Upper, Middle and Lower, or Upper-Middle, Middle, and Lower-Middle. The Second Principle would have John, Jane and Jim choose the latter, but I suspect they would go for the former, as long as the Lower Class were guaranteed a level above subsistence.
Let’s take this even further and assume that the lowest level of society continues to rise unabated over the next hundred years so that it is historically aligned, in an impossibly objective sense, with today’s Middle Class. By any historical standards that is an utterly desirable life, and yet analogy would lead us to conclude that relative to the upper levels of Future America, it would be unacceptable to Future John, Jane and Jim in the Original Position. It’s a question of whether those under the Veil of Ignorance would make decisions based on Absolute conditions or relative ones.
