[PEN-L:32578] Re: John Rawls

[enilsson@xxxxxxxxx]

Jim D wrote,

> My point was that this seems pretty individualistic. It
>doesn't recognize that people care about the fates of
>others even without doing the "putting myself in the
>other guy's shoes" routine.

Rawls artifical situation (where you didn't know what place you would
have in the society being designed) doesn't necessarily have any
relationship to the assumption that people _don't_ care about others.

If people were 60% purely self interested and 40% caring about others,
their choice of the "best" society would still be shaped by this 60%.
Hence the need for Rawls artifical situation.

By assuming people would not know where they would be in the yet-to-be-
created society, this would (might?) eliminate all "self-interested"
perspectives about the construction of the just society.

I don't know, however, if the choices people would make in this situation
would be based on avoidance of risk of being poor or otherwise
disadvantaged. This might be a possible assumption about how people would
choose in this artifical situation, but I don't think this is the only
possible assumption about how people would act and other possible
assumptions about human motivations would lead to the Rawlsian solution.
The focus on avoiding risk might--or might not--be a neoclassical
interpretation of such a situation.

Eric.