Piercing Rawls's Veil of Ignorance
A (hopefully) final follow-up
In response to The Lies of Rawls several readers said
“The point of the veil is that you should care about others.”
and claimed this was kinda an obvious lesson. (One said those literal words, thus the quotation.)
I agree that it's obvious that one should care about others. There are tons of ways of learning this, the Veil itself is unnecessary. It adds nothing to the "You should care for others" discourse1, and actually it's really stupid if used for that purpose.
First, it rests on the assumption that the only entity the listener cares about is himself (or herself), and appeals to selfishness. "You could have been anyone, so you should want even the shittiest life to be good, cuz that could be you" implies that that's the best reason to care if someone else is suffering! But since I'm not actually anyone else, this is an argument that would not convince any actual selfish person. It pretends to be making a case for caring for others when in fact what it's doing is assuming you already care for others, and smuggling in a moral directive because you care for others.
What the Veil actually does is try to convince the listener that they should care about all entities exactly the same amount. Originally I think this was intended to only apply to the people sharing a particular society, but even on that level it's bonkers stupid. I care about people I love far more than most people, and I care for people who share my values more than those who oppose them. Nowadays the argument has been expanded to care for every human on Earth equally, which is even more dumb, because I care about local people more than distant people for the exact reasons that "You should care for others" exists as a moral norm in the first place2.
What's really repulsive to me is that it tries to convince the listener of this immoral position (yes, I think it's immoral to care about all entities equally, actually focusing on some people is vital) by destroying even the idea of social and personal bonds. It posits erasing everything that makes being human good as table stakes to consider the argument, and somehow people not only take it seriously, they cite it as a reason to do things.
I’m kinda glad that in recent years the Veil has even been expanded to non-humans. I may not have seen how terrible this argument was otherwise. It's actually terrible in its original form, but I needed the shock of WTF to make me refocus and consider it from first principles rather than just accepting what I had been taught.
When I wrote "you could’ve been born an E. Coli!" I received one reply "this is literally true." Sure, in the Veil argument it is. But IRL it is not. An Entity could have been born an E. Coli (and an entity was!). But that entity is not you, and it could not be you. And vice versa. So now I need an ACTUAL argument as to why I Should Care About [this entity]. That's what woke me up to the Veil actually not being an argument for caring for others at all. Instead it’s riding on the fact that this belief pre-exists in everyone, in order to seize the legitimate Karmic Debt we all owe away from those we legitimately owe it to, and redirect it to… usually a group the arguer values more than your family. :/ The Veil is a net that eats away at society by destroying the most conscientious within it, which is what makes it among the worst of these traps. Yeet it.
The Veil is not "consider alternatives where more people will be happier." That is just standard utilitarianism. The actual Veil argument was to argue that we should maximize the outcome of the most misfortunate until they are as well off as the 2nd-most misfortunate, then repeat, and so on up the line to the greatest extent possible. On the theory that everyone would be terrified that they might end up as the most misfortunate, so they want to minimize how bad that spot is.
Though I don't have zero care for the distant, to be clear
From the wiki article linked in the first footnote.
> The concept of the veil of ignorance has been in use by other names for centuries by philosophers (...) John Harsanyi helped to formalize the concept in economics, and argued that it provides an argument in favor of utilitarianism
So while Rawls used the veil to argue in favor of the described position, the veil has also been used to argue for (average preference) utilitarianism.
Also (average preference) utilitarianism doesn't technically demand your preferences to change in any way, it is simply a description of what morally good outcomes are. And doesn't have a position on what constitutes good desires.
Eg if humans desire to have special relationships with certain people then utilitarianism recommends (absent an overwriting concern) that people do have such relationships.
the veil of ignorance is not an argument about caring for others. it’s a thought experiment used to think about how one would want to structure society given that none of us chose to be born into the circumstances in which we were born.
you could argue that the veil of ignorance leads us to conclude that we should care about people, but the veil of ignorance could just as easily be used to argue that we *shouldn’t* care about people … at least not that much.
consider a society in which working adults at the high end of the economic distribution make $100,000/ year, while those at the lower end make $50,000. imagine that this society cares deeply for for the comparatively “impoverished” financial circumstances of those at the lower end of distribution and, thus, decides to redistribute the economic goods equally. imagine then that this results (due to the economic upheaval this redistribution creates) in everyone making $40,000/ year. … this type of redistribution would be unjust according to rawls’s theory (which makes space for what he calls “beneficial inequality”) since it actually makes people at the low end of the economic distribution worse off than they were under an unequal distribution … and this latter, economically equal society would clearly be a less desirable society to be born into than the former, economically unequal society when considered from behind the veil of ignorance.
in other words, the veil of ignorance can help us to evaluate which forms of inequality are just and which are not, and therefore, can actually help us to *limit* the extent to which we care about the existence of some, beneficial forms of inequality and, consequently, the people at the lower ends of those distributions.