04-09-2004, 05:39 PM
The "veil of ignorance" is a somewhat flawed model for support of Rawls' position, in that (as Harsanyi apparently points out) if you were impartial, you very well might choose a social system that maximizes utility, rather than maxmin. Assuming the total utility for society was maximized (not just one kind of utility, but all kinds), then perhaps a "veiled" being would see the greater good of all being more important than the possibility that he (or someone else) would get stuck with a bad position. I think the Bayes Theorem is quite trivial to the problem, since it is nothing but a statistical model, while the actual problem is philosophical (or psychological, in a sense).
However, it has always seemed somewhat academic to me, since I'm with Adam Smith on this one: a well run system tends towards equality, and general equality tends to make a system run better. So a society which is utility-maximized with also be fairly close to pareto-optimal (though very unlikely to be Nash-optimal, since opportunism will always provide some way for a player to increase their share), with a fairly high level of equality. I think Rawls would have agreed with this position, and his critics are mostly people who believe either that this is not true, or just not necessarily true.
Jester
However, it has always seemed somewhat academic to me, since I'm with Adam Smith on this one: a well run system tends towards equality, and general equality tends to make a system run better. So a society which is utility-maximized with also be fairly close to pareto-optimal (though very unlikely to be Nash-optimal, since opportunism will always provide some way for a player to increase their share), with a fairly high level of equality. I think Rawls would have agreed with this position, and his critics are mostly people who believe either that this is not true, or just not necessarily true.
Jester