Rob Wiblin: belief

Transcript context

…That should not have had as much influence as it has had, though it’s a wonderful book. You learn a lot from it, and Rawls was a very impressive figure. On Nozick, I think his actual views, which you see in his later works, involve a clear understanding that economic growth is good, but in Anarchy, State, and Utopia — it’s all about deontology. That doesn’t work. The actual intuition that drives the Wilt Chamberlain example — “Well, poor people spend money on Wilt Chamberlain. They enjoy it. Wilt earns money.” — is that this is part of some broader process of growth that will elevate many, many people, not just that it’s good if some poor youths can pay money to see Wilt play basketball. So he never brought out what really was making his argument stick. Yeah. Harsanyi had, I think, a much better version of the veil of ignorance argument that advocated in favor of something like total utilitarianism. And then, I feel, it was ruined by Rawls. But Rawls’s theory, it turned out, was much more popular and got a lot more play. What do you think is going on there? Do you agree with me that people should go back to the original Harsanyi veil of ignorance? I agree. I don’t favor either veil of ignorance, but Rawls was at Harvard. Rawls was a professional philosopher. He was connected in the right way. His book came along at the right time, when people wanted a rationale for a particular kind of social democracy. The way in which Rawlsian — like, the principles of liberty, and then maximin principle and what can be good for everyone — the way all those interact, I tend to think, is not coherent, and there are many sleights of hand in A Theory of Justice, not just the problem with economic growth and future generations and savings rates. It’s a brilliant book, how well he disguised those. It’s a kind of master class in the philosophy of disguise, is how I admire the book.…

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