Seemingly in response to my blog post from this morning, about what philosophy can or should add to the Occupy Wall Street movement, though most likely just a coincidence, Steven Mazie has a blog post over at The Stone that demonstrates the many ways in which John Rawls provides the ideal philosophical background for the movement:

[T]o move forward and make a difference, Occupy Wall Street needs specific goals backed by a more coherent, more inspiring vision for American democracy.  To their credit, protestors have recently begun debating which specific demands the movement should make, but their conversations appear to be unguided by any deeper wisdom.  A perfect intellectual touchstone would be the work of John Rawls, the American political philosopher who was one of the 20^th century’s most influential theorists of equality. Rawls named his theory “justice as fairness,” and emphasized in his later writings that its premises are rooted in the history and aspirations of American constitutionalism.  So it’s a home-grown theory that is ripe for the picking.

While there is certainly much in Rawls that seems to line up quite nicely with some of the central tenets of the movement, most notably and obviously Rawls’ Difference Principle (which states that inequality is only permissible insofar as it benefits the least well-off members of society), I think Mazie makes one critical mistake and one critical omission.

First, the mistake: Mazie suggests that the protesters ought to hold up Rawls’ A Theory of Justice as their weighty tome of choice. He cites Atlas Shrugged, so beloved of Tea Partiers, as proof that people are still reading long, dense texts for philosophical inspiration and so the Occupiers ought not to be deterred by its 600+ pages. But why not simply point people to Rawls’ final restatement of his argument, Justice as Fairness, which sets out the same argument (with helpful additions from Rawls’ other great volume, Political Liberalism) in fewer than 250 pages? If your goal is to get a whole bunch of people to read Rawls and familiarize themselves with his arguments — as is my goal when I teach Justice as Fairness in contemporary political theory course — it makes far more sense to use the shorter and more up-to-date version of his argument. I’m not saying that the Occupiers can’t read A Theory of Justice; I’m hypothesizing that most of them won’t.

Now, the omission: Nowhere does Mazie discuss the concept of the Veil of Ignorance, which is both critical to Rawls’ theory and so fitting when we think about the many problems raised by the Occupiers. The basic idea is simple: If we’re attempting to reason together about principles of justice that will inform the basic structure of our society, we ought to begin from a position in which we ignore all the morally arbitrary or irrelevant features that we know about ourselves. Since we don’t know about our natural talents and endowments, our race, class, or gender identity, or other such features that determine a great deal about how we tend to fare in society, Rawls argues:

that the most rational choice for the parties in the original position are the two principles of justice. The first principle guarantees the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good. The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and prerogatives of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.

I don’t think it’s too difficult to see the ways in which the Veil of Ignorance might shape some policy proposals that the Occupiers could put forward. Even though there’s no such thing in the real world, it’s clear that encountering Rawls’ thought experiment highlights the myriad injustices present in our society today, ones with which we would all be dreadfully uncomfortable if we could simply do the work of imagining ourselves behind Rawls’ Veil.

So, though I ultimately think that Mazie’s conclusion about the Occupiers’ affinity with John Rawls makes good sense — we’ve been talking about it in my class for weeks now — I also think he might have strengthened his piece considerably by making just a couple of points that he failed to set out. In brief, the affinity between the Occupiers and John Rawls seems pretty clear to philosophers; now philosophers might work at making it easier for other people to see.

HT: Zack Beauchamp.