5.2 Value profile: justice

Exercise a

Introduction

First, you will participate in a natural lottery. From a hat (or box) you will draw one of the following:

The natural lottery

• You (or your group) has been born as a woman
• You (or your group) has been born as Michael Jordan. (You have talents that would make you an excellent basketball player if these are properly developed.
• You (or your group) has been born as Albert Hirschmann, a German of Jewish dissent who comes of age in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. You have extraordinary mental talents and have a good preliminary education but are now living in a world where people of your descent are the objects of persecution.
• You (or your group) has been born as a graduate from the Harvard MBA program.
• You (or your group) has been born in a nation that occupies what is now called the "Global South." (Haiti would be a good example.)
• You (or your group) has been born as a Black man who has always lived in Detroit, MI.

Some key assumptions to guide you all through the negotiation process.

• Your group has interests that need to be protected in this process. You can try to integrate interests, compromise interests, or tradeoff interests with one another.
• You and the other parties to the contract are rationally self-interested. As such you are interested in maximizing access to Primary Goods such as rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth.
• You are willing to accept constraints to your primary goods but only if other groups also do so. In other words, you should not unilaterally give up your group’s access to any primary goods since these compose rational-self interest and are also essential to survival.
• This contract is supposedly neutral as to different conceptions of the self, for example, whether the self is essentially or non-essentially related to any community. But it tends in the direction of what MacPherson terms “possessive individualism.” In this case, there is a human nature that is prior to an independent of any relation to other individuals or to a community. Hobbes reduces this human nature to acquisitiveness or unlimited desire. Locke and Rousseau see a “fellow feeling” as balancing or checking acquisitive desire.

Negotiate a new social contract with the other groups.