Begin by answering the following questions:
- What are your group's interests, needs, or desires?
- Does your group have its fair share of primary goods: (1) Liberties and Rights, (2) Opportunities and Powers, (3) wealth and income
- Are your interests/access to goods being met under the current system of distribution?
- If not describe/prescribe a redistribution process to give your group what is "its due."
Exercise b
1. Now, renegotiate this contract under a veil of ignorance. The same classes will emerge in the system of justice you are creating by your contracting: Political leaders (legislators, judges, mayors, etc); Wealthy Individuals; Individuals with High Intelligence; Individuals with Low Intelligence; Poor); Members of Minority Groups; Women; Men. Only now, your task will be to negotiate a procedure of distribution under a veil of ignorance. You will enter into this system and come to occupy one of these roles, but at this point of negotiation, you do not know which of these roles.
2. As in Exercise A, you are negotiating on the basis of Hume’s circumstances of justice:
- Each group has interests that need to be protected in this process. Different group interests can be reconciled through compromise, integration, or tradeoff.
- You and everyone else are rationally self-interested. As such you are interested in maximizing for your group Primary Goods such as rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth.
- All negotiating parties are equal. But the roles bracketed by the veil of ignorance are not equal. How would you take this into account in the negotiation?
- Obviously your position will be constrained by the other parties in the negotiation. But, because of the veil of ignorance, you don’t know how that constraint will take place. What kind of negotiation stance can you take under the veil of ignorance? Again, remember that you want to maximize your acquisition of primary goods (rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, wealth and income). But this maximization cannot be brought about by privileging any of the roles mentioned above. You may be rich but you may be poor; you may be smart but you may be not so smart; you may be a man but you may be a woman. How do you insure maximize access to primary goods under these conditions?
- 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.
3. Negotiate a new procedure for distributing primary goods, risks, and harms under this veil of ignorance. Describe in detail your procedures.
Exercise c
1. Compare the procedure you developed in Exercise A with the pattern based approach of Rawls. Did you come up with something like the Equal Liberties Principle and the Difference Principle? Compare your procedure with Nozick’s Historical Process procedure. Which comes closest to the Hobbesian conception of distributive justice?
2. Compare the procedure you developed in Exercise B with the pattern based approach of Rawls. Did you come up with something like the Equal Liberties Principle and the Difference Principle? Compare your procedure with Nozick’s Historical Process procedure. Is this process compatible with a negotiation under the veil of ignorance? Finally which theory seems most compatible with your negotiation in Exercise B, the pattern based approach or the historical process approach?
Bibliography
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Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, species Membership . Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press. Your first item here
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A Theory of Justice . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p. 12.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings . Indianapolis, IN: Hackett (1987): 53.
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