>>>>A powerful way to think about theories of justice that connects our conversations
about the history of justice with the contemporary landscape, in the way that we think about
justice in our own world, is to think about what we mean by equality of opportunity. So
for Milton Friedman, equality of opportunity means that all people are protected in their
natural liberties and have the same opportunity to exercise their freedom in the public sphere.
And so this is a formal equality of opportunity, meaning that it's a kind of legal or constitutional
equality. Now you should ask, do we intuitively think that's consistent with justice? Do we
think that formal equality of opportunity that the protection of natural liberties is
necessarily just? And take as a concrete example a question that we'll be exploring over the
next several discussions, the institution of public education. Public education is deeply
embedded in the republican tradition of American thought. The tradition that goes back to the
very founding moment, thinkers like John Adams thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, and their
belief that people have to be empowered to be citizens and that they require a certain
kind of education to do so. Friedman's libertarian economics, if it's carried out to its logical
conclusions, may not in fact even allow for a very robust idea of public education. Because
if all we need to do to ensure a just society is ensure equal natural liberties, than there's
no warrant, there's no force that that compels us to ensure that people have a broader, a
more substantive equality of opportunity. A system of public education is a guarantee
of a kind of equality of opportunity that is more substantive. And it's a search for
a more substantive equality of opportunity that defines the broad American political
landscape today. And we can look to another thinker, a contemporary of Friedman, but one
who deeply inspired the American left and who is, in fact, the intellectual figure that
dominates mainstream American left-wing thought in the last generation of the 20th century,
and who remains to this day an inspiration for American liberalism: John Rawls. A philosopher
who is a professor like Milton Friedman, but not an economist, rather a philosopher and
who spends 40 years at Harvard University practicing and teaching philosophy. And Rawls
is famous above all for his monumental 1971 publication, "A Theory of Justice". And Rawls'
"A Theory of Justice" is a touchstone of modern liberalism and its conceptions of justice.
And in the theory of justice, Rawls says that we can reason our way to the conditions, to
the arrangements, to the institutions and rules that would govern a just society. But
he says, to do so, we have to act from what he calls the original position and what this
requires of us is that we forget who we are, that we don't take any of our subjective attributes
but rather operate as equal individuals behind what he famously calls a "veil of ignorance".
That means that you don't even know what you will be after the design of this society.
And it's a very powerful kind of metaphor for what it would mean to rationally design
a social and institutional order according to the principles of justice, and to do so
in a way that wasn't simply a rationalization of your own benefits. That wasn't a way of
describing the world that would somehow explain the way it is or the way that you benefit
from it, as just. Operating from behind the veil of ignorance is a way of ensuring a truly
rational and just order, because you don't know when you design it where you will end
up in the social order that it produces. And so it's a way of designing the rules that
must govern a just polity, and Rawls articulates some of the conclusions that would come out
of this way of ordering a social contract. And the first is, that it would guarantee
the maximization of each individual's liberties in a way that is consistent with the equal
liberties of everyone else. And so Rawls' political theory is grounded in a kind of
egalitarian liberalism, and so it sees individuals as agent that should be free, that they should
have liberty. And so this is liberal theory, but it's also profoundly egalitarian theory.
And Rawls says that a just order has to satisfy a second set of conditions so if the first
is equal liberty in a scheme that's consistent with everyone else's equal liberties, the
second is that this society has to fulfill the commands of distributive justice. And
so Rawls' theory of justice is grounded in an ancient conversation about, how do we determine
what each person deserves? And so Rawls imagines, like Aristotle, that there are some finite
goods that must be distributed and we must determine how they are distributed. And in
describing his vision of distributive justice he articulates two principles. One is that
it must embody a fair equality of opportunity, so in other words, it must embody a fair,
a truly substantive equality of opportunity. For Rawls differences of wealth are problematic,
and so he's not willing to accept differences in wealth in the same way that Friedman is,
who in his classical liberal, his libertarian paradigm, is willing to accept differences
in wealth because people start from a position of formal equality of equal liberty. Rather
people have to have fair equal opportunity, and that's a more substantive, a more robust,
that it's not simply enough that all people are able to negotiate contracts as they wish
but instead they must be provided with a position that allows them to have a fair equal opportunity.
And so this is where institutions like education or welfare can ensure a more substantive equality
of opportunity that would allow people not simply to have equal rights, but to have equal
opportunity. Everyone has the same chance. Rawls' vision of distributed justice goes
one further, however. He articulates what is known as the difference principle. Rawls
says that the intuitive just way to distribute property is completely equally, and so why
wouldn't we just have equality of outcome? Why wouldn't we just take up the amount of
GDP, the amount of product that we have in our economy a year and simply divide it out
among all the individuals? Well, the only way we can accept differences in wealth for
Rawls is if people have a fair equality of opportunity, and if the conditions of what
he calls the difference principle are met. And this principle says any difference of
wealth can only be just if it benefits the least well-off member of society. And so,
Rawls actually argues that this is the scheme, this is the conditions that people would agree
to in an original condition. If they were behind a veil of ignorance and they didn't
know if they would be a wealthy banker or the most impoverished wage worker in a factory,
that they would want to design an order that would guarantee that any differences in wealth
were somehow to the benefit of the least advantaged member of that society. And so Rawls' vision
of equality is extremely robust. It goes beyond formal equality, the equal protection of rights,
and it goes even beyond simply fair opportunity. That you can't just bring people to the same
conditions and then let them operate. Any differences that emerge, in fact, can only
be justified if they help those who are on the bottom. And so think in terms of three
different visions of what equality can mean. It can mean formal equality, equal protection
of rights in the sense of Friedman. It can mean substantive equality of opportunity,
that everyone has the same chance to succeed. And an equality that says we can only accept
differences, so if give everybody the same chance, we can only accept differences that
benefit whoever is on the very, very bottom, and for Rawls is the only truly just condition.
Now this is quite a radical proposition, and in fact it grates against, it it contradicts
a tradition of distributive justice that in fact goes back to Aristotle. And here Rawls
very clearly departs from the tradition of Aristotle that says justice is giving each
person what they're due and that somehow that desert, that merit, the grounds of deciding
what people deserve is grounded in their own individual excellence. Rawls isn't in fact
willing to accept that. And in fact he contradicts the meritocratic, the merit-based system of
distribution because he says people are endowed by the natural lottery in a way that's morally
arbitrary. That why is it fair that some people are smart, are good at shooting three-pointers,
are made to be doctors, that some people have a legal mind? In fact, that's morally arbitrary
they don't deserve their own attributes. They're given those in the lottery of fate, and they
don't necessarily merit extra distributions because of that. And so Rawls articulates
a theory of justice that says equal protection of rights isn't sufficient to ground an idea
of distributive justice, that fair equality of opportunity is necessary but not enough,
that in fact even in the fair system that we create there will be differences, and those
differences have to be such that they benefit whoever's the least well-off. And this is
a conception of justice that both draws from and depart the ancient tradition, the old
conversations, and it's a vision of justice that has been highly influential in the last
generation in America.