O terque quaterque beati!

 

O terque quaterque beati!
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O thrice and four-times blessed!
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Line 95; referring to the Trojans who had died defending their city.
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Variant translation: O three and four times blessed!

 

Virgil

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The point of one of [Rawls’] main constructions—the introduction of the “veil of ignorance”—is precisely to exclude from consideration empirical information that might prejudice the overriding normative force of the outcome. It is, then, extremely striking, not to say astounding, to the lay reader that the complex theoretical apparatus of Theory of Justice, operating through over 500 pages of densely argued text, eventuates in a constitutional structure that is a virtual replica (with some extremely minor deviations) of the arrangements that exist in the United States. It strains credulity to the breaking point to believe that “free and rational agents” (with no further qualifications), even if they were conducting a discussion behind an artificial veil of ignorance, and assuming that they were to agree on anything at all under those circumstances, would light on precisely these arrangements. Some critics might fasten on this as an indication of the essentially conservative bias of Rawls’s discussion: the theoretical imagination is employed not to think about alternatives to the status quo, but in order to reproduce it schematically in thought, presenting it as the outcome of full, free, rational discussion. This might seem grossly unfair, given Rawls’s evident intention to produce a work that would have some powerful redistributive implications. if, however, one thinks it at all reasonable to judge what is after all presented as a political philosophy by its actual political effects, it is hard to see how Rawls’s perfectly genuine redistributive hopes could have any chance of being realized—and not merely because Rawls has no theory of political action or agency, although that is also true. The actual effect of Rawls’s theory is to undercut theoretically any straightforward appeal to egalitarianism, Egalitarianism has the advantage that gross failure to comply with its basic principles is not difficult to monitor, There are, to be sure, well-known and unsettled issues about comparability of resources and about whether resources are really the proper objects for egalitarians to be concerned with, but there can be little doubt that if person A in a fully monetarized society has ten thousand times the monetary resources of person B, then under normal circumstances the two are not for most politically relevant purposes “equal.” Rawls’s theory effectively shifts discussion away from the utilitarian discussion of the consequences of a certain distribution of resources, and also away from an evaluation of distributions from the point of view of strict equality; instead, he focuses attention on a complex counterfactual judgment. The question is not “Does A have grossly more than B?”—a judgment to Which within limits it might not he impossible to get a straightforward answer—but rather the virtually unanswerable “Would B have even less if A had less?” One cannot even begin to think about assessing any such claim without making an enormous number of assumptions about scarcity of various resources, the form the particular economy in question had, the preferences, and in particular the incentive structure, of the people who lived in it and unless one had a rather robust and detailed economic theory of a kind that few people will believe any economist today has. In a situation of uncertainty like this, the actual political onus probandi in fact tacitly shifts to the have-nots; the “haves” lack an obvious systematic motivation to argue for redistribution of the excess wealth they own, or indeed to find arguments to that conclusion plausible. They don t in the same way need to prove anything; they, ex hypothesi, “have” the resources in question: “Beati possidentes.”

 

Raymond Geuss