Justice: What's the Right thing to do?Episode 7(2) Rawls: Justice as Fairness

Part 1— A Lesson in Lying

Immanuel Kant believed that telling a lie, even a white lie, is a violation of one’s dignity.

Kant says that lying even to a murder is wrong. The reason is once you start taking consequences into account to carve out exception to the categorical imperative, you’ve given up the whole moral framework. (一旦你开始考虑事情的后果，开例外，不遵循绝对命令). You’ve become a consequentialist or maybe a rule utilitarian.规则功利主义者

Kant doesn't base morality on consequences, debase it on formal adherence to the moral law.

Part 2 — A Deal is a Deal

Another application of Kant’s moral theory is his political theory. Kant says that just laws arise from a certain kind of social contract. But this contract is of an exceptional nature, it is not an actual contract that happened when people come together and try to figure out what the constitution should be. Kant points out that the contract that generates justice is what he calls an idea of reason.

“A contract that generates principles of right is merely an idea of reason (引申出公正原则的契约，只是理性的一个想法)，but it has undoubted practical reality, because it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of the whole nation.”— Immanuel Kant

Kant is a contractarian (契约论者), but he doesn’t trace the origin or the rightness of law to any actual social contract. Why not? I think Kant’s reason is that actual men and women gathered in real constitutional conversation would have different interests, values, aims and it would also be differences of bargaining power and differences of knowledge among them. So the law that would result from their deliberations wouldn’t necessarily be just, wouldn't necessarily conform to principles of right, but would simply reflect the differences of bargaining power, the special interests, the fact that some might know more than others about law or about politics.

John Rawls worked out in his book, A Theory of Justice in great detail and account of a hypothetical agreement as the basis for justice.

Rawls theory of justice in broad outline is parallel to Kant’s in two important respects. Like Kant, Rawls was a critic of utilitarianism:

“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override…The rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” — John Rawls. 每个人拥有基于公正的不可侵犯性，即使整个社会福利，也不能凌驾于其上。我们的权利受公正保护，不屈从政治谈判或社会利益的算盘。

The second respect in which Rawls’ theory follows Kant’s is on the idea that principles of justice properly can be derived from a hypothetical social contract. Not an actual one.

What is the moral force of this kind of hypothetical agreement? Is it stronger or weaker than a real agreement, an actual social contract? In order to answer that question, we have to look hard at the moral force of actual contracts.

Moral Force of Actual Contracts

• How do they bind or obligate?

a. consent-based —AUTONOMY 自主自愿

b. benefit-based — RECIPROCITY 互惠

• How do they justify the terms they produce?

(The answer is they don’t.)

Actual contracts are not self-sufficient moral instruments of any actual contract or agreement. It can always be asked is it fair what they agreed to? The fact of the agreement never guarantees the fairness of the agreement.

Two different aspects of the morality of contract: the consent-based aspect of obligations & the benefit-based aspect. 契约的道德力量的两个不同方面。

Actual contract have their moral force in virtue of two distinguishable ideals : autonomy & reciprocity.

But in real life every actual contract may fall short, may fail to realize the ideals that give contracts their moral force in the first place.

Imagine a contract among parties who were equal in power and knowledge rather than unequal, who are identically situated rather than differently situated. That’s the idea behind Rawls’ claim that the way to think about justice is from the standpoint of a hypothetical contract. 思考正义的方法是站在一个假想契约的角度上。

#contractautonomyreciprocity