Reconciling Rawlsian Justice with Consequentialist Thought — Epoche C1
John Rawls's veil of ignorance — the thought-experimental screen that hides from the parties choosing principles of justice all knowledge of who in particular each of them will turn out to be — is routinely presented as the device that finally defeated utilitarianism. Two claims are made against that story. First, a correction: the veil is not intrinsically anti-utilitarian, because the economist John Harsanyi derived average utilitarianism from essentially the same device, and Rawls had to work hard to block the derivation. Second, a limited synthesis, narrower but firmer than the one usually gestured at: principles chosen behind the veil cannot be applied, compared or refined without consequential information, and Rawls's own architecture is built to admit that information stage by stage. What Rawls Is Committed To, Stated Precisely Before any reconciliation can be assessed, four load-bearing terms need their plain meanings, because the popular summary — that Rawls chose 'liberty and equality' over utility — misstates the theory in ways that matter here. The original position is a hypothetical choice situation in which representatives select the principles that will govern the basic structure of society: the major institutions — constitution, property system, courts, the economy, the family — that jointly distribute rights, duties and life prospects. The veil of ignorance is the stipulation that these representatives know no particular fact about themselves: not their class, sex, race, natural talents, nor even their conception of what makes a life good, nor which generation they belong to. They do know general truths of economics and psychology. Primary goods are the all-purpose means a rational person wants whatever else they want — the basic liberties, freedom of movement and choice of occupation, powers of office, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect. Rawls's measure of how well a life is going, for purposes of justice, is an index over these goods, not a measure of satisfaction. Rawls's principles are two, but they contain three requirements ranked in strict order, and the ranking is the part usually lost. First, each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties. Second, social and economic inequalities are permissible only if they attach to offices open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged — the difference principle . The order is lexical: the liberty principle must be satisfied before the second is consulted, and fair equality of opportunity before the difference principle. The difference principle is therefore the last-ranked criterion, not the master one, and calling the theory 'liberty and equality' obscures that no gain to the worst off may be purchased by curtailing basic liberties (Rawls 1971). The word deontological also needs care, because it is where the supposed chasm is usually located. Rawls gives it a restricted sense. A teleological theory, in his usage, specifies the good independently of the right and then defines the right as whatever maximises that good; classical utilitarianism is the paradigm. His own theory is deontological only in the sense of not being teleological so defined. It is emphatically not the claim that consequences are irrelevant to rightness — Rawls says plainly that any doctrine taking no account of consequences would be irrational. The disagreement was never about whether outcomes matter; it was about whether the right is defined as maximisation of an independently specified good. The Same Veil, the Opposite Conclusion: Harsanyi's Derivation The strongest reason to doubt that the veil is anti-utilitarian by nature is that a utilitarian conclusion had already been drawn from it. The derivation is reconstructed here, because a reader who has not seen it cannot judge how much work Rawls's own argument must do. Harsanyi (1955) asks what an impartial observer would choose if he had to select a social arrangement without knowing which of the $n$ positions in society he would occupy, treating each as equally likely. He then faces a lottery, and standard decision theory tells him to maximise expected utility. Writing $u_i(x)$ for the utility of the person in position $i$ under arrangement $x$, that expectation is $$W_{\mathrm{H}}(x) \;=\; \sum_{i=1}^{n} \frac{1}{n}\, u_i(x) \;=\; \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n} u_i(x).$$ The factor $\frac{1}{n}$ is a constant, identical for every arrangement, so ranking arrangements by expected utility is exactly ranking them by the sum, and therefore by the average, of individual utilities. On these assumptions the veil does not merely permit average utilitarianism; it entails it. The step carrying all the weight is the assignment of probability $\frac{1}{n}$ to each position, justified by the claim that the veil supplies no information whatever distinguishing one position from another. Harsanyi buttressed this with a theorem independent of the lottery story. The aggregation theorem states that if each individual's preferences over uncertain social prospects satisfy the standard axioms of expected-utility theory (completeness, transitivity, continuity, independence), and the social preference satisfies them too, and society is indifferent between two prospects whenever every individual is, then the social evaluation must take the form $$W(x) \;=\; \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_i\, u_i(x), \qquad a_i > 0 .$$ That is: a weighted sum of individual utilities, and nothing else. It applies to the original position because the parties there are precisely choosing among social prospects under risk; adding impartiality — no reason to weight any person above another — forces the weights $a_i$ equal, and equal weights return the average. Rawls blocked this at the probability step. He denies that the parties may use equal probabilities, on the ground that they have no objective basis for any probability judgement at all, and adds th