Reconceptualising Rawls's Original Position as Public Reason — Epoche C1
The Original Position in Outline John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) revived the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant — the tradition that grounds political principles in what people could agree to — but carried it, as Rawls put it, to a higher level of abstraction. Instead of asking what actual people would agree to (actual people bargain from unequal positions, and agreements struck under duress or advantage carry no moral authority), Rawls asks what principles would be chosen in a carefully designed hypothetical situation, the original position . Its defining feature is the veil of ignorance : the parties choosing principles — the representatives who deliberate on behalf of a society's citizens — know the general facts of economics, psychology and sociology, but know nothing particular about themselves — not their class, race, sex, natural talents, religion, nor even their personal conception of what makes life worth living. Whatever principles they choose, they must be prepared to live under from any position in society, since for all they know they will occupy the worst one. Rawls argues the parties would choose two principles: first, that each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of basic liberties compatible with the same for all; second, that social and economic inequalities are permissible only where offices are open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and where the inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged — the celebrated difference principle . The reasoning he attributes to the parties follows the maximin rule of choice under uncertainty: rank alternatives by their worst possible outcomes and pick the alternative whose worst outcome is least bad. Maximin is not generally rational — nobody buys a lottery ticket by maximin — and Rawls is explicit that it applies only because the original position exhibits three special features: the veil deprives the parties of any basis for estimating probabilities; the guaranteed minimum under his principles (equal liberty, a decent share) is one the parties can live with; and the alternatives risk outcomes — slavery, persecution — that are intolerable. Under those conditions, gambling on being among the winners would be irresponsible. Often, then, the original position is understood primarily as a problem in the theory of rational choice: self-interested choosers, an information constraint, a decision rule, a solution. This interpretation is not baseless — Rawls himself wrote in 1971 that the theory of justice is "a part" of the theory of rational choice, a sentence he later retracted as an error, for reasons this essay will make central. The rational-choice reading, while foundational, reduces the original position to an instrument of individual calculation, and thereby weakens the deontological force Rawls sought — "deontological" meaning that the right is prior to the good: just principles constrain what may be done to persons regardless of aggregate benefit. I contend that a richer understanding emerges when we re-conceptualise the original position as a model for the public exercise of reason by moral persons — a perspective, moreover, deeply resonant with communal ethical traditions of Southeast Asia. Why the Rational-Choice Reading Falls Short Rawls built the original position against utilitarianism , the doctrine that institutions are just insofar as they maximise the sum (or average) of welfare across persons. His core objection is that utilitarianism "does not take seriously the distinction between persons": it extends to society the principle of rational choice for one individual — accept a present sacrifice for a later gain — and thereby licenses sacrificing some people's liberties for other people's greater happiness, as though society were a single person with one experience. A theory meant to block that move had better not itself be a mere maximising calculation. Yet if the original position is only a rational-choice device, it is exposed on exactly this flank, and the exposure is not hypothetical — it has a named author. The economist John Harsanyi argued (most pointedly in his 1975 review of Rawls) that a rational chooser behind a veil of ignorance, assigning equal probability to being each member of society and maximising expected utility — the standard Bayesian rule of weighting outcomes by their probabilities — would choose not Rawls's two principles but average utilitarianism , the principle of maximising average welfare. On Harsanyi's setup, the veil of ignorance generates utilitarianism rather than defeating it. If the whole content of the original position were "rational agents choosing under ignorance", the dispute between Rawls and Harsanyi would reduce to a technical quarrel about decision rules — maximin versus expected utility — and the deontological conclusion would hang on a contested premise of decision theory. Michael Sandel's communitarian critique in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) presses from the other side: parties defined only by rational self-interest are so thin, so denuded of character and attachment, that it is unclear why their choices should bind us, the thickly situated beings they purport to represent. Both critiques strike the same joint: calculation alone, however ingeniously constrained, does not yield moral authority. The Two Moral Powers and the Priority of the Reasonable The resources for a better reading are in Rawls's own text, and become explicit in his later work. In A Theory of Justice the basis of equality — the answer to "in virtue of what are persons owed justice?" — is moral personality : persons are characterised by two moral powers, a capacity for a sense of justice (the capacity to understand, apply and act from fair terms of cooperation) and a capacity for a conception of the good (the capacity to form, revise and pursue a view of what is worth living for). One clarification the or