Hmmm ... Justice

While traveling along the Heaven Path, there will inevitably arrise circumstances and states of affairs that cause us to ask what our responsibilities are to our fellow beings. This will occasionally come up in terms of whether our own position of advantage relative to others is just, but will more frequently come up in terms of whether other's position of advantage relative to us is just.

Just-ness seems to be an inherently slippery subject with a wide variety of philosophies that support one or another theory of justice.

I would like to address a concept of justice proposed by John Rawls.

Mr. Rawls held that Justice is the state of affairs that each of us would choose if we had to choose from behind a veil of ignorance.

In other words, each of us must describe a theory of justice that would operate in the world without knowing what our own role, status or situation will be in that world.

This is useful for a couple of reasons. One being that it is easy and to some degree natural to adopt a theory of justice that is self-serving but much harder to find one that serves everyone including you equally well, and two, it allows us to look at each of the possibilities while still assigning the chooser the same level of sincerity, dillegence and intelligence that we assign to ourselves in having chosen a particular theory, because it is us that is choosing while assigning different (other people's) sets of circumstances to ourselves while making our choices.

As a hard-working andmoderately successful entrepeneur it is easy to dismiss as ingenuous arguments in favor of the redistributive theories of justice and find validity in arguments against those theories.

On the other hand, being a hard-working but ultimately unsuccessful entrepeneur who is watching ones children wish they had something to eat for the third staight day, it is much easier to see the validity of those arguments that were otherwise dismissed as disingenuous.

And not knowing which of those two situations you will be in makes it much easier to see exactly how much of each theory should be incorporated into a just theory of justice.