Knowledge Problems from behind the Veil of Ignorance.

• Author: D'Amico, Daniel J.
• Position: Influence of John Rawls' framework on F.A. Hayek's critique of social justice - Critical essay

Relative to the prominent influence of the Rawlsian framework (Rawls 1971), F. A. Hayek's (1978) forceful critique of social justice has been largely overshadowed. This is not surprising because Hayek's bold proclamadon that social justice is essentially meaningless was likely penned prior to his closer reading of Rawls. (1) Hence, those committed to Rawlsian social justice today perceive Hayek's argument as a sort of straw man rather than as a deep or foundational engagement.

I argue that much of Hayek's initial skepticism was warranted and remains prescient even amid the more nuanced Rawlsian framework. Rawls's theory is not a moral prescription for specific institutional changes; it instead aims more modestly to identify the margins from which we may assess the relative moral qualities of different institutional communities. In other words, Rawls is concerned primarily with how we know which sets of rules and public policies are more just compared to others.

My central claim is that the Rawlsian framework does not succeed in this more-mild aspiration. To assess the relative moral conditions of different institutional systems requires comparative institutional analysis beyond the capacities of the Rawlsian paradigm. In short, Rawls does not sufficiently address the epistemic challenges inherent to the processes of institutional design or selection. In result, Rawls may succeed in providing some good reason(s) for why social equality bears moral relevance, but his paradigm provides no meaningful way to assess the relative moral value of social equality or any other normative value against other reasonable moral standards.

In essence, the idea of the veil of ignorance is a conceptual attempt to mitigate individual citizens' biases. It seems obvious that any individual would prefer rules that privilege her own personal interests, but what sorts of institutional rules would a person select if she were conveniently blind to her own identity or socioeconomic status within a community? What rules would reasonable citizens choose from behind a "veil of ignorance"? Rawls argues that such agents would be risk averse and would thus prioritize those institutions that assure the well-being of the least well-off. Rawls labels this situation "the maximin condition." Hence, the veil of ignorance is thought to vindicate a general normative commitment to social equality.

Rawlsians and Hayekians draw contrasting policy inferences from the two thinkers' respective theories. Rawlsians interpret the insights from the veil of ignorance to justify stronger institutional commitments to redistributions and social safety nets than are currently observed. Hayek (1960), although not principally opposed to public-welfare programs, tends to emphasize the epistemic challenges inherent to central planners while designing and implementing such programs. Furthermore, Hayek's commitment to generality places strong normative limitations on the potentials of progressive redistributions.

I believe that the disagreements of policy across Rawlsians and Hayekians are more than skin deep. Rather than merely reflecting the alternative biases of these two thinkers or the biases of their respective followers, these divergences stem from core differences in how the two models understand the positive operations of society and specifically the processes of institutional design and selection therein. In short, the Rawlsian framework implies that social outcomes, like material distributions, are capable of being designed and strategically manipulated through democratic deliberation. In contrast, Hayek's insights and more contemporary findings of social science suggest a far more limited potential for democratic deliberation to effectively reshape inequality via institutional manipulations. In Kantian terms, "ought implies can." Hence, normative policy implications that are justified on Rawlsian grounds break down if such outcomes are not systematically governable by designed efforts and then break down further if such efforts conflict with other normative commitments of high moral weight.

Comparative social science today demonstrates a much broader swath of institutional types than the Rawlsian vision accommodates. In short, different communities confront some similar and some unique social problems, but such problems are often distinctly shaped by the particular conditional factors faced across diverse societies. Hence, the intentions and functions that motivate collective choices toward the design and maintenance of institutional norms also vary across communities. Such institutional functions are difficult if not impossible to fully comprehend let alone predict from a purely theoretical vantage or behind a veil of ignorance.

Attempting to ascertain the normative dimensions of a particular social norm apart from the real social context within which it was developed is comparable to asking what is the just price for a particular commodity. It could very well be that an equilibrium price in a particular social setting was brought about by morally dubious procedures or actions, but such information alone tells us virtually nothing about how to actually obtain more morally desirable outcomes or at what morally reasonable consequence.

To demonstrate this limited potential of the Rawlsian framework, I investigate Inuits' historic social norms as a useful case study. "Inuit" is the current name used to refer to the indigenous peoples once commonly referred to as "Eskimos" in the present-day Arctic areas of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska. A variety of sociological and ethnographic reports provide consistent qualitative descriptions of individual life, legal customs, and social norms common among Inuit prior to the mid-twentieth century (see Briggs 1971; Brody 1977; Matthiasson 1992). Although Rawlsians may object that the veil-of-ignorance paradigm was intended to assess the normative qualities only of advanced Western democracies, I select the Inuit case specifically because its vast differences from contemporary developed contexts highlight some specific limitations of the Rawlsian framework and its associated inferences in that certain Inuit social norms seem to explicitly violate Rawlsian standards of social equality while promoting alternative social outcomes of dire normative relevance.

Although it is true that historic Inuit social norms were vastly different from Western norms, this case suffices to demonstrate a variety of key theoretical insights regarding how institutions are understood to evolve, operate, and change. First, institutional forms that relate to and shape legal, political, and economic outcomes are often deeply embedded in local conditional factors and long-run historical processes therein. Second, particular outcomes such as wealth distributions are the result of multiple different institutional types coexisting and interacting through time. Institutions across political, economic, legal, and cultural dimensions of a community tend to come in interdependent bundles. Hence, third, institutional forms cannot be transported or manipulated across societies without practical consequences, some with inescapable normative relevance. Insofar as these principles of institutional dynamics are...