The Rawls–Harsanyi Dispute: A Moral Point of View

Abstract

Central to the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute is the question of whether the core modeling device of Rawls' theory of justice, the original position, justifies Rawls' principles of justice, as Rawls suggests, or whether it justifies the average utility principle, as Harsanyi suggests. Many commentators agree with Harsanyi and consider this dispute to be primarily about the correct application of normative decision theory to Rawls' original position. I argue that, if adequately conceived, the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute is not primarily a dispute about the correct application of normative decision theory to Rawls' original position. Instead, Rawls and Harsanyi aim to model different moral ideals, and this difference in their moral assumptions leads them to significantly different conclusions about justice. There is no winner in the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute. Instead, the dispute merely clarifies the moral ideals and their formal representations that need to be assumed in order to justify either Rawls' contractualist principles of justice or the average utility principle. Thus understood, the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute offers a promising starting point for future research that can deepen and enrich our understanding of the demands of justice.

Ethics in Digital Health: A Deontic Accountability Framework

“…The ODP-EL standard indicates potential direction for research in this area, using a rich model of possible word semantics, based on Kripke model, augmented with the concept of utility [1]. This model, grounded in legal compliance approaches [29] and broader ethics developments [30], can provide a firm basis for further tooling developments.…”

Impartiality, Priority, and Justice: The Veil of Ignorance Reconsidered

“…However, Rawls's original position argument for the difference principle, and thus for a strongly prioritarian principle of justice, is controversial. In particular, Roemer rejects Rawls's argument, 34 36 Rawls's final revised argument for the difference principle is valid on decisiontheoretic grounds, although it is conceptually a different point whether or not Rawls's assumptions are ultimately plausible. For my argument, it is sufficient that if Rawls's assumptions are made, then the difference principle, and thus a prioritarian principle of justice, is justified in Rawls's original position, despite the criticisms of Rawls's early argument for the difference principle.…”

The Harsanyi-Rawls Debate: Political Philosophy as Decision Theory Under Uncertainty

“…The two authors get to different conclusions mainly because, despite these similarities, they in fact use qualitatively different experiments with different objectives (Moehler, 2015). First, there's a distinction on what is being distributed in those scenarios: in Rawls (1971, p. 65), there are agents who are in the process of defining the basic structure of the distribution of the "benefits and burdens of cooperation" of a stable society -i.e., resources.…”