Quiggan on Rawls
Yesterday, I commented on John Quiggan’s claim that utilitarianism lacks serious competitors as a public philosophy, by asking “Rawls?” Quiggan responds:
- Rawls attempts to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, but in the end only produces a variant that is more egalitarian than usual because the underlying preferences are more risk averse than most utilitarians assume [Harsanyi derives standard utilitarianism from an almost identical setup].
But surely Quiggan realizes that this criticism of Rawls was laid to rest decades ago. The role of the maximin principle in the original position has nothing to do with assumptions about preferences for risk–as Rawls himself made clear in A Theory of Justice and has been repeated dozens of times in the secondary literature. The gap between the assessment of utilitarianism in moral and political philosophy and its assessment in economics seems to be almost as large as ever, despite Sen’s heroic efforts. Utilitarianism is certainly an open topic in moral and political philosophy, and it has its defenders, but any reasonable assessment of the state of play would eschew the claim that utilitarianism lacks serious competitors. A more likely assessment would be that utilitarianism faces serious challenges–and that sophisticated consequentialists have embraced positions that move away from utilitarianism in significant respects.