第15讲：《什么是公平的起点？》
John Rawls把他的“无知的面纱”理论运用到社会和经济平等的争论焦点中，以及公平治理的问题。他问，如果每个市民都必须参与税收的再分配问题—在他们不知道最终会成为社会成员中的穷人还是富人的时候-我们大多数人不是更喜欢消除金融风险并同意财富的公平分配么？
Some of the major alternatives
Utilitarian
Rawl: we each want to be respected with dignity, even if we turn out to be a member of a minority, we don’t want to be oppressed. So we would reject utilitarianism.
First principle, equal basic liberties基本自由原则
“Utilitarianism makes the mistake of forgetting, or at least not taking seriously, the distinction between persons.”
Second principle, do they work to the benefit of everyone including those at the bottom. Only those inequalities would be accepted behind the veil of ignorance.
Some people challenge the argument, saying, maybe people would want to take their chances, hoping that they would wind up on top.
The second argument is the straightforwardly moral argument: the distribution of income and wealth and opportunities should not be based on factors for which people can claim no credit. It shouldn’t be based on factors that are arbitrary from a moral point of view. (Difference principle)
e.g. A feudal aristocracy 封建贵族统治 The thing that’s wrong about it is that people’s life prospects are determined by the accident of birth. But that’s arbitrary from a moral point of view.
That suggests moving to a system of fair equality of opportunity: a merit-based system绩效化制度. Everyone starts from the same starting line.
Rawls: Even that doesn’t go far enough in remedying, or addressing, the moral arbitrariness of the natural lottery. It may eliminate the influence of social contingencies and upbringing, but it still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents.
Now how do you go beyond?
Rawls: you don’t have to have a kind of leveling equality, if you want to go beyond a meritocratic conception. You permit, you even encourage those who may be gifted to exercise their talents. But what you do is that you change the terms on which people are entitled to the fruits of the exercise of those talents. “Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.”
Question: effort?
Rawls: Even the effort that some people expend, conscientious striving, the work ethic, even effort depends a lot on fortunate family circumstances, for which we cannot claim no credit.
Example: birth order
（这里觉得好deterministic）
第16讲：《我们该得到什么？》
Sandel教授重述了三种不同的理论，涉及如何在生活中分配收入，财富和机会。他总结了自由主义，精英制度系统和平等主义理论，引起了对当今社会薪酬差别的公正性的讨论。Sandel比较了美国联邦最高法院O’connor大法官（200 000美元）和法官Judy（2,500万美元）的工资。Sandel问大家，这是否公平？如果不是，原因何在？Sandel解释了John Rawls的观点-他认为，个人的“成功”往往是和荣誉无关的随机结果：运气，继承的财富，积极的家庭环境。但是，对于付出更多努力和更长时间去获得成功的个体-如何来衡量他/她付出的努力呢？
Theories of distributive justice
Libertarian: free market system. A system of free exchange, a free market economy
Meritocratic system: fair equality of opportunity
Egalitarian: a more egalitarian conception of distributive justice that he defines by the difference principle
Examine the 3 objections to Rawls’ egalitarian theory/difference principle
1. What about incentives积极性?
Defender: The standpoint from which the question of incentives needs to be considered is not the effect on the total size of the economic pie, but instead from the standpoint of effect of incentives, or disincentives, on the well-being of those on the bottom. “The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well.” You can have incentives and adjust the tax rate but only for the purpose of not hurting people at the bottom.
(from meritocratic conception) What about effort? “They deserve it”
Answer 1: Even the work ethics depends on all sorts of family circumstances and social and cultural contingencies for which we can claim no credit.
Answer 2: They don’t really believe that moral desert attaches to effort. It isn’t really effort that the defender of meritocracy believes is the moral basis of distributive shares (example of two workers, one strong and one weak). It’s the contribution, but then contribution takes us right back to our natural talents.(from libertarians) What about self-ownership?
Milton Friedman: “Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned. The only way to try to rectify that is to have a leveling equality of outcome.”
Rawls’s answer: “The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.”
Robert Nozick: if we tax people against their will we are stealing from them
Rawls’s answer: Maybe we don’t own ourselves in that thoroughgoing sense after all. The only respect in which the idea of self-ownership must give way, comes when we are thinking about whether I own myself in the sense that I have privileged claim on the benefits that come in the exercise of my talent in a market economy. But we don’t. We can have rights and respect human dignity without embracing the idea of self-possession.
“A just scheme answers to what men are entitled to; it satisfies their legitimate expectations as founded upon social institutions. But what they are entitled to is not proportional to or dependent upon their intrinsic worth.”
“The principles of justice that regulate the basic structure … do not mention moral desert, and there is no tendency for distributive shares to correspond to it.”
Even if I had sole, unproblematic, claim to my talents and to my effort, it would still be the case that the benefits I get from exercising those talents depend on the factors that are arbitrary from a moral point of view. What other people want in the society depends on the law of supply and demand, it’s not my doing. It’s a mistake and a conceit to suppose that we deserve in the first place a society that values the qualities we happen to have in abundance.