Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [111]
Turtles in Veils: Justice as Fairness
And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,
Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.
And the turtles, of course . . . all the turtles are free
As turtles, and, maybe, all creatures should be. (Yertle)
So back to Mack. Given the requirement for some sort of sovereign in order to escape the state of nature, how might Mack know he is getting what the sovereign was created to give him? That is, how might Mack figure out if the kingdom of Sala-ma-Sond is a just social arrangement? And, if it isn’t, what can he do about it?
While a contractarian, John Rawls (1921–2002) doesn’t share the traditional task of determining the conditions necessary to bring people together into a legitimate civil society; rather, his is an effort to specify conditions necessary for any government to be just (and so legitimate). For Rawls, essentially justice is fairness—and Mack, like the rest of King Yertle’s subjects, is not being treated fairly.
Consider Mack, a smallish turtle with a blue-black checkered shell, and Desmond, a large turtle with a hawkish beak. Left to create any sort of social relations they might desire, Mack might create a society in which turtles with solid colored shells are required to carry their checked fellow citizens piggyback style and in which smallish turtles are always given first grazing rights in the nearby clover field. Desmond, on the other hand, might create a civil society in which the large and hawk-beaked are given preferential treatment in hiring or housing. Obviously there is an advantage to selecting principles that favor oneself and those like you. As often, these same principles disadvantage those with attributes, tastes, or characteristics unlike yours. Since it is nigh impossible to call a society just that distributes advantages and disadvantages in such an arbitrary manner as nose shape, Rawls reasons that ignorance of things like our own size and shell color will keep us from selecting the principles of justice in a biased manner.
Rawls does this with a thought experiment called the “original position,” an abstracted state of nature that is used to establish the parameters of a just social contract. In this original position, individuals operate under what Rawls calls a “veil of ignorance.” This veil provides an epistemological limit such that each individual is not aware of many of those traits that we often take as essential to our individual identities: are you a male or female? Healthy or sickly? Smart or not so much? Individuals behind the veil lack knowledge of their gender, race, disability, age, economic class, etc. That is, the individual does not know if she will be “advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstances.”15 This ignorance keeps the person from being able to “tailor principles to the circumstances of one’s own case.”16 That is, self-interest—stripped of the self’s particulars—will generate rules that would justly govern civil society.
Recall Hobbes’s claim that we cannot help but pursue our own interests and are disinterested in the welfare of others except in relation to ourselves. By removing any knowledge necessary to pick out one’s own interests, Rawls argues that we will select just and fair principles for our society. Moreover, as self-interested “generic human beings” we would each select the same principles: none of us would prefer a principle that enslaved persons under 5'4" since no rational being would choose enslavement and none of us is aware of what our own height will be revealed to be.
Similarly, we can determine if our existing society is or is not just by asking if we would be willing to swap places with any one of our fellow citizens. Consider the gender gap in wages in the United States. On average, women make about seventy-seven cents for each dollar received by a man.17 While of course a complicated set of