But we have a hard time explaining our sense of injustice to the powers that be in a way

that sounds rational and without personal pique or bitterness.

That’s why we need John Rawls, a twentieth-century American philosopher who provides us with

a failproof model for identifying what truly might be unfair – and how we might gather

support for fixing things.

Rawls: http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/35/100835-004-0A003A0A.jpg

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 1921, Rawls—nicknamed Jack—was exposed, and

responded, to the injustices of the modern world from a very young age. As a child, he

witnessed at first hand shocking poverty in the United States,

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qhA2oMrxkIQ/Tj6AiqtlZqI/AAAAAAAAErs/djyozUjG9A8/s1600/There%2527s_no_way_like_The_american_way.jpg

the death of his brothers from an illness he unwittingly transmitted to them, and the

horrors and lawlessness of the Second World War.

http://haveblogwilltravel.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/old_town_warsaw_waf-2012-1501-311945.jpg

All this inspired him to go into academia: he wanted to use the power of ideas to change

the unjust world he was living in.

It was the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 that properly made Rawls’s name.

http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/565/846/734846565.0.m.jpg

Having read and widely discussed his book, Bill Clinton was to label Rawls ‘the greatest

political philosopher of the twentieth century’– and had him over to the White House for dinner

on a regular basis.

What, then, does this exemplar of fairness have to tell the modern world?

TEXT: 1. Things as they are now are patently unfair

The statistics all point to the radical unfairness of society. Comparative charts of life expectancy

and income projections direct us to a single overwhelming moral.

Here are three important example charts but we probably should re-draw them (a small graphic

design task) for the film so that we haven’t stolen theirs: http://pgpf.org/sites/default/files/sitecore/media%20library/PGPF/Chart-Archive/0015_life-expectancy-full.gif

I’d also suggest the first graph on this website--it’s from a video: http://ethericstudies.org/responsibility/one_percent.htm

Here’s for the whole world: http://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/files/2009/05/conley_champagne_distribution.png

But day-to-day, it can be hard to take this unfairness seriously, especially in relation

to our own lives. That’s because so many voices are on hand telling us that, if we

work hard and have ambition, we can make it. Rawls was deeply aware of how the American

Dream seeped through the political system and into individual hearts – and he knew

its corrosive, regressive influence. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/THIS_IS_AMERICA..._WHERE_EVERY_BOY_CAN_DREAM_OF_BEING_PRESIDENT._-_NARA_-_515762.jpg

He was a statistician who knew that the rags-to-riches tales were overall so negligible as not to

warrant serious attention by political theorists. Indeed, mentioning them was merely a clever

political sleight of hand designed to prevent the powerful from having to undertake the

necessary task of reforming society.

Rawls understood that debates about unfairness and what to do about it often get bogged down

in arcane details and petty squabbling which mean that year after year, nothing quite gets

done. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Barack_Obama_presidential_debate_preparations.jpg

What Rawls was therefore after was a simple, economical and polemical way to show people

how their societies were unfair and what they might do about it.

TEXT: 2. Imagine if you were not you

Rawls intuitively understood that a lot of the reason why societies don’t become fairer

is that those who benefit from current injustice are spared the need to think too hard about

what it would have been like to be born in different circumstances. So he devised one

of the greatest thought experiments in the history of political thought,

He called it: ‘the veil of ignorance.’

Show in text: THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE

and show a picture

Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves in a conscious, intelligent state before our own birth, but

without any knowledge of what circumstances we were going to be born into; our futures

shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Hovering high above the planet (Rawls was fascinated

by the Apollo space programme), we wouldn’t know what sort of parents we’d have, what

our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local hospital

could do for us, how the police and judicial systems might treat us and so on…

satellite view: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Flat_earth_night.png

The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate is: if we knew nothing about where we’d

end up, what sort of a society would it feel safe to enter?

The ‘veil of ignorance’ stops us thinking about all those who have done well and draws

our attention to the appalling risks involved in entering, for example, US society as if

it were a lottery– without knowing if you’d wind up the child of an orthodontist in Scottsdale,

Arizona

one option//example: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8340/8240125300_bb65771f96_b.jpg

or as the offspring of a black single mother in the rougher bits of eastern Detroit.

one option/example: http://pixabay.com/p-279457/?no_redirect

Would any sane birth-lottery player really want to take the gamble of ending up in the

society we now have? Probably not--they’d insist that the rules of the entire game had

to be changed. Otherwise it would be too risky.

TEXT: 3. You know what needs to be fixed

Rawls answers the question for us: any sane participant of the veil of ignorance experiment

is going to want a society with a number of things in place: they’ll want the schools

to be very good, the hospitals to function brilliantly, unimpeachable and fair access

to the law and decent housing for everyone. The veil of ignorance forces observers to

accept that the country they’d really want to be born randomly into would almost certainly

be a version of Switzerland or Denmark. In other words, we know what sort of a society

we want to live in. We just haven’t focused on it properly until now - because the choices

have already been made.

Rawls’s experiment allows us to think more objectively about what a fair society looks

like in its details. When addressing major decisions about the allocation of resources

we need only ask ourselves: ‘how would I feel about this issue if I were stuck behind

the veil of ignorance?’ The fair answer emerges directly when we contemplate what

we would need in order still to be adequately positioned in the worst case scenario.

TEXT: 4. What to do next

A lot will depend on what’s wrong with your society. In this sense, Rawls was usefully

undoctrinaire – he recognised that the veil of ignorance experiment throws up different

issues in different contexts: in some, the priority might be to fix air pollution, in

others, the school system.

But crucially, Rawls provides us with a tool to critique our current societies based on

a beautifully simple experiment. We’ll know we finally have made our societies fair when

we will be able to say in all honesty, from a position of imaginary ignorance before our

births, that we simply wouldn’t mind at all what kind of circumstances our future

parents might have and what sort of neighbourhoods we might be born into.

The fact that we simply couldn’t sanely take on such a challenge now is a measure

of how deeply unfair things remain – and therefore how much we still have left to achieve.

All this John Rawls has helped us to see.