Sometimes I fear how short-sighted, naive and selfish people can be… and that’s coming from someone who is a little bit of all three.
One reason I love John Rawls is because I believe he seriously gets people to stop fucking around and puts them in the position they should be… in the Original Position under the Veil of Ignorance (which I think would logically place them in the shoes of those who are worst off in society). Why is it so hard to get people to truly care about others if they say they care about others? I mean, I should be more specific as to why I’m asking the question. What I don’t understand is blatant inconsistency when it comes to goodwill.
My professor asked us a question in class. Well, he placed us in a scenario which at first glance seems funny or even ridiculous, but that’s only because I had no fucking idea how some people, including people I had faith in, would respond.
The idea is that you are some place, anywhere, isolated except for one other human. He specifically said we were on campus, on the quad, walking somewhere. The other human is an infant that is lying face down in a puddle about 1 inch, or however deep it needs to be so that the infant would die if he was not turned over. Without digression being allowed, he wanted us to answer whether it was our duty to save the child’s life by flipping it over. We were asked to ignore caring for the child afterwards and we were made to assume that saving the baby’s life took almost no effort on our part. He wanted us to know if we HAD to, if we were OBLIGATED to, if it was our DUTY to save the child. NOT if we OUGHT to, or if we would LIKE to or if it were a good idea, but if we were COMPELLED to save it.
I sat there, believing this to be a non-issue; OF COURSE YOU SAVE THE FUCKING BABY! Now, it doesn’t seem that anybody wouldn’t have saved the baby, but some people had to think, seriously think, and DOUBT as to whether they had to…. and it made me fucking sick… particularly one person whom I thought better of. To me it seems an absolute truth that you are deontologically supposed to save the child’s life and it seems an absolute truth that if you do not, you are a bad fucking person.
The biggest issue people seemed to have was that they did not feel compelled to force others to save the baby… they couldn’t force the care of the baby on someone else… I think that’s fucked up. It’s all because I’m Rawlsian and I believe that I am indeed my “brother’s keeper”, whether I like it or not, whether I want to be or not.
To be fair, something similar occurs to me when thinking about abortion, but I think there is a clear distinction which places me in non-contradictory positions. I am against abortions in the sense that I do not feel comfortable partaking in what could easily be the murder of a baby. The issue here is that I am not qualified to say when exactly life begins; I assume conception, but am hard pressed to figure out how to defend that assumption logically to the extent of holding it as a principle to be accepted universally. Unlike the baby in the scenario, which we know to be a living, autonomous human being deserving of rights and liberties, a fetus can be argued to be only as much as a potential to be a human being (something which I personally find troubling and largely incorrect, but at the same time something which may, in all actuality, be correct) and it’s an argument that is not easily (at least logically) found invalid or untrue. So I do understand the impulse to keep my opinion from forcing someone to do something they don’t agree that they are doing, but I feel this to be distinct from the baby/puddle argument.
I come back to the person that I find inconsistent, that person seems good, seems to care, seems to be nice, seems to be far from totally selfish, but I’m wrong. That person complained about humans being destructive towards other humans, but didn’t seem to mind the total obliviousness to them. That, to me, is inconsistent and bullshit. I feel like if you truly cared about the well being of others, you wouldn’t stop at total non-intervention.
I won’t use names because it is not my goal to slander, it is my goal to simply remind myself that looks can be deceiving and that people can be horribly inconsistent to the point that I am disgusted. It is to remind me not become disillusioned with the human race as a whole despite the plethora of “bad apples.” I feel there is misguidance, misjudgment, and misunderstanding stemming from persons being naive (assuming they aren’t selfish assholes) and I need to work to prove to these people that they are wrong.
Unfortunately, I am only at a point where I truly feel John Rawls is right (I’m talking post theory of justice, working my way through critics of his, before reading Political Liberalism) but I don’t know if he is perfect. Although his critics are making me question some things, so far it has only been to the point of further contemplation and not to the point of disagreement. Regardless of what Rawls got wrong, if he got something wrong, I feel that, so far, his noble theory is second to none and until I find out if there truly is something better, I will pursue Rawlsianism as the ideal way.
I gotta say, it’s tough being a Rawlsian liberal, at least in the sense that the alternative, in general, is being conservative, republican or libertarian and seeing those things triumph would be soul-crushing (and I honestly think it could, and does, cost people their lives or at least their well-being) whereas if Rawls prevails, the dissenters seriously have little to worry about (relative to the problems of those worst off if they win) even if they disagree.
