Mario Solis

I guess it’s not that I’m not benevolent or that I don’t believe benevolence does great things, it’s that I think it’s all too often misguided and unreliable.

There are bad people out there… there are a lot of bad people out there. Some people are only bad for a short while, others for a lot longer. Some do bad things even though they are overall good people. Some may only ever do one bad thing, but it can be a very bad thing.

It’s too easy for benevolence to be discarded, particularly when dealing with most people, since you won’t be very attached to most people.

I have a theory on why John Rawls wrote a Theory of Justice. Rawls knew himself well, he knew he was a liberal, he knew he wanted a society which allowed for plurality of peoples and he was a man who cared for the general welfare of others. He would be for a society in which people were allowed to work towards their relative idea of what the good life is as long as it followed certain rules and principles. He realized we lived in a world where benevolence was unreliable, but he was also convinced that he lived in a world where people could be convinced that they should provide for those worst off. I don’t believe Rawls wrote a theory of justice to convince benevolent people to be benevolent, I think it’s possible that John Rawls wrote a Theory of Justice to convince those who aren’t benevolent by nature to provide for those worst off by using logic to get them to understand that it is what’s best and that it is what’s just and fair.

It just seems that using justice will result in the most amount of benevolence in practice. Like the free market, I think there needs to be regulation and there need to be arbiters.

In class today, it was pointed out that Rawls uses the difference principle to say that nobody deserves anything but that the same principle, at the same time, says that the community as a whole deserves what individuals do not. I think this is the wrong way of looking at what Rawls says. I think what Rawls means is that people don’t deserve to be better than other people in their arbitrary draw from the natural lottery (natural talents or born-into social position or inheritance), NOT that people don’t deserve anything at all, in fact, it’s because he believes that people DO deserve things that he is fighting to make sure that those who have the least or who are the worst off will have the most possible for their relative position in society.