A funny thing happened on the way through the blogosphere

So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw yesterday that Matt Yglesias had posted something about John Rawls on his blog. I think I largely agree with his criticism of A Theory of Justice (TOJ), but I wanted to put my two cents in on the issue.

First of all, for all of his strengths as a philosopher, Rawls was a mediocre writer at best, and a downright awful one at worst. This flaw is on full display in TOJ, in which Rawls is maddeningly prone to rambling, obfuscation, and general failure to do his ideas justice with his prose. And Yglesias is correct to point out that for all of Rawls's verbiage, he has remarkably little to say about what his ideas mean for the real world.

That being said, I think Rawls deserves more credit than Yglesias gives him. I have always been a big fan of the veil of ignorance as a theoretical construct - it is elegant, well-described, and potentially quite useful. Rawls's difference and maximin principles are similarly well-developed, and also have the advantage of being surprisingly concise, at least as political philosophy goes. The veil of ignorance is hugely impractical, of course, and can never be implemented in its purest form: we all have our biases, and all of our thinking is irreversibly influenced by our socioeconomic background. Nevertheless, it can often be a useful exercise to try to imagine how one might feel if one were in stuck on a significantly less desirable rung of the social ladder, and by doing so we can often get a good enough idea of what the less well-off experience to be able to more effectively combat it. [Editor's note: Now that was a sentence worthy of a philosophical treatise, lengthwise if not content-wise]

So while TOJ is not a silver-bullet solution to the problems of establishing justice, it certainly contains some interesting insights and a few cleverly-designed tools to use in evaluating individual circumstances. And given the general lack of silver-bullet solutions to philosophical quandaries, that's a pretty respectable accomplishment on Mr. Rawls's part.