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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 421 subjective circumstances of justice consist in the mutually conflicting goals and values of the parties. This, as we have seen, is built into the original position by their mutual disinterest and differing conceptions of the good. The objective circumstances of justice consist in a moderate scarcity of resources, such that there are not enough for each individual to have as much as he wants. Only under conditions of moderate scarcity can questions of justice arise: An overabundance of resources presents no need for raising questions of fair distribution (as, for example, fresh air and clean water did not before the industrial revolution); whereas an extreme scarcity of resources - i.e. one in which proportional amounts to everyone is insufficient for each and withholding distribution to anyone is unjustifiable - makes questions of fair distribution impossible to answer. Together, the subjective and objective circumstances of justice - the necessity of fairly distributing moderately scarce resources among individuals with divergent and conflicting plans for their use - constitute the conditions under which such individuals are moved to find principles of such distribution on which they all can agree. 3.1.2. The Parties' Psychology The parties in Rawls's original position are defined by certain further special psychological characteristics in addition to being mutually disinterested. Rawls's detailed treatment of these and other motivational assumptions in A Theory of Justice rekindled attention to a philosophical tradition of moral psychology that had begun with Aristotle but had lain virtually dormant in the analytic tradition after Kant. Rawls stipulates that the parties are not moved by envy, i.e. by rancor and spite (TJ 538) such that they so strongly desire that another have fewer resources that they are willing to accept fewer resources themselves in order to achieve this (TJ 143). This means that individuals do not compete with one another or measure their own degree of well-being comparatively. An envious person, on Rawls's view, is one who engages in the practice of cutting off her nose to spite her face. As we saw in Chapter II.2.4, she regards another's gain as by definition her own loss, which she will take steps to prevent - by choosing to incur a more serious yet more bearable loss for herself. For such a person, no loss is worse than the loss of self-regard she experiences as caused by another's success; and any other alternative loss that will prevent this is preferable. For example, an envious colleague might attempt to thwart one's professional success in order to avoid feelings of personal and professional inferiority, by placing administrative or procedural obstacles in the path of one's research - even though the completion of one's research would yield needed practical and social benefits and precedents for the status and reputation of one's department overall and so for that colleague himself. Thus an envious person is one who is willing to accept quite substantial social or material losses in order to avoid the feeling - to which she is © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
