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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 435 procedure, the particular distribution has no claim to justice. So, for example, there is nothing inherently just about your having 86% of the pot compared to my 2%, unless this is the outcome of a gamble in which we both voluntarily participated. Only its status as the outcome of that procedure makes it just. The way in which the two principles of justice distribute primary goods in the well-ordered society is just, on this view, because and only because of the procedure of deliberation and agreement in the original position through which they have been selected. However, Rawls's integration of widely accepted principles of rationality into the conception of the original position insures that the resulting distribution will not seem arbitrary. Rawls's account of pure procedural justice develops further the conception of moral objectivity he limned in "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics," discussed in Section 1. Like that account of moral objectivity, pure procedural justice might be compared to an analogous conception in the natural sciences, which we might call pure procedural truth. Like pure procedural justice, pure procedural truth would presuppose no criterion of validity independent of the actual outcome of a correctly carried-out procedure for ascertaining it. Therefore, like pure procedural justice, pure procedural truth would be value-neutral in the important sense that it would be unbiased by any preconceptions about what a legitimate outcome ought to look like. More specifically, pure procedural scientific truth, on this hypothesis, would be defined as the outcome - whatever that outcome might be - of correctly carried out procedures of observation, data gathering, inductive reasoning, hypothesis construction, deductive reasoning and prediction, experimentation under controlled conditions, and intersubjective replication of predicted experimental results. Whatever outcomes resulted from this procedure would qualify as by definition objectively valid. Now natural scientists do not actually adhere to this conception of pure procedural truth in all of its particulars, nor would they necessarily accept the outcomes of these procedures as such without qualification. On the contrary: we know that scientists very often proceed unsystematically and intuitively, follow hunches rather than rational deliberation and deviate from canonical scientific procedure at many points along the way. Moreover, even the more scrupulously procedural may shrink from anointing the outcome of their labors with the appellation of objective validity. For suppose that outcome is too anomalous relative to their initial premises, or deviates too far from accepted scientific dogma of the day, or violates too radically the personal metaphysical views that underlie their acceptance of that dogma. Then rather than legitimate it as objectively valid, no matter how many times that outcome has been replicated under controlled conditions by different laboratories, they may blink at the requisite inference rather than stare it down. They may infer instead that mistakes in procedure must have been made somewhere in order to generate this outcome; or suspect that evidence © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
