| OCR Text |
Show Chapter X. Rawls's Instrumentalism 458 and purposes. The second possibility is that the parties' choice of the two principles of justice, on the supposition of having long-term interests, demonstrates only that individuals having a certain kind of personal identity would choose a society that would protect it, without providing any independent argument against the choice of Utilitarianism.33 If the parties are then not assumed to have long-term plans and purposes but nevertheless are assumed to choose principles of justice for the basic structure of the society in which they will then live, it is then an open question whether they would choose a society which protected long-term interests over one that did not. But if the continuity thesis is supplanted by the discontinuity thesis, and in particular clause (1'), these difficulties do not arise. For it is only if the parties are conceived as continuing persons who had adopted certain projects and purposes prior to the original position, which they then advance in the well-ordered society subsequent to it, that there is any independent requirement for how long a person in the original position must endure, and how long a long-term interest must be in order to count as long-term. A person, and hence her goals and interests, must endure long enough to have originated and engendered in the person a deep commitment to the fulfillment of these goals and interests before the circumstances of the original position occurred; they must survive the protracted period of conflict, dialogue and deliberation which the original position, with the support of clause (2), surely entails; and it must survive the actual lengthy period of implementation of the two principles of justice in the well-ordered society which the continuity thesis plus the four-stage sequence entails. Such longstanding commitment to a goal or interest is impressive indeed. It might even survive what we normally think of as a natural human lifespan. Rejecting the continuity thesis, on the other hand, permits us to leave open the question of how long, in actual time, the parties' long-term interests must be in order to count as long-term. It is then sufficient that a long-term interest survive for the duration of a person's adult life, as we would normally expect. But there is now no reason to place any prior constraints on how long such a life must be. Hence whether a person has a weak identity or a strong one is irrelevant to whether that person can be said to have long-term interests or not. The person's interests are identified as long-term relative to the duration of her personal identity. Now since there are no longer any independent constraints on how long the parties themselves endure, nothing about the conception of the original position forces the characterization of the parties as having either particularly weak or particularly strong personal identities. And the ascription to them of long-term interests fails to decide this question one way or the other. 33 Scheffler, op. cit. 399-401. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
