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Episode 429: The Veil of Ignorance · Words & Numbers

0:00
Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony and this.
0:02
Is words and numbers brought to you by the fine people at where,
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Anthony? Polyhimny.
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No, no Poly. Polyhemnia.
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Polyhimnia. Go look it up, everybody who's
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saying what the hell is that? Go look it up.
0:21
So before we had the letters CACI and now what Are we just P?
0:27
Shut up. What's new and exciting in your
0:32
world? You know, and there's a doxology
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here and you're getting in the way of it.
0:37
What's new and exciting in your world this week?
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See, you ask these questions I'm just not prepared to answer.
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How are you not prepared? I've asked it.
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Every single week I forget. Every single week, for as far
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back as I can remember, I have said the same thing to you.
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And every single week you have found a way to disappoint me.
1:02
Well, I'm looking through my notes here.
1:04
Something struck me as interesting the other day.
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President Trump's in the news doing all these things that he's
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doing, and judges are telling him to stop deporting people.
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And he's saying, you know, basically, I can do what I want.
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And people are getting annoyed, disturbed, some are cheering
1:21
them on, whatever it is. But there's this great sense of
1:25
something is wrong because the president is disobeying the
1:29
judges. And it occurred to me as I'm
1:32
thinking about that, and I'm thinking about people getting
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all bent out of shape about it, and suddenly it dawned on me,
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But no, this is what the founders intended.
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I mean, what we've been doing is splitting power between the
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parties, the Democrats versus Republicans.
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That's not the way the government was set up.
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It was set up to split power amongst the branches.
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And the states as well. And the states, right?
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I mean, that's another issue entirely.
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So you know the powers chopped up vertically and horizontally.
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The interesting thing right now is all the people who were so
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happy about how the courts interrupted Joe Biden's plans
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for the last four years now are saying things like we didn't
2:20
elect a judiciary. Well, oh, right.
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No, no kidding. I am getting so irked with
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political hypocrisy that I think that should be our next big
2:33
project is on political hypocrisy.
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And that's what fascinates me, that there's a lot more of it
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than what I thought. I mean, I always thought the
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people in the extremes will do whatever their party says.
2:44
It's everybody. But where it comes out here, you
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know, in Northern Virginia, which is a very blue area, tons
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of Teslas around now, nine months ago, a Tesla was a sign
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that you were a dyed in the wool Democrat.
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You're a good liberal. Right.
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Yeah. And so the Republicans are
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keying the Teslas, and now it's the other way around, right?
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Which just tells me that people aren't thinking.
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They're picking whoever their standard bearer is and whatever
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the standard bearer says, that's what we're going to do.
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There are things that Donald Trump says on the regular that
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all of his followers were so pissed off about over the last
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four years that I don't even know how they don't see it.
3:31
Apparently they don't If people are out there getting a little
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worked up about the things I have said, which seems to happen
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quite a lot given the hate mail that I've been getting, and
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we'll get to that in a second. If you're all worked up about
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it, you should go look at Federalist 9 because not
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Federalist 10, but Federalist 9 gets into why each branch should
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have partial agency into the operations of the other two.
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They're designed to meddle in each other's affairs.
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That is the design. So did you elect A judiciary?
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Well, not exactly, but it's part of the system that you bought
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into, so keep quiet and. Deal with it.
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Let me just stop. You're whining.
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But I did get some hate mail recently about a criticism I
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made. Apparently I didn't mean it this
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way, but apparently someone took it this way that I was
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criticizing the Mennonites in Texas because they're the ones
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who are apparently avoiding the measles vaccination, and theirs
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are the children who are dying. And I did just a little bit of
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digging on this because I thought, do they actually have a
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religious objection? And it turns out that they
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actually don't. You can be Mennonite and take a
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vaccination. It's fine.
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They tend to have trouble cutting any slack at all to
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government authority, so that's going to cause an obvious issue,
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but it's not doctrinal. They can have this if they want.
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So if you're sending me hate mail about that, dial it down a
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notch. You were in Utah with the
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Mormons for a long while. Did the Mormons have a problem
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with vaccination? Not to my experience.
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I'm sure there were some there who did and the one of the
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gigantic cause celeb when I was there was that they were finally
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getting around to putting fluoride in the water in Utah.
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And this was back in 99 two thousand when I lived there the
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first time. And my students would come to
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class talking about the Satanic problem of fluoride in the
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water. And you know, it's, it's always
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this kind of nonsense. I would believe it if you want.
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It doesn't make it any more true.
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We're all in. I do mean all.
6:00
We are all, to a greater or lesser degree, terrified of
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change. I'm really not.
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I mean, I have a conservative soul, I'll admit it.
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I would prefer if things didn't change all the time, but I'm not
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really frightened of it. I can barely get you to get out
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of bed an hour earlier or later. Well, that's.
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Because I have this sleep condition, you idiot, I can't
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get out of bed any earlier. All right?
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That. See, now I'm angry.
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And. And I'm just going to tell you
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to be quiet because I want to talk about Pete Hegseth, our
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dyed in the wool loser of a Defense Secretary who a few
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weeks back, you might recall, published a bunch of secure
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information to a group chat that he was using.
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Do you remember this? Turns out he did it another time
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too. A time before or since.
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That's a good question. It seemed to be right around the
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same time, but it's another group of people on signal about
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strikes that we made in Yemen. And I mean, his brother was on
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the list this time. These are people who have no
7:19
business knowing what our military plans in Yemen are.
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There were a number of people on the list.
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I predicted when that first list came out that Pete Hegseth would
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crash and burn in some sort of alcohol fueled ordeal.
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And now I'm really, really predicting it.
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Any other Secretary of Defense in any other administration
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would have been fired after the first time.
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I don't know if they're going to plan on keeping him around for
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the second one, but by any rational standard he should be
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out of a job. Well, see, and this goes back to
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what you were talking about earlier when Hillary was caught
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with her server and classified emails on it.
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The people on the right, and rightly so, lost their minds.
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This was a security breach. There were laws against it.
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But now the shoes on the other foot, are those same people
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losing their minds or no, They're that's no big.
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Deal. No, no big deal.
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And when you impress upon them that no, indeed it is a big
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deal, what do they say? Well, Hillary Clinton, blah blah
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blah blah, not realizing that if you want to have standards,
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everybody has to live up to them.
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Right, yes. And let me underline here for
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people that are firing up their fingers for the hate mail, this
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is not an anti Trump tirade we're going on here.
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This is a question of consistency.
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You hold somebody to a standard, you hold both sides to that
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standard. Yeah, and on that cheerful note,
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we might as well move on to the foolishness of the weak.
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I was just getting fired up. Yeah, well, you're about to get
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even more fired up because for the foolishness of the weak, we
9:07
go back again to that more. I got more on this.
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The only word I can use, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who
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declared upon hearing that Pope Francis had just passed away.
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Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.
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Oh my. In a celebration.
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Marjorie. In a celebration of Pope
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Francis's death. Yeah.
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Classless, miserable woman. She needs to go as far away as
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is humanly possible. I can't believe the people of
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her district in Georgia keep sending her to Congress.
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It should be embarrassing to them, but of course they have no
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shame, so nothing's going to ever be embarrassing to them.
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We should take this moment because I, of course, the news
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just came out today of his death and you and I have taken him to
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task repeatedly in newspaper articles, here on the podcast,
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whenever he stepped his foot into economics.
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Having said all of that is horrible of an economist, as I
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think he was in terms of being a church leader.
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I was very pleased with him. I thought he did a lot of good
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inside the Catholic Church. Yeah, I really wasn't.
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I'm not a big fan. I can't think of many good
10:36
things to say, but I will never dance on somebody's grave.
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Just stop it. For the love of God, just stop
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it. It's utterly classless and you
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shouldn't need a bald guy on a podcast to tell you that.
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You should know before you open your stupid mouth that it's
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going to be offensive. James is getting fired up now.
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Look, she's an idiot. And the fact that she just keeps
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on running her mouth and nobody tells her to shut up is
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astonishing to me. Going back to the principle of
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consistency, and I'll make a prediction here, amongst the
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arch conservative Catholics there were a number of groups
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who claimed that Francis was not a legitimate Pope and they had
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all kinds of arguments as. To he is Satan's minion aunt.
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Where have you been? Well, but the fact is they were
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pointing to arguments in the Apostolic succession and how it
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did not trace to Francis. Therefore Francis was not a
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legitimate Pope. I'm not going to go into any of
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that. What I'm going to predict is if
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the next Pope who's elected is an arch conservative, all of
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those arguments would still apply to him.
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And I guarantee you those same people will all of a sudden
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discover a flaw in their previous argument, which means
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that the next Pope who, assuming he's an arch conservative, all
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of a sudden is legitimate. And this brings us back to this
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issue of you apply a principle, you apply a rule, and it should
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apply to everybody whether you like them or not.
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Yeah, one would think right. Now I had a a friend who was
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this way. We would debate economics, and
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this person was not an economist but enjoyed thinking about it.
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And so many of his arguments were lacking in principle so
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that he would end up like we're describing here, arguing, for
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example, in favor of markets when they produce the outcome
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that he wants or against markets when they don't produce the
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outcome that he wants, ignoring the principal entirely.
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And I point out to him, look at the end, what you really want is
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just to be dictator. You just want the outcome that
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you want, and to hell with everybody else.
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He kind of nod and said, yeah, I, I guess I do.
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Well, he was honest in that, I guess.
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At least he was honest about it. For One Stop shopping for all
13:10
things James and Aunt, visit our website wordsandnumbers.org.
13:16
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to patreon.com/words and Numbers this week.
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I want to talk about, I say I want to talk about, I want you
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to talk about it. I'm going to throw it out here.
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The philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment
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called The Veil of Ignorance, and you're going to have to
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correct me here because this is your area rather than mine.
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But as I understand it, the argument went like this.
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Suppose. Let's stop before you go any
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further. OK, go ahead.
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Go ahead. You can do it better than I can.
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It's 2 step argument and the first step is not the veil of
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ignorance, it's what he calls the original position.
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OK. The original position for Rawls
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And just to give you an idea, Rawls was born in 1921 and died
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in 2002. Oh, that recently?
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Really. Yeah, he had a very long career.
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But you know, his most important work was in the 1980s.
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He wrote A Theory of Justice, a gigantic, very boring book from
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which these things are coming. It's it's one of those cases
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where he wrote a very big influential book that would have
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been an outstanding article. Right.
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Right now, I got to read like 900 pages of this because he
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just couldn't jam it all into an article.
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I mean, he did actually. The original position and the
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veil of ignorance were released this way Once Upon a time.
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Now with the original position, what he's getting at is a kind
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of state of nature theory, right?
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So when we think about Locke and Hobbes and Rousseau and even
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Montesquieu, who in the Persian letters has a kind of state of
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nature theory, when we think about all of them, what do we
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always think about? When you think about the state
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of nature, it's a group of people living out in the
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wilderness without benefit of government.
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This is always what the state of nature is and asking what kind
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of rights these people would have in that condition, what
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they would do, if anything, collectively in that condition,
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right? These are the important
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questions because they arrive at something that we might
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recognize as just, if you want a just society, these are probably
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the questions you're going to ask.
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And it's interesting, right? Because for Hubs, life in the
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state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,
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he says. It's just brutal.
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We will kill each other in the state of nature.
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According to Hobbes, yeah. According to Hobbes, Locke comes
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along and says, why do you think that?
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Wouldn't we kind of just leave each other be for the most part?
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And Rousseau comes along and thinks, well, why would you
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think of that? Wouldn't it be the case that we
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had a certain amount of empathy if we saw somebody who looked
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just like ourselves suffering? Well, all these things are
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right, right? We might kill each other, but we
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probably wouldn't. And we would probably even feel
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sorry for one another if we saw our fellows suffering.
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And OK, you got three very different takes on a state of
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nature right there. They are mutually incompatible.
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Right. Just in compound and enter
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Rawls, who said, well, I think you're actually all taking this
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in the wrong direction. Really what we need is this
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thing, the original position where we can talk about people
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living without benefit of government.
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But you know, you could have a thought experiment and ask what
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that would be like. And more importantly, we have
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this thing, the veil of ignorance, right?
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And he says in this original position where we live without
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benefit of government, OK, let's ask a very basic question in a
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new and exciting way. And look, I'm not a big fan of
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John Rawls, but this is interesting.
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He says, what kind of life would you sign on for?
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What kind of overarching government would you be in favor
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of if you didn't know anything about the tales of your own
18:08
life? OK, so imagine that you're about
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to be born and here you are up in the cosmos seeing, and you
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get to choose to be born into circumstance A or circumstance
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B. That's what you're Oh, no, no,
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no, no. You're.
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He tells you you're going to be born into a society with this
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government. Well, careful.
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Because the idea is that once you are behind the veil of
18:35
ignorance, when you don't know anything about the details of
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your own life, the kind of government that you would be in
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favor of will be very, very different than one that you
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would choose with an understanding of the details of
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your own life. And that just seems exactly
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correct, doesn't it? Yeah.
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I mean, because, look, designing a society is always an exercise
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in the implementation of justice, but what you know about
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yourself will somehow influence how you will choose.
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So, OK, so let let me make sure I got this straight.
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Yeah. So the thought experiment is you
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could be born, for example, into a rich household or poor
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household. I'm not going to tell you which
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one you're going to be born into.
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You tell me what kind of government you want, and then
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we're going to roll the dice and you're going to end up in one of
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these households. Yeah.
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And now all of a sudden, those of us who are the staunchest
19:37
defenders of keeping government out of our wallets, all of a
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sudden a lot of those people are going to say, well, maybe
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there's a call for a welfare state.
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That's right. Hang.
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On a second, and it doesn't really get in front of us when
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we think about rich people and poor people.
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It's more pointed when we think, OK, I might be black, I might be
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white, I might be Asian, I might be Jewish, I don't know.
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I might be disabled, I might be fully abled.
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I don't know. Right, right.
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The idea here is that if these are the sorts of things you
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don't know, you're going to do whatever you can to take care
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of, if not openly benefit, at least take care of what you and
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I might call the least among us, right?
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The people who really experienced the most difficult
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lives, they're probably going to be treated very differently from
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behind a veil of ignorance than they would in a state of nature.
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And isn't that something? And Rawls, he says a lot of
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things in 900 pages. Most of them, many of them are
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really silly. But boy, when he gets it right,
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he gets it really right. And he talks about the veil of
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ignorance and, and what have you.
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But then he also talks about the conditions under which people
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might be said to get legitimately wealthier.
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Notice you can get wealthier without it being legitimate.
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And I think most of us would agree with that.
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You people would say, I know I don't agree with them.
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Well, sure you do. You wouldn't allow somebody to
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steal all the wealth, right? There are legitimate ways to
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come to it and illegitimate ways.
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And Rawls puts a very fine point on it.
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He says any increase in wealth is fine as long as the least of
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us are benefited too. Not benefited as much, right.
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So the rich get richer and the poor get richer.
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The poor don't get richer to the same degree, but they do in fact
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get richer. And Rawls would say every time,
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as long as you can say the poor are getting richer, there is no
22:04
justice problem here. There's no justice problem at
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all, no. As long as the poor are better
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off today than they were yesterday, you don't have a
22:16
justice problem. I don't know.
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I think there's a problem there only because oligarchies emerge
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and you could easily see a case in which the poor are very
22:30
marginally benefited and the same group of rich people just
22:35
get more and more powerful, and that's going to be a problem.
22:40
Yeah, I'm thinking about child labour for example, and it is
22:45
clearly the case that, you know, if you go to a lesser developed
22:51
country where people are starving, and I mean starving
22:54
literally, and you open up a factory and pay them pennies an
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hour to work, they'll be better off.
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They're all better off. Now, according to Rawls, that's
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perfectly legitimate. That's just, and yet it strikes
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even me, a free market economist, it strikes me as a
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little bit odd. Now, you know, I would make
23:13
arguments about competition, we'll push that up and blah,
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blah, blah. But from a justice perspective,
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it still bothers me a bit. I don't know that it bothers me
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at all, but oligarchy sure does. And an oligarchy will be that'll
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be the thing that just does away with the American style
23:36
democracy that we've got. Yeah.
23:39
So we may be talking about the same sort of thing because as I
23:43
think about the problem, my concern is if you squelch
23:48
competition so that that guy who went and built the factory
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forever more, he's paying them pennies an hour and they don't
23:56
have the ability to earn more because there is no competition
23:58
for their labor. That's a problem.
24:00
But that smells a lot like what you're describing.
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It's an oligarchic situation. In other words, they're
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imposing. Factory owner is using some form
24:09
of coercion. Yes, he made them better off to
24:12
prevent them from becoming any better still.
24:15
Well, yeah, it would seem like monopsony is lurking, right?
24:19
The surface of this line of reasoning that we've got,
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although it doesn't have to. You could end up in the same
24:26
sort of position even if you don't technically have monopsony
24:30
power. So tell me more than what you
24:34
have in mind when you talk about oligarchy.
24:36
Well oligarchy is just the rule of the few.
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A small group of people over time gobbles up all the
24:44
available political authority that they can find and before
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you know it, it's illegitimate. I mean the hilarious thing right
24:51
now is that Bernie Sanders and AOC are wandering from city to
24:55
city on their anti oligarchy tour not realizing that they're
25:01
two oligarchs. How do you not see it?
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But apparently they just can't. The same way that Bernie doesn't
25:09
see that he's a millionaire. Well, he does see that he's a
25:11
millionaire though, because he doesn't talk about the evil
25:14
millionaires anymore. Right.
25:16
The millionaires all of a sudden aren't evil.
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That's not where your problem is.
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Your problem. Is those stinking?
25:20
Billionaires. And, you know, I'm old enough to
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remember when Bernie Sanders said a lot about millionaires,
25:28
right, Until he became one. And then again, I mean, I guess
25:32
political hypocrisy is just going to be kind of like the
25:35
Sesame Street word of the day, right?
25:37
The letter of the day. Here we are.
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There's just no way around this foolishness, right?
25:45
And Rawls offers us, I think, a very interesting way to think
25:49
about these things. I don't want to live in a world
25:54
in which I have to decide what justice looks like before I know
25:59
what my own circumstances are. And that's just the point, isn't
26:03
it, that none of us want to do that, Which probably indicates
26:08
exactly why we would have to. And I would argue that the
26:13
evidence that none of us want to do that is right before us.
26:17
And it is the market for insurance.
26:19
And there's all kinds of things going on around the edges.
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But generally speaking, what's happening with insurance is you
26:29
are paying an amount of money to protect yourself against ending
26:34
up in a bad situation in the future.
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It's very much like this veil of ignorance wherein you can
26:42
arrange matters so that if you end up in the poor house or in
26:46
the bad situation, there's some protection.
26:48
For you, the obvious difference is is that in Rawls The Theory
26:53
of Justice, you know nothing about yourself when you deal
26:57
with insurance. Clearly you do.
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What you don't know are the odd sort of things that will happen
27:03
to you over time. Yeah.
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And we're actually going to do a separate episode on insurance,
27:09
and we'll go into all the details and so forth.
27:11
I'm thinking perhaps take the example of catastrophic
27:15
insurance, right? Something that most reasonable
27:19
people would say, yeah, at a low enough price, no question, I'd
27:22
buy that. Yeah, I just don't think that
27:27
the comparison is apartment enough to do a lot of heavy
27:31
lifting. When you say, look, you won't
27:34
know anything about your own situation, that's a really
27:39
different philosophical animal than anybody else has ever put
27:43
forth. And you got to give it to Ross
27:46
as a result, right? This is a really good thought
27:50
experiment. It's only a thought experiment,
27:52
but it's a particularly good one because most people, if they're
27:56
honest, would admit that they're going to come up with a
28:00
radically different understanding of what justice is
28:04
under those circumstances than they would under a circumstance
28:08
of perfect knowledge of their own reality.
28:12
Yeah, you don't get to hide behind the.
28:15
Well, I worked hard for it therefore.
28:17
You don't. And look, what is fair.
28:22
I mean, he has this thing justice as fairness.
28:25
OK, I mean, we're splitting hairs by the time you get to
28:28
that. But what does a fair system look
28:32
like? And it turns out, unless you
28:37
have an immediate answer as to why walls is wrong, it may take
28:42
a lot more work to land on a just system than first appears
28:48
to be the case. Right.
28:50
You know, I don't know what more to say about that.
28:53
It's that kind of interesting. It's a definitive statement that
28:58
we're making does. Rawls propose an answer, or is
29:01
he simply posing the question? Oh, you know, you don't write
29:03
900 pages without having an answer.
29:06
It's not right. And you know, the the fact of
29:09
the matter is, is that we all do know the reality of our own
29:14
existence. We all know this.
29:17
And the best you can do is make people aware of how that might
29:22
be impacting their decision making, right?
29:24
You can't get them ever to say, well, this is thus just and we
29:31
will always do this. People will not do that.
29:34
Human beings are deeply self interested and they will follow
29:39
their own self-interest and they will refer to that as justice
29:43
every single time. We see it all the time.
29:48
I would imagine the closest we come to that is the about to be
29:53
parent. I've seen so many examples of
29:58
young men who were not antagonistic but not that
30:02
interested in issues of women's rights until they had daughters.
30:07
Yeah, I think that's that's fair.
30:10
That's where any and even having a wife might do something, you
30:15
know, to how they view the world, but you know, by the time
30:21
they get to a change of heart because they have daughters,
30:25
that's self-interest. Well, gab, I would say roles.
30:32
Thought experiment rests on self-interest to begin with.
30:36
No, it's in Contra distinction to self-interest.
30:39
It shows you how your own self-interest pollutes your
30:43
political outlook. Well, that's an interesting you
30:48
say that because as I'm performing the thought
30:50
experiment for myself, asking you what sort of government, I'm
30:55
invoking myself interest and say, OK, if I'm born into a poor
30:58
situation, this is the kind of government I'd want.
31:02
But if I'm born to a rich situation, that's going to harm
31:05
me in certain ways. So what's the optimal in
31:08
between? Is my self-interest is driving
31:10
my answer? Right.
31:11
You want to maximize the good things that will happen, but
31:16
honestly, you can't do that. You have to understand what you
31:20
would say if you just had no idea where you felt.
31:25
And ultimately, we're always asking about the same question,
31:28
right? What do those who are, how best
31:34
to put it? What do the most profoundly
31:38
disabled among us? What did they deserve?
31:42
There's the question that this always becomes, and I don't know
31:48
the answer to that question. I don't know the answer to that
31:50
question in my life as I have it.
31:53
I don't know the answer to that question under some sort of
31:57
roles in system. I just don't know.
32:01
I've been thinking about it for 30 years and I don't know.
32:05
Well, for his 900 pages roles ends up not too far from the
32:09
golden rule of treat others as you would have them treat you.
32:13
I think ultimately that's right. Ultimately that's right.
32:17
It's sad. It's not particularly
32:19
fascinating to come to that conclusion.
32:23
Nonetheless, I think that's as close as you're going to get to
32:27
a realistic summary. So what do we all do?
32:32
I don't know, but it's interesting to think about it
32:35
from this other direction, right?
32:38
You get radically different answers when you force yourself,
32:43
when you're alone, to think about it in this way.
32:46
It may not be the answer you want to get, or you may be
32:50
arriving at an answer you have real distaste for, and yet that
32:56
might be indicative that your own politics are defective.
33:03
Right. If you can look at a radically
33:06
different perspective and say, yeah, under those circumstances,
33:10
I might choose that, Well, then maybe you should choose that
33:13
under all circumstances. Maybe you're the defect.
33:18
And that's, I think, what made Rawls so important during his
33:24
time, right? Because you could read it and
33:26
say, well, yeah, I'm, I'm the problem.
33:31
And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
33:33
numbers. Until next time.
33:34
Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
33:38
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
33:42
week. Can't take it easy.
33:42
See you next week, James.