Veil of knowledge

An Op-Ed by Michelle Alexander in today's Times has taken me back to a moment in college I've come to think of as my turn to religious studies - but also made clear how the world has changed since then. Alexander's piece ponders how differently we might all be thinking about the unfolding climate crisis if we believed in reincarnation.

considering future lives can ... be productive, challenging us to imagine that what we do or say in this life matters and might eventually catch up with us. Would we fail to respond with care and compassion to the immigrant at the border today if we thought we might find ourselves homeless, fleeing war and poverty, in the next life?

Alexander reminds us that future people are more likely be climate refugees than Times readers: if we’re reborn in 50 years, there’s only a small chance that any of us would be rich or benefit from white privilege.

As I was reading the piece, I remembered the tutorial at Oxford (with John Gray) where I first encountered John Rawls' "original position" behind the "veil of ignorance," a thought experiment which could lead all people to realize that, if they didn't know what their social station or gifts would be, they'd choose to live in a society where the least well were not so poorly off. This was based, I argued in my bold undergraduate way, on an assessment of risk-averseness that was culturally contingent. Rawls assumed we had but one life to live. But what if one thought one would come back many times, over time presumably inhabiting many stations in society? Might this not make someone prefer a society with greater inequality but productive of opportunities for greatness they knew they'd eventually get a chance to participate in? I'm not sure what it says about my own class-consciousness that I came up with this argument; I was thinking of new friends who were Hindu. Rawls was claiming to be neutral as among metaphysical conceptions of the good, but young philosopher Mark thought he'd found a flaw in the argument. I wasn't defending the caste system more than rhetorically: like most folks, I accepted Rawls' conclusion implicitly but thought we needed a better argument for it. In any event, my argument was waved off as "religious studies, not political philosophy," and the rest is history.

Alexander came across Rawls' argument when she went to law school.

If denied basic information about one’s circumstances, Rawls predicted that important social goods, such as rights and liberties, power and opportunities, income and wealth, and conditions for self-respect would be “distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage.”

Back then, I was struck by how closely Rawls’s views mirrored my own. I now believe, however, that the veil of ignorance is quite distorted in an important respect. Rawls’s veil encourages us to imagine a scenario in which we’re equally likely to be rich or poor or born with natural talents or limitations.

But of course most people in the future, as in the present, are not rich.

Rawls was right: True morality becomes possible only when we step outside the box of our perceived self-interest and care for others as much as we care for ourselves. But rather than imagining a scenario in which we’re entirely ignorant of what the future holds, perhaps we ought to imagine that we, personally, will be born again into the world that we are creating today through our collective and individual choices.

Who among us would fail to question capitalism or to demand a political system free from corporate cash if we knew that we’d likely live our next life as a person of color, earning less than $2.50 a day, in some part of the world ravaged by climate change while private corporations earn billions building prisons, detention centers and border walls for profit?

One of the common criticisms of Rawls was that his supposedly ignorant choosers - ignorant about where they would end up in society - were in fact equipped with lots of social scientific knowledge. (This is where their risk-averseness is rooted.) What if that knowledge included not just a realistic sense of how unlikely anyone would be to win the lottery and lead a life of security and privilege, but a realistic sense of how current trends make it ever more unlikely? 

That's Alexander's plea, like that of so many trying to turn the tide of ecological ruin. Some version of imagining ourselves alive in the ever more precarious future is crucial. Maybe we need to get metaphysical, too. Just as the plans of the Silicon Valley elites to flee a ravaged planet to state-of-the-art space stations and colonies on other planets are a refusal of our common life, so, too, are those religious views according to which the earth was never meant to be our home, where it could be destroyed and we could be OK. But would I dare say this to someone who endures present calamity with the faith that one day, when all this is dead and gone, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain" (Rev 21:4)?