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Encountering a new name

Image result for James Mirrlees

Grant John Rawls a lot of assumptions. Grant his moral epistemology of "reflective equilibrium," to start. Grant that justice consists of the broad institutional features of a society, and grant that THESE should be what hypothetical negotiators would cook up behind a "veil of ignorance."

All those concessions still won't lead us to the conclusions that Rawls is set upon, unless we also agree with him about whether the negotiators would adopt the conclusion that Rawls thinks they will adopt? Would they adopt the equal liberty principle and difference principle, and would they do so in a lexical ordering?

The decades since Rawls' elaboration of his views in A Theory of Justice have given people plenty of opportunities to spill out alternative outcomes of those negotiations.

But James Mirrlees (pictured above) didn't need a lot of time. He did so almost instantly. I haven't read Mirrlees' paper, but a secondary source describes him as saying the negotiators would adopt an "equity-adjusted sum total of utilities." Sounds like a mash-up of the difference principle (for the "equity adjustment") with old-fashioned Benthamite utility maximization, leaving the equal-liberty principle in the dust except as an accidental side effect.

I'm somewhat surprised that the name is new to me. I've been reading and thinking about this subject for a long time, and I've never heard of Mirrlees before. Or at least not in a way that has "stuck." Now his name will stick, because I've put him in a blog entry.

Anyway ... the point is that insofar as it isn't obvious that all of Rawls' premises get him to his conclusion, he may simply have taken a misguided approach to justice altogether.


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