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governance · 1971 – 1979

Behind the Veil

Rawls builds justice out of a hypothetical contract made by parties who do not know what they will become, and finds that the resulting principles — basic liberties first, fair equality of opportunity, then the difference principle — never license a society ordered purely by aggregate benefit. Scanlon's criticism arrives alongside and on its own terms: reasons we could not reasonably reject, offered to each person rather than to a chooser.

“No party in the original position may know the place in society it will occupy, nor its class position or natural assets. (paraphrase of §3, 'The Veil of Ignorance')”
— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

Advances

  • The veil of ignorance as a device for testing principles without self-interest
  • The difference principle: inequalities only where they benefit the least advantaged
  • Reasonable rejectability as a standard for interpersonal justification

Landmarks

  1. 1971 CE

    A Theory of Justice published

    The book that spent two decades displacing utilitarianism as the default starting point.

  2. 1975 CE

    Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other

    First circulated as lectures in 1973-74; published by Harvard in 1998.

  3. 1979 CE

    The revised edition

    Rawls answers his critics and rewrites the speech, which now sets the terms of the disagreement.

Who was arguing

Alignment stack at 1979 CE (1 of 20 techniques)

  • Hard Constraints

    training

    Encode prohibitions as rules the optimiser cannot trade away, rather than as terms it can outbid. Runs from Asimov's Three Laws (1942) to rule engines, shielded formal verification, hard token constraints and refusal scaffolding. Weakness: a system that can route around a rule it can represent can route around it, so the constraint has to be enforced somewhere the policy cannot rewrite.

Techniques introduced in this era: Hard Constraints