“For example, there’s John Rawls’ Maximin Principle, which says that we should arrange society so as to maximize how well off the worst-off person is. Now, the Maximin Principle is extremely terrible—it implies that if we find the one person who’s been tortured the most, and we can’t stop them from being tortured but can make them feel better about it by torturing everyone else, then we should do so.”
How does torturing everyone else better the condition of the helpless, most-tortured person? Unless somehow torturing others benefits the least well off, then it’s just pointless torture, not “maximin.”
The original poster did say, “but can make them feel better about it by torturing everyone else”. The point is that the maximin principle implies that making the lives or many people much worse in order to make the life of a single person marginally better is justified as long as the one who benefits is the worst off among all people.
But Rawls is talking about distributing resources, not just making miserable people “feel better.” He explicitly rejects the idea that basic liberties may be infringed by appeals to greater equality.
For maximin to be used in the way you’re saying, we’d need a pretty bizarre scenario, one where, for instance, a single person has a terrible disease that can only be cured by more money and resources than all the money and resources of everyone in his Rawlsian society (anything short of that extreme would mean we could spread the cost around in a less onerous way; it would take a pretty big cost and a pretty small pool of resources to get close to making “many people much worse in order to make the life a single person marginally better”). In addition to being outlandish, it seems like such a specific situation would fall outside the very general considerations of the original position.
Also, decimating the economy to cure one person would likely lead to lots of people being as bad or worse off than the sick person and an inability to cure future instances of disease. OP’s discussion of the matter is wrong to the point of being embarrassing. Good catch.
“For example, there’s John Rawls’ Maximin Principle, which says that we should arrange society so as to maximize how well off the worst-off person is. Now, the Maximin Principle is extremely terrible—it implies that if we find the one person who’s been tortured the most, and we can’t stop them from being tortured but can make them feel better about it by torturing everyone else, then we should do so.”
How does torturing everyone else better the condition of the helpless, most-tortured person? Unless somehow torturing others benefits the least well off, then it’s just pointless torture, not “maximin.”
The original poster did say, “but can make them feel better about it by torturing everyone else”. The point is that the maximin principle implies that making the lives or many people much worse in order to make the life of a single person marginally better is justified as long as the one who benefits is the worst off among all people.
But Rawls is talking about distributing resources, not just making miserable people “feel better.” He explicitly rejects the idea that basic liberties may be infringed by appeals to greater equality.
For maximin to be used in the way you’re saying, we’d need a pretty bizarre scenario, one where, for instance, a single person has a terrible disease that can only be cured by more money and resources than all the money and resources of everyone in his Rawlsian society (anything short of that extreme would mean we could spread the cost around in a less onerous way; it would take a pretty big cost and a pretty small pool of resources to get close to making “many people much worse in order to make the life a single person marginally better”). In addition to being outlandish, it seems like such a specific situation would fall outside the very general considerations of the original position.
Also, decimating the economy to cure one person would likely lead to lots of people being as bad or worse off than the sick person and an inability to cure future instances of disease. OP’s discussion of the matter is wrong to the point of being embarrassing. Good catch.