Gideon's Blog |
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Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Jacob Levy has a touching obit for John Rawls, and links to many others. I was never much of a fan, I admit. I always classed Rawls with Ronald Dworkin as liberal intellectuals who believed that a sufficiently impressive theoretical edifice could convince everyone to be a conventional liberal like themselves. I also think the veil of ignorance is a deeply wrong idea; we do not, any one of us, start at on original position; we all start where we are. That said, I probably didn't appreciate him enough because I grew up in his world. (Lincoln-Douglas-style high school debaters in my day only had to know two thinkers to have a debate: Rawls and Nozick. And they didn't need to know them deeply, either, just have a few pithy quotes at the ready.) And I grant him this: at least he was wrong. So many others who labor in the same fields are not even wrong, a far more damning indictment. |