Rawls & Rationality in the 1970s

Pynchon ripping the veil

The last few weeks on whatever social media platform you’re on have been grim. These last few weeks I’ve also found myself thinking about the 1970s (in part after seeing One Battle After Another and like everyone else rereading Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland) – the decade that saw Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, a president nobody voted for, the Bicentennial, and all sorts of national strangeness. I was also rearranging books on my bookshelf and pondering John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) and its thought experiment: what kind of society would you design if you were in an “original position” of equality, choosing its fundamental principles from behind a “veil of ignorance”?

In 1971, Rawls’s veil of ignorance made sense because ignorance was still possible, though just hanging on. But you could avoid knowing what was happening across the world, in other people’s lives, in every corner of society. Not in the social media age. Now you see everything.

But the veil is still worth thinking about. The point of the exercise is that behind the veil, you know nothing of what makes you you. As Rawls put it, “…no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like.” You don’t know your race, your gender, your personal conception of what makes life worth living, or even which generation you’ll be born into, 1850, 1950, or 2050.

You have to be impartial. Without knowledge of your future life, the veil nullifies “the effects of specific contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage.” Rawls believed that a rational person (if you believe in rationality) would protect against worst case scenarios. You’d make sure of basic liberties for everyone and arrange social or economic inequalities so that the least advantaged would benefit. Since the chances are good that anyone could end up near the bottom, you’d design a society that makes the bottom as not horrible as possible.

You can argue whether risk-averse logic should govern modern liberal political thought. And Rawls’s catchy idea always had its critics, notably Robert Nozick, who in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) argued that Rawls’s vision of redistributive justice violated individual entitlements and the sanctity of property. It’s a good rebuttal and Rawls refined his views over the next two decades, reframing his theory as limited to politics rather than a comprehensive moral doctrine. It’s a theory meant to secure fair cooperation among citizens with deeply different beliefs, and in the context of campus politics, this is important.

The veil of ignorance is still taught today, and it’s good to ask how social media fits into his model, how the concept of “ignorance” works in a social media mindset, how social media encourages fantasizing about the best case, about possible viral success, of influencing others, not worrying about worse case. There’s a growing scholarship on this.

The social media question

If you were to design society from scratch, behind the veil of ignorance, would you choose to have social media as it currently exists? If you didn’t know whether you’d be an influencer with millions of followers, or someone whose mental health is destroyed by comparison, or someone being algorithmically radicalized, or someone who finds genuine connection online? My first thought was no. The potential for broad, systemic harm (anxiety, polarization, erosion of self-respect) is distributed widely, while the extreme benefits (wealth, fame) are concentrated in very few hands.

But it’s worth thinking through. First, the nature of the “public forum” has changed. Rawls’s concerns in 1971 were about the openness of the public forum, that “everyone should be able to make use of it. All citizens should have the means to be informed about political issues.” Rawls meant a distinct sphere of life: the courthouse, a town meeting, a local newspaper. You’d enter the public arena, speak as a citizen, and then return to your private life. There were boundaries. With the “everywhere forum” of social media, those boundaries have dissolved. Every action is potentially public.

This collapse of public and private undermines Rawls’s distinction between two parts of a society’s “basic structure.” He writes that we must distinguish between “the aspects of the social system that define and secure the equal basic liberties and the aspects that specify and establish social and economic inequalities.” The first part, the political and constitutional sphere, is governed by the strict Principle of Equal Liberty. The second part, the economic and social sphere, is governed by the more flexible Difference Principle, which allows for inequalities if they benefit the least advantaged.

Which part does a privately-owned platform like X or Meta belong to? Is it just another company in the economic sphere (Part 2), free to create vast inequalities of influence for profit? Or, by functioning as the de facto “public square,” has it become part of the structure that defines and secures our basic liberties (Part 1)?

If Rawls were revived today by some AI model, he might revise his theory to insist that any entity, public or private, that constitutes the essential framework for public discourse and for securing the “fair value of political liberty,” is no longer a mere economic actor. It becomes part of the first sphere of justice, and I’m guessing a revision would make this explicit, that when private associations come to constitute the essential framework for public discourse and the exercise of political liberty, they would subject to the requirements of the first principle of justice.

The blurring of the public and private spheres also alters the psychological conditions of the citizens living within it. Rawls’s theory rests on the assumption of a rational citizen, a person capable of what he calls “deliberative rationality,” the ability to step back, assess principles, and form a coherent plan. Rawls published A Theory of Justice the same year Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The same year Nixon was still lying about the secret Cambodian bombing campaign. It’s interesting to recall that Rawls was proposing that we could think rationally about justice, design fair institutions, choose principles from behind a veil of ignorance while the news was showing everyone what institutions looked like when you pulled back the curtain.

But of course you could choose to read the excerpts or choose to turn the page.

The “everywhere forum” of social media is designed to interrupt deliberation. The algorithm, optimized for engagement, puts the outrage directly in front of you. A feed decides which injustices to learn about. A feed decides when to engage with political discourse. Can citizens even develop the mental faculties needed to participate in a just society in the first place? Is a certain amount of ignorance needed?

But this assumes a world with social media.

The point of the exercise is that behind the veil, you’re choosing principles for a society you’ll live in, but you don’t know your circumstances. Rawls argued rational people would be risk-averse: they’d use a “maximin” strategy: maximize the minimum outcome, protect the worst case.

Applied to whether or not there would even be social media, in the best case, you’re a platform owner or influencer. Maybe 0.01% outcome. The average case, you’re a regular user. Some connection, some comparison, some distraction. Maybe net neutral. The worst case, the algorithm radicalizes you, or destroys your mental health, or permanently damages your child’s development, or gets you fired for a ten-year-old tweet.

Who knows if you’re algorithmically vulnerable? It’s the new elect or damned. Behind the veil, you don’t know if your brain chemistry makes you susceptible to addiction, if your identity makes you a target for harassment, if you or someone in your family will develop an eating disorder from social media. You don’t know if you’re the person whose life is ruined.

Every pro AI model I asked replied it would choose a world without social media: “The concentrated benefits don’t justify the distributed risks. No thanks.”

Human attention is now a resource to be fought over. There is constant, zero-sum struggle for it; there are proprietary algorithms to capture it and to grant access to what Rawls calls “social advantages” and other scarce resources, like education and opportunity.

Rawls’s list of basic liberties includes “freedom of the person” and “freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law.” These liberties, Rawls argued, “lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate.” For Rawls’s generation, “seizure” meant the state taking your physical papers. Today, it’s whoever has seized our digital selves, including patterns of thought possibly unknown to ourselves.

The fabric of society rends without goodwill. As Rawls put it, “if those engaged in a system of social cooperation regularly act with evident intention to uphold its just (or fair) rules, bonds of friendship and mutual trust tend to develop among them...”

Yikes, I say, after spending some time on any platform. While I endeavor myself to be kind (even to my detractors), I see sometimes with envy how I would “do better” if I amplified conflict. The algorithms create a distorted perception of society around me, making bad-faith arguments seem far more prevalent than they are. Where are “bonds of friendship and mutual trust?”

Can there be a good life with social media?

I think of Zena Hitz when I read Rawls here: “The aim of deliberation is to find that plan which best organizes our activities... so that our aims and interests can be fruitfully combined into one scheme of conduct.” Rawls was interested in human flourishing and saw that human beings “enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities.” He was interested in the “right” over the “good,” arguing that principles of right “put limits on which satisfactions have value; they impose restrictions on what are reasonable conceptions of one’s good.” He argued that interests “requiring the violation of justice have no value.”

Social media complicates this. The “good” for the platform is often defined as maximizing engagement. This “good” is agnostic about justice; it will promote hateful or false content if it is engaging.

In the digital age, Rawls’s critics sound prescient. Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor’s argument that the self behind the veil is too thin to carry the moral weight of community carries more weight when social media dissolves us into fragmented, hostile tribes. Susan Moller Okin’s argument that injustice often begins in the family carries more weight given online misogyny and how family matters are given a global public stage. Nancy Fraser’s argument that power operates through cultural visibility has the most weight of all.

The reality is we’re not actually behind the veil anymore. Ignorance is impossible We’re already in the world of social media. The real question is: given that it exists, what do we do?

Pynchon, Rawls

Read more books. I appreciate Thomas Pynchon’s obsession with the 1970s (read Gravity’s Rainbow, read Inherent Vice, read The Crying of Lot 49), when the cultural idealism of the 1960s collapsed into paranoia, disillusionment, and entropy. His central axiom is that everything is connected, and connected to your detriment. His books are good, dark fun.

The seductions of Pynchon still appeal, the thrill of the “languid, sinister blooming,” but Pynchon’s heroes also seem to need, in the background, Rawls’s rational belief that there could be a just society, founded on reason and mutual respect. It’s just not happening, maybe not possible, on social media. Maybe in books.