Voting Through the Veil: John Rawls on selfish vs. selfless voting
a day ago
- #Veil of Ignorance
- #Democracy Critique
- #Social Mobility
- The post discusses the concept of John Rawls' 'Veil of Ignorance,' which encourages imagining a society without knowing one's personal attributes, to promote fair political choices.
- It introduces a game called 'The Veil' as an interactive way to explore this concept, critiquing libertarian ideals for harming social mobility and highlighting biases in voting behavior.
- Democracy is described as enabling selfish motivations, leading voters to support policies like tax cuts that reduce social mobility, based on aspirational beliefs like becoming 'millionaires in waiting.'
- The author argues that voting should use Rawlsian logic to consider societal welfare from all positions, favoring systems that protect everyone, not just reward the fortunate.
- It references resources like 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and an interactive on global inequality, emphasizing how birth lottery affects life outcomes and the importance of empathetic political decisions.