Wokeness Dismantled, Part 1

Private virtue vs. public virtue

Woke people are proud of their “empathy” for everyone. They’re not only proud of it, they’re smug about it. They empathize with those Hamas terrorists; they empathize with those violent felons in state penitentiaries; they empathize with those addicts “experiencing homelessness” lying on the street. And if you don’t… well, you need to be re-educated. Certainly cancelled. Or something worse.

Sometimes they put it on their lawns so everyone can see how virtuous they are:

It’s easy (and fun!) to ridicule this sanctimoniousness, but let’s take it apart:

Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

So there we have it right there: “Private morality IS public morality. There’s no difference.”

There is a difference, though. Philosophers throughout history have known that. This is the first of a series of articles on the (non-existent) foundations of wokeness.

Empathy

The woke empathize with “marginalized” people by putting themselves in their place:

• How would you like it if no one would hire you as a convicted felon?

• How would you like it if you had to camp on the street, and the police arrested you for it?

• How would you like it if you had entered the country illegally and they wanted to deport you?

I’ve talked to homeless people. Petting my dog is always a great conversation-opener. We talk about the weather or the traffic or sports or the dog — never about their situation in life and what led them to it. In other words: treat them like normal people.

But there’s a fundamental error in assuming that this same approach works on a large scale. Your empathy towards one person is not the prescription for a social problem involving thousands of them.

In this post we’ll look at one reason why this error continues to be made.

John Rawls and His Original Error

A Theory of Justice was and continues to be a hugely influential book in liberal circles. The famous “veil of ignorance” thought experiment is summarized in Wikipedia as follows:

The original position (OP), often referred to as the veil of ignorance, is a thought experiment often associated with the works of American philosopher John Rawls. In the original position, one is asked to consider which principles they would select for the basic structure of society, but they must select as if they had no knowledge ahead of time what position they would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a "veil of ignorance", which prevents them from knowing their ethnicity, social status, gender, and (crucially in Rawls's formulation) their or anyone else's ideas of how to lead a good life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally.

In Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical (Rawls) says:

Briefly, the idea is that in a constitutional democracy the public conception of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines. [emphasis added]

Later on, he proposes two principles that he claims will meet broader acceptance than the existing rule of law bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment: Bentham, Locke, Mill, and others, which we could summarize as “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

1. Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with a similar scheme for all.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. [emphasis added]

You can see two of the tenets of woke “theory”:

• If I’m behind the veil of ignorance, I don’t know if I’ll be gender-confused or disabled or addiction-prone or sociopathic, so I’ll pick the society in which I come out the best, just in case I do turn out to be that way.

• Some people don’t agree with Judeo-Christian traditions or Enlightenment philosophy, so we have to discard those.

Criticisms of Rawls

If you’re thinking, “This is nonsense!” you’re not the only one. Yet to the woke, this is an irrefutable proof of their rightness.

Let’s start with this hypothetical, impossible “you” behind the veil of ignorance. How could anyone possibly know what such a person would choose? He or she is an abstract entity whose views are assigned by Rawls, and assumed to be accepted by everyone. There are no such persons.

This person is supposedly risk-averse: they would think, “Oh no! I have to insure against every possible outcome! If I am a sociopath, I’ll want society to be tolerant, and not lock me up in one of those awful prisons!” They will all have one overriding goal: avoiding the worst outcome for themselves.

Furthermore, in Rawls’ thought experiment there are multiple participants who debate the possible society they will live under, and then they reach unanimity.

Philosophers have disputed Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” theory, and I won’t bore you with the details, except that it’s impossible for any participant to discard his or her “me-ness.” Suppose “me” thinks, “I want to maximize my own potential, if I have any talent in music or business or sports! I won’t want to be dragged down to mediocrity!”

Gamblers prop up the big Las Vegas casinos with their desire to take a risk, so surely some of those people behind the veil would want to roll the dice as well. If everyone were risk-averse, Las Vegas and Macau would not exist. It’s perfectly reasonable for them to analyze it thusly:

Hey, the probability is that I won’t be one of those “marginalized” people.

An Empirical Experiment

In an actual experiment, people did not behave Rawls’ way. The details are given in that paper, but here is the table they were asked to choose a column from:

You can see that the “floor or low income” row is the “best treatment for the worst off.” Distribution 4 has the highest floor and, correspondingly, the lowest average.

In the experiment they considered the good of the entire society: the average, as well as the worst and best cases. They were pragmatic, in other words. They wanted everyone to be as well off as possible, with a “safety net” so that the worst-off were protected, to a degree. They did not concern themselves exclusively with the lowest incomes as Rawls asserts they would.

As the author says:

Under all experimental conditions, all groups reached consensus and no group ever selected maximizing the floor as their preferred principle [ed. corresponding to Rawls’ principle of “the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society”]. Overwhelmingly, the most popular principle was the "intuitionistic" principle of maximizing the average with a floor constraint. It was the choice of 35 of the 44 groups. This principle was chosen by all groups in our original design and was, overall, the most popular choice under all variants. Selected floor constraints ranged from a minimum of $6,125 to a maximum of $17,225, with a mean floor constraint of $10,130. Seven groups chose to maximize the average, and two to maximize the average subject to a range constraint.

Conclusion

That lawn sign at the beginning is naive and childish in many ways, and I’ve demonstrated one of the ways. There is more silliness to dismantle there, and I’m here to do it in the next posts. Sneak preview:

What works in your family doesn’t necessarily work in a big country.