It’s been a while between posts, so let me
just note a couple of pieces of philosophical interest in the electronic media.
Salon has a review of the recent book of essays on
The Matrix and Philosophy. The summary detail is that the analytic essays
are interesting though because everyone sets up the background in their own
essay they are a bit repetitive. A good editor would be useful here. I wonder
how many editors of collections like this will write to an author and say, “You
don’t need to summarise Plato for us, X has done it and her paper will appear
before yours in the book.”

And Slate has a nice piece about the
relationship in Theory of Justice between the veil of ignorance thought
experiment and the difference principle. The main conclusion is that the
thought experiment doesn’t seem to support the difference principle on
plausible assumptions. I remember asking someone who knew a bit more about Rawls
than I do about this once and being told that for Rawls at least if it was
shown that the two were in conflict, it would be the veil of ignorance
reasoning, and not the difference principle, that would go. That might be right
as far as Rawls’s own thought went, and the difference principle has enough
intuitive appeal that even if one argument for it failed it might still be
true, but I’m not sure I’d jump the same way. I think that we wouldn’t always
choose the society where the worst off are best off from behind the veil of
ignorance, and that shows the difference principle is mistaken. I don’t think
we’d just maximise expected utility from behind their either – we wouldn’t put too
much weight on the off chance that we’d be one of the few lucky
multi-millionaires. As far as I can tell, the balance we’d draw from behind the
veil of ignorance between raising the lot of the worst off, raising the lot of
the median, and raising the lot of the average is actually pretty close to the
balance we should draw when evaluating whether actual societies are better or
worse than others. That is, I think Rawls was right that the better society is
the one we’d choose to be in from behind the veil of ignorance, even though
that doesn’t imply the difference principle.