Beyond the Veil of Ignorance
Alan Ryan,
Literary Review,
Apr 24, 2023
This is a review of Daniel Chandler's Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Unfortunately, distribution of the book itself is neither - you'll have to wait until someone posts a copy on Sci-Hub if you don't have the means to obtain this London School of Economics production. Nonetheless, the reviews are useful as provocations. Despite a Guardian Reviewer saying that John Rawls "had precisely zero impact on the real world", the idea of justice as fairness is a central concept in liberal democratic ethics, and stands as influential as John Stuart Mill's writings on liberty. Chandler challenges us to imagine what that concept would look like in a world where, as Rawls says, "citizens hold different views about personal morality and religion, there is no external standard that we can appeal to." We can imagine an egalitarian and just society, and it's not out of reach, but the question is how to get there when even western democracies "are plutocracies, based on government by the better-off for the better-off."
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