The justification of education: a Rawlsian interpretation

The justification of education:a Rawlsian interpretation

John Rawls’s “Original Position” offers more than a decision procedure for justifying principles of justice, as he intended. It enables a unique way of understanding and justifying education. It may help us to get past our educational myopia; of education being no more than schooling and formal teaching, job preparation and conformist behaviour. Here’s how.

Prelude

Rawls’s work with the Original Position in his A Theory of Justice was pivotal for me in seeing how to restore the ancient understanding of education that we now find so difficult to grasp and to accord its proper priority; that education firstly has to be seen as a big picture and needs to be appreciated through all of our institutions, practices and decisions.

The loss of this insight means that we have denied ourselves enormous power, not only of self-understanding, but also of our ability to heal our societies and their institutions as well as our personal lives. We struggle with social issues and the great costs that are being paid by too many citizens, simply because we have deprived ourselves and alienated ourselves from the educational, reducing our attention to the narrow institutions of schooling and the equally narrow technologies of formal teaching; and within that narrowness, we have reduced the purpose of education to vocationalism and behaviour management, purposes that, in themselves, are unworthy of education and insufficient to our humanity.

This discussion was originally written as two lectures for undergraduate students in the 1980s, as an introduction to John Rawls´s A Theory of Justice, and as an explanation of how his theory might be used to justify educational inquiry and decision-making in a thoroughgoing way. The style reflects their original nature as presentations. Since that time, I have worked on many further elements of the educational theory, and a number of issues with Rawls´s work, at least for this purpose, have become apparent.

The lectures subsequently evolved as handouts for numerous courses over many years. This version of the two lectures has been revised in the light of a variety of issues with Rawls´s theory. Some of these arose in the massive secondary literature on his work. Perhaps the most important one, however – the account of “self-respect” – emerged in the light of my own attempt to apply his scheme to large educational problems.

Though Rawls himself went on to make revisions of his own, none of those changes have been incorporated here, largely because, at this stage I still feel that the issues with the theory that are important in our context (and remained important later) are partly attributable to shortcomings in the educational vision that were never addressed.

I have learned much from exchanges with my friend Ralph Page over the use of Rawls, and have tried to incorporate what I have learned from him without gifting him with my errors.

The “Original Position”

We will begin by considering some background matters before presenting the basic moral “machinery” which Rawls has provided us with. In order to understand this piece of machinery, which is called the “Original Position” you must be ready to make a considerable effort of the imagination, and without some of the general background that I will now provide, the effort of imagination may be just too great — the “Original Position” will appear altogether too weird. And I should also add, of course, that Rawls’s actual theory is a theory of justice, and was not offered as a theory of education. It seems to me that his theory has tremendous potential, in our contemporary context, for helping to generate a theory of education, and I have adapted it to do so here. It is interesting to recall that Plato began the Republic, in which so much of his educational theory is embedded, by trying to work out what “justice” was.

Rawls’ theory of justice is a Social Contract theory — a revival and revamping of a tradition of Social Contract theorizing which perhaps reached its height in Rousseau’s work (also, note, a profound educational thinker). The Social Contract tradition began most explicitly with Thomas Hobbes, though elements of it can certainly be traced right back to Plato. Basically, what you attempt to do in Social Contract Theory is try to imagine a group of people sitting down before society has actually been formed, and attempting to decide upon its institutions beforehand – as a contract that would bind them all when the society came into being.

In reality, as we grow up, most of us discover that we are expected to follow and conform to many institutions we had no part in creating, and that we are to submit to them now, regardless of the fact that we were never asked if we wanted to, and that we may not now be able to give our free consent to them because of our upbringing. It would not be unreasonable that many of our social arrangements may not seem entirely legitimate to us, and indeed, may not be. Equally, they may seem acceptable simply because they are taken for granted – we grew up with them with such familiarity that we have never been able to question them, or to take questions seriously when they are raised.

These arrangements may, nevertheless, be deeply unjust, or have reduced us to very much less than we might have been. Social Contract theory asks us to step back from these conventions and ask ourselves whether we would, indeed, agree to them if we could recognize them as social inventions that could have been quite different.

Our success in doing this usefully will depend upon the degree to which we can imaginatively “step outside” them, understand their implications, and conceive of alternatives. If we were to “step outside”, however, we would have to do so in some way that disqualify many of the peculiarities of our upbringing, and the advantages or disadvantages of our own social positions. Our conclusions here shouldn’t be “just about us”.

A literal Social Contract could never have been an historical possibility, of course. Human beings have always been social animals. But even if there could have been similar beings who were, in the first instance, non-social, but later came to be social, they could never have constructed their social arrangements thoughtfully, and reached intelligent collective agreements about them, because they would need language to do so, and language requires, or presupposes, a society.

Conventions form, and all sorts of arrangements come about for reasons and through processes other than fair, rational negotiation, as good history can so frequently show. The Social Contract is therefore an imaginative model or metaphor that can help us to clear up our thinking, and it depends very much on the power and effectiveness of our imaginings. It is a constructed model of an impartial point of view which can help us to see what “being fair”, and “freely consenting” would be like.

Before setting up the contractual myth of the “Original Position” (his version of the Social Contract) Rawls establishes a few principles and definitions which must be expressed in the structure of the decision-making if the outcome is to be considered ethically or morally legitimate. People sometimes get into contractual arrangements that are unfair, because the circumstances under which agreement was reached were not themselves fair. The basic “rules of the game” that Rawls sets up are moral assumptions that will lie behind all of the subsequent decisions. The binding power of all the subsequent decisions will therefore depend upon how compelling these assumptions are felt by us to be. Hopefully, they are very widely and deeply held, if not universal. Some attempt needs to be made, nevertheless, to explain why we should find them compelling, and I will try to give a sketch that before moving on to discuss the “Original Position”.

Moral duty

Firstly then, there are two primary duties. Duties are moral imperatives that we must perform regardless of any relationship we have entered into with others. The “Good Samaritan” is an example of someone who fulfilled a moral duty. The man on the side of the road was a stranger to him. The Samaritan did not know him, and had not had anything to do with him before the trouble befell him.

“Other things equal”:

We should not do harm to others (though some perspective needs to be maintained upon the level of sacrifice that we may be called upon to make. No-one would suggest throwing away our lives to save another person a scratch).
Indeed, we should endeavour to benefit others others – but not at to the extent of great sacrifice on our part either.

It should be noted that these are things we must at least do if we are to act morally. They set a minima. Beyond these requirements of duty lies altruism; kinds of actions that we should receive moral admiration for undertaking, but which are “above and beyond the call of duty” – we cannot be blamed if we do not go so far.

Obligations

Obligations, in contrast, arise when people enter into arrangements with each other — usually because more can be achieved through cooperation than in isolation. Sewers, roads, houses, food, cars, electricity, acquiring knowledge, friends and lovers all involve relationships calling for cooperation. It is clear that our whole civilisation depends upon these arrangements, and for the purposes of Social Contract Theory, we can consider them as “contractual” even though, in very many cases, the contract entered into may be implicit rather than expressed. When we climb on a bus and are asked for our fare, we usually do not need to discuss the terms of the contract we are entering into. From our point of view, however, contracts can very easily be unfair, exploitative, or manipulative. Our task is to find a way of determining what would make the contracts legitimate from a moral point of view.

The basic moral rules governing these contractual arrangements might be stated as follows:

The arrangements must be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements.
That is, if an arrangement is to be moral, the parties must enter into it, and assume the obligations freely — no coercion or manipulation is allowable.
If you enter into such an arrangement and are receiving benefits from it, or are going to, then you must play your part – fulfil the contract.

There are, of course, various reasonable excuses, but we won’t go into them here. Let me repeat the primary moral rule. The arrangements must be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements. I think that we all subscribe to this rule, and presume that most of our arrangements satisfy it. We don’t, for example, ask the bus-driver whether driving the bus is reasonable from his point of view when we step on the bus, and usually we don’t loose much sleep over whether it is reasonable from our point of view to ride on the bus. We presume these things to be sorted out, or we sort them out for ourselves quite easily. But there are cases where it is very difficult to work out whether the arrangements are proper, and there is also the possibility that we take some arrangements so much for granted that we do not notice that they are morally faulty. I will try and make up an illustration which will present some of the difficulties to you clearly, so that you can see the power of Rawls’ “Original Position”.

Suppose that two people are attempting to decide whether they should embark on some long-term intimate relationship with each other, such as a marriage, and they are trying to work out how that relationship should be arranged. And presume that they both have a strong moral concern under the rule. Once the hormonal and otherwise drug-induced ecstasies have abated, and the couple begin to figure out how they are going to live together – such things as where to live, how to arrange their money and spend it, perhaps even how to earn it, what to eat and how to cook it, how to get the washing done and how to treat each other’s friends – we would hope that love would motivate them to wish for these things to be fairly arranged. There are three basic difficulties in applying the moral rule in such a situation.

If we are both to be parties to the arrangement we must ensure that what is decided upon is in fact reasonable from the other person’s point of view. This requires us to “put ourselves in the other person’s shoes” — which is something we can only do in a limited way under the best of circumstances. To approach an understanding of another person requires skill, experience and effort. Our attempts to understand other people are always limited by the fact that we must depend firstly upon our own experience. No two people experience the world exactly alike throughout their lives, and what other people tell us about their experience is always second-hand. One never can have the experience of growing up as a member of the opposite sex, for instance. We must try to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, but there is always a limit as to how well we could do this. While you are in the process of coming to understand them they, inconveniently, have been evolving.
Secondly, we will be involved in a sort of moral struggle. It is important that the arrangements be reasonable from our point of view as well as from the point of view of our potential partner. We mustn’t have what is reasonable from our own point of view overridden, if we are to give ourselves our due. But it is true, nevertheless, that our own wants and desires will be more real to us then the wants and desires of the other person. This is true, because our own wants and desires are in our experience, and we cannot live the life of the other person in order to experience his or her wants and desires properly. We can and must try, but the moral danger is that we will tip the scales, or try to tip the scales, in favour of what we want and desire. On the other hand if we get neurotic about this one we might end up by making a doormat of ourselves — which wouldn’t be any better.
And then there is the third difficulty — whether or not we, or the other person, are entering into a particular arrangement freely. This is not a highly “philosophical” question, but a very, very practical one. If you are a man in a heterosexual relationship, and the woman agrees with you, is it because she knows what she is doing in a rather full sense — the alternatives were real ones for her, but she has chosen this one instead — or is she agreeing with you because she is a little needy, afraid of losing you, and underneath it all is an anxiety to please you? If you are a woman, is the man agreeing with you because he as examined the alternatives, and this one seems the most reasonable from his point of view, and out of respect for your view, or is he agreeing to avoid conflict and build some credit in the emotional bank? Or is he indulging you in a slightly infantilising way until you want equal support in the housework? Or perhaps he always did what his mother suggested, and you remind him of his mother.

Feminists didn’t necessarily attack the role of mother and housewife because there is anything intrinsically wrong with that role — they attack it because women tend to be brought up to believe that being a housewife and mother is the primary way in which a woman can gain satisfaction, But also both because of the low status accorded it (it isn’t “real” work, and because it relegated their own potential interests and ambitions quite a way down the list – after the husband, and often after the children as well.

Feminists tended to doubt that many women who become housewives and baby-producers did so as a result of free choice. They tended to believe that women were psychologically channelled into certain domestic roles. What I will call “indoctrination” – learning that leads us to believe that contracts are fair when a clearer view would show quite vividly that they are not – corrupts the legitimacy of many apparently “normal” arrangements.

People can, for example, believe (on the basis of unfortunate experience) that they deserve no better when the history of their perception has corrupted their ability to judge the reasonableness of their own position in intelligent ways. If their understanding does indeed improve, they may be right to want to renegotiate the contract, or to call it off altogether.

Let us recall the first moral rule: the arrangements must be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements. Now if you have understood the difficulties which arise in connection with applying the rule where a relatively simple case is concerned, you will appreciate, I think, why Rawls felt he had to devise a special model for dealing with the problem of “justice” for a whole society.

You see, Rawls wasn’t just concerned with how we might be just toward one another on an individual level. Like Plato, he was concerned with this, but his effort was directed toward working out what a just society would be like. It is, in fact, very difficult for individuals to be just toward one another in an unjust society. And if one is going to attempt to assess whether or not the basic social arrangements themselves are just or not, the problems with applying the rule become even more difficult.

Suppose that our society is, in many respects, unjust. We will have grown up in this unjust society, and our ways of thinking will have been formed partially by the injustices embedded in its institutions. So if we set out to determine whether or not our society is just, we will tend to think this out with concepts and procedures of thinking that have been formed by unjust conditions. Moreover, since our own ways of thinking and our own wants and desires will be more real to us than any others, we will tend to think of what “justice” is in terms of what is reasonable from our own point of view.

We may tend to bias things toward our view rather than toward the point of view which might be held by someone much older or much younger than ourselves; or someone who has grown up in the society under conditions vastly different from our own, and who we have not even met, or tried to understand. A crucial test of whether you can be moral or not is not whether you can be fair or good to someone you know and like and have much in common with, but whether you can be fair and good to someone you find different or obnoxious, or someone at the other end of the country, or on the other side of the world, whom you do not even know.

When we attempt to develop a theory of education that will enable us to assess the adequacy of our educational arrangements, we face the same problem which Rawls faced with respect to justice. If our educational arrangements are bad in certain respects we may not see them as bad because we grew up under these educational arrangements. We may take much of the system for granted, and our attempts to assess the system may partly be controlled by the very system we are trying to assess.

We grew up in the system, and learned to think and feel in certain ways in that system. What we need to do, both where education and justice are concerned, is to find some way of standing far enough away from the system to see it clearly — or at least as clearly as we can. We need to remove ourselves to some sort of impartial standpoint — some position where we can be fair to people. This is why Rawls devised the “Original Position” — the imaginary standpoint in which we strip away all of the elements which might lead to an unfair outcome — such things as our individual experiences, wants and desires; and the particular institutions which we grew up in and live under.

Some people find this “Original Position” very hard to imagine, because so much has been stripped away. If you do find it hard to imagine, it won’t make Rawls wrong. He only devised the “Original Position” because it seemed a vivid metaphor which gathered all the essential elements together. It expresses (in more detail) the moral principles that have already been discussed. His answer to anyone who finds it hard to imagine would be “work out why each element is in the ‘Original Position’ and you will see that is an important element in moral reasoning. Then reason out these moral problems concerning justice in terms of these elements.”

Think of the “Original Position” as a boardroom or a convention centre in which decisions to set up a society are being made (Rawls was American, and America did, of course, have such a convention in which the Constitution of the United States was developed). The “Original Position” contains “people” who must decide upon these things in this order:

They must firstly decide upon basic principles of justice.
Using these principle, they must decide upon basic constitutional and economic arrangements, and ensure that their decisions conform to the principles of justice they have already settled upon.
Ruled by the decisions they have already made, they must settle upon all the other basic institutions — the judiciary and the executive, for example.
They must work out how they are going to live their lives. The decisions, in other words, begin with the most general and basic, and end with the most specific and personal.

The decisions must be made in this order because the higher decisions must constrain the lower ones. It is a “decision procedure”. In modern Western societies it often seems as if the first two were reversed – that decisions about justice have to take the economic arrangements of capitalism as constraining assumptions – with many unfortunate consequences.

Now the next step really does call for imagination! These persons in the Original Position (usually shortened to “POP”) are enshrouded, or perhaps it would be better to say “surrounded” by what Rawls called “veils of ignorance.” As each decision is made, a veil of ignorance is lifted and they know a little more before they have to make the next decision. All is revealed to them before they make the last one. Before discussing how little they know in the beginning, let me explain some general conditions that apply all the way through until the last stage.

They must all agree to every decision — each POP has the right of veto.
They are equal in intelligence, cunning and persuasive ability — no one is able to get more for themselves by outwitting anybody else. There are no ties of affection — nobody is going to give anything away out of affection. They are to secure for themselves the best possible conditions for leading a satisfying life.
As I will explain in a minute, they have no idea, until the end, what they will specifically want out of life. But they do have a short list of general things that almost any worthwhile life will need. Rawls calls these things “primary goods”. The things that he thinks almost any worthwhile life is likely to require in some measure are these: rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth — and a very special and important one; self respect (or “self esteem”). By “powers”, he doesn’t mean just political power — he means things like skills, and intellectual and emotional powers. And by “wealth” he doesn’t mean the desire to be wealthy, but rather social wealth, such as access to libraries and museums and similar things. Each POP then, must ensure that s/he is going to get the best possible deal for themselves out of the decision-making where these goods are concerned. But remember that they must reach agreement on these things, and they can’t outsmart each other.
The list of primary goods comes to us with its own set of problems. The most notable omission from our point of view is anything to do with knowledge, understanding, reason, or intelligent intellectual independence. This would be fatal from the educational point of view, but there is no obvious reason why we cannot add it back in. More on this below.
Finally, whatever they agree to, POP know that the society which they organize under these decisions must be relatively stable. It won’t do to have a perfectly just society which can only survive for a week. This is a very interesting element, particularly for us, since it forced Rawls to face some educational questions. The society which POP creates must not be one which generates a lot of envy in people, or justice will be eroded. Moreover, the justice of the institutions will only be maintained if the institutions foster in people a “sense of justice” — a concern for justice. Growing up within the institutions must lead people to care about being just to one another, and to care about maintaining just institutions. This concern, in Rawls’s theory for ensuring that people would develop a sense of justice and a desire to maintain just institutions would have been very familiar to Plato. Now let us return to the “veils of ignorance”.

The veils of ignorance

Recall that persons in the original position (POP) must reach agreement; that they are not to be concerned for others but must do the best to secure the primary goods for themselves, and that they must begin by settling on the basic principles of justice. Notice that, though they are to do the best they can for themselves, the situation is set up so that they must respect the points of view of other POP since they must reach agreement and they do not have the ability to outwit each other.

Now in the beginning (when they have to make the first decisions about justice) what sort of people they are, and what they will want or like is a total mystery to them. They will only know what sorts of individuals they are when the last veil of ignorance is lifted. This is what they don’t know in the beginning.

They don’t know what sex they are (or gender orientation).
They don’t know what powers and abilities they will have when the veils finally do go up. That is, they don’t know whether they will be strong or weak, intelligent or feeble-minded, or disabled in some way. In the Original Position they are equally intelligent, but they are unlikely to be so once all is revealed to them as they exit the Original Position. It is very important here to be alert to the possibilities of disability and dependency. Martha Nussbaum has pointed out that we are likely to spend more of our lives dependent than independent. It is too easy to have in mind, throughout this process, an image of able-bodied and independent young people – which is a distortion of life and its prospects.
At this point they do not even know whether they will be happy-go-lucky, or intense, for example. They do know that they will want satisfying lives — but all they know is that they had better secure the primary goods for themselves if they are to achieve this.
They do not know how old they will be, or even which generation they will belong to. When all the veils go up, they may find out that they are old and frail, or that they are new-born babes, gurgling in cribs. Crucially, they do not know what social position they will be in. You see, the first decision they make is the decision about principles of justice. As they make this, and the second and third decisions, they are going to decide the basis upon which the goods are to be distributed. When the final veil goes up, they are going to see who they are, and where they stand in the social system. And then, they had better be able to live with their decision. Rawls believes that it would be reasonable for them all to agree to some differences in the distribution of the primary goods, though he wouldn’t agree that the differences which we do have in our societies are the sorts of differences which POP would be wise to agree to.
But you see, if a person in the original position agrees to there being a difference in the distribution of something which is good, he or she (or it) would be foolish to do so simply because she might end up in the best off position. Where they will end up will be randomly distributed, as will sex, age, desires and personal endowments. If POP agree to there being a difference in distribution, each POP must face the fact that the odds of ending up in the position of the worst off are quite even.
POP do know a few things, in addition to the rules of the game. They do not know at the beginning what the level of technological development of the society will be, or what its history is like. They will know a little more about these things when the first veil goes up. They do have some general knowledge about economics, politics, psychology and sociology, but they don’t know any particular facts – ones that might distort their understanding in terms of existing social arrangements. They do know some general rules about working out how to have a satisfying life — what Rawls calls “having a rational life- plan”, though an educational flaw is that Rawls neglected to ensure that they would have this knowledge and these abilities in the world after the decision-making. This is a problem because of his omission of knowledge and reasoning from the primary goods (as I mentioned above). “Rational life-planning” will be discussed in more detail below. At this point, though, we simply need to be aware that POP do not know anything of the content the particular plans they will later want to devise.

The “Original Position” as a model or metaphor

Now remember that no actual Original Position ever has existed, or ever will exist. It is an “ideal” situation — an intellectual device which serves as a kind of measuring instrument. It is not all that strange theoretically. Physicists talk of the nature of an “ideal” gas, without ever expecting to find a gas which is “ideal”. The Original Position is a measuring instrument against which we can check our actual institutions to see whether or not they are fair. But it will not work unless the model is pretty vivid for you.

Let us try to make it more vivid. Suppose that, while we are together in a room, I zap you from the arcane sources of my fantastical powers so that suddenly you don’t know what sex or gender you are, how old you are, what you want out of life, or what social position you might be in. When (if) you recover from the shock, I tell you that you must not leave this room with its mysterious fog) until you have decided upon principles of justice, and that you all must agree upon them. When you have made that decision I provide you with a bit more information, and you must make the next decision. Each time you make a decision, the social world out there alters to conform with the decision you make.

You make the third decision, and I dissolve the final veil. The walls of the room dissolve, and in a flash you see who you are after all. You see what sex/gender you are, how old you are, what your disposition is like and what your native talents are — and, finally what social position you are in. And the social position, with the goods available to it, will be a consequence of your decision-making. “What you see is what you get”.

What you get, among other things, is a mind formed by the circumstances in which you will find yourself. If minds differ according to the ways in which we organise ourselves culturally – in terms of age, gender, disability, talent, “cultural capital”, social class, wealth, work or whatever, then what we get is the mind-forming conditions of the place in which we find ourselves.

Rawls glimpsed this in making “self-respect” (our self-esteem, or sense of our own worth) a primary good. We can, and do, distribute self-esteem. The long-term, cross-generational unemployed tend to be assigned very little of it (and often believe that they deserve no more). In remarking on the absence of knowledge, understanding and reason as primary goods, I have tried to draw attention to just how much there might really be to see with the help of the Original Position as a tool. We do not just distribute self-esteem, as one quality of mind: we distribute minds themselves.

Justice

Rawls considered a number of alternative principles of justice which POP might consider in the Original Position. It seemed to him that all members of a society will be better off if some of the primary goods are distributed unevenly than if all members get the same. That is, some differences in distribution may lead to a marked increase in the quality, quantity, and availability of the goods for the worst off than anyone would get if the goods were distributed evenly. This is an argument that has been exploited in neo-lconservative economics. Give tax breaks to the rich, who will then invest the extra money wisely, and the economic benefits will “trickle down” to boost the lives of those at the bottom.

When this has actually been done, of course, there has never been any serious effort to show that it happens (indeed, there is evidence that the rich do not invest the extra money), and there is no attempt at all to assess the reasonableness of the decisions from the standpoint of the worst off in any genuine way. The worst off are probably a lot worse off than if the goods were distributed evenly. It is simply an ideology serving the interests of those with power (neo-conservative economics should be famous for its almost total absence of educational insight).

So think back to the Original Position. Rawls thought that, since POP don’t know where they will end up in the system, and since they would be foolish to gamble, the most reasonable principle they could decide upon would be this: unless it is clear that an uneven distribution would be to the advantage of the group which would become the worst off under the distribution (as compared with how they would be placed if the distribution was even), then the goods would be distributed evenly. In other words, his most interesting suggestion here is that where knowledge of our own situation in society is controlled for, we would be wise to permit some persons in the society to end up advantaged only if that would be acceptable to the worst off as improving their situation.

“Worst off” has to be decided from the position of those who will be worst off – and it is important to note that this might not be assessed in terms of money alone. An increase in money might not be desirable if it was accompanied by a decrease in self-esteem, or vital knowledge and understanding. And we need to note the dangers that can arise from the ways in which knowledge and understanding can be distorted by power. It is all too easy to create social arrangements that have the “educational” (more properly, the “indoctrinatory”) effect of convincing those low down that they not worthy of anything better – even when they are living in poverty and material squalor. The system itself will tend to generate self-justifying ideology that encourages a low (and false) sense of self-worth in those lower down.

The value of the Original Position as a way of assessing this is that, in actual societies, the advantaged may be inclined to think that their own extra advantage is in the interests of the worst off without making sufficient attempts to be really sure, or to find out what life is really like in the worst off position. It is all too common to hear those who have favourable shares of goods expressing the view that “anyone could do what I have done”, and that “they could have these things too, if only they applied themselves”.

Since it is often uncomfortable to learn that one´s advantages were gained at the expense of others, a natural self-deception can easily come into play. Moreover, in actual societies the worst off may believe that their own situation is indeed improved as a consequence of the advantaged having the advantages that they do, and in fact be quite misguided in their belief, particularly if they have been brought up to believe that others know better than they (a constant message of conventional schooling).

There is plenty to suggest that class ideologies and the distribution of knowledge tend to encourage the worst off to accept their position as just. I have noted that Rawls missed out knowledge, understanding and intelligent, intellectual independence as a primary good. This is a fatal omission, given what we know about ideology. When I add it back in, I am immediately inclined to think that this is not a good that I would want to see distributed unevenly. The worst off would have to have this good. It may well be (unfortunately, for Rawls´s “Difference Principle”) that any distribution of the other goods may well break down the equal distribution of powers of mind.

You will recall that one of the things which persons in the Original Position have to consider in their decision-making is that the decisions they make must result in a stable society, and also that the society which results must foster appropriate moral sentiments in its members — such as a sense of justice and as little envy as possible. This suggested to Rawls that it would be proper to test his theory, in part, by seeing if people growing upon within institutions ordered under the decisions which seemed most reasonable for POP to make, would in fact develop a sense of justice and limited envy. For this reason he made a considerable attempt in the latter part of his book to show that children growing up in institutions (such as the family) which complied with the theory would indeed develop a sense of justice, and be able to reason in the light of principles expressed in the Original Position. And he employed some of the findings of the developmental psychology of the day in his attempt to demonstrate this.

Such a move on the part of a philosopher is quite novel in moral philosophy. Even in philosophy in general, it is only very recently that philosophers have begun to worry about the extent to which their theories make sense in the light of our knowledge of human development. When they begin to ask such questions, all kinds of research are required to become more and more interdisciplinary than they have tended to be in the past. In attempting to test his theory by considering whether children growing up in institutions ordered according to the theory would in fact acquire sentiments which the theory had shown to be appropriate, Rawls had begun to ask himself educational questions. It is unfortunate for philosophy of education that few of the people who have written about his theory have focussed attention upon this aspect of it at all.

Rational Life-Plans

In order to be able to develop its educational implications further we must look more closely at one aspect of it that so far has only just been mentioned. This is the section in which he deals with the rules for developing “rational life-plans”. Persons in the Original Position know that they will want satisfying and worthwhile lives. They do not know who they are, or what they are like, or what they will want to be able to do, but they do know that almost all satisfying ways of life require the primary goods in some measure, even to get off the ground, and they do know the rules of rational life-planning.

Expressions like “rational life-planning”, and even the idea that such planning involves following “rules” are likely to leave some of us feeling uncomfortable, even if there are also those who have no doubt that very firm plans are not only possible, but desirable, and that there definitely are quite unambiguous rules that should be followed. The problem is that any step that we take towards rigorous ideas of “rationality”, “plans” and “rules” will increase the danger that a contentious conception of good living will come to be imposed upon people.

The whole point of such a theory is to be generous and hospitable to as wide a range of intelligent solutions to the problems of living as we possibly can. “Rules” of “rational life-planning” will be a worry for some, and we should respect that, since what such expressions do tend to convey are demands pitched higher than we need. Insofar as Rawls felt that we should consider ourselves as “plans” just as we are, to the extent that we do order our lives according to rules and intentions, his idea of a plan is loose enough to quell most objections. Similarly, he suggests that the extent and nature of planning – even to engage in it at all – is a decision to be made from within life-planning, like any other. This gives us an important educational clue.

Instead of laying down a conception of planning, and a set of rules to go with it, the obvious educational approach would be for the learner to engage in inquiries about the wisdom of various ways of considering planning for life – and the possibilities of various proposals about rules. Cultures past and present, and an enormous range of interpretations of actions and their outcomes, provide a huge fund of experience to be explored. We do not need to settle what “rational life-planning” (or one of its alternatives) might be. Learners will have to settle that for themselves, just as each of us has our own right to do so.

The terminology, though, is unfortunate. In some ways the word “rational” is worse than “plan”, because “rational” is often used to convey something tighter, more rigorous, and even potentially more formal than, for instance, the word “reasonable”. Yet finding alternative is not at all easy. The best solution that I can see is to use alternative words and expressions to identify this area wherever we possibly can, with the understanding that our approaches to sorting out our own lives can be more or less intelligent, more or less reasonable. We can speak of ”conceptions” of life, or living, life “schemes”, “purposes”, “meanings”, and so on. What is involved in undertaking the development of these things “intelligently”, or “reasonably” is also, in the end, a subject for individual inquiry and decision, with the recognition that the exact character of reasoning will always differ among individuals, dependent as it will be upon the trajectory of individual experience.

As for the “rules” of life-planning, These are not “rules” in the sense that, if you broke one you could be convicted of a mistake. In any individual plan, at any particular phase of life, someone might have their own good reasons for violating one. Think of them, instead, as “wise recommendations”, for we are dealing here with what Aristotle appropriately called “practical wisdom”. With this in mind, there may be a huge range of such things that could be an important part of educational inquiry.

The set of rules that Rawls identified are as follows:

1. Do not think of a plan of life as something which we lay down as an unchangeable blueprint at some point in our lives. It is not suggested that we sit down and “draw up a plan”. Yet all of us have some aims, some things we want out of life, and some idea as to the means which we will, or might employ. Some of these things might be more or less complete or more or less clear. To the extent that this is true, it is reasonable enough for us to think of ourselves as plans. It is possible that, to the extent that our own plan is unclear or incomplete, we may think of ourselves as poor plans. But this is not necessarily the case. A plan could be too clear by losing flexibility for the sake of clarity. It would be foolish to have a full and complete plan of life which turned out to be virtually useless because of some small stroke of luck, good or bad in the future. Whether or not our plans of life are sound will depend upon how well we have considered the rules or principles of planning, as well as various issues that widespread experience has shown to emerge in life.
2. The principle of “effective means” suggests, rather obviously, that if our purposes or ends are clear to us, and if the means of obtaining the ends are clear to us, we should choose among those means the ones which will enable us to realize our ends in the best way. A very obvious principle, except that people quite frequently acknowledge that they regret having “gone about things the hard way”.
3. Inclusiveness. If two sets of purposes or ends are otherwise more or less equally favoured, we ought to choose the one which will allow us to pursue or realize additional ends which we might have. If we are trying to choose between going to Paris or Rome (should we be so lucky as to have a choice) it may turn out that the sorts of things we want to do in Rome can also be done in Paris, but in Paris we can do some additional things as well — things we would like to do. Where long-term planning is concerned (and remembering that it will be harder to predict what we will be like, or want, in the long-term) the further ahead we plan, the less specific the plan should be. The principle of inclusiveness here suggests that we should favour plans which preserve a greater range of alternatives — a greater richness and range of things which we might want, even though we do not want them now. We must remember that we all will change throughout our lives.
4. The principle of postponement couples with inclusiveness over the long-term. We should put off making irrevocable decisions as far as we can and as long as we can so that our options remain open and our hands remain free. Having a child at a young age, without much thought of the constraints on life that the subsequent responsibility will impose, or for desires that might emerge some years hence, is usually thought to be unwise, and can be an occasion for regret.
5. “Greater likelihood” couples in with effective means, inclusiveness and postponement. “Greater likelihood” suggests that, other things equal, we should select the means which will most likely achieve our ends. It differs from “effective means” in that “effective means” has to do with achieving the ends in the best way. Greater likelihood has to do with the means that are most likely to bring about the ends at all.
6. The sixth rule or principle is a most interesting one from the moral point of view. It is called “time preference”. Rawls says that it “resembles a principle of right”, by which I think he means that it resembles the duties and obligations that we owe to others. The point about this, in our own case, is that no one period of our lives is worthy of more respect than any other. We might view ourselves as a series of persons existing through time, each one deserving our equal respect. This principle warns us, for example, of the dangers of sheer hedonism, in which we go for immediate gratification without thought for the long- term consequences.

The principle might become a little more real to you if you recall that young children are very bad at delaying gratification, and that we go to considerable lengths to have them learn how to judge their desires, and hold off for those that are greater, but more distant in time. If offered an immediate gift, such as chocolates, and they can choose between this and something else which they would otherwise much prefer to have, but won’t get for a week, they will commonly go for the immediate gift. Future gratification is not privileged, of course. The person we are now has equal rights with the person in the future.

One test is whether the future you is likely to rebuke the present you for the decision you make. That is, one should attempt to protect oneself against future regret that might result from the decisions you now make. “Regret” here functions as a rebuke which the future person makes against the present person because the future person has not been accorded proper respect.

“Regret” in this system is particularly useful in another way. Earlier I said that some may feel that this “rational life-plan” business is altogether too rationalistic and logical. Why shouldn’t someone live life completely spontaneously, making decisions from moment to moment without agonising over all the consequences. Well, there is no reason why anyone should not live in this way except that it is presumably desirable to know what one is doing when one is doing that. Rawls makes it quite clear that the decision as to the extent to which a person should reason about his or her life-plan is a decision about what to do in life, just like any other.

There is nothing intrinsically worthwhile about all this reasoning — at least, not for everyone. When someone decides to make each decision spontaneously, and without careful thought, whenever the occasion presents itself, there is only one moral constraint over and above having a care for other people. And this is that he or she be prepared to live with the consequences of the decision. Over the long term, this can be very significant. A decision made flippantly in one’s twenties could lead to fifty years of misery. Having an unwanted child, or getting deeply entangled in a toxic relationship (marrying an unsuitable person, and then persisting with the marriage over a long period simply because we “made our bed and must lie in it”) are examples of the decisions which we might later wish had been better made. The extent to which each of us ought to engage in rational life-planning is a part of sorting out life-planning itself — it is up to each of us to decide. But there can be high prices to pay for decisions that are made blind. It is hard to get much satisfaction out of life if we are filled with self-disgust or bitterness.

Future regret is, then the moral test. A friend told me a tale of a young man who inherited US$3,000,000 in his early twenties (when US$3,000,000 was worth a good deal more than it is today). At the time, he was passionately involved in quite dangerous motor sport. Since he had already seen a number of friends killed in the course of it, he figured that his own life prospects probably were not that good. Going on as he was, he doubted that he would live beyond thirty. So he spent the money at a rate that it would run out at about that time.

His prediction was wrong. He would probably now be a very old man. Was he wrong to decide this? Well, it really was his business. If he can say “easy come, easy go”, then the later self may have been reasonably well protected. But if , as a result, he spent the rest of his life bitterly regretting it, then he is might now agree that it was unwise.

When Rawls remarks that this matter of time-preference “resembles a principle of right”, I think he was on the verge of a very important idea. I think that there is a principle of right here, that what we owe ourselves is equal, in moral force, to what we owe others, since we are human beings too. Rawls fell just short of saying this.

But note that, in the Original Position, we do not know our age or generation. This is to ensure that we do not, for example, discriminate unfairly against the aged. If we make a decision that disadvantages the aged, we have to be aware that we may very well be old when the veils are removed. This precaution does not just protect the elderly in the society that we will create. It protects ourselves for the sake of our old age. It is built into the original Position as a principle of right, though Rawls himself seems not to have made the connection. When we think of ourselves as a series of people continuing over time, each deserving of equal respect, we are applying the principles upon which the Original Position is constructed.

This is so important that it really needs to be expressed as a third moral duty in the original discussion of the moral bases of the Original Position. It will be recalled that the duties were:

1. No harm to others (“other things being equal”)
2. Benefit to others (“other things being equal”)

We should now add a duty that says:

We owe it to ourselves (as a duty of respect) to live a life that is good

The presence, in the Original Position, of the knowledge of what life-planning involves is an expression of that duty. It is not merely the case that we “will want” a rational life-plan. We will want one (our own intelligent scheme for a worthwhile life) because we to are human beings and should “do ourselves justice”. Unless this duty is present along side the duties to others, the balance of duties lacks symmetry.

It is also necessary for the principles covering obligations to work properly. If arrangements must be reasonable from the points of view of all parties, then the reasonableness of all parties needs to be robust. A very high proportion of social injustice occurs, not because people see arrangements as unfair because they are unreasonable from their own points of view, but because they do see them as reasonable when they should not. They see the arrangements as reasonable because they have come to believe things (often about themselves or others) that are ill-conceived as a result of educational failure.

In the course of growing up they have come to adopt assumptions, explanations, attitudes and problem-solving strategies that they would have dismissed had they had an adequate opportunity to examine them thoughtfully, and with the skill to do so. These assumptions, explanations, attitudes and techniques subvert their efforts to live well, and often illegitimately favour the interests of other people.

Many of these things are generated by systematic injustices in the social system that they help to maintain. As a consequence, when we apply the principle of obligations – that arrangements must be reasonable from the points of view of all those who are parties to the arrangement – it is morally necessary that all parties make an effort to determine that the arrangements are indeed reasonable from all points of view under favourable conditions of reason – that is, reason not corrupted by ignorance, or by unexamined ideologies that may be working against the interests of any of the parties. It is not good enough to carry on when some parties are consenting with a failure of understanding, or from an ideology which suppresses their genuine interests, or as a result of being duped.

This does not mean that we have to decide for other people what is reasonable for them – which would defeat the whole purpose. But it may be necessary for us to be aware of the kinds of hindrances that can commonly thwart free consent in the particular case, and check with them that these have been understood and considered. We check the quality of the process through which they reached their decision, rather than the conclusion itself. This checking is an educational evaluation, and requires the development of educational judgement in us all. If POP do not secure adequate educational conditions for themselves, then the whole pursuit of justice is corrupted

“Self-esteem”

The seventh rule of rational life-planning is that we must secure for ourselves some measure of self-regard or self esteem. Rawls calls this self-respect, and it is one of the primary goods that POP must secure for themselves through their decision-making. It is a feeling, a conviction about one´s worth, rather than a moral duty that we must attempt to fulfill, irrespective of how we happen to feel.

Rawls did not distinguish two different meanings for self-respect, because he did not identify a moral duty to ourselves, which I will also call “self-respect”, understood as a moral duty. My proposal is that, apart from feeling positively about ourselves as “self-respect/self-esteem”, we should also acknowledge self-respect as a moral stance that we should adopt towards ourselves, and something that our actions should express or fulfil. This would have a symmetry with the moral duty we have to respect others equally as persons, and the processes of “rational life-planning” and its variants would be an account of how this duty might be expressed. Thus a women, having lived for years in an abusive relationship, may one day reach a point where she can say to herself, in effect, that she is failing in her duty of respect for herself, and owes herself a better life.

A person can perform a moral duty of respect for others (or even himself or herself) without liking the person who is to be respected. One can fulfil one’s duty in this way, even while feeling distaste for the person (including oneself) who should be respected. But it is extremely difficult to carry through a plan of life unless one has some confidence that one can do it. Similarly, it is difficult to carry anything through when we don’t really see the point of it, or when we don’t value ourselves.

This is where Rawls´s notion of self-respect-as-self-esteem comes in. Self-respect here is an affective thing. It is a matter of how we feel about ourselves, as opposed to a duty which we have. Strong feelings of shame, humiliation, or loss of dignity are the sorts of things which make it difficult for us to believe that we should matter, or are worthy.

Rawls thinks that self respect, in this sense (self esteem) is bound up with mutual respect in a similar affective sense. We feel respect for other people (admire them, for example) when we appreciate them for what they do (or are). Rawls believes that it is virtually impossible to secure self-esteem for ourselves if there is nobody who thinks what we are doing is worthwhile. So that, if we are to value ourselves and our plans of life, we will be wise to cater for the need to secure self-value, by noting the fact that the contents of our plans will make things more difficult for us to the extent that nobody else will appreciate the things we would want to consider worthwhile.

Rawls was not claiming that we should do what everyone else appreciates, but he is pointing out that it is hard to do what no one else appreciates. Artists and poets have lived and died without anyone thinking that they were devoting their lives to anything worthwhile: but when you think of some cases of this, it will probably be quite clear that such lives are very hard. They require strength which not many of us possess; and effort which few of us would be prepared to make. A good deal of energy will have to go into simply maintaining one´s plan as worthwhile – energy that other plans will not require.

Top achievers in our societies (in New Zealand, these are more likely to be sports people) are granted enormous resources for self-respect-as-self-esteem. Women who decided to be doctors in the nineteenth century were faced by opposition and disapproval at every turn, and would need to drawn upon extra internal resources constantly. For most, it was more reasonable to be a housewife (and, preferably, a mother) which would occasion much more respect and approval, even if it meant less than for men.

These, then, are the bones of rational life-planning, pretty much as Rawls proposed them. Remember that persons in the Original Position understand these principles and rules of planning, and that I am proposing here that POP had better make sure that the abilities to engage in it are well secured in the society they will enter.

These ideas might seem very “thin”, and of course they are intended to be, because the task was to come up with a scheme of loose rules that would show considerations for life-planning while at the same time not prejudicing life-reasoning in favour of particular plans – of biasing it towards one cultural commitment rather than another. When I first heard that Rawls had done this, I became very excited, because modern Western ethics has been extremely coy about making any sort of suggestions as to what we should consider when devising our lives. Rawls had done much more here than anyone else who thought that devising our on lives should be up to us.

Years of reflection since that time have left me in awe of just how much relevant educational content there might be for a person who was to develop and settle their own life for themselves. The problem isn´t finding relevant content – it is bringing some sort of organisation to the vast amount that might be available, and considering what we might do to make intelligent selections from within the content. If we adopt the following two principles as priorities in educational processes, and maintain a concern to eliminate biases in the choice of educational content (providing “checks and balances” where bias is unavoidable) we have some reasonable hope of developing a rich, full and justifiable educational point of view.

At the centre of all educational arrangements, priority should be given to the development of learner inquiry into the conditions of their own good living.
From as early as possible, learners should inquire into the nature of education and educational decision-making in order that they become equipped, as soon as possible, to make their own educational decisions for themselves in intelligent ways.

Now let us turn to consider the use of the Original Position as a means of assessing the adequacy of various institutional arrangements which we have, particularly educational ones.

The application of the original position

We can use the Original Position to assess arrangements which we have in the following kind of way. Imagine yourselves in the Original Position. You don’t know what generation you will be — what age-group you will end up in. Now think about how things are arranged in Western Societies where old people are concerned. Think about the importance or significance we give to various kinds of work, and of how people become “obsolete” in this system. Think about how we house them, and how we actually treat them.

If you think about it for a while, or if you have any experience of dealing with elderly people in general, you will recognise the general ambivalence we have – we don’t value them very much. We don’t expect that they could have much to contribute, and in terms of the things which we seem to consider worthwhile in our society what we see them as being able to do isn’t considered very valuable.

Now from the standpoint of the original position, it is just as likely that you will emerge as a seventy-year-old as that you will emerge as a five-year-old. And remember that, in the Original Position, you should ask yourself whether the situation in which our old people find themselves is the sort of thing which you would be happy with as a consequence of your decision-making — bearing in mind that what you see is what you get. You see, one reason why we do not take the plight of the aged as seriously as we might is that we all know that we are not going to wake up tomorrow morning and find that we are seventy years old. Being seventy is a long way away for most of us, and it is difficult for us to imagine what sorts of people we will be when we are seventy. But persons in the Original Position dare not be as indifferent to this as we often are.

Of course another reason why we may not tend to take the plight of the aged as seriously as we might is that we have grown up in a society which accepts a certain view of what it is to be old. Having grown up in the society as it is, it has formed our thinking in various ways, and we take certain parts of our society and culture as “second nature”.

It may be, for example that many of the characteristics which we expect to see in old people are not consequences of certain people having spent a certain period on this planet. In other words, the characteristics which we expect of old people may not simply be consequences of the ravages of time. Rather it may be that how we situate people who have passed a certain age actually ages them.

If we take these institutions for granted as necessary parts of a worthwhile society for us (such as the concepts of “old age”, as well as the institutions in which we make arrangements for old people), persons in the Original Position will not take them for granted. They are freed from our upbringing, and can examine all such institutions to see if they would be acceptable. In this way the Original Position can help to highlight areas where persons are not receiving the respect which is their due. And the beauty of the Original Position is that it enables us to see whether the arrangements are fair, even when the people within the arrangements are unable to see (perhaps as a consequence of their schooling, socialization, conditioning, or whatever you care to call it) that they are on the thin end of a bad deal.

There are, of course, a myriad of areas which could be investigated with profit from the standpoint of the Original Position. And one of the reasons why this standpoint is so powerful is that it can enable us to see the educational implications of many of these areas. The central and most basic question in ethics is not “what sort of society will provide us with what we want?”; but rather a prior question, namely “what sort of society ought to form our wants?”(iii) Many ethical theories take it that we all have wants and desires, and that the problem of justice is that of determining how we can satisfy these wants without being unfair toward other people. But Rawls, through the Original Position, wants us to ask whether or not the wants and desires which we have were formed under unjust conditions.

In other words, a moral theory should not begin with what adults want, and simply take the development of their wants and desires for granted. This is where his theory gains very real educational power. We can begin to see this power by beginning to consider the ways in which the “socialization” or “education” (the inverted commas here are intentional) channels people into wanting certain things, or feeling that they should want certain things, or fearing certain things in ways that constrict the sorts of opportunities that might otherwise have been available to them. It is very important to understand this point about opportunity. It won’t do to think of opportunity simply in an external way. It won’t do to say that someone has an opportunity simply because the external conditions are present which would allow many people to do something. There is a “psychological” side to opportunity. To have an opportunity, one must be able to choose either to exercise it, or not to exercise it. This means that, for example, fears of certain kinds or beliefs of certain kinds can prevent people from having opportunities.

Now think of some of the ways in which people grow up to believe that they should not aspire to certain things — that, perhaps, certain things are “out of their class”, or that they are the sorts of things that “men (or women) don’t do, or shouldn’t want”. There is something wrong with women who don’t want children. Think what it means, in our society, to “be a man”, and how boys learn what it is to “be a man”. They aren’t (I don’t think) born with those ideas or attitudes. Think of the social pressure, and all of the educational background, that goes into producing these beliefs and feelings. Think of the kinds of things that many children from working-class homes grow up to feel that they should want out of life, and compare this with the kinds of things that children from middle-class and professional families grow up to feel that they should want out of life. Think also of our materialistic and competitive dispositions. Should I start on our cultural differences?

One doesn’t need much anthropology to realize that such attitudes are at least partial products of the social arrangements which we have, and their educational consequences. Materialistic and competitive attitudes are not quite as “natural” as we assume them to be when we do not think very carefully about how they arise. Now I am not saying that people who are channelled in these ways are necessarily unhappy. No doubt, many of them are. And I am not saying, either, that people cannot choose to go against the social and educational forces — quite a number of them do.

But the two points to note are these. Firstly, if you are to be happy and free within the constraints of these channels, you had better be the sort of person who can be happy within the channels in full knowledge of the range of alternatives which might have been open to you. From the standpoint of the Original Position, that is a big risk to run. Secondly, if you are going to choose to go against the social and educational forces, you must expect life to be quite hard, and must be prepared to count that difficulty in your life-planning. If Rawls was right that self-esteem or self-value depends, to some extent, upon other people valuing what you do, you will immediately rob yourself of much of the support which would otherwise be available.

Many of you may know people who have made such a stand. If you know them well, you may be aware of many of the battle-scars which they bear. If you want to assess the morality of the educational forces which are at work here, it will be little use to “shoot from the hip” in terms of what you already feel or believe about women, or men, or competition, or materialism, or class attitudes, or ethnicity, or old age, or any of the other things which I have mentioned (or many that I have not).

We may all be inclined to accept the arrangements and attitudes which we have, simply because we have grown up in a society in which certain ways of life, and certain attitudes, are taken to be normal, and you have learned to accept them as normal. What we need to do, if we are to get clear about these things, is to assume a standpoint something like the Original Position in which your own developmental background and your own standpoint in life doesn’t count. And then ask yourself whether or not you would be content to have the arrangements, including those which develop dispositions, wants and beliefs, to be as they are in our society.

Persons in the Original Position are constructing a society. Our society is in a constant state of reconstruction. It seems to me that the Original Position can suggest to us the kinds of directions which our reconstruction ought to take. Two sets of “principles” of education and indoctrination have been set out below. Taken together, they might be seen to constitute a concept of education. These are my own, and it seems to me that they represent what persons in the original position would want to secure in the society which they will devise. I have also set out two “principles” of indoctrination.

It also seems to me that when we inspect an actual society, and find that educational arrangements haven’t been secured when they could have been, we have indoctrination. How serious the indoctrination will be will vary with the circumstances. If, for example, a teacher deliberately sets out to mess up pupils´ powers to develop for themselves a worthwhile way of life, then that teacher surely ought to be fired in no uncertain terms.

But I also believe that serious indoctrination is widespread — that intentional indoctrination also only represents the tip of the ice-berg. A lot of discussion would have to go on before you could understand these principles in a way which I would be happy with, but I hope that you will get some idea of what I intend by considering the things which I have said about the Original Position and its application to social institutions.

Education G (general): the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, skill, disposition and sentiment in a manner which will maximize the capacities of individuals to devise viable rational life-plans consistent with the requirements of mutual respect, and to choose among them rationally.
Education S (specific): the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, skill, disposition and sentiment in a manner which will maximize the capacities of individuals to realize plans which they might reasonably choose.

The negative equivalents which a community must seek to discover and eliminate, and to prevent from arising in the future can be stated as:

Indoctrination G (general): failure to secure Education G. Positively to control the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, skill, disposition and sentiment in a manner which will impair the capacities of individuals to devise viable rational life-plans consistent with the principles of mutual respect, and to choose among them rationally.
Indoctrination S (specific): failure to secure Education S. Positively to control the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, skill, disposition and sentiment in a manner which will impair the capacities of individuals to realize plans which they might reasonably choose.

Education G is general. It is concerned with the development of the general power to figure out a worthwhile way of life. Education S is specific. It is specific to the actual content of plans — the realization of particular aspects of plans in one’s own life. I want to warn you against a tempting misinterpretation. It would be easy to see Education G as covering what we have traditionally called a “liberal” education; and to see Education S as covering, perhaps, vocational education. This would be a serious mistake, because the two are bound together in a way that is commonly overlooked in this liberal/vocational distinction. Education G and Education S are bound together by the concept of choice. One can hardly choose to do something which one has no reasonable chance of doing. So education S must be essentially integrated with Education G.

Moreover Education S must not be construed simply as vocational education. From the standpoint of the Original Position, many people may realize that how they earn the bread and butter might not be of very great significance to them. There may be a vast range of things which people might rather have as central in their lives. In our society as it is, we consign many of these things into a less important category of leisure pursuits and hobbies — as if the devil really will make work for idle hands. But this may just be a part of our preoccupation with money and material things which flows from the dominating economic arrangements that have been made.

Education G and Education S, taken together, seem to me to provide a concept of education akin to a liberal education more appropriate to our times. Together they define a genuine “liberal” education — an education for liberty — for freedom. Education S is essential to this. This will be clear, I think, when you consider some of the things that a liberal education has been taken to mean at times. To be liberally educated has sometimes meant to have some understanding of the arts and sciences, and some facility with other languages. But one might have such an education, and still have very little choice as to what to do with one’s life. There may not be any real alternatives. All that one may be fit for is to engage in sophisticated chit-chat in the salons.
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The theory of education that is germinal here, and that evolved from bringing an educational perspective to John Rawls’s work, has subsequently been set out in my book (on-line here) Education – as if our lives depended on it. I eventually had to go beyond Rawls treatment of self-respect, and have given this a more extensive treatment in chapter 3 An anatomy of respect. Chapter 4, The practice of self-respect incorporates Rawls’s idea of rational life-planning, but goes far beyond it in its educational exploration. Chapter 5, The love model returns more closely to the idea of respectful social contracts out of which educational decision can arise, and draws on the Golden Rule, as yet another alternative account of the values.

Part 4 of the book returns to justification. Here I have abandoned Rawls metaphor of the Original Position in favour of developing my own account, based on Plato’s Myth of Er.