Why Hoppe is the Best Answer to Rawls

In the famous book on political philosophy: A Theory of Justice1, John Rawls outlines his conception of a just society. In this book, Rawls employs a thought experiment known as the “veil of ignorance” in order to argue that society could be organized most fairly if men only considered what political system they would wish existed if they had no control over their attributes. From this he envisions a series of plausible political systems, all with baked-in assumptions about the goodness of egalitarian democracy and socially planned economy (that we would directly control the distribution of resources via policy).

If you are a student of political science then undoubtedly you have heard this all before. You may have even been walked through the common objections to his thought experiment or the conclusions he derives from it. You might have thought for yourself about this book and come to your own conclusions. Given the sheer influence of this piece on modern day political theory I feel obligated to treat this book very seriously —my sister even owns a copy of it for some reason. This article is my response to Rawls, which is really the political theory of Hans Herman Hoppe, anarcho-capitalist and Austrian thinker. This is because on a serious consideration of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, I cannot see how there could be a better system (or perhaps a non-system) to enter into.

Rawls is a thinker with a strong liberal ethos, so much so that he even considered his theory applicable mainly within the framework of families as the basic unit of politics and male heads of family as voters and representatives of that unit —a stance he has attracted much progressive and individualist ire as a result of2. This liberal ethos means that in many ways he assumes American style liberal democracy is the best system and is looking for a way to justify this rationally, much in the same spirit as social contract thinkers.

But the issue is that the thought experiment is completely absurd and totally irrelevant to political thought. I must add that this, along with the generally presumptive and uncritical nature of his work makes me surprised at his broad influence. I digress, the thought experiment is absurd because it asks a question that is has no certain answer. Let me first lay out the veil of ignorance is Rawls’s own words.

Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.3

So, we are totally ignorant of these things and yet we are “rational” and “disinterested” actors making a sort of social contract with our fellow man which we will have to enter into. The first question is naturally: who cares? Why ought our politics be guided by disembodied rational minds coming up with social contract theory. We all are, in fact, individuals with given attributes and no policy will be fair to us or our interests even if they would be fair to the ignorant rational mind. Obviously I’m not the first one to point this out, this is most people’s knee jerk response to Rawls. But it is important to note that, we as rational men here today want a proper justification for why we should be bound to employ this thought experiment. One that is much more than us already agreeing with the conclusions Rawls uses it to come to.

Why should justice be fairness?

Because the rational actor in the original position would select this principle.

Why should I use the original position to justify politics?

Because it gets us to the principle of justice as fairness.4

This article, however, does not exist to poke fun at the veil of ignorance thought experiment, everyone has already done that before. I merely found it pertinent to mention this critique because my broader argument is that Rawls is completely wrong in the conclusions he draws from his own thought experiment. As an even stronger argument, I will now demonstrate an internal critique on why the rational actor would not choose a liberal democratic system but would rather choose a highly decentralized or even anarchic system (such as the type Hoppe desires) from the original position.

So… imagine if you will what would you do if you had to design a society which you would then enter into, but you didn’t have any knowledge of your own attributes. Let’s consider some possibilities.

One obvious principle that every rational actor would choose is to make his society Pareto optimal, that is to always move to a state in which someone is made better off and no one is made worse off. Rawls himself notes this, but is this principle actually useful in narrowing down our options?

I should say not, this is because any change in the distribution of resources must necessarily harm someone, unless we buy into the idea of a diminishing marginal utility of wealth, then you may want to advocate for a type of egalitarian society on these premises where wealth is constantly redistributed to maximize utility. But even in that scenario, we have now harmed everyone’s personal freedoms and ability to enjoy innovation and entrepreneurship to a significant degree.

If I don’t know whether I will enter into society as someone who is severely disabled or supremely gifted (or anywhere in between) then I would rationally want to ensure that my society had some baseline help for the least fortunate, even if it was at the cost of the most fortunate, this way I am ensuring that no matter where I end up, I will live a decent life. This seems perfectly reasonable, but I would like to challenge this with a slightly different yet equally rational way of thinking.

What if rather than minimizing my suffering when I’m the worst off, I instead use an expected value maximizing strategy? This means that I would create a society where my chances of being in a certain social strata multiplied by the utility of these lives was the highest. This may very well result in me desiring a society where 1% of people who are the most difficult to care for are left to the wayside but the middle class gains much more wealth as a result, if I were a rational expected value maximizer then I might prefer this solution. Not that this is an inherently more rational one than the maximum harm minimizing solution. The point is that making us rational doesn’t lead us to one answer.

When diving into this game of probabilities the original position thought experiment suddenly becomes endlessly complicated, wouldn’t you need more knowledge than any one man today possesses or can ever possess to make an accurate decision of the best society to enter into from behind the veil of ignorance? If you took this thought experiment seriously than I think certainly so.

If I don’t know what kind of person I will be or what my interests will be after I enter society then it would make sense for me to desire a democratic system that allows me to influence politics and advocate for my interests. Probably also with minority rights and local government to ensure that I’m never left out and beholden to the whims of others.

Wrong! I may very well want to live a politically disengaged life where I never have to think about politics, I may want to live in a benevolent monarchy or religious government so that I can be more truthful towards my religion. I may even want to live in a technocracy because if I am born a rational person and I end up to subscribing to Plato’s view on politics, what other system could I desire? Also democracy is horrible for minorities, the individual freedoms aspect is the only good part, democracy is the tyranny of the majority and so if I were born as a minority I would have a life subject to the whims of the majority of my nation.

None of this to say that I would absolutely want to live in an authoritarian regime because they might treat me terribly too, but there’s really no saying which system leads to which. I think overall it would make more sense to want to live in a dictatorship with enshrined freedoms, but that is just my opinion. If I was a purely rational being I would either have to do some advanced statistical analysis or end up like a mouse trapped between two equidistant blocks of cheese.

What if I am a rational actor with irrational premises —as we all are. Or rather how do I know what I will value in life once I enter into my society (because I am a purely rational being in the original position). What if I enter into society a Buddhist and find to my great horror that my materialistic society overflowing with wealth has become a personal hell. Or for that matter a communist, a monarchist, a hedonist and any other number of beliefs that I may be imbued with as a result of my life in my rationally constructed society. Wouldn’t I only be able to appreciate my perfect construction if I entered the world just as perfectly rational as I was in the original position. These would be my greatest fears if I indeed found myself in Rawls’s hypothetical.

But there is a solution, a solution that is unorthodox yet brilliant and satisfies all my worries from behind the veil of ignorance.

What if there was no society, or more precisely no state? Hans Herman Hoppe picks up a long tradition of anarchist thought when he imagines an answer to this question. He explains not only what that would look like practically but also why we might desire it as compared to our current system and even further how it may be morally compulsory to move into that state.

The state is essentially an immoral organization, it is so because it does not respect the autonomy of its citizens, as the holder of power, you will submit to its laws or suffer the consequences and therefore if you wish to live you will also fund it and its whims against your will by the taxation of your economic activity. As a result, the state can only be a satisfactory entity to those citizens who happen to already agree with the government’s policy and the price they are charging to conduct such policy. That and those who are direct beneficiaries in some other way of the state’s enterprises.

As a result of this, the state impairs the economy. If the most efficient economy is that where everyone’s demand is accurately communicated to the market and where suppliers are able to freely supply those demands, the government through its mere existence thwarts that efficiency5. Any investment the state undertakes must be separate from that allocation of money desired by the market, if people had a demand for said investment, they would have already made it6. Likewise for law, if a society wished to follow a set of norms then they would have no need of a state to impose them.

But how is a stateless society possible, there must always be a monopoly on violence in some sense right? Actually, no! If the market for security were opened up and reinforced by an insurance market than there would be a genuine competition between companies to provide the best security service in a given geographic area. This idea of insurance is Hoppe’s brilliant innovation.

Other things being equal, private property owners generally, and business owners in particular, prefer locations with low protection costs (insurance premiums) and rising property values to those with high protection costs and falling property values. consequently, there is a tendency toward the migration of people and goods from high risk and falling property value areas into low risk and increasing property value areas. furthermore, protection costs and property values are directly related. other things being equal, higher protection costs (greater attack risks) imply lower or falling property values, and lower protection costs imply higher or increasing property values. These laws and tendencies shape the operation of a competitive system of insurance-protection agencies.7

It is conceivable, as Robert Nozick believes8, that a security force would gain a monopoly on a small city. Yet this would not entail expansionism by any means (especially in a society of rational people!) The end of the monopoly on violence would lead to a great decentralization of states one way or the other. Something much more resembling the Europe of the middle ages than modern states. This is because individuals have unique tastes and desire separate things, each man wishes to have his own set of laws, his own community and his own autonomy. Therefore rather than one state across the entirety of America, which constitutes a liberal democracy you would have thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of communities each with their own system of governance. Some as large as cities like New York, some as large a farms and some spanning only a single building or acre of land. The only supreme law among these “entities” is that of voluntarism which proceeds out of each man’s desire for whatever ends he may happen to possess (being egoistic or otherwise), and that any man may enter in contracts as he so chooses. These are in fact not laws set by any governing body but facts of nature.

Now that may sound like the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard, and if you want a more thorough and well defended presentation of this idea then I urge you to read Hoppe yourself or any other great anarchist thinker because I cannot give you the best justification for this idea. But what I am here to give you is why I would select an anarchy, such as the above outlined, if I found myself in the Rawlsian original position.

Maybe you can already understand why I would make the choice of broad anarchy with freedom of movement based on my critiques of the Rawlsian original position. The central argument is quite simple, no matter where and how I was born I could enter into the voluntary agreements and arrangements which benefit me most. Now there is a very nuanced point to be made here about whether I will be brainwashed as a kid or if I am mentally deficient. But I think these concerns are just as much of a problem for any system that could be thought up from the original position. At least if I am most people with an average intelligence, I would be able to understand those things which I desire most and enter into contracts and arrangements to acquire them.

The massive benefit of general anarchy is that it allows all political arrangements. You could have a democratic society in a city state next to a communist homestead, I personally believe certain political systems would run themselves into ruin, but if you don’t then great. You could have a Christian monastic society and a Hindu one or a secular society with an English legal tradition. As long as you can find another like minded individual who voluntarily agrees to run your own property in a certain way, it can be done! Just as long as there is no kidnapping, murdering, expansionism etc as these would lead to retribution by security forces or impossible insurance premiums. Everything must be voluntary. But if you sign a contract to live under communism, then you can be compelled to follow the agreed upon terms. Therefore in a true sense, any system one may be born into the world desiring could be sought our or created, or simply lived out as an autonomous individual! This is the best solution to the veil of ignorance because it is essentially all solutions, it casts the widest net and makes it most likely you will be able to have an enjoyable life no matter what your starting point is. And it doesn’t even require any deep computation to ensure it works out the way you assume it would. Certainly not anywhere close to impossible amount needed for a utility maximizing approach.

The point of this article is to make an immanent critique of Rawls using a totally different system than he wants to advocate for in order to answer his own thought experiment. It’s also a way of explaining why anarchy may be a more desirable —and possible— system than people originally assume. Of course I don’t expect this article to convince you that anarchy is a reasonable system or works exactly how I have outlined —although I think there is a serious discussion to be had there. More than that I want you to realize that Rawls’s book and theory are even more ridiculous than anarchy and that you shouldn’t support liberal or egalitarian democracy uncritically.

Political theory is full of unexamined axioms, random assertions, appeals to consensus and bad thought experiments. This is my attempt to remedy one of them that I kept seeing everywhere.

I think its time people realized that you can’t justify the state or even the democratic state rationally, there is no social contract, there is no original position. The state is an immoral, violent and ugly entity that came into existence due to highly complex and non-ideal processes and that we all now live in whether we like it or not. Not that we should destroy the state but let’s at least be honest that we didn’t ask for this.

Thanks for reading.