In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance.

<title>ABSTRACT</title>John Rawls's most mature notion of political order is “stability for the right reasons.” Stability for the right reasons is the kind of political order that Rawls hoped a well-ordered society could ideally achieve. In this paper, I demonstrate through the tools of modern game theory, the<italic>instability</italic>of “stability for the right reasons.” Specifically, I will show that a well-ordered society can completely destabilize by the introduction of an arbitrarily small number of non-compliers whenever individuals fail to achieve full common knowledge ever so slightly.

<title>Abstract:</title>A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person's private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person's basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name 'perspectival diversity'. This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by enlarging the domain to include<italic>individual perspectives</italic>alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to<italic>see</italic>or<italic>perceive</italic>the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society.

Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt's "Equality as a Moral Ideal" (Ethics 98(1):21-43, 1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency (or sufficientarianism) consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough, relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have presented different versions of sufficientarianism that retain the general spirit of what Frankfurt had proposed in his seminal work. However, all of these different versions of sufficientarianism suffer from two critical problems: (a) they fail to give right answers to lifeboat situations, and (b) they fail to provide continuous ethical judgments. In this paper, I show a version of utilitarianism that solves these problems while retaining the major attractions of sufficientarianism. I call it "prospect utilitarianism." In addition, I show that prospect utilitarianism can avoid standard objections to utilitarianism and has aspects that can appeal to both prioritarians and egalitarians as well.

In Book I of Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (i) justice is the advantage of the stronger, and (ii) justice is the good of the other, while injustice is to one's own profit and advantage. In the beginning of Book II, Glaucon self-proclaims that he will be representing Thrasymachus' claims in a better way, and provides a story of how justice has originated from a state-of-nature situation. However, Glaucon's story of the origin of justice has an implication that justice is the advantage of the weak rather than the stronger. This is inconsistent with Thrasymachus' first claim, which states that justice is the advantage of the stronger. This is a problem for Glaucon since he is supposed to be representing Thrasymachus' original claims in a better way. In the present article, I provide two solutions to this puzzle with the help of elementary game theory.

Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is a theory of human psychology claiming that all human actions are ultimately motivated solely by one's own self-interest. In this paper, I argue that there are reasons to think that Hobbes was not committed to psychological egoism in any of its plausible formulations.

In his article, "Equality as a Moral Ideal", Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitarianism and presents what he calls the "doctrine of sufficiency." According to the doctrine of sufficiency, what is morally important is not relative economic equality, but rather, whether somebody has enough, where "having enough" is a non-comparative standard of reasonable contentment that may differ from person to person given his/her aims and circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to show that Frankfurt's original arguments in support for his doctrine of sufficiency have critical problems that Frankfurt himself does not properly recognize. In the end, I will argue that in order to solve these problems the doctrine of sufficiency cannot help but to incorporate certain prioritarian commitments commitments which many would view as implying economic egalitarianism. This is embarrassing for a doctrine whose raison detre was mainly to defeat economic egalitarianism.

Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of rationality which foreshadows that of David Hume. The Humean conception of instrumental rationality is a conjunction of the following two claims: (a) no preferences or desires can properly be said to be irrational in themselves, and (b) the role of reason or rationality can only be confined to informing the agent with true beliefs about the world, and revealing the most effective means that could satisfy the agent's current ends whatever they happen to be. In this paper, I argue that, unlike what many people think, a careful reading of Hobbes shows that he was committed to neither of these claims.