Abstract
In terms of social and economic cooperation, each individual’s allocation is the ultimate goal, and mutual cooperation, is only a means to attain that outcome. The development of productivity and division of labor will change people from existing in a self-contained, isolated manner toward group-oriented habitation, that is, from being isolated individuals to becoming members of a group. Rawls proposed contemporary social contract theory. He submitted an attractive theory of justice in the distribution of burden and product. However, his ideas are based on the unrealistic assumption of the isolated individual; therefore, his idea of the veil of ignorance and that of unanimous consent in the political field being a must today cannot be upheld. If distributive rules do not treat minority people too harshly and universal suffrage is guaranteed, minor conflict and negotiation become the main elements of the decision-making process, not an abstract quality such as the veil of ignorance. To create a more realistic distributive theory on the basic structure of society, we need to replace the assumption of isolated, independent autonomous individuals as the contracting entity with that of a group-oriented personality and to study interactions among today’s groups and find the new direction of distribution that this will generate.
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Notes
- 1.
Excellent scholars such as him, of course, facilitate the development of study in every field, but what needs to be noted here is that with the slowdown of economic growth since the 1970s, the relationship between utility and economic growth, or the distributive problems hidden behind growth, has been the subject of greater attention.
- 2.
Rawls (1999), p. 10.
- 3.
Rawls (1999), pp. 83–84.
- 4.
Modern societies have safeguards in place to prevent this minorities’ control from occurring although it does happen in practice, either without consent (limits on who is eligible to vote) or with consent, i.e., when representatives are elected to a legislature and do not consult with the constituents regarding every vote but may be more swayed by lobbyists, for example.
- 5.
Of course, when such a democratic system is denied, it will take a different course, most likely a violent one.
- 6.
Fisk (1974), pp. 72–73.
- 7.
Op. cit., p. 73.
- 8.
Op. cit., p. 78.
- 9.
Rawls (1999), p. 68.
- 10.
Today, as we observe increasing contact among people within and outside their countries through productive cooperation or travels, people increasingly understand that they are similar entities . This will eventually lead them to create more equal distributive rules than before, whether related to economic classes, gender, etc., wherever conflicts have existed. To clarify how such a new way of understanding each other could be realized, new distributive rules form an important theme in understanding the issues concerning social structure.
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Tsukada, H. (2018). WHO? Deciding Subject: Critical Development of Rawls’ Theory (1). In: The Market Economy as a Social System. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1837-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1837-5_3
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