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Let me throw in here what Rawls
might reply to this objection. He considers something very much like it
in his Theory of Justice. Basically he says that a situation like
this will not arise. And let's bear in mind that the parties in the Original Position have a general knowledge of how human societies work, and they
know that this sort of case is not going to occur. He makes
the following statement:
Yet it seems extraordinary that the justice
of increasing the expectations of the better placed by a billion
dollars, say, should turn on whether the prospects of the least
favored increase or decrease by a penny....Part of the answer is
that the difference principle is not intended to apply to such
abstract possibilities. As I have said, the problem of social
justice is not that of allocating ad libitum various
amounts of something, whether it be money, or property, or whatever,
among given individuals. Nor is there some substance of which
expectations are made that can be shuffled from one representative
man to another in all possible combinations. The possibilies which
the objection envisages cannot arise in real cases; the feasible set
is so restricted that they are excluded. [Rawls, Theory of
Justice p.
157-8]
When Rawls says that such cases cannot
occur, I think he means that there will always be other options
available that are beneficial to the more affluent and also
beneficial to the last advantaged
group.
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