quick thought on rawls

John Rawls advocates his "Original Position" thought experiment as a way to properly set up a just society. The experiment begins with a veil of ignorance, in which all participants are ignorant of a host of many features about themselves: age, gender, time period, economic status, etc. The veil of ignorance helps participants think about justice in a way that is detached from these morally trivial traits that can obscure decision-making about justice. In these conditions, Rawls thinks reasonable people will endorse the principles of his "justice as fairness" doctrine. Since the veil of ignorance makes them unaware of their social position, then they will not choose to constitute society in a way that unfairly privileges one group of people with morally trivial traits over another. 

This view presumes something important about human motivation: when we make decisions, we act on our own self-interest. Ironically, this view of the generation of society is similar to Nozick's in Anarchy, Statu, Utopia. There, states eventually arose because individuals in the state of nature had to create communities of protection; that is to say, they were not sufficient on their own and needed the state to provide important services. And this also seems plausible: whatever the origin story is, one important reason most people submit to the authority of the state is that it provides important services that we need to flourish, such as a way of arbitrating cases of gross injustice between dominant and vulnerable parties. 

I have at least one quesiton about this view that I hope to answer: first, should we join Rawls in pre-supposing that we make decisions out of self-interest? It is one thing to say that the state provides services that we have reason to embrace, but it is another thing presume from the outset of the "Original Position" thought-experiment that the doctrines we choose to embrace are chosen in our own individual interest. Surely there are some decision-makers who will not reason in this way. For example, we may think of a group of ascetic monks who do not care to have equal opportunity in society, and they do not mind if they are apart of the disadvantaged class in a society where the Rawlsian difference principle is not respected. In answering this question, Rawls may have at least two avenues of reply: first, argue that the asceticism of the monks is, in fact, self-interested decision making, though it's self-interested in certain spiritual goods and not the material goods most people are interested in. Second, Rawls could argue that his scheme of decision-making is an ideal one that presumes the participants are rational actors, and the asceticism of the monks is not rational. Here, he would need to elucidate what he means by rationality.