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Abstract:
Following the tradition of social contract theories of the early modern age, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, renewed the notion of the "original position," that is, a set of behavioral assumptions from which general principles of justice are deduced. José Saramago's novel Blindness enriches Rawls's normative theory by adding behavioral assumptions that help clarify some of the problems raised by the theory's critics and enhance its application to social and political settings.
Introduction
Following the tradition of social contract theories of the early modern age, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, renewed the idea of the "original position" intended to set up a fair procedure for the achievement of justice through bargaining between parties situated behind a veil of ignorance. "They do not know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case," he writes, "and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations."1 The original position is a heuristic device for the evaluation of societies by their approximation to the principles achieved in an imagined bargaining process between rational actors stripped of knowledge about their relative positioning. Rawls proposes two principles that would be agreed upon in serial order behind the veil of ignorance: the liberty principle, in which equal tiberty is assured, and the difference principle, based on maximin choice, in which inequality in the allocation of resources is accepted as long as the least advantaged are also benefiting.
This theory has rightly been considered one of the most important contributions to contemporary political thought. Whether or not one agrees with Rawls's rejection of utilitarianism (i.e., the assumption that rational actors behind a veil of ignorance would choose the public good), and with the version of distributive justice the second principle implies, the theory calls for considerations transcending particularistic interests and, thus, inspires a general ethical discourse in the Kantian tradition. Rawls pays tribute to Kant by claiming that the notion of the veil of ignorance was implicit in the eighteenth-century philosopher's ethics, but also adds assumptions of his own about the parties in the original position, their knowledge, and their model of reasoning.
For example, the parties in the original position are ignorant about their social, economic, and intellectual status; the...