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by seneca 2701 days ago
The problem with Rawls is that, brought to its logical conclusion, his ideas essentially say that you can all but enslave the most effective people in your society to benefit the least advantaged, so long as they are slightly more advantaged than the single least advantaged member of your society. It sounds nice on paper, but it's essentially endorsing extreme totalitarian socialism. It's the kind of dystopia Kurt Vonnegut was satirizing in Harrison Bergeron [0].

It also complete ignores the rights of the so call "advantaged" class. From the stand point of Social Contract Theory, society exists because it's advantageous to all of its members to give up some rights in order to protect others. If you systematically disadvantage a group of people, especially those who are deemed the most capable and advantaged, you will quickly leave them with no reason to want to be a member of your society. Unless you plan to run an authoritarian dictatorship, you will be left with few citizens other than the disadvantaged, who will suffer for having the others run off. Not to mention that the idea of intentionally systematically disadvantaging an entire class of people is, on its face, disgusting.

There are plenty of other arguments against Rawls, but the primary ones are made by Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia [1], and he can make them better than I can. Rawls is a brilliant philosopher, but his ideas are better left in the realm of thought experiment, and not in government.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia