A Theory of Ethics

In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, detailing his “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment. In 1981, Peter Singer published The Expanding Circle. Decades later, these two works continue to influence the field of moral philosophy.

When tracking something as sticky and abstract as moral philosophy, there are no goalposts to measure the legitimacy of new ideas. Many feel uneasy discussing morality. Yet we engage with it every day. Every lesson we teach our children, every vote, every purchase, every slight decision is deeply steeped in our conceptions of morality.

People love to claim “I’m not political” but this position is born of extreme privilege; it is incoherent. Politics is the manifestation of ethics to the larger group. Acting within the status quo is a political and moral decision. To interact with others (and none of us is a self-sufficient island) is to act politically. Humanity is a social species, and in order to organize ourselves, common moral (i.e. political) sentiments are required.

John Rawls recognized our dependence on our social order. “Surplus value”— including wealth, rights, and liberty—is generated only when we collaborate. Rawls was a great enthusiast and believer of liberal democratic societies but thought if they were to survive, their institutions must be just. No question interested him more than distributive justice: how should the surplus value created from our collaboration be distributed?

Rawls was a statistician. He looked around him, he looked at the numbers, and he saw extreme inequality; the American rags-to-riches story was vanishingly rare. But he also acknowledged that perfect, forced equality was not a desirable state. So then, what levels of inequality can be justified? Inequality based on work or effort inputted seemed fair. But how can that be distinguished from the unfair position we are born into? In his view, we are not entitled to morally arbitrary things. Our station at birth is morally arbitrary: our family’s wealth, the neighborhood we are born into, and how highly the market values our skills.

Enter his Veil of Ignorance thought experiment. What if we were to wipe the slate clean and reform the parameters of society? The catch is, we would do so behind a Veil of Ignorance where we could not know anything about ourselves—Intelligence? Handicapped? Old? Our tastes? Our position in this imaginary society? 

Behind this Veil, how would we structure that society? To Rawls, the society we would create would look nothing like the modern United States. We would consider it far too risky of a lottery when the top 1% hold more than 40% of the wealth. And we might be more sensitive to the plight of someone born into poverty in a neighborhood mired in gun violence and failing schools.

We would operate under a Maximin (the Max for the Min) Model: we would design a society with the best outcome for the least advantaged, knowing that could be us. From this principle then, inequalities are justified if and only if

• The inequality provides a better outcome for the least advantaged
• The more advantaged position is open to everyone

Or, in the reverse, the Difference Principle: remove inequalities until it would harm the least advantaged.

In short, Rawls thought we should treat society as we do our family. Grandma Jenny doesn’t move so well anymore and can’t contribute much, but I owe my well-being and very existence to Grandma Jenny so we all cook for her and look after her. And no one gets seconds until everyone’s gotten first portions.

Which is an appropriate segue to Singer’s The Expanding Circle. The “Circle” refers to the beings whose interests we should value similarly to our own. Singer’s central tenet is based on an observation of history.

In a hunter-gatherer society, our Circle may have only extended to our immediate surroundings, our family or tribe. The neighboring, warring tribe is the “other” and their lives are inherently “less valuable” than the lives of our own tribe. And then, millennia later, perhaps our Circle extended to an entire city-state. And then, to an entire nation or race.

For much of our country’s history, to a white man, perhaps only other white men would be granted admission into his Circle, with women and blacks and children excluded. Our Circle is reflected in our daily discourse and in our laws.

Who do we extend the dignity of personhood to? For most of us today, our Circle encompasses all of humanity. We may favor our family or our countrymen, but the mainstream view is that we should at least consider the innate humanness of all people and extend the concept of human rights to all.

Singer asks, “Why stop there?” Most pet owners already include animals in their Circle. Why not all mammals? All animals? Trees too? This may strike our contemporary selves as an absurd impracticality, but to those living in 1700, I’d wager the thought of including slaves in their Circle would have struck them as an absurd impracticality as well. Consider how written law referenced blacks in the antebellum period (and for many decades after). Fugitive slave laws treated humans as the property of other humans and punished those who assisted slaves or hid slaves comparably to those who knowingly possess someone’s property today, whether it be their car, jewelry, or farm animal.

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races (applause)… And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior.” 

Abraham Lincoln, during his 1858 Senatorial campaign

Replace “black race” with “industrially-farmed pig” and it may be indistinguishable from how we talk and think today. Our contemporary minds may jump with indignation and claim “A black person is still a person. A pig is something different entirely,” yet a 1700 colonial governor may very well have said “A white man is still a person. A negro is something different entirely.”

Fifty years after Rawls introduced the Veil of Ignorance and forty years after Singer’s Expanding Circle, it’s time to merge the two ideas.

Rawls only considered the interplay between humans. He was supremely aware that the overcompensated banker did not produce wealth from his toil alone. His work depended greatly on the cooperation of millions: his education, the lawyers who govern the system of private property and enforceable contracts, the steelworkers who employ the banker’s investments, and all who allow the machine to churn without throwing a wrench into its gears.

But not once in A Theory of Justice does he acknowledge the other living beings upon which all surplus value depends. Or, as he may have referred to them, “natural resources.”

Extending Rawlsian justice to an Expanding Circle would mean recognizing that it is not only human cooperation that girds our wealth, but the input of all life that makes our lives possible. We are birthed from our mother, trade with our neighbors, but are sheltered by trees and subsist off corn. We say the blood of our ancestors runs through us and we honor them as such, but more physiologically accurate would be to say the blood of the pigs we eat runs through us.

If we combined the Maximin Model with the Expanding Circle, what would the world look like? Imagine how we would live if we were to treat our position in life as arbitrary. Why am I me and not you? Why am I me and not the oak tree shading my front yard? Why am I me and not the pig on my dinner plate, whose life frittered away in the most humiliating dignity-destroying contraption imaginable? Would we treat pigs not with apathetic authoritarianism but with a compassion born from appreciating that our stations result from the lottery of birth and nothing more?

Treat a pig equally? Some scoff. Invite her to our birthday party? Serve her cake and ice cream? But that is a bastardization of the concept of equality. Equality does not mean preparing a dinner plate for the tree in our front yard any more than it means treating our grandmother like we would our peers. True equality requires the work of understanding how to provide for the unique needs and dignity of the individual. It means being as sensitive to the life of the tree as we are to the lives of our loved ones. The Veil of Ignorance simply codifies “Treat others as you would want to be treated—if you were them.”

While this concept seems alien to us, the ostensibly “unnatural” view treats the life around us as objects to be used for our pleasure and power rather than as beings imbued with the same force of life as ourselves.

To live morally would not mean harvesting nothing because we don’t want to kill. Death begets life. Unless our bodies start producing chlorophyll, our lives depend on the consumption of other life.

So I would consume other life, yes. But I would be dead-serious to the gravity of taking another’s life to further my own. Overconsumption beyond my needs becomes unthinkable, as would the commodification of “natural resources” in the same way that I acknowledge the wrongheadedness of the commodification of other humans. I would respect my own life as a precious privilege, fully aware of the lives given to perpetuate it.

I do not live this way. Tomorrow, I will wake up in my house built of objectified commodities, clothed in objectified commodities. I will boil up a pot of water with objectified, commoditized energy to cook my objectified, commoditized oats. I will not live as though my day began behind a Veil of Ignorance. 

My failures do not invalidate the ethics. A theory of ethics is a compass, not a study in psychology. In the Christian tradition, just because I have sinned and I will sin again does not preclude me from striving to live a brighter, more sinless tomorrow.