Nona basically most of what I would have said on the issue, albeit, probably more eloquently.

@ Erica: Watched the video. Its OK. Dawkins basically is invoking Sorites' paradox. I accept his argument, that we can't be drawing absolutist bright line rules, but he did not need to pull out evolution to have me on board.

Eben is challenging us to think critically but there is nothing morally consistent about the "we are all kin" theory within the context of this course. I'd suggest it might be cognitively dissonant within a course that spent so much time on legal realism. Of course, I don't actually think for a second that Eben truly believes his "we are all kin theory." I agree with you Erica, he is just trying to "challenge" us. He is staking out the most absolutist position on the issue, because, by doing so it opens our mind and drives us further away from preconceived notions.

@ KayKim? : The "Rawlsian Veil" to me is also utter bullshit. It is a pointless, unexecutable exercise. I will always be me, even when I am pretending not to be me.

(disclosure: I have had the experience of talking to many people who fought recently in the Middle East and have seen multiple disturbing presentations)

To use Eben's tactic: Life in Afghanistan might not be so bad. It's only bad because of who I am, an American. I cannot fathom being an Afghani. Are perpetual Civil Wars bad? I don't know. They seem bad. But then again, they seem bad because I don't have to experience them. Behind the "veil of ignorance" I may reach that conclusion. I may not. It is pointless to think about because it can never happen. Afghans could be quite happy people and we are just getting in the way of ourselves from seeing it.

Daniel Gilbert makes a similar argument illustrating the nonsense of the Rawlsian Veil in a book called Stumbling on Happiness. He looks at adult conjoined twins and asks whether if they could separate, would they? From our vantage point, we would think this life were terrible. Indeed, non-conjoined twins thought that a conjoined condition was absolutely miserable. Yet, the conjoined twins answered that they would not separate if they could. I remember a similar event in my own experience when I once saw a person who was paralyzed from the waist down who said it was "the best thing in his life that had ever happened to him." It is all relative--including the concepts of happiness and justice.

But the "Rawlsian Veil" requires some sort of evaluation on happiness and justice. But "all claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view — from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn't a view from nowhere." (Gilbert) Nowhere, being the place we would need to be behind the veil of ignorance.

-- MatthewZorn - 01 Mar 2010