Lara Buchak, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Berkeley
"Taking Risks Under the Veil of Ignorance"
Abstract: A natural view in distributive ethics is that everyone’s interests matter, but the interests of the relatively worse off matter more than the interests of the relatively better off. I provide a new argument for this view. The argument takes as its starting point the proposal, due to Harsanyi and Rawls, that facts about distributive ethics are discerned from individual preferences in the “original position.” It then draws on recent work in decision theory, along with some intuitive principles about risk-taking, to derive the view. I show that this argument avoids a version of the “separateness of persons” objection, and that it explains the shift between attitudes towards risk and attitudes towards inequality.
Free and open to all
