Our society is deeply divided over the meaning of the good life, over what is good and what is evil. We tell clashing stories about things that matter a great deal, things such as abortion, marriage and family, education, and the role of religion in the public square. As one scholar has said, people with different world views may live and work together in peace, but they “may have trouble...governing one another.”
Indeed, even thoughtful law professors can disagree on the meaning of rationality. Consider what two great scholars have to say about living a rational life.
First, Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law, who spoke at a panel discussion on religion in the public square at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools:
"When we die, we die. The only meaning we will ever experience is in the here and the now. The challenge is to make this life as deep in its significance as possible. Much–not all–of received religion stands in the way of this by inviting us to avoid, evade, deny the fact of our mortality. If we are to live in the truth, the place to begin is by rejecting all false projections of life after death, all false assertions of transcendent meaning beyond those that we ourselves create. Only then can we proceed to live in the manner of Socrates by asking how best we are to live the life we actually have rather than suppose this question has been–or will be–answered elsewhere in a more authoritative fashion."
Now consider the response of Professor Phillip Johnson of Berkeley Law:
“If God really does exist, then to lead a rational life, a person has to take account of God and his purposes. A person or a society that ignores the Creator is ignoring the most important part of reality, and to ignore reality is to be irrational."
How can Professors Ackerman and Johnson possibly govern each other? What kind of educational system would allow each of them to educate their children from a rational (as each of them understands rationality) perspective?
Consider this explanation of Prof. Rawls idea of "justice as fairness:
The original position is a central feature of John Rawls's social contract account of justice, “justice as fairness,” set forth in A Theory of Justice (TJ). It is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are to imagine ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. They do know of certain fundamental interests they all have, plus general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences. The parties in the original position are presented with a list of the main conceptions of justice drawn from the tradition of social and political philosophy, and are assigned the task of choosing from among these alternatives the conception of justice that best advances their interests in establishing conditions that enable them to effectively pursue their final ends and fundamental interests. Rawls contends that the most rational choice for the parties in the original position are the two principles of justice. The first principle guarantees the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good. The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and prerogatives of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.
If Profs. Ackerman and Johnson had to design an educational system from "behind the veil of ignorance" how would they design it?
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