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TheOtherDave comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - Less Wrong
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Note that there's nothing physically impossible about altering the probability of being born gay, straight, bi, male, female, asexual, etc.
True, and this could create some interesting choices for Rawlsians with very conservative values. Would they create a world with no gays, or no women? Would they do both???
I don't know how to reply to this without violating the site's proscription on discussions of politics, which I prefer not to do.
OK - the comment was pretty flippant anyway. Consider it withdrawn.
Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" discusses the death penalty imposed on a violent child rapist/murder. The narrator says there are two possibilities:
1) The killer was so deranged he didn't know right from wrong. In that case, killing (or imprisoning him) is the only safe solution for the rest. Or,
2) The killer knew right from wrong, but couldn't stop himself. Wouldn't killing (or stopping) him be a favor, something he would want?
Why can't that type of reasoning exist behind the veil of ignorance? Doesn't it completely justify certain kinds of oppression? That said, there's also an empirical question whether the argument applies to the particular group being oppressed.
Not dealing with your point, but that sort of analysis is why I find Heinlein so distasteful - the awful philosophy. For example in #1, 5 seconds of thought suffices to think of counterexamples like temporary derangements (drug use, treatable disease, particularly stressful circumstances, blows to the head), and more effort likely would turn up powerful empirical evidence like possibly an observation that most murderers do not murder again even after release (and obviously not execution).
Absolutely. What finally made me realize that Heinlein was not the bestest moral philosopher ever was noticing that all his books contained superheros - Stranger in a Strange Land is the best example. I'm not talking about the telekinetic powers, but the mental discipline. His moral theory might work for human-like creatures with perfect mental discipline, but for ordinary humans . . . not so much.
This was pretty common in sf of the early 20th century, actually — the trope of a special group of people with unusual mental disciplines giving them super powers and special moral status. See A. E. van Vogt (the Null-A books) or Doc Smith (the Lensman books) for other examples. There's a reason Dianetics had so much success in the sf community of that era, I suspect — fans were primed for it.
Is that true of all of Heinlein's books? I would say that most of them (including Starship Troopers) don't have superheroes.
Well, I'm not exactly a Heinlein scholar, but I'd say it shows up mainly in his late-period work, post Stranger in a Strange Land. Time Enough for Love and its sequels definitely qualify, but some of the stuff he's most famous for -- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, et cetera -- don't seem to. Unfortunately, Heinlein's reputation is based mainly on that later stuff.
The revolution in "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" cannot succeed without the aid of the supercomputer. That makes any moral philosophy implicit in that revolution questionable to the extent one asserts that the moral philosophy is true of humanity now.
To a lesser extend, "Starship Troopers" asserts that military service is a reliable way of screening for the kinds of moral qualities (like mental discipline) that make one trustworthy enough to be a high government official (or even to vote, if I recall correctly). In reality, those moral qualities are very thin on the ground in the real world, being much less common than suggested by the book. If the appropriate moral qualities were really that frequent, the sanity line would already be much high than it is.
It might be relevant to note that Heinlein served in the U.S. Navy before he was discharged due to medical reasons.
Most men in his generation did military service of some form.
I read Starship Troopers as a critique of fascism, not its endorsement, but I could be wrong...
I wouldn't say the Starship Troopers government was fascist, but Heinlein clearly thinks they are doing things pretty well. The fact that the creation process of that government avoided fascism with no difficulty (it isn't considered worth mentioning in the history) is precisely the lack of realism that I am criticizing.
As long as we're using sci-fi to inform our thinking on criminality and corrections, The Demolished Man is an interesting read.
What would a Rawlsian decider do? Institute a prison and psychiatric system, and some method of deciding between case 1 (psychiatric imprisonment to try and treat or at least prevent further harm) and case 2 (criminal imprisonment to deter like-minded people and prevent further harm from the killer/rapist). Also set up institutions for detecting and encouraging early treatment of child sex offenders before they moved to murder.
They would not want the death penalty in either case, nor would they want the prison/psychiatric system to be so appalling that they might prefer to be dead.
The Rawlsian would need to weigh the risk of being the raped/murdered child (or their parent) against the risk of being born with psychopathic or paedophile tendencies. If there was genuinely a significant deterrent from the death penalty, then the Rawlsian might accept it. But that looks unlikely in such cases.