lukeprog comments on The Unselfish Trolley Problem - Less Wrong

5 Post author: elharo 17 May 2013 10:51AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 17 May 2013 11:18:22PM 7 points [-]

That is not Rawlsianism. Rawls was writing about how to establish principles of justice to regulate the major institutions of society; he was not establishing a decision procedure.

Yes. "Rawlsianism" is mostly commonly used to refer to Rawls' theory of political justice specifically (e.g. Kordana & Tabachnick 2006).

I will briefly remark, however, that Rawls' original work on the justification of ethical principles was in the context of decision procedures. His first paper on the topic, "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics" (1951) is pretty explicit about that. Also, other philosophers have gone on to borrow the Rawlsian approach to political justice for the purpose of justifying certain decision procedures in ethics or practical decision-making, e.g. Daniels (1979).