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Tutorial 3: What does it mean to be a moral member of society?

Your textbook author writes:

“Because where you stand depends on where you sit, people might make the most impartial judgments when they do not know their own relative position. That is, people’s understanding of universal moral values takes them “behind the veil of ignorance” (Rawls, 1971) to behavior deemed right, without knowing whether one might be victim, perpetrator, or helper and whether an ingroup or outgroup member. Judgments of fairness without knowing one’s own position reveal principles uncontaminated by self‐interest or other biases. The Rawls veil of ignorance proposed that people should make moral choices without knowing how they, specific others, and their groups would fare.” (Fiske, 2018, p. 302)

Article 7 – “A solution to the mysteries of morality” – writes:

“We refer to this type of rule as Rawlsian morality (Kurzban et al., 2010) after the philosopher John Rawls (1971), who argued for adopting the set of moral rules that people would choose if they did not know their own identity in society (Binmore, 2007).” (DeScioli&Kurzban, 2013, p. 488)

Rawlsian morality refers to using this following process to determine what is “moral”:

Step 1: You don’t know your identity in society: you might be the person who committed the crime, the victim of the crime, or a relative of the victim. Similarly, you might be the person who engaged in an act of helping, the person who benefitted from that helping, or a relative of the person who benefitted. Or you might be the enemy of the person who benefitted from the helping – in which case that helping might actually have cost you.

Step 2: You evaluate the behavior – blind to who you are in the context of the behavior.

Rawlsian morality can potentially help us identify universal principles of morality: social behaviors that we see as right or wrong, regardless of whether we have committed the acts or been the recipients/victims of them. However, when we evaluate our own and others’ behavior, we find that the patterns of our own decision-making and moral judgments about social behavior often do not fit a Rawlsian model of morality.

For your second tutorial assignment (worth 5% of the unit marks), your task is to read pages 488-489 of Article 7 and:

1. Define, in your own words, strategic morality.
2. Describe how Rawlsian morality differs from strategic morality.
3. Identify and describe one example from your own personal life (or society more broadly) where you have observed someone exhibit Rawlsian morality. This could be a person either making decisions about their own behavior following a Rawlsian process of thinking, or a person making judgments about another person’s behavior.
4. Identify and describe one example from your own personal life (or society more broadly) where you have observed someone exhibit strategic morality. Again, this could be a person either making decisions about their own behavior or a person making judgments about another person’s behavior.