Utilitarianism, the Difference Principle, or Else? An Experimental Analysis of the Impact of Social Immobility on the Democratic Election of Distributive Rules

Abstract

Within ethics, distributive justice constitutes a central and controversial topic. Despite the rise of positive approaches to studying existing distributive preferences in society (see Konow, 2003), the question how different normative positions are justified is still fundamentally important for moral philosophers.¹ With John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), a revival of normative theories of justice — including distributional aspects (see Nozick, 1974; Harsanyi, 1975) — has been observed. Even though much of the debate took place on an abstract-theoretical level, one must not overlook the crucial role of assumptions about the empirical world in this debate. At the end of the day, different normative conclusions are drawn partly because of the pre-election of different assumptions on an empirical level. An instructive example about the influence of positive assumption on normative theory is the debate between John Rawls (1971; 2001) and John Harsanyi (1953; 1955; 1975). Both used an Original Position to develop their normative conclusion, but due to different positive models of human decision making, the former derived his famous difference principle implying substantial redistribution, while the latter arrived at the utilitarian norm of maximizing average income.