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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Rationality and the Structure of the Self
  • The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls , Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean con­ception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work?

Not Being (or Understanding) John Rawls

22 Mar 2026 - 17 Apr 2026
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    • A reaction to Being John Rawls - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten. This was an utterly brilliant piece by SSC but it gets Rawls completely wrong. This seems to happen a lot, he also completely inverted the meaning of Moloch in one of his more famous earlier works (see Meditations on Meditations on Moloch ). I don't mean to give him shit for it, I actually find it a fascinating and useful exercise to break down these intricate rhetorical moves and figure out just what is going on and where they go wrong. (This contains spoilers, you should read the thing first).
    • The conceit of this piece is that all the characters are essentially versions or facets of the same being. The star is John Rawls the alcoholic, other versions appear, such as John Rawls Banker, John Rawls Psychologist, John Rawls Visionary. Rawls' idea of the veil of ignorance, which is a purely pragmatic epistemological device, has mutated to be something more like the Vedantic doctrine of the unity of all souls (see I Am You ). If this isn't obvious to the reader, at one point John Rawls Brahma appears and makes it explict:
      • “Each aeon,” said John Rawls Brahma, “I and my wife Margaret Rawls Sarasvati fall asleep together upon a cosmic lotus. In my dream, I become a diamond, and each of my billion billion facets believes itself to be a separate being. Yet as these beings meet, they feel some preconscious intimation of unity, and begin to consider one another as themselves. As each facet reflects each other facet, each part starts to contain the whole of John Rawls Brahma within it, and the pattern of the links between them resolves into the Moral Law. The bones of Gods are made of Law, and thus the emergence of the Moral Law reforms John Rawls Brahma.
    • Individuals, who are all just facets of this single being, can help each other or not. If they are wise/enlightened, they will do so out of what amounts to self-interest, because they know that other people are really themselves. If they are too stupid or unenlightened to see that, they will refuse to help others (and reap the karmic consequences).
    • This makes Rawls' Veil of Ignorance into something metaphysical, like the cloud of unknowing that hides people's true divine nature from themselves. I sincerely doubt Rawls thinks of it that way. I can't pull Rawls out to berate SSC, but I asked Claude to simulate him:
      • How would Rawls react to an interpretation of his theory in terms of the Vedantic idea that all souls are one, manifestations of some unified single mind (The one and only transmigrant in Coomaraswamy's term)?
      • Rawls would have a layered and somewhat resistant reaction.
      • The convergence he'd acknowledge
      • The practical conclusions align well. If you literally are every person — the one transmigrant cycling through all positions — then behind the veil you're not just imagining you might be the worst-off person, you will be that person. This would make the difference principle (protect the least advantaged) feel almost analytically true rather than a rational gamble. The Vedantic grounding makes Rawls's intuitions metaphysically necessary.
      • The "political not metaphysical" objection
      • This is the big one. Rawls spent much of his later work (especially Political Liberalism) explicitly retreating from any comprehensive doctrine — religious, metaphysical, or otherwise. He wanted principles of justice that citizens with different worldviews could all endorse from their own starting points. Grounding justice in Advaita Vedanta makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't share that metaphysics. It converts a procedural device into a sectarian argument.
      • **The separateness of persons problem — inverted**
      • Rawls's sharpest objection to utilitarianism was that it violated the separateness of persons — it effectively merges everyone into one aggregate subject. The Vedantic interpretation does this ontologically rather than mathematically, which Rawls would find even more troubling. His whole framework assumes distinct individuals who need terms of cooperation precisely because they're not the same entity.
      • The deeper irony
      • If selves are genuinely non-separate, the contractualist move — rational agents choosing principles that protect their interests — starts to dissolve. Who is the chooser? The veil of ignorance works because there's an agent who will eventually wake up somewhere specific. Vedantic non-dualism threatens to erase the very subject whose prudential reasoning the argument depends on.
      • The most productive framing might not be through Rawls at all, but through Parfit's Reasons and Persons, where weakening personal identity systematically shifts moral conclusions toward impartiality. The Vedantic view is the limiting case of Parfit's reductionism about persons — and Parfit thought this did have major ethical implications, though he drew more utilitarian than Rawlsian conclusions from it.
      • So: interesting convergence on conclusions, structurally illuminating, but Rawls would resist it as a foundation — and rightly suspect it quietly hollows out his own framework from beneath.
    • Alright, now I have to do it myself. Here's the key paragraph in Scott's story:
      • “My theory of charity,” said John Rawls Visionary, “centers on nine words: there but for the grace of God go I.* *Society is a contract where we agree to help the less fortunate, knowing that if the shoe were on the other foot, they would help us in turn.”
      • This, and the story more generally, represents Rawlsianism as a form of charity – reasons for the well-off to help the less-well-off. But Rawls theory is a theory of justice, something quite different. Rawls (the real one) is not proposing reasons for people to be charitable, he is proposing principles on which to structure a society that achieves fairness. Neither "justice" nor "fairness" makes an appearance in this story.
      • Justice as fairness, Rawls says, favors either a property-owning democracy or liberal (democratic) socialism. ...The aim of both systems of political economy is to enable all citizens, even the least advantaged, to manage their own affairs within a context of significant social and economic equality. “The least advantaged are not, if all goes well, the unfortunate and unlucky—objects of our charity and compassion, much less our pity—but those to whom reciprocity is owed as a matter of basic justice” (JF, 139).
      • Rawls constructs justice as fairness around specific interpretations of the ideas that citizens are free and equal, and that society should be fair. He sees it as resolving the tensions between the ideas of freedom and equality, which have been highlighted both by the socialist critique of liberal democracy and by the conservative critique of the modern welfare state. Rawls also argues that justice as fairness is superior to the dominant tradition in modern political thought: utilitarianism.
      • In Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism, citizens relate to each other as equals within a social order defined by reciprocity, instead of within the unjust status hierarchies familiar from today.
    • So the SSC scenario doesn't have much to do with Rawls actual Theory of Justice. This is not surprising. The politics of SSC and of "Rationalism" more generally do not have a lot of time for justice – they may not be right-wing, but they are definitely against "social justice" in all its forms. Their preferred method of helping the unfortunate is mechanized and rationalized charity (effective altruism), not the universal rights of a liberal order. They are broadly libertarian, and a Rawlsian society relies on a coercive and redistributive state to ensure justice and fairness.
    • I'm not here to write a strong defense of Rawls, just to not a certain irony around the idea of rationality. The foundational assumption of Rawls is that it is possible to collectively and rationally structure society for the benefit of all. But Berkeley Rationalists do not think like that. For them, rationality s a utility optimization problem and the notion of liberal rational proceduralism is foreign to them.
    • It is interesting that Vedantic and Buddhist ideas about the self have such appeal in this community (they appeal to me too, but their political application seems highly suspect). They seem to function as a kind of escape valve from what is otherwise a radically individualistic ideology. It's Ayn Rand selfishness tempered by the knowledge that the self is an illusion.
    • That actually doesn't sound so bad, but I feel that to build an actual workable society, we need a model of persons as real individuals, grounded not in a narrow self-interest or in some vague notion of universal oneness, but in actual agents in relationship to an actual society.

    • Followup

      • Wow thanks for commenting, I am honored. And I apologize for the critical tone; your piece was a perfectly fine riff on Rawls.
      • Still I think there is a major detour from his real point, which is how to structure the institutions of society, not a guide to individual action or desert. He says this pretty explicitly:
      • The primary subject of the principles of social justice is the basic structure of society, the arrangement of major social institutions into one scheme of cooperation. ... The principles of justice for institutions must not be confused with the principles which apply to individuals and their actions in particular circumstances. These two kinds of principles apply to different subjects and must be discussed separately.