Distributive Justice- Marx, Rawls, Sen & the Socioproctological solution

Suppose a Society has the power to decide how Income and Wealth should be distributed between its members. Then, we may speak of 'distributive Justice' as being a feature of a Society aiming at Just outcomes.

It is often supposed that Marx endorsed the slogan 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'- which is a good characterization of a family relationship or specific type of joint-enterprise, but is not a feature of a Society with a complex economy. The truth is Marx said Socialists would have to proceed on the basis of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution'- i.e. more productive workers get more. The Soviet Economy, very inefficiently, stuck with 'piece-rates' so as to comply with Marxist orthodoxy in this respect. Naturally, this meant that a lot of money was wasted on monitoring individual output. Moreover, the figures were fudged so that Managers could retain workers in jobs where output was difficult to measure or appeared low.

Only after the attainment of Communism- which itself might have to wait for some Technological Utopia- would it be sensible for Leftists to equate Justice with needs based equality of income.

Marx says

' In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

In other words, once people work only because they want to, can the product of labor go to those who need it most. This statement is still false. Currently, I produce poetry because I want to engage in that type of labor. However, I want my poetry to go to those who already have a lot of poetic 'capital'. I don't want stupid and illiterate people to be chanting my verse. The same would be true if I were a dress designer. I would not want some ugly but poor damsel wearing my sublime creations. I'd want Pippa Middleton or P. Chidamabram, or some other such aristocratic hottie, flaunting her callipygous form in my clinging fabrics.

Back in the Sixties, some economists- like Samuelson- thought Soviet Russia could overtake the US in terms of material standard of living. There was great optimism about robots and computers reducing 'socially necessary labor' to a mere two or three hours a day. But the problem remained, how could you persuade Society, without recourse to authoritarianism, to ensure ugly but needy people got the first claim on what people voluntarily produced purely for their own pleasure?

One answer is Religious- look upon the material needs of the other as a means to fulfill your spiritual needs and thus redeem your soul. Another was Philosophical- your 'essential' self could under some contingency have been poor and needy, thus, if 'essences' matter, it is rational for you to assent to a Social distribution mechanism such that the worst off have first call on resources.

It was in the context of this type of 'rationalist' argument for altruism that Rawl's 'A Theory of Justice' had a great impact at the beginning of the Seventies when there was still considerable optimism about a 'convergence', of a technocratic sort, between types of Economic regime such that an affluent, leisured, Society was almost within reach for all sufficiently educated Polities.


Rawls's theory features two key principles:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value. 

Would we want to live in a Society where drug addicted rapists have the same 'basic rights and liberties' as decent people? No. We'd want them locked up if they possess mental competence, or placed under appropriate care if they are of diminished capacity.

Perhaps, some other sort of liberty is meant. In this case, a Monarchy, or one with an elected President who enjoys some measure of Executive privilege, would be anathema to us. Thus no British or American Rawlsian could in good conscience hold office upon condition of upholding the existing constitution. But there are important reasons for believing that Societies were everybody has equal rights would rapidly disintegrate in the face of external aggression or internal dissension. The 'Golden Liberties' of the Polish Commonwealth appear to have been disastrous for that noble and cultured Nation.

More generally, it is not in our interest to wish to have the same liberty, or specific immunity,  as a Judge or a member of Parliament or a servant of the State, executing their duty in accordance with the law. An MP or an officer of the Court should have more freedom of expression so as to be able to expose possible abuses than a muckraking journalist or a person intent on sowing hatred and dissension.

Finally, it would be foolish to limit discretionary responses or equitable remedies to unexpected situations by saying 'only these liberties and no others should be guaranteed.' The fact is, our notion of 'liberty' changes as science and technology changes. Fifty years ago, few would have thought that the British people would put up with a ban on smoking in pubs. Yet, now, we are surprised the thing was ever tolerated.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;

So, hereditary monarchies are unjust. America is unjust because only 'birthers' get to be President. In any case, economists don't know whether or not 'economic inequalities' exist. A guy who has a lot of money may be a fraudster or may go bankrupt because of a flaw in his business model. A guy with no money may be either deliberately or ignorantly not using some very valuable resource he has.

Much social and economic inequality arises because of things which it would be very costly to change. I suppose, if I had a lot of very expensive surgery, I could win a Beauty Pageant and earn a lot of money as a prostitute. But, according to my Accountant, the outlay for the operations would greatly exceed the Expected Value of my earnings.

and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

What is of the greatest benefit of the least advantaged is that their fellows stop adding to their number. Redistribution worsens a Malthusian trap. In an affluent country, the least advantaged may be those with a family history of violence, addiction and sexual abuse. What benefits them most is the shrinkage and atomization of the communities into which they are born.

Rawls's 2 principles are highly undesirable. However, purely as an academic exercise, one may ask the question- 'is there a unique political system which satisfies both conditions?'

The answer is no. Any system can satisfy these two conditions by giving its own interpretation of words like 'person', 'liberty', 'fairness', 'basic', 'disadvantaged' etc.
What if we specify the meaning of these terms in advance? Would we then get to a unique constitution?
Not if Knightian Uncertainty obtains- i.e. the future is not fully anticipated. Currently, some people ask whether a robot or an A.I could have legal personality. Tomorrow, the question may be about the rights of clones or human-animal hybrids or rocks or gas clouds which have achieved sentience. As for what questions might arise a hundred years from now- very few of us have the remotest inkling.

Lawyers know that the Judiciary can throw up surprises of a type their Professors had considered inconceivable even a decade or two previously. They also know that there is seldom any unanimity between jurisdictions. What is illegal in Scotland may be legal in England. Even where the decision is the same, the ratio may be different. The fact is, even with a written Constitution and well developed Case Law, different schools of thought may disagree widely over how the Constitution is to be interpreted.

Rawls's Theory of Justice was understood to uphold the notion that justice required focusing on the best outcome for the worst off. Unfortunately, it was actually 'anything goes' because Rawls was placing his faith on an Economic theory which- at almost exactly the same time as his book was published- was shown to be, for purely mathematical reasons, to be 'anything goes'. In other words, it was always feasible that something intended to help the poor would actually hurt them because 'income effects' and 'hedging' changed the nature of the General Equilibrium.

During the Seventies, advanced countries experienced 'stagflation'. One popular explanation, at the time, was that redistribution had gone to far. Both inflation and unemployment were rising because there were limits to what institutions could achieve. In this context, Rawls's work had no practical effect. Yet, as an academic availability cascade, it was kept up over subsequent decades and Rawls himself became one of the best known political philosophers in the world.

Sen has critiqued Rawls's work and, in her turn, critiquing this critique, Dr. Laura Valentini writes-

'Central to contemporary theorizing about justice, Sen observes, is the question -What is a just society?‘. Those who, like Rawls, put this question at the heart of political philosophy subscribe to what Sen calls transcendental institutionalism. On the one hand, their approach is transcendental‘ because it aims to identify an ideal of a perfectly just society.

This is scarcely true. Only distributional justice was being looked at. Rawls was saying the same thing as everybody else- viz. inequalities actually benefit those who are worst off. The reverse may have been true- viz. the worst off would die if inequalities were removed- but it can never be shown that an inequality benefits the less favored party under all circumstances. All we can say is- 'things being what they are, we'd better stick with the status quo, though in our hearts we yearn for something more Christian'.

Economics is only one part of Society. There are many things which matter more than money. Sex appeal, Charisma, Sporting Ability, Character, Disposition- the list is endless. Rawls wasn't describing an 'perfectly just society' in which all such things were taken into account. His concern was much more narrow, but it was also one that had already become obsolete.

The economist, Harsanyi, rubbished the assumptions behind Rawls's maximin principle almost immediately. He distinguished sharply between our personal and our moral preferences and is generally described as a 'rule utilitarian'. However, even his formulation could not become the basis of an institutional approach because there is a sort of 'Newcombe problem' such that it is generally in our interest to ascribe to a morality greatly at odds with how we actually behave. But current Institutions already exhibit this hypocrisy. Thus there is little point rising from one's armchair to bring about a Revolution which would merely pour old wine into new bottles.

Sen may feel that Rawls was more clear cut in espousing economic egalitarianism than he was himself. Neither, to my knowledge, attempted to redistribute their own income and royalties to the least well off in their own field. Nor, to be fair, did either of them support any particular institution or other mechanism to achieve their ideas or theories. Thus, neither could be said to be 'transcendental' thinkers. At best, they make clear their own moral preference and give some more or less spurious argument in favor of it, but they say little or nothing about how it is to be achieved. Thus they are not 'institutionalists' and so present a smaller, indeed vanishing, target for hostile attack.

Dr. Valenti says Sen thinks Rawls scheme is

is 'institutionalist‘ because it attempts to establish what perfect institutional arrangements would be like, without paying much attention to the conduct of individuals.

Rawls says he thinks the outcome of a particular choice situation would be egalitarian. He is wrong. But he doesn't specify any 'institutional arrangement' in this Theory of Justice. It is not physically possible to get everybody to choose a Social state from 'behind the veil of ignorance'.

In short, transcendental institutionalists seek to identify a set of perfectly just social institutions. For them, societies in the real world are unjust to the extent that they fail to exhibit such institutional perfection.

This is nonsense. We can look at the outcome of any institutional process and start hollering that it has do what is best for the worst off. Thus, when Rep. Al Green grilled Zuckerberg on the number of LGBTQRSTY people working on a particular project, he could have invoked the shade of Rawls to justify what many people thought was a bizarre piece of political theater.

I suppose Zuckerberg could have tried to turn the tables on his interlocutor by saying 'you tell me how to design an Institution which secures the interests of these people.' Perhaps, Al Green- being an experienced politician- could have answered that question in a compelling manner. However, Rawls would have been no help to him because he was entirely silent about Institutional questions.

Dr. Valenti affirms that Sen, quite bizarrely, considers Rawls's 2 principles mentioned above to generate a unique set of Institutions.

In Sen‘s view, this theory exhibits the following distinctive marks of transcendental institutionalism: (i) it delivers a unique and definitive set of principles, (ii) these principles select a particular set of institutions, and do not apply to individual behaviour, and (iii) a society whose institutions satisfy these principles is perfectly just

(i) is not true. The same notion can be expressed by any number of principles with varying degrees of 'definitiveness'. (ii) these principles select a large class of institutions though none may be compossible with physical reality. Institutions are useless unless they change individual behavior. (iii) is false because Rawls never speaks of 'perfect justice'. Our thoughts may be unjust. Our dreams and subconscious processes even more so. Rawls was not a Priest or a Guru who claimed to be able to purge the Human Species of the taint of Old Adam.

Rawls was not a transcendental institutionalist. I am. Socioproctology's theory of Justice is based on 2 principles
1) Socioproctological Institutions are those whose outcomes are perfectly just
2) Societies featuring a full range of appropriate, well functioning, Socioproctological Institutions are perfectly just.

A. Transcendental Institutionalism is neither Necessary nor Sufficient for Justice comparisons Sen forcefully argues that, contrary to common opinion, knowing what a perfectly just society would look like is neither necessary nor sufficient for making comparative judgements of justice across different social systems.

This is not the case. A Socioproctologist can easily see whether or not a Society has a full set of institutions and whether they function in a Socioproctological manner. This is a necessary and sufficient condition for a person capable of knowing a perfectly just society (i.e. a socioproctologist) when he sees one, to say 'this society is more just, as is evidenced by its embrace of socioproctology, than that other society where even the name of the founder of Socioproctology is unknown.'

Indeed, anyone who makes 'comparative judgments of justice across different social systems', is either right, in which case she is a Socioproctologist avant la lettre, or else is wrong and thus a subject of investigation for Socioproctology by reason of being an asshole. 

The problem with Sen's approach is that 'comparative judgments' are on a spectrum between purely arbitrary & substantively conceptual. To the extent that they are arbitrary, they are not context independent and thus mere reflexes or behavioral traits ; but to the extent that they are conceptual, and concerned with distributive justice, they are necessarily socioproctological. This can be easily proved.

Suppose a concept of distributive justice is non socioproctological. Then a person with that concept would not be an asshole and thus not a fit subject for socioproctological investigation. However, not being an asshole is itself a desirable property and alters bargaining games. Hence it is itself an argument in the function of distributive justice. Thus no concept of distributive justice can be wholly non socioproctological.

Obviously, this proof depends on a folk theorem such that only an asshole would have a concept of something quantitative which has no mathematical representation. Socioproctology is itself socioproctological for this reason. Moreover, it follows that only Socioproctological Institutions- by fingering assholes and thus permitting their disintermediation- can implement distributive justice

This is problematic insofar as comparative judgements are precisely what we need to advance justice in the real world.

This is utterly false. Human Justice can develop perfectly well without any 'comparative judgments' with other similar species who have evolved on different planets. It may argued that 'intra-human' Justice requires comparative judgments. This is not the case. A comparison may be admitted as a datum for a judgment. It is not itself a judgment. Thus if the datum changes- e.g. a superior comparator becomes available- we say the facts have changed. The ratio has not changed. Judgments distinguish carefully between datum- which may be compartive- ratios- which decide the case and obiter dicta which may be illuminative but are not binding. 

It may be argued that any decision is actually a judgment. But, for a theory of Justice, it must be the case that some decisions are judicial and some are not. The class of decisions which constitute the administration of Justice are sharply defined from non-justiciable decisions. 

Now we may decide to take a particular action on the basis of a comparison. I may say Beyonce is more successful than Sen. I shall twerk like Beyonce instead of talking like Sen. But my subsequent career does not arise out of any judicial act or decision pertaining to Justice. 

To advance Justice in the real world, either there are better ratios- i.e. the Law is reformed- or else there are better facts- i.e. the information set is expanded- or else the nature of the background obiter dicta has become more harmonious and illuminating. But none of this involves 'comparative judgments' as being themselves part of Justice. Decisions as to facts are kept separate from the Law. They are subject to different protocols. 'Due process' works differently when expert testimony, as opposed to the Judge's ratio, is impugned at the appellate level.

It is easy enough to write pseudo-philosophical nonsense by taking a word like 'judgment' which means one and only one thing in a Theory of Justice and to use it as equivalent to 'decision' in an Economic theory. 

Firstly, to know that the iniquities of hunger,

am I really suffering an 'inequity' because I'm hungry but can't be arsed to get up and sling something into the microwave?  

illiteracy,

am I really suffering some terrible inequity because I can't be arsed to learn how to read and write my own mother tongue? 

torture,

why class torture- which is something some other guy is doing to you- with hunger? 

arbitrary incarceration, or medical exclusion‘ are sources of injustice,

To know an inequity is indeed to know a source of injustice. But to qualify as an inequity the thing has first to be justiciable. My hunger or illiteracy is not justiciable. My torture definitely is in this jurisdiction but medical exclusion may not be.

However, I am perfectly at liberty to imagine a perfect type of justice where things I consider unjust are justiciable matters and thus represent inequities recognized by the Justice system. 

one need not have a detailed account of what qualifies as a perfectly just society.

One never needs to have a detailed account of anything in your mind. Furthermore, you are welcome to use 'perfect' as a Tarskian primitive. You don't have to define it. On any justiciable matter, your testimony is not stricken just because it isn't fully detailed or perfect in some other way. It may be admitted as a fact. It may not. That depends on how you hold up under cross-examination.

The Law as a buckstopped protocol bound system may stipulate an ideal of justice. It may, as a legal fiction, pretend that it descends from the perfect Justice of Greek speaking druids. But then again, it may not. Justice, as by Law administered, can describe itself as Transcendental or even Divine. What it does not feature are 'comparative judgments' because all ratios are absolute. Obviously, this itself may be a justiciable matter. One may say such and such ratio is defective. It was applied on the basis of a comparison which may have seemed expedient but which was contrary to the Constitution. Justice must be absolute. However, the Bench may decide otherwise. The thing has been buckstopped. But for how long?

We can establish whether a society is more or less just by reference to these criteria, without appealing to the higher-order ideal of a fully just social system.

No we can't.  'Hunger, illiteracy, torture, arbitrary incarceration, or medical exclusion' may increase at the same time as a society is becoming more just because of a popular uprising against the reign of a bunch of evil bastards. Bengal was becoming more just during the Nineteen Forties. Hunger certainly increased as did torture and arbitrary incarceration. But the game was worth the candle.

[T]he injustice of continuing famines in a world of prosperity, or of persistently grotesque subjugation of women', can be easily detected without a complete and exhaustive picture of what full justice requires.

So can the injustice of men wearing skinny jeans or women voting for Donald Trump or people eating Marmite though I can't stand the stuff.

The problem here is that unless you have a 'complete and exhaustive picture of what full justice requires', people can say that you are just virtue signaling or speaking subjectively. That's why people invest in an Ideology or in Religious Faith. Better still, one can become a Socioproctologist- for a modest fee.

Secondly, knowing what a perfectly just society looks like does not automatically allow us to make comparative judgements of justice.

Yes it does- for a modest fee.

To make such judgements, we also need a metric to evaluate which social arrangements are furthest away from the ideal and what improvements would bring them closer to it.

Socioproctology does indeed specify metric of this sort. However any 'totalizing' ideology can construct a partial ordering over Stalnaker-Lewis closest possible worlds to establish a Konus index.
Method- for any change, i , from what currently obtains, O, look at the closest possible world to our own in which it occurs and select that persona (or possible self) in it which leaves you indifferent between worlds. Repeat, for that world's closest neighbor till you get a closed path- i.e. you are back in the original world which we designated as O. Call this your Konus curvature for i- call it K(i).

Rank all K(i) weakly. Call the result you Konus curvature for O. Rank for all O, to get your Konus index.
Query- what if you can't get a closed path for any O? Then you don't have an ideology. You might be Napoleon- consult a psychiatrist- but whatever you lack in inches you do not make up for by being an ideologue.

Similarly, an incomplete Konus index, implies your ideology is incomplete or of the type of a Napoleon le petit.

A bonus- if your closed paths take in every possible person then your ideology is subjectively Universalisable in the sense that there is some assumption re. preferences over basic goods plus degree of risk aversion you can make such that you can plausibly argue that everybody might acquiesce in the type of Society you choose from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

Since Ideologies counsel tactical retreats as part of a wider strategy, the difficulty arises that Ideologies might seem self-contradictory or that they end up appearing operationally indistinguishable from each other. However, since you now have a Konus index you can treat Tactical changes as being like the Slutsky Subsititution effect and Strategic advances as being like a positive Income effect. In other words, changes in real world constraints can be represented by shadow prices and the whole question of Ideology becomes tractable for Economic analysis.

Economists do in fact do invoke 'General Equilibrium' models when arguing for specific policy initiatives and this ties up with 'justice' if that is a desiderata for the funding Agency. 

 Transcendental Institutionalism is Parochial and Status-quo-biased Transcendental institutionalism, Sen complains, unduly limits the scope of justice.

This is not true of Socioproctological Transcendental Institutionalism. What limits the scope of justice is economic scarcity.

This is because its demanding ideal of perfect justice can only be realized where state-like institutions exist.

 I have made no such stipulation. Rawls's principles are couched in the language of the Law, not the State. Law can exist without a State and vice versa. Furthermore Laws don't necessarily feature Rights and Remedies. They may be wholly punitive in nature or indicative, or reputational, merely.

Only institutions such as those of the modern state can engage in the comprehensive redistributive policies advocated by most contemporary theories of justice.

This begs the question whether states really can do redistribution in a sustainable manner. Collective insurance is a different matter as is dealing with nuisances or providing Charitable assistance. It may well be that inequality increases at the same time as social insurance, or other benevolent schemes, are greatly increased in scope and scale.

There is no evidence that States can do anything better than purely Socioproctological Institutions with comparable powers.

Since ought implies can, on this view, outside the state, principles of justice become irrelevant.

We don't know about the 'can'. The fact is most countries stopped talking about redistributing wealth a long time ago. Even in Communist China, in the Eighties, Xu Muqiao emphasized Marx's principle for 'immature' Socialist countries- '"from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution"- such that 'need' could be ignored in deciding outcomes. It is a fact that absolute poverty has dropped very dramatically since then.

This is why, Sen says, theorists such as Rawls and Thomas Nagel, to whom he also ascribes this institutionalist paradigm, deny that principles of distributive justice apply to the global arena, and limit the scope of public reasoning about justice to domestic political communities.

Coz otherwise they'd have had to be cheerleaders of Vietnam type wars all over the Globe. India did receive a lot of Aid in the Fifties and Sixties. However the thing worked like a 'resource curse'- i.e. inflated the currency and introduced serious distortions into the economy. There is good reason to believe that 'global redistribution' harms the poorest countries.

In short, the search for perfect justice renders transcendental institutionalism oblivious to some of gravest injustices plaguing our world: international ones.

Sadly, we Socioproctologists have no power. It doesn't matter what we are oblivious to. The gravest injustices plaguing Sen's own part of the world required sensible interventions by people like Sen. They made none preferring to feather their own nest and pose as Mother Theresas of Economics. By contrast, I pose as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer of Socioproctology.

C. Transcendental Institutionalism is Inflexible Aiming at the identification of the perfectly just society, Sen further argues, transcendental institutionalists tend to ignore the inescapable plurality of competing principles‘ that any plausible approach to justice should acknowledge.'

A metric should be rigid. It shouldn't suddenly shrink or expand. An approach to justice may be 'plausible'- all naughtiness is caused by Satan or failure to adhere to Ahimsa- but still quite useless. Rawls work was useful because politicians or lawyers could say 'we oppose x because, by Rawls's maximin principle, x is unfair and unjust since it is not primarily concerned with the welfare of the worst off.'
The problem with 'the inescapable plurality of competing principles' is that the Decision Space becomes multi-dimensional and so, by the McKelvey Chaos theorem, there is endless pi-jaw or an unseemly struggle for Agenda Control. What follows is either a Concurrency deadlock or a fudge nobody is happy with. Thus to gain a Pareto improvement, the thing is disintermediated by interested parties.

Rawls‘s original position reasoning, for instance, is said to lead to the selection of a unique set of principles.

Principles can be endlessly expanded and are easily expressed in a multiplicity of manners which may not in fact be equivalent.

It is unclear, however, whether all rational or reasonable persons would really assent to the theory of justice Rawls proposes.

Nonsense! Sensible people would just say 'We want a collective Social Insurance scheme' and refuse to entertain any 'deontological' notion of distributive justice.

There may be a plurality of permissible principles, and the ambition to pick out one set, and one only, is misguided and counter-productive, preventing rather than encouraging dialogue about justice.

But dialogue about justice is as futile as dialogue about whether Spiderman can beat up Dracula. A principle may be useful when making an argument- but only because you want to win that argument. Saying 'having principles is misguided' is fine if you immediately add 'but much more so is discussing matters of principle'.

When designing a theory of justice, Sen suggests, we should always be open to revising our conclusions.

It would be better not to do the thing in the first place. It is an exercise in stupidity.

For instance

[w]e often think, if only implicitly, of the plausibility of principles in a number of specific cases ....

Principles are imperative, not alethic. A hypothesis may be plausible or implausible- but it belongs to the realm of fact. A principle may appear to have a logical structure but- this is Jorgensen's dilemma- this is an appearance merely.

But once the principles are formulated in unconstrained terms, covering inter alia a great many cases other than those that motivated our interest in those principles, we can run into difficulties that were not foreseen earlier, when we signed up, as it were, on a dotted line. We then have to decide what has to give and why.

The Supreme Court, which has the power to reverse itself, does this all the time. In this manner, a body of case law evolves on the basis of 'harmonious construction' such that there is 'economia', as opposed to 'Akrebia' in interpreting legal principles in the light of developments on the ground.

Why would anyone who was not a Jurist or a Legislator want to have a Theory of Justice? The thing is a waste of time for anybody save a Socioproctologist because only assholes waste time in this way and Socioproctology is concerned with assholes.

But, problematically, these trade-offs seem to be inadmissible within Rawls-inspired, transcendental theorizing, with its insistence on exacting and highly demanding rules‘.

Rawls has a workaround. He tells us that everybody gets an Econ 101 plug in behind the veil of ignorance. So just by changing the syllabus for this plug in we can get any result we like.

Once we have identified what perfect justice requires, we can no longer revise that ideal.

Yes we can. Indeed, we do it all the time. My Rum & Coke is just perfect. Suddenly I remember I have a couple of limes in the fridge. That will make my drink perfecter. Opening the fridge, I discover a half eaten pizza I'd forgotten about. Chuck it in the microwave and open a can of anchovies and get out a jar of capers. Perfectest... Screw the Rum & Coke. I fancy some OJ to wash down my pizza. Bliss...

We remain trapped, so to speak, within the realm of perfection. 

Stuffing my face with pizza I see that Samsara is indeed Nirvana-

Om! purnam-adah purnam-idam 

Purnaat purnam-udachyate

Purnasya purnam-aadaaya

Purnam-eva-avashishyate

This is perfect

That is perfect

From the perfect springs the perfect

Take the perfect from the perfect and

Only the perfect remains