This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 15, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What if your worst enemy were the one in charge of enforcing rules that you chose?

What rules for society would you choose? How does the worldview of John Rawls

meet the standards of robust political economy? Mark Pennington takes on the arguments offered

by Rawls and others in his new book, robust political

economy.

He spoke at the Cato Institute in March.

Now there are a number of egalitarian thinkers that I address in the book.

And again, I don't have time to discuss all of these so I'm going to focus on just one in this context of robust political economy and that's John Rawls.

People who are influenced by Rawls' thinking are concerned about what kind of institutions

manifest a notion of impartiality.

So Rosie are concerned about having social rules which are seen to be impartial,

rules which anybody could actually be willing to accept. Now there are various

theoretical devices of course which roles derives to try to get people to think

about what impartiality would actually require. The most famous of these is the

Rorsian Vale of Ignorance. Behind the Vale of Ignorance, people are supposed to know nothing

about their own particular place in society.

Their economic status, their social status, they're supposed to know nothing about where

they're going to be in a particular pecking order.

The purpose of that veil of ignorance is to try to make

them reason impartially, to choose rules that everyone, irrespective of their social standing,

...