Discussion 23: John Rawls

If you knew nothing about your talents, gender, race, economic standing, or education, then what type of society would you want to live in?

1. If it was up to you, what type of society would you construct?

2. What would Rawls say about your society?

I would like to live in a world with fair treatment, in which everyone enjoys the same rights as others, and in which there are no differences in pay between men and women and no wage differences in the workplace or anywhere else in life if I did not know about my skills, gender, race, economic status, or education. Every person may have his/her constitutional rights, such as freedom of expression, voting rights. And everybody should be educated where it should not be expensive. The rich and poor have an equal chance of being properly educated because nobody knows another person’s skills and talents or what an individual would offer a certain company if he is exposed to education.

There should be no room for prejudice in society, not against Black people, Whites or Latinos or any other race and should always be viewed in equal measure; there should be a certain proportion of bad people in any company and of good people who should not be affected by their race, sex, or their economic standings and their commitment to society or the Planet for their future. In “Liberalism,” Rawls states that we want to pursue success rather than race, class, sex. Success is not only achieved; success is merited, and it is deserved by all who achieve it. I would want absolute equality between races, economic status of gender and education if it was up to me to create a community.

Everyone in life deserves the same respect, regardless of who he is, as long as he is an individual. I want to see a society in which the salary of an employee does not depend on his/her ethnicity or gender but on the hard work and skills that could improve society. It must be earned by anyone who has a job, and this achievement does not lead him, not what his parents or his family have to say. Even if you’re talented, I think that you can pay more than a non-talented person who doesn’t have a ratio of 90:10; you deserve more payments than to some degree. Finally, I agree with Rawls when he notes that if a highly productive and talented person is paid more than a person who is not productive, it does not seem correct that we should take a portion of his income and allocate it to people who have not contributed to society at all.”

Discussion 24: Thomas Nagel

What does it mean to have structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view, and how does this help understand Nagel’s phenomenological approach of what it is like to be a bat?

I had difficulties grasping what Thomas Nagel intended to convey, but what I was able to pick up is the idea that consciousness needs to be present to connect mind and body. In reductionism, it does not. In his readings, he mentioned a phenomenological approach that demonstrates how you can research consciousness frameworks from the first-person perspective where you can see the experience and obtain from it if you try to do everything that an organism can do.

Furthermore, we cannot be unique creatures, even with an unbelievable imagination and the ability to use our senses. Thomas Nagel gave him the example of how it is to be a bat, although he did not even know what to be as a bat with a human ability to interpret things via sonar and his ability to hang upside down and behave like a bat. Everyone has their understanding of who they are. This is where the character of the subjective came in. Nagel says we are probably never going to understand entirely the viewpoint of someone else or another organism and that two people cannot operate from the same perspective of action; one person would not do it so well as the other. For instance, a blind person using his or her echolocation and like how bats relate.

It can never be completely known what the individual is experiencing or thinking about, but the same applies to a person who is depressed, no one will fully explain what the individual feel, even though someone wishes to understand; something is still missing from experience. On the other hand, Nagel claims that almost every encounter has some objective components and says that even the blind can objectively know what lightning is or how it is to see.