Pedro Francés-Gómez
Fulbright Research Scholar
Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy
University of Granada

Abstract:

The talk presents an on-going research project based on a series of experiments designed to test the following: first, whether people behind a veil of ignorance choose a liberal-egalitarian principle of fair distribution for a real situation in which they are going to participate by working and generating a common output; second, whether and to what extent do people actually distribute their commonly produced output according to the agreed principle, in absence of any coercive power, reciprocity/reputation effect, or external incentives to comply.

The underlying rationale for our questions is the idea that experimental data may help underpin normative theories of justice –in particular we are interested in social-contract theories that defend liberal-egalitarian principles for institutional justice. As is well-known, social-contract theories, in particular the Rawlsian version, assume that ideally rational agents situated behind a veil of ignorance would agree on a liberal-egalitarian principle of distributive justice; they assume further that rational people can commit themselves to act in a fair manner out of a “sense of justice”. These theories are much criticized for their idealizing assumptions: if these assumptions are too removed from what is possible for ordinary people, normative theories may well lack applicability.  Our objective is to contribute to the realism of social-contract theories by exploring to what extent some of these idealizing assumptions are reflected in actual behavior.

Some preliminary results show that subjects:

• Do indeed tend to agree on a liberal-egalitarian principle for distribution of common output when situated behind a veil of ignorance (knowing which kind of task they are going to perform, but ignoring a crucial element in their endowment: in our case, how many minutes they will have to work -in this case more minutes imply almost certainly more production).
• They comply with the agreed-upon principle much more than expected –much more than predicted by standard economic models.
• The level of compliance depends to some extent on how agreement behind the veil of ignorance is reached: if they can talk to each other, even if the chat is anonymous, compliance level rises.
• They are influenced by actual bargaining and agreement among them (however it is reached) but not much by simply simulating the reasoning of the social contract.

 

Even though it is a work in progress, we think that preliminary consequences for institutional design can be derived.