The Demonstration Of Utilitarianism And Virtual Social Insurance Theory Within Rational Choice Theory

The rational choice theory has been widely applied to studying the moral choice problems in contemporary moral philosophy, with different focuses by theorists who comes from various research fields. On the issue of choosing principles of justice behind the veil of ignorance, John Harsanyi presented a demonstration of a version of average utilitarianism from the perspective of decision theory. This kind of demonstration is totally different from traditional approach used by traditional utilitarians, such as Bentham and Mill. First, Harsanyi transformed the "veil of ignorance" into a situation characterized by "risk and uncertainty" which is a classic decision situation in decision theory. Then he proved that if the Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory is followed by rational agent, the rational decision maker should pursue the alternative which can offer them maximum utility.Because the condition of risk and uncertainty is highly similar with the condition of the veil of ignorance, the problem arises:"why these two similar decision conditions could generate two different results?" In order to solve this problem, I formulated a virtual social insurance theory within a strict framework of rational choice theory and proved that rational agent following the expected utility theory will join a virtual social insurance which requires the agents behind the veil of ignorance distribute basic goods among them equally.This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the traits of rational choice theory and its development history in ethics. Chapter Two turns to Harsanyi’s Demonstration of Utilitarianism. At the end of this chapter, I discussed some inequality issues caused by Harsanyi’s demonstration. Chapter three focuses on formulating the virtual social theory which is presented to solve the divergence between Harsanyi and Rowls. The main idea of the theory is that the condition of the veil of ignorance gives rise to utility loss of the decision maker whose psychological features meet the law of diminishing marginal utility. In order to maximize their utility, all decision makers decide to join an insurance which require that these rational agents should make a prior commitment to giving up entire basic goods above the average level to obtain a social status which is not in a disadvantageous position in future society. As a result of this promise, the principles of justice derived from the veil of ignorance turn into an agreement on equal distribution.The virtual social insurance theory is an attempt to use expected utility maximization principle which Harsanyi used to demonstrate Rawls’ equalitarianism conclusion. If this argument is correct, in a sense, the theory could be regarded as a rational foundation for Rawls’ theory, further, it shows that the appeal of equality could be demonstrated by common people’s basic psychological feature:diminishing marginal utility, and this will no doubt provide the contemporary political philosophy with a new approach to considering the relationship between the appeals of egalitarianism and our basic human nature.