On justice, chickens and the game of life

So I was repairing the kitchen drawer and listening to the radio without paying it any attention and suddenly a man is talking about chickens, most especially about chicken welfare, something I’ve done a little research on in my time, and the man is doing an interview with someone else who turns out to be the head of KFC in the UK or the head of chicken welfare at KFC in the UK or at any rate a pretty senior cheese who’s allowed out to do interviews for Radio 4 and this person from KFC is answering the sensible questions from the interviewer and it all sounds very plausible to me and the man is saying that KFC’s chickens benefit from welfare standards that are well above the national average and I reckon that’s probably right and suddenly the interviewer asks:

“So if you were to come back as a chicken, would you be happy to be a KFC chicken?”

Which brings both me and (more importantly) the interviewee to something of a halt.

Because that is a question.  Of course the man does not want to come back as a KFC chicken; but of course, too, he cannot say that out loud in public.  And he knows that, and the interviewer knows that, and we the listener know that, and his silence is the answer.  No one would want to come back as a KFC chicken.

This is a (beautifully crafted and well deployed) version of Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’.

In ‘A Theory of Justice’ – widely regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy of the twentieth century (and the subject of its own Radio 4 programme not that long ago) – John Rawls invites us to imagine that we are a sentient but disembodied being, conscious in the moments before our actual birth-into-the-world.  We – that is you, or me – know two things: first, we are aware of the world into which we shall shortly be born, we know about countries and nations and wealth and poverty and joy and misery; and, secondly, we know that we shall be born into one of earth’s lives.

The ’veil of ignorance’ means that we do not know which of the available lives will be ours.

Perhaps you will be born into extreme opulence.  Perhaps your parents will be Nobel prize-winning writers, or scientists.  Perhaps they will be teachers, or railway workers, or fulfilment centre agency staff.  Perhaps you will live in a house, or a flat.  Or a narrow boat.  Or a caravan.

Perhaps you will be born into terrible poverty.  Perhaps you will be born in a war zone.  Perhaps you will be born into a set of grinding and restrictive circumstances that forever blight your life chances.

How does that feel?

How do you feel about the odds?  Any second now you are going to be born into one of the lives available on planet earth.

You do not need any data or further evidence at this point: you already know.  The maldistribution of justice in the world is blindingly, screamingly obvious.  Any life you are hoping to avoid is, in some way, one that is a victim of injustice.  Any life you are hoping to have is a beneficiary of that injustice.

What are your odds?  How many of the lives available are, from your perspective, ok?  Are you happy about the possibility of being a new-born baby in Syria?  Or in Congo or Ukraine?  Or in a house full of mould in Rochdale?

A chicken at KFC?

This kind of reasoning can, I think, be extended.  I recall hearing someone in a discussion about ‘white privilege’ referring to the life you can live if you are ‘a white man’ as (something like) ‘living life on the easiest setting’.

I think this is a terrific way of thinking about it.  Life is, after all, a big game, and we all these days know about computer games.  (Indeed, there are those that believe that this thing called life really is an actual and giant computer game.)  Most games, and certainly all role-playing games, come with two distinct features: you can play the game at a variety of difficulty settings; and, as a player, you have a set of capabilities (or tools etc.) that can increase or diminish through the game, depending on what happens, how you play the game, the difficulty setting and so on.

So let’s imagine a game in which the goals and/or prizes are things like ‘health’ and ‘long life’ and ‘happiness’ and ‘having a nice house’ and ‘finding true love’ and ‘having plenty of money’ and ‘having good holidays’ and ‘having a fulfilling career’ and ‘being a good friend’ and ‘being held in high regard by my peers’ and ‘having a family’ and ‘being loved by my happy healthy prosperous children’ and so on and so forth.

Roughly speaking, you already know the rules.  You have to go to school, learn a variety of socially-determined practices, make choices, cope with the vicissitudes of good and bad luck, and so on.  You know the rules already because you are already playing this game.

What, do you suppose, is the easiest possible setting?  Or, perhaps more precisely: with what set of personal attributes and in what sort of societal settings, would you, or any other individual, stand the best chance of getting the most/best prizes?

Well, let’s see.  It’s not too hard really, is it?  White, able-bodied, heterosexual men, with private educations and extensive high-functioning family networks, living in advanced capitalist democracies.  They’re the ones.  They’re the ones who, before we even start, will be playing the game at the easiest settings.   What might be called 'success' is not guaranteed, of course – people fuck up, after all, and there are plentiful psychological and practical and other pitfalls, as in any game – but these people are the ones who are most likely to get the prizes.

And that is what is meant by ‘privilege’.  That is what is meant by ‘a beneficiary of injustice’.

All other lives are less privileged.  All people living other lives will – on average, on balance, other things being equal - find it harder to win the prizes.  All other lives will be somewhere on the spectrum of lives that you, from behind the veil of ignorance will, to a greater or lesser extent, be hoping to avoid.

(This is not to suggest that everybody is wandering around wishing they were an able-bodied heterosexual white man – far from it.  There are plenty of upsides to being something other than a white man, and plenty of downsides to being a white man.  I remember once reading the results of a survey in which people were asked whether, in the event that they were to be born again, they would prefer to come back as male or female.  Virtually all women said they’d rather come back as women – and so did most men.

But, for the moment, I’m trying to unpack the nature of ‘privilege’, so please bear with me a little longer.)

I want to see what happens if we simply make some blunt comparisons.  We’ll change just one thing at a time, each time, and see what difference it makes.

We’ll start with that ‘able-bodied heterosexual white man’.  For the sake of argument, let’s imagine his life being in London, a fine house in Holland Park.  Now let’s change one thing, and simply put that life in, I don’t know, Puerto Rico.

Easier or harder to win the prizes?  Harder.

Let’s try some other places.  New York.  Huddersfield.  Paris.  Mexico City.  Wellington.  South Shields.  North East Pakistan.

Any place you find yourself thinking: hmm, that would be ‘better’, that means ‘it would be easier to win the prizes’.  And vice versa.

Let’s reset, go back to London, and this time we’ll change… his body.  He is paralysed from the waist down.  Everything else is as at the start.  Easier game or harder game?  Harder.

Now re-set to the beginning of the game.  Now make him black.

Easier or harder?

And so on.

It starts quickly to get quite tricky.  In fact, it’s already tricky.  Who am I, for example, to know or assert that the life of this man who is paralysed is harder?  Am I not, in fact, making an ‘ableist’ assumption?

Am I in fact saying “I don’t want to be disabled”?  And, if I am, is that, in fact, prejudiced?

What about being black?  Am I saying “I don’t want to be black”?

I don’t think I am.  In fact, I know I’m not.  I’m not saying that at all.  I am trying to make an objective argument.  I need merely to look at the data, whether in terms of life expectancy, rates of arrest, health outcomes, likelihood of becoming a judge or the manager of a football team: this game, the one we all find ourselves playing, is one in which - other things being equal - being black makes it harder for you to win the prizes.

Not impossible, for sure.  But harder.

As I started to say a moment ago, this isn’t for one moment to suggest that there aren’t aspects to any given life that aren’t (a) truly amazing and wonderful and (b) unavailable to people living other lives.  I had the great pleasure recently of visiting the Horniman Museum where, I discovered, there was an exhibition about hair.   Despite the brilliance of the exhibition, I cannot truly know what it is like to be a black woman having my hair braided by another black woman and the powerful sense of history and identity and continuity and femininity and kinship that experience might entail; and neither can I (or would I) say whether that experience was ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other.  And I can’t judge whether any one activity represents some sort of substitute or compensation for any other activity.

It’s possible, of course, that the ‘prizes’ of the game we find ourselves playing are – in the jargon – endogenous.  Which is to say: what we think of as the ‘prizes’ are, in fact, merely those things that the system has designed itself to present as the kinds of goals we should strive for, a striving that ultimately is for the benefit of the system qua system rather than us as individuals.  More bluntly, capitalism wants us to want shiny holidays, that way we’ll work hard and buy hard, and that’s the way capital ensures it gets its returns.

Maybe, one day, we shall collectively understand that, in fact, the highest form of welfare - that is, the best possible set of prizes - is to have your hair braided by someone who loves you, and that being part of a community that achieves that, even though it means you’ll never be a judge, is just fine.

Maybe not.  I don’t know.

In the meantime, this particular game is being played.  The game is structurally biased in favour of people with some attributes and against those with others.

You are behind the veil of ignorance – what are you hoping for?

And what do those hopes say about you, about us, about this particular game?

There’s one more angle before I’m done, about which I thought I might previously have blogged but it turns out it’s either in Bad Habits or the actual manuscript of The Economics of Enough.  Anyway, it’s based on the idea put forward by Allen Carr in ‘The Easy Way to Give Up Smoking’ in which he makes a simple, bald statement, along the lines of:

“No parent, ever, hopes their child will grow up to be a smoker.”

You know this to be true.  You do not need evidence.  It is stupendously obvious.

Well I found myself wondering how far one could generalise his statement: and I think you can, and quite a long way.

Think of any behaviour, or lifestyle.  Any.  Really.  Now picture yourself holding your new-born child (one you’ve had, one you might have, one you will never have but can imagine anyway).  Now, bearing that behaviour or lifestyle in mind, do you find yourself thinking “I would really be very happy if this child did/had that in the future” or do you find yourself thinking “I really hope this child doesn’t ever do that”.  If the former, the behaviour or lifestyle you’re thinking of is ‘good’ or ‘lucky’ or ‘privileged’.  If the latter - then, well, you get the idea.

(As a powerful illustration, try it with: “working in the sex industry”.) 

All three perspectives - the veil of ignorance, playing the game on the easiest setting, and wondering if you would wish it for a baby - seem to me to be like moral scalpels, ways of peeling back the layers to see what's really going on. 

Some of the preferences you find yourself having may, in fact, be prejudicial.  Some may point towards the nature of injustice.   (Deep down, the two may be related.)

Some of your preferences, despite feeling intensely personal, may actually be the outcome of the way the system around you – the game – has come to be configured.  

We need to look very closely indeed at how the game works, and to appreciate as fully as possible any piece of fortune that makes anything at all any easier.

Note: sorry, I know 'game of life' is John Conway's thing, but that isn't what I'm talking about today.