st good or happiness for the greatest number. Implicit in this is a philosophy of social morality, wherein individual achievements of happiness may (but do not have to) intersect with the happiness of the greater number. Happiness is not defined as a permanent pitch of excitement but rather a kind of order, an absence of pain or peril within the community. To the greater good of all, individual wishes for happiness or experience may sometimes have to be subordinated.
Rawls does not accept this, saying that if there is a conflict between "claims of liberty and right on the one hand and the desirability of increasing aggregate social welfare on the other . . . we give a certain priority, if not absolute weight, to the former." Individual liberty is "not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." The view of the society as "average" is that it makes an important presumption: that all persons in society will be sufficiently disinterested in temperament to have the welfare of the greater good foremost in mind. Compare this with the contract theory of society, which presumes a confluence of interests predicated of debate and agreement. But Rawls goes further.
[T]his principle [utilitarianism] may be viewed as the ethics of a single rational individual prepared to take whatever chances necessary to maximize his prospects from the standpoint of the initial situation. (If there is no objective basis for probabilities, they are computed by the principle of insufficient reason.) Now it is tempting to argue against this principle that it presupposes a real and equal acceptance of risk by all members of society. At some time, one wants to say, everyone must actually have agreed to take the same chances. Since clearly there was no such occasion, the principle is unsound.
In the utilitarian conceptualization, says Rawls, even a social norm of slavery is not inconceivable, if slavery is interpreted as "necessar...