The Epic, the Novel, and Rawls

Precursors to Rawls' A Theory of Justice in Media and Philosophy

For any readers in DC on January 21st,

Dean W. Ball

and I are hosting the first AI Bloomers DC of 2025. Please sign up in advance here.

I received the following questions from Richard Jordan in response to my article on Rawls and television. They are excellent questions and examples, which clarify several of the weaknesses in the original article. Here are the questions in full:

As you know, Rawls is just the latest in a long line of state-of-nature theorists, many of whom tend toward some blank-slate view of human nature. If the appeal of the Veil of Ignorance is driven by tv, by "a routine of technology" that hides human differences, then why did these earlier philosophies also catch on? The only answer that occurs to me is that Rawls requires more interchangeable humans than Hobbes or Locke. Is that right? And is that belief what television enabled? (No one who lived through the English Civil War could suffer the delusion that we all basically want the same things!)

Similarly, living vicariously through fiction is nothing new: one could say the same thing about novels or really any kind of extended narrative. I'm willing to buy that 20th c. television was so very canned that it succeeded in creating the illusion of a homogenous humanity, but I don't see any evidence that man "does not have empathy for the abstract other — until the invention of the television set." CS Lewis is famous for describing the ways novels allow us to inhabit other lives, Adam Smith grounds his moral theory on the ability to inhabit and anticipate generic human responses to our behaviors, Vergil enabled Romans to sympathize with Dido, and the Iliad (pace BAP) portrays Hector in such a way that no Greek could but have admired this Trojan "Other."