Rawls, Rawls, Rawls Your Boat

From James Taranto's Best of the Web:

"Another letter to the editor in Saturday's Journal struck us as relevant to this debate. It came from Bruce Paulsen of New York (first letter; links for WSJ.com subscribers):

David Lewis Schaefer's opinion piece on John Rawls ("Justice and
Inequality," July 23) reminded me of an epiphany I had in college in the
late '70s. Then, as now, social justice and inequality were big topics on
campus. The conventional wisdom was that Rawls was right, that his nemesis
Robert Nozick was wrong and that "justice as fairness" was the goal to be
pursued. I proudly carried my thick, dog-eared copy of Rawls's "A Theory of
Justice" under my arm.

Then, in an ethics class taught by a well-known professor, I was asked
to write a paper on the lifeboat scenario--a thought experiment involving an
overcrowded lifeboat entering a storm, where it is clear that not all will
survive. A dedicated Rawlsian at the time, I decided to apply his theories to
the assigned situation. But no matter how I construed them, his theories kept
leading me to the conclusion that the only "fair" result was that everyone in
the lifeboat had to die. Even as a young, liberal college student, this struck
me as an unacceptable result.

Thereafter, I spent less time lugging around Rawls's volume, and looked
for a more practical philosophy.

What prompted our July 26 op-ed was Barack Obama's statement that he favored an American retreat from Iraq even if the result would be genocide:

'Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the
deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops
in the Congo right now--where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of
ethnic strife--which we haven't done," Mr. Obama told the AP. "We would be
deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of
us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea.'

This sounds an awful lot like Paulsen's collegiate application of Rawls to the lifeboat scenario. Obama finished college nearly a quarter century ago. Shouldn't he have started looking for a more practical philosophy by now?"