A theory of Justice: Revised Edition

particular plan of life. In time his choice will lead him to acquire a
definite pattern of wants and aspirations (or the lack thereof), some as-
pects of which are peculiar to him while others are typical of his chosen
occupation or way of life. These considerations appear evident enough,
and simply parallel in the case of the individual the deep effects that a
choice of a conception of justice is bound to have upon the kinds of aims
and interests encouraged by the basic structure of society. Convictions
about what sort of person to be are similarly involved in the acceptance of
principles of justice.
64. DELIBERATIVE RATIONALITY
64. Deliberative Rationality
I have already noted that the simpler principles of rational choice (the
counting principles) do not suffice to order plans. Sometimes they do not
apply, since there may be no inclusive plan, say, or else the means are not
neutral. Or it often happens that we are left with a maximal class. In these
cases further rational criteria may of course be invoked, and some of
these I shall discuss below. But I shall suppose that while rational princi-
ples can focus our judgments and set up guidelines for reflection, we must
finally choose for ourselves in the sense that the choice often rests on our
direct self-knowledge not only of what things we want but also of how
much we want them. Sometimes there is no way to avoid having to assess
the relative intensity of our desires. Rational principles can help us to do
this, but they cannot always determine these estimates in a routine fash-
ion. To be sure, there is one formal principle that seems to provide a
general answer. This is the principle to adopt that plan which maximizes
the expected net balance of satisfaction. Or to express the criterion less
hedonistically, if more loosely, one is directed to take that course most
likely to realize one’s most important aims. But this principle also fails to
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64. Deliberative Rationality

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provide us with an explicit procedure for making up our minds. It is
clearly left to the agent himself to decide what it is that he most wants and
to judge the comparative importance of his several ends.
At this point I introduce the notion of deliberative rationality following
an idea of Sidgwick’s. He characterizes a person’s future good on the
whole as what he would now desire and seek if the consequences of all
the various courses of conduct open to him were, at the present point of
time, accurately foreseen by him and adequately realized in imagination.
An individual’s good is the hypothetical composition of impulsive forces
that results from deliberative reflection meeting certain conditions.
14
Ad-
justing Sidgwick’s notion to the choice of plans, we can say that the
rational plan for a person is the one (among those consistent with the
counting principles and other principles of rational choice once these are
established) which he would choose with deliberative rationality. It is the
plan that would be decided upon as the outcome of careful reflection in
which the agent reviewed, in the light of all the relevant facts, what it
would be like to carry out these plans and thereby ascertained the course
of action that would best realize his more fundamental desires.
In this definition of deliberative rationality it is assumed that there are
no errors of calculation or reasoning, and that the facts are correctly
assessed. I suppose also that the agent is under no misconceptions as to
what he really wants. In most cases anyway, when he achieves his aim, he
does not find that he no longer wants it and wishes that he had done
something else instead. Moreover, the agent’s knowledge of his situation
and the consequences of carrying out each plan is presumed to be accu-
rate and complete. No relevant circumstances are left out of account.
Thus the best plan for an individual is the one that he would adopt if he
possessed full information. It is the objectively rational plan for him and
determines his real good. As things are, of course, our knowledge of
what will happen if we follow this or that plan is usually incomplete.
Often we do not know what is the rational plan for us; the most that we
can have is a reasonable belief as to where our good lies, and sometimes
we can only conjecture. But if the agent does the best that a rational
person can do with the information available to him, then the plan he
follows is a subjectively rational plan. His choice may be an unhappy one,
but if so it is because his beliefs are understandably mistaken or his
knowledge insufficient, and not because he drew hasty and fallacious
inferences or was confused as to what he really wanted. In this case a
14. See