My students and I have lately been reading Rawls, and we have been considering, among other things, the implications of his claim that we do not deserve our “natural assets” and thus can claim no exclusive title to them on that basis. “The existing distribution of income and wealth,” Rawls writes, “is the cumulative effect of prior distributions of natural assets—that is, natural talents and abilities—as these have been developed or left unrealized, and their use favored or disfavored over time by social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune.” He concludes: “Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty [advocated, for example, by Adam Smith] is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view” (A Theory of Justice, p. 72).
Given, then, the second of Rawls’s two principles of justice—namely, the “difference principle,” which holds that social and economic inequalities are justified only if they conduce primarily to the benefit of society’s “least advantaged” (TJ, p. 83)—one might conclude that differences in natural assets, as well as the benefits accruing from them, are among the inequalities that are to be so arranged. (Rawls later discusses the necessity and role of a “distribution branch” of government whose “task is to preserve an approximate justice in distributive shares” (TJ, p. 277).)
Across my desk today comes a singular instance that might illustrate the scope of Rawls’s position. Perhaps you have heard of the 12-year-old Indiana boy who is a mathematical genius, so much so that he may be on the verge of discovering some hitherto unknown extensions of Einsteinian General Relativity, possibly even revising it in light of problems he may have discovered. Time magazine has a story about him here.
Apparently people who work on such things think the boy may actually be on to something. So perhaps we might expect some new discoveries and new directions in mathematics and astrophysics from him in time. How exciting.
But reading about his otherwise relatively normal life, which includes things like playing video games and spending time with his “girlfriend” (whatever that means for a 12-year-old), Rawls’s argument beckoned to me. The boy clearly has natural talents, and perhaps even world-changing natural talents. By Rawls’s reasoning, he does not deserve them, and so has no moral claim on them. And it would be unjust to let him alone benefit from what seems like a winning ticket in the “natural lottery” (TJ, p. 75). So, shouldn’t we view them as a natural treasure, a natural precious asset, and, applying Rawls’s “difference principle,” argue that it is to be employed so that it is of principal advantage to the least advantaged in society?
What might this mean? Well, perhaps the boy and his natural assets should be nationalized: they should be viewed as part of the common pool of natural talents from which we are all equally entitled to benefit, subject to the condition that the least advantaged among us must be the primary beneficiaries. That would mean, I should think, that there should be some collective or democratic deliberation about what use(s) of this boy’s natural talents are that satisfy this principle.
Now, by imaginatively putting myself into a Rawlsian “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance,” perhaps I can begin to speculate what those uses might be. Trying to do that now—I’m actually squinting and furrowing my brow quite philosophically at this very moment—it seems easier for me to imagine what kinds of things we would not allow the boy to do than it is to imagine what we would require him to do.
For example, I can tell you that there would be no more video games or spending time with the “girlfriend.” With an intellect like that, every minute not spent working on something important is effectively depriving the rest of us of potential benefits. How could we possibly justify wasting time on things like that? What, then, should we require him to do? I am not so sure, but it may be that working on General Relativity is not one of them. Cancer? Obesity or longevity? Hunger?
His charming mother, who appears, though only behind the camera, in a video associated with the Time story, seems to love her son, even if she does not understand him. A speculation: She would not appreciate our collectively deciding about the best use of her son’s talents, and she would probably try to assert some kind of authority over him. The Rawlsian would presumably hope that she would not press that too hard, lest an unfortunate unpleasantness ensue.
But nationalizing the boy would seem to follow from Rawls’s principles. To what uses do you think we should put his talents?
PILEUS 
The Rawlsian argument echoes of the arguments of Bertram Scudder and Simon Pritchett (Atlas Shrugged), who claimed that the minds of the able belong to the unable, and that the underprivileged, by virtue of their wretchedness, exert a moral claim over the productive.
Ayn Rand is correct in describing this as pure evil. Ability is arbitrary only in the sense that the unable cannot fathom why they do not possess it. Economic wealth is distributed on the basis of ability because it is ability that produces economic wealth. To divorce the two is to destroy both. Without the possibility of profiting from ability, it is transformed from an asset to a liability. When wealth is apportioned on the basis of need in place of ability, people are motivated to divest themselves of ability, and hoard need and inability. It should therefore not come as a surprise when, for example, paying the unemployed to remain unemployed results in continued unemployment.
I guess I don’t need to mention how excited I am to see the movie…
What have you that you did not receive? (1 Corinthians 4: 7)
This statement “The existing distribution of income and wealth is the cumulative effect of prior distributions of natural assets—that is, natural talents and abilities—as these have been developed or left unrealized, and their use favored or disfavored over time by social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune.” is so broad to be utterly uninstructive. It seems to say either “things have happened in the past that affect the present” or “everything has been determined” depending on how strongly one reads “is the … effect”.
The former reading is useless, it leads to nothing as a moral logic.
The latter is ironically underinclusive. That is, there is no logical or empirical basis to limit the set of what has been determined (and implicitly is not “justified”) to “the existing distribution of income and wealth”. We could as easily say “the philosophical reasoning of John Rawls is the cumulative effect of ….” and assert that all Rawls did was determined by prior forces and is in no way entitled to a priviliged position in our discourse.
I think this is just reasoning backward and somewhat totalitarian. If you happen to want a world with greater equality than natural assets produce, you must necessarily reject any moral claim to retain the fruits of one’s natural assets, provide justification for a high degree of intervention in and coercion over others’ lives and claim to be able to discern a remarkable amount of information about everyone else in your society to a remarkable degree of certitude (see the totalitarian point I made above). There is really no logical or empirical support other than the postulate that equality trumps all (those familiar with Arrow’s theorem understand that “equality trumps all” necessarily eliminates all personal liberty), the ends justify the means (obviously not a well regarded moral position) and so on. Personally I find that distasteful and the claimed ability to ascertain the truth about one’s fellow citizens absurdly implausible. I suggest for example, that one’s genes are beyond moral evaluation (another illustration of the totalitarian aspects of Rawlsianism) and that no one can ascertain enough about all the individuals in a society to assert what is morally due them all.
Now I see plainly why Rawls was so damned hard to read all those years ago as an undergraduate: it takes an awful lot of deliberately obtuse philoso-babble to obscure his principles enough to avoid triggering the reader’s intuitive sense of moral revulsion at what he proposes. If he can get his audience thinking and talking about his ideas in terms of his own attenuated jargon before thinking about their implications in concrete terms, he stands a better chance at their having already absorbed his principles by the time they come ’round to that point.
Or to put it more simply: the notion of our individual talents being undeserved and therefore appropriable by others sounds pretty scary when said plainly, certainly scarier than talking vaguely about “achieving distributive justice” with regard to “natural assets.”
Wasn’t it Kurt Vonnegut who wrote the short story about the intellectually gifted man with the implant in his ear that disrupted his thoughts with a loud screech every few moments in order to neutralize his “unfair” natural advantage over others? I recall that man watching a ballet on TV in which the dancers wore sandbags of various weights in proportion to their talents. Your hypothetical about the boy reminds me of that.
Don’t get me wrong. I disagree with both Rawls’s approach to political philosophy and his substantial account of justice. And I find his treatment of desert and natural talents disgusting and morally obtuse. But don’t tell me none of you have read far enough in Theory of Justice to read about Rawls’s the man who spends his life counting blades of grass and using his significant mathematical talents to perform complicated mathematical operations on them. Rawls asserts that this man commits no injustice. This is sufficiently similar to apply to your case as well. So either Rawls is being grossly inconsistent in Theory of Justice or you aren’t paying very close attention to Theory of Justice. I hope that we can all agree that Rawls isn’t so stupid as to insert the gross inconsistency.
So although I haven’t read Theory for some years now, I can guess at three different ways that Rawls might think that none of what you say follows:
1. In every conflict with the difference principle, the equal liberty principle trumps. Much of what you discuss can be construed as violating equal liberty.
2. The difference principle (a) concerns the distributive of primary goods, not natural talents, and (b) it is concerned with economic incentives, not with individuals.
3. The well-ordered society is supposed to supply everyone with a chance to pursue a rational life-plan. That would pretty much be ruled out if the state could interfere with individuals this intimately.
This a very odd reading of Rawls. I’d go further, and says its categorical misrepresentation of Rawls theory to your readers and students.
As the commenter before notes, Rawls theory leads him to conclude that a “just” or “well ordered” society would be based on two principles of justice. The first, principle being concerned with individual liberty/freedom. Rawls, notes that the first principle of justice as lexical priority over the second(the second being the difference principle, which you describe above). Thus, Rawls holds that there should never come a time when in the name of distributive justice, a persons individuals liberty should be compromised. In this the first principle, moderates the second. The idea that the boy couldn’t have a girlfriend b/c his time could be used otherwise is a wholesale misreading of Rawls. Rather, Rawls would argue that the boy should be allowed to pursue whatever course of study/life he desires. Rawls conception of moral dessert only asserts the monetary gains that he might accrue, are not solely his own. This is because the fact that we as a society value “great mathematicians” and express that value through monetary compensation, is not the basis of a claim of moral dessert.