you would be someone else

this whole line of counterargument just reads as semantic confusion to me. yeah sure, if "you" were born in india "you" would be someone else. hell, if your parents tried just one more position then they woulda hit a different sperm and u would have had totally different genetic characteristics and therefore would be a completely different person, regardless of the identical environment. but the rawlsian veil of ignorance isn't some argument about identity, it's about equilibriums.

if u construct a society which is fundamentally worse than no society for some meaningful segment of it, such you yourself would not consent to even the possibility of being placed in such a position if you were behind the veil, then you have a society out of equilibrium. members of that class will eventually find the situation unacceptable, the society will collapse, and it will be replaced with something new with potentially very different hierarchies. if those new hierarchies are again out of equilibrium, the process will simply repeat.

sure, there's no sense in which "you could have been born indian". but there's certainly a sense in which india might rise as a global superpower, there's certainly a sense in which you may have friends or children born in india, there's certainly a sense in which a society massively massively tilted against indians will inevitably lead to a restructuring where perhaps you personally or those very like you end up in terrible positions.

reach equilibrium.

@wavelettes

it's either 0% or 100%. identity is a structural property of a CAUSAL web. if you’d spawned elsewhere you wouldn’t be “you,” you’d be a different emergent configuration. “this specific chess game could’ve begun with a different opening.” hmmm no, that would be a different game https://t.co/4iveMAl12P