Choosing the Best Social Order: New Principles of Justice and Normative Dimensions of Choice

There are many standard rules of aggregating individual preferences; majority rule is but one example. These rules determine what we typically consider to be a fair or a just solution to the problem of social choice. Yet we know very little, either about how these solutions relate to what a person, not a rule, would choose as a fair outcome or about what ethical or political beliefs would guide people in their choices. An empirical study was conducted to address these problems. As standard normative solutions fail to explain choices obtained in the study, we propose a new set of solutions, which generalize two classical principles of justice: Rawlsian and conservative. These generalized solutions fit the data remarkably well. More important, they uncover two normative dimensions within which choices turn out to be very consistent. These dimensions, we conjecture, indicate subjects' underlying attitudes. We use this theory to compare ethical-political attitudes in samples from Poland, Japan, and the United States.