John C. Harsanyi
If we chose the rules without knowing our place, we would aim at the highest average well-being.
Life
John Harsanyi (1920-2000), born in Budapest, was a Hungarian-American economist, a professor at Berkeley. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Prize in economics with John Nash and Reinhard Selten for his work in game theory, notably on games with incomplete information. In moral philosophy he defends rule utilitarianism: if we chose rules without knowing our place in society, we would aim at the highest average well-being. His reasoning dates from 1953, well before Rawls.
Main works
An impartial judgment is made by choosing a distribution without knowing one's own position.
Grounds utilitarianism on impartiality and individual rationality.
Models games where players lack information about the rules or others' payoffs (work cited by the Nobel).
In his own words
« Now a value judgment on the distribution of income would show the required impersonality to the highest degree if the person who made this judgment had to choose a particular income distribution in complete ignorance of what his own relative position... would be within the system chosen. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceRight rules are those a person would choose, not knowing their own place in society, to maximise average well-being.
Harsanyi, "Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility" (1955)
Ethics is built from rational impartial choice, not read off an objective moral reality.
Harsanyi, "Morality and the Theory of Rational Behaviour" (1977)