Postscript
This paper was written in May 1973. In the meantime, John Rawls has tried to answer some of my criticisms in a paper entitled "Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion." His defense to the counterexamples I have put forward against using the maximin principle as a moral principle (in Section 3 of the preceding paper) is that "the maximin criterion is not meant to apply to small-scale situations, say, to how a doctor should treat his patients or a university its students. . . . Maximin is a macro not a micro principle" (p. 142). Regretfully, I must say that this is a singularly inept defense.
First of all, though my counterexamples do refer to small-scale situations, it is very easy to adapt them to large-scale situations since they have intrinsically nothing to do with scale, whether small or large. For example, instead of asking whether a doctor should use a life-saving drug in short supply for treating patient A or patient B, we can ask whether, in allocating scarce medical manpower and other resources, society should give priority to those patients who could best benefit from medical treatment, or should rather give priority to the most hopelessly sick patients—a policy problem surely affecting several hundred thousand individuals in any major country at any given time. Or, again, instead of asking whether scarce educational resources should be used for the benefit of individual A or individual B, we can ask whether, in allocating educational expenditures, society should give priority in certain cases to several hundred thousand highly gifted students, who could presumably benefit most, or to several hundred thousand seriously retarded individuals, who could derive only minor benefits from additional education, etc. I am really astonished that a distinguished philosopher like Rawls should have overlooked the simple fact that the counterexamples I have adduced (and the many more counterexamples one could easily adduce) have nothing whatever to do with scale at all.
(John C. Harsanyi, "Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis of Morality? A Critique of John Rawls's Theory," The American Political Science Review 69 [June 1975]: 594-606, at 605 [boldface and ellipsis in original; footnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 