2. The difference principle

catastro and coricocat are in one of their frequent misanthropic moods, feel that everything is fucking fukt and decide to set up a blog. they consider how the burdens and benefits of the blog should be distributed to make it just.

should there be a fair distribution of posts written by catastro and coricocat? it would seem that coricocat is doing all the work here while catastro sips his grape juice. is this just? perhaps coricocat has more time to write than catastro and her personality tends to regularity against catastro's spontaneity. they agree that the important thing is equality of opportunity to post.

by the year 2010, coricocat has unwittingly written some spectacularly good posts which a publisher wants to buy and he offers coricocat a large amount of money. should coricocat take the money and give catastro tuppence ha'penny for the two posts he has sent compared to her 202, or should the money be divided equally between them? after all, catastro had every opportunity to post... but given that he was busy doing other things and his personality doesn't tend to regularity... did he really?

John Rawls attempts to sort out this problem with his 'difference principle'. He states that these inequalities between catastro and coricocat are only justified if they result in catastro being better off than he would otherwise have been. Rawls, however, has nothing to say about the relative gains of either, so coricocat offers catastro, not half of the money, but a quarter. J K Galbraith comes in at this point and calls coricocat a horse and catastro a sparrow. Rawls says that this is fine so long as catastro already has more money than coricocat but, if not, an equal distribution is to be preferred.

in sum, inequality (of opportunity) is just only if everyone profits by it; otherwise equality (of outcome) should prevail.

coricocat finds Rawls' position appealing and, finding that catastro doesn't have more than two magic beans to his name, gives catastro half the money...

in his dreams!