Paul Gomberg

John Rawls's repeated assertions that the basic structure of society creates profound and inevitable differences in life prospects for people born in different starting places seems to contradict his assertions that, under fair equality of opportunity, a person's life prospects would not be affected by class of origin for those similarly endowed and motivated. This seeming contradiction seems to be resolved by Rawls's apparent belief that class of origin inevitably affects motivation. This reconciliation leaves us with a very weak conception of "fair equality of opportunity." Should Rawls have advocated something stronger? Within the constraints of his theory of justice nothing stronger seems possible. Still, his theory harbors highly implausible sociological assumptions. A more plausible sociology requires us to reject distributive justice in favor of contributive justice.

Are skeptical arguments invalid because they trade on an ambiguity of the word "possible," asserting that it is possible that our experiences are not of anything outside our own minds and concluding that it is not certain that there is an external world outside our own minds? It is sometimes asserted that such arguments invalidly trade on an ambiguity of "possible" where the premise is true only in the sense "logically possible" while the inference is valid only in the sense "empirically possible." However, once we distinguish different grammatical complements of the phrase "it is possible" we recognize that, when used with the same complement, "possible" is not ambiguous. So the claim that skeptical arguments trade on an ambiguity of "possible" fails.