In the first, they were told:
Suppose that some people make more money than others solely because they have genetic advantages.The second group was told:
Suppose that Amy and Beth both want to be professional jazz singers. They both practice singing equally hard. Although jazz singing is the greatest natural talent of both Amy and Beth, Beth’s vocal range and articulation is naturally better than Amy’s because of differences in their genetics. Solely as a result of this genetic advantage, Beth’s singing is much more impressive. As a result, Beth attracts bigger audiences and hence gets more money than Amy.Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, people told only the abstract were far more likely to consider the situation unfair.
The question obviously has implications for Rawls' theory of distributive justice, which is fairly heavily reliant on
a) Reflective Equilibrium as a process for moral decision making
b) The unfairness of situations described above
The authors argue that:
Rawls, by his own lights, has reason to favor the judgments rendered in the more familiar concrete condition that deny the brute luck constraint over the judgments rendered in the less familiar abstract condition that affirm the constraint. A tension therefore looms between Rawls’s acceptance of the brute luck constraint and his methodology.
This is interesting stuff, but I think more depth into the psychology is needed (in the field, not in this specific paper necessarily). If we understand more fully the psychological processes which generate our moral intuitions, then we are better placed to how we should accord them value. This is really the area I see experimental philosophy making big headway in the future, as philosophers have been reticent to rely on psychological evidence in argument, and vice versa. In many ways, experimental philosophy is the behavioural economics of philosophy, and papers like this show why it is so promising, but also why it has still quite far to go.