The American philosopher John Rawls was one of the most influential political thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in 1921 and dying in 2002, he’s responsible for a renaissance in political philosophy.

A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus, was published in 1971 and is a philosophy of what a just and fair society would look like.

Before Rawls, the dominant political philosophy for at least the previous century had been utilitarianism. There were and are many different forms of utilitarianism, but they all have their foundations in a simple premise: the greatest good for the greatest number.

In political philosophy this translates to something like: a just society organises it institutions, norms, and laws so as to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

Imagine you’re a civil servant. You’re tasked with mapping a bus route through several villages. By which principles do you map the route? So that it can pick up the greatest number.

This is the utilitarian approach.

But critics of utilitarianism saw a problem. That it seems to justify certain actions that most perceive of intuitively as unethical.

Imagine a society where ten percent are held in slavery. The slaves are unhappy but there is an increase in happiness for the remaining ninety percent. In this instance, the greatest good for the greatest number seems to justify slavery.

Or imagine a surgeon with another doctor dying on the operating table. The dying doctor needs a new heart. The surgeon remembers there’s a homeless man outside. The dying doctor is surely going to do more for others if he’s saved than the homeless man, so the surgeon goes and sedates and kills him, in order to give his heart to save the doctor. Again, utilitarianism seems to justify this.

Rawls thought that no-one had accounted for this problem adequately.

The problem with utilitarianism is one of rights. That certain rights shouldn’t be violated, no matter the benefit to others.

For example, every village might have the right to be served on a bus route, even if one of the villages is tiny and the route becomes less efficient as a result of the bus going there.

Rawls writes that we have an intuition that individuals have ‘an inviolability founded on justice or, as some say, on natural right, which even the welfare of every one else cannot override’.

Rawls thought that philosophers had failed to account for this problem and that it needed to included in a theory of what a model society should look like.

The question, politically, is how we organise what Rawls called the ‘basic structure of society’.

How would institutions, laws, economic practices, and rights be organised if we could start afresh?

The questions are: What is justice? What is fairness? If we accept that these things are in some way important, what do they mean?

Rawls writes that, ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’, and that laws and institutions ‘must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust’.

He takes inspiration from the social contract tradition of Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They imagined what people would be like in a state of nature, and how a society would come into fruition when they came together to cooperate.

Rawls argues we should partake in a similar thought experiment, what he calls an original position.

What’s chosen in the original position is ‘the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association’.

Importantly, in the original position, we decide what the basic structure of society should look like from behind what Rawls calls a veil of ignorance.

He writes, ‘Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance’.

In other words, the only way to theorise a just society is if we imagine that we don’t know what place we’d take in it. In this sense it’s like dividing a cake when you know you’ll be the last person to choose a slice.

Under the veil of ignorance a person can’t choose low taxes because they’re rich or high taxes because they’re poor.

So how would you choose?

There is an element to Rawls here that could be described as liberal reason or liberal rationality.

Rawls assumes that individuals in the original position will be rational individualists. That they would choose in a way that rationally benefits them the most. Rationality here discounts gambling and looks to maximise gain in a mutually disinterested way.

Critics have complained that this presumes individualistic values, but Rawls argues that even if you’re more charitable than most or less materialistic (which you wouldn’t know at this point under the veil of ignorance) you could still choose to give whatever you’ve rationally maximised away, and so, out of the alternatives this principle would be chosen in the original position.

Rawls considers a number of political or moral propositions that might be considered.

He starts with utilitarianism. But in addition to the problems we’ve seen, there’s another reason utilitarianism is unlikely to be chosen.

Imagine two societies of 100 people.

In one society, 60% have 1,000,000 dollars.

The other 40% has $10 between them.

In the second, 50% have 400,000 and the other half 600,000.

Utilitarianism favours the first society because it has $10 more, but this seems ridiculous. Surely everyone would choose the second society.

It seems unlikely, Rawls writes, ‘that persons who view themselves as equals would agree to a principle which may require lesser life prospects for some simply for the sake of a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by others’.

For these reasons, Rawls dismisses utilitarianism.

What if we conceive of the basic structure as something approximating liberal free markets and unlimited property rights?

If this were the case we’d enter into society with two assets: our natural talents and the assets bestowed on us at birth – inheritance, family wealth, education from parents and peers etc, which we benefit from by accident and good fortune.

It’s for this second reason that Rawls rejects libertarianism. He writes that, ‘Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view’.

It hardly seems just nor efficient that a Person A from a rich background makes the most of his natural talents because their parents can afford education while Person B cannot.

Traditionally, liberals have corrected for this through fair equality of opportunity.

Rawls says that, ‘those with similar abilities and skills should have similar life chances. More specifically, assuming that there is a distribution of natural assets, those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system’.

But what about those talents and abilities? Don’t we also come to have them by accident and good fortune, not fairness and justice? Is it fair, just, that Sam is born good at mathematics and Sally born without legs? Or Jane with natural charisma and Tom with debilitating shyness?

Furthermore, in the original position we don’t know what our natural talents are going to be.

We come, then, to equality of outcome. If we don’t earn our family fortune nor our natural assets, then is it only just to share in the fruits of society equally?

But how would we encourage harder work, reward better musicians, innovate? Some people might simply want to work harder, others content with a simple life.

Rawls proposes an alternative: the difference principle.

If we are reasoning from behind the veil of ignorance that we want more of life’s ‘primary goods’ – ‘rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth’ – then we would choose a system that made everyone better off even if there are inequalities.

Despite it being chance and that we do not earn our natural abilities – and so they have nothing to do with fairness – it is fair to use those natural abilities to the advantage of ourselves and everyone else.

Rawls writes that the ‘higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society’.

It’s this difference principle, also referred to as maximin – maximise the minimum prospects – that leads Rawls to his formulation of the two principles of ‘justice as fairness’.

The principles are in lexical order; that is, that the first should always be prioritised over the second.

They are:

First, each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all.

Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

The two principles might generally be summed up like this: ‘All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage’.

For Rawls, each part of justice or fairness grows out of this fundamental observation.

First you need basic liberties: ‘political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the rule of law’.

It’s important to understand that for Rawls, the difference principle is not a statement about taxation or the public or private ownership of property, although it leads to those questions.

It’s simply about the basic structure of institutions. That they should be organised in a way that makes the least advantaged better off, and that inequalities are justified only if the least advantaged are better off by them.

While Rawls has been hugely influential, he has many critics. A frequent criticism has been that he is risk-averse, that not everyone would ‘play it safe’ in the original position, and some would gamble for a utilitarian society if the inequalities weren’t too wide.

But he’s also been praised for combining liberal-individualist and egalitarian socialist values. His model of fairness could be applied to a libertarian-socialist society and a capitalist one, although Rawls himself favoured the former.

Ultimately, the two principles reflect that we are both social creatures and individualistic ones. I think this is one of A Theory of Justice‘s most important contributions to political philosophy. The two principles are a product of the idea that there are parts of the individual that social life and politics wouldn’t be possible without, that are inviolable, and which we wouldn’t bargain away even for the sake of a richer society, that we would only come to sign the social contract if it made us all better off.

Sources

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Frank Lovett, Rawl’s A Theory of Justice

Samuel Freeman, Rawls

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Original Position, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/