John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 November 24, 2002) was an American

philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy..

A Theory of J ustice, by John Rawls


General Conception
All social primary goods - 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 goods is to the advantage of the least favored.


Social Contract
John Locke: Free people need to agree on some ground rules in order to live
together in harmony.


Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham: Act so as to maximize good (pleasure)
in the aggregate.
Later twist: minimize pain. From either perspective, your actions are judged
good or bad depending on the consequences they have for you and for others.
"The greatest good for the greatest number" can be abused, leading to the
"tyranny of the majority" (e.g., Nazi Germany's mistreatment of the Jews and
the United States' mistreatment of African Americans). Rawls' approach guards
against this common source of injustice.


Intuitionism
Acknowledge a set of first principles to be subscribed to, but do not prescribe a
priority ordering.


Good vs. Right
A person's good is that which is needed for the successful execution of a
rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favorable circumstances.
Liberty
Opportunity
Income
Wealth
Self-respect
"The good is the satisfaction of rational desire." (Section 15)
Each person has his or her own plan of life - what is good may vary. Right is
set down in the social contract, the same for everyone, influenced by the "veil
of ignorance." Rawls specializes the concept of something's being right as it
being fair. (Section 18)


Principles of Justice
(Section 11)
First Principle: Liberty
Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of
equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.

Second Principle: Wealth
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just
savings principle, and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair
equality of opportunity.
Representative persons: prototypical members of any identifiable group (e.g.,
women, high school students, citizens of Haiti, etc.).
Efficiency: any re-arrangement in which every representative person gains is
more efficient.
Difference principle: in order for any change to be accepted as an
improvement, it must help the least advantaged representative person.


Priority Rules
Rawls explicitly addresses the fact that there will be situations where these two
primary principles will be in conflict with each other. Rather than compromise
between them in such cases, he takes the position that there is a specific
priority.
The Priority of Liberty
The principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore liberty
can be restricted only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases:
(a) a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberty
shared by all;
(b) a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with the lesser
liberty.

The Priority of Justice over Efficiency and Welfare
The second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of
efficiency and to that of maximizing the sum of advantages; and fair
opportunity is prior to the difference principle. There are two cases:
(a) an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunities of those with
the lesser opportunity;
(b) an excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those
bearing this hardship.


Efficiency
Rawls adopts the concept of efficiency that is associated with the name Pareto
in the field of economics. It is perhaps most easily described in the negative:
No system can be called efficient if there is an alternative arrangement that
improves the situation of some people with no worsening of the situation of any
of the other people.
In general, there are many arrangements that are efficient in this sense. Not all
of them are equally just; other principles of justice must be invoked to select
the most just arrangement.


The Difference Principle
"The difference principle is a strongly egalitarian conception in the sense that
unless there is a distribution that makes both persons better off (limiting
ourselves to the two-person case for simplicity), an equal distribution is to be
preferred [page 76, emphasis added - RDP]."
In other words, there should be no differences except those that can be justified
on grounds of efficiency.


The Veil of Ignorance
Rawls supposes that a (virtual) committee of rational but not envious persons
will exhibit mutual disinterest in a situation of moderate scarcity as they
consider the concept of right:
1. general in form
2. universal in application
3. publicly recognized
4. final authority
5. prioritizes conflicting claims
Rawls claims that rational people will unanimously adopt his principles of
justice if their reasoning is based on general considerations, without knowing
anything about their own personal situation. Such personal knowledge might
tempt them to select principles of justice that gave them unfair advantage -
rigging the rules of the game. This procedure of reasoning without personal
biases Rawls refers to as "The Veil of Ignorance."
Pinker (2002), describes Rawls' Veil of Ignorance this way in the midst of
presenting wide-ranging evidence that a significant fraction of the variability
among human beings, including variations in mental abilities, must be
attributed to genetic, rather than purely environmental, factors:
Can one really reconcile biological differences with a concept of social
justice? Absolutely. In his famous theory of justice, the philosopher John
Rawls asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested
agents negotiating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or
status they will inherit at birth--ghosts ignorant of the machines they will
haunt. He argues that a just society is one that these disembodied souls
would agree to be born into, knowing that they might be dealt a lousy
social or genetic hand. If you agree that this is a reasonable conception
of justice, and that the agents would insist on a broad social safety net
and redistributive taxation (short of eliminating incentives that make
everyone better off), then you can justify compensatory social
policies even if you think differences in social status are 100 percent
genetic. The policies would be, quite literally, a matter of justice, not a
consequence of the indistinguishability of individuals.
Indeed, the existence of innate differences in ability makes Rawls's
conception of social justice especially acute and eternally relevant. If we
were blank slates, and if a society ever did eliminate discrimination, the
poorest could be said to deserve their station because they must have
chosen to do less with their standard-issue talents. But if people differ in
talents, people might find themselves in poverty in a nonprejudiced
society even if they applied themselves to the fullest. That is an injustice
that, a Rawlsian would argue, ought to be rectified, and it would be
overlooked if we didn't recognize that people differ in their abilities.


Natural Duties and Obligations
Support just institutions
Mutual respect
Mutual aid
Do no harm
Do your fair share
Be faithful (keep your promises)


Civil Disobedience
Civil disobedience is by its nature an act responding to injustices internal to a
given society, appealing to the public's conception of justice. (Section 57)
Civil disobedience can be justified if the following three conditions are all met:
1. If the injustice is substantial and clear, especially one that obstructs the
path to removing other injustices (e.g., poll taxes and other burdens on
the right to vote). This certainly includes serious infringements of the
principle of liberty and blatant violations of the principle of fair equality
of opportunity.
2. If the normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in
good faith and have failed. Civil disobedience is a last resort.
3. If there are not too many other minority groups with similarly valid
claims. The just constitution would be eroded if too many groups
exercised the choice of civil disobedience. The resolution of this
situation is a political alliance of these multiple minorities to form a
working majority coalition.


Possible Problems
Stability
Envy
Priority of liberty depends on "progress."
Self-respect vs. material goods
Is justice a zero-sum game?




ohn Rawls is perhaps the most significant intellectual in philosophical ethics to have
written in the past hundred years. It is nearly impossible to address ethics in
contemporary philosophy without saying something about John Rawls. Central to his
theory of justice are the concepts of fairness and equality from behind what he terms a
"veil of ignorance".
Rawls's veil of ignorance is a component of the way people can construct society. He
refers to an "original position" in which a person is attempting to determine a fair
arrangement for society without any preconceived notions or prejudices.
In this original position, people are behind what Rawls calls a "Veil of Ignorance" and do
not know where they will fall in the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, sex,
disability, and other relevant factors. Rawls is a Kantian liberal in that he believes that
principles of justice should be universalizable, and so the only way to ensure that people
will select fair principles of justice is to be certain that they do not know how the
principles they select might affect them as individuals. A person behind the "veil of
ignorance" does not know which side of a social contract he or she will be on, does not
know his or her race, class, sex, or status in society. A person who does not know what
privileges he or she will be born with (or without ) is, in Rawls' view, more likely to
construct a society that does not arbitrarily assign privilege based on characteristics that
should have no bearing on what people get. Rawls believes that a society cannot be just
without fairness and equality and believes this veil of ignorance both reveals the biases
of current society and can help to prevent biases in establishing future social
arrangements.
Rawls is often thought of as a liberal philosopher given his position emphasizing
fairness regardless of social status. His philosophy can be used to justify programs
like affirmative action but has also been used by the more politically conservative to
argue that the American political system allows each person a fair chance and that most
people would choose the American political system from behind a veil of ignorance.
This article is about the American philosopher. For the New Zealand actor, see John Rawls
(actor).
John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 November 24, 2002) was an American
philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant
Conant University Professorship at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship at Christ
Church, Oxford.