But he believed that both the First and Second Principles together are necessary for a just society. Rawls was interested in political philosophy. Thus he focused on the basic institutions of society. Unless such institutions as the constitution, economy, and education system operated in a fair way for all, he argued, social justice would not exist in a society. Rawls set out to discover an impartial way to decide what the best principles for a just society were.
He reached back several hundred years to philosophers like John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau who had developed the idea of a social contract. Locke and Rousseau had written that people in the distant past had formed a contract between themselves and their leader.
The people would obey their leader, usually a king, and he would guarantee their natural rights. This would be the basis for a just society. Thomas Jefferson relied on this social contract idea in writing the Declaration of Independence. By the 20th century, most philosophers had dismissed the social contract as a quaint myth. Rawls, however, revived the social contract concept of people agreeing what constitutes a just society.
Rawls devised a hypothetical version of the social contract. Some have called it a "thought experiment" Rawls called it the "Original Position". This was not a real gathering with real people, bargaining over an agreement. Instead, it was an imaginary meeting held under strict conditions that permitted individuals to deliberate only by using their reason and logic.
Their task was to evaluate principles of social justice and choose the best ones. Their decision would be binding on their society forever. Rawls added a requirement to assure that the choice of social justice principles would truly be impartial.
The persons in this mental exercise had to choose their justice principles under a "veil of ignorance. It was as if some force had plucked these people from a society and caused them to experience severe amnesia. Under the "veil of ignorance," these imaginary people would not know their own age, sex, race, social class, religion, abilities, preferences, life goals, or anything else about themselves.
They would also be ignorant of the society from which they came. They would, however, have general knowledge about how such institutions as economic systems and governments worked. Rawls argued that only under a "veil of ignorance" could human beings reach a fair and impartial agreement contract as true equals not biased by their place in society.
They would have to rely only on the human powers of reason to choose principles of social justice for their society. Rawls set up his "thought experiment" with several given systems of social justice principles. The task of the imaginary group members under the "veil of ignorance" was to choose one system of principles for their own society. Rawls was mainly interested to see what choice the group would make between his own Justice as Fairness concept and another called "Average Utility.
The fictional persons in the experiment, using their powers of reason and logic, would first have to decide what most people in most societies want. Rawls reasoned that rational human beings would choose four things, which he called the "primary goods":.
In the next and crucial step, the participants would have to decide how a society should go about justly distributing these "primary goods" among its people. Clearly, designing economic, political, and social institutions that favored the "most advantaged" members of the society would not be justice for all.
On the other hand, the members of the experiment group would rationally agree that equal rights and liberties, opportunities, and self-respect for all would be just. But what about everyone having equal wealth and income? Rawls was sure the parties would reasonably conclude that some but not extreme inequality of wealth and income is necessary in a just society.
Entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders should be rewarded for working to improve the economy and wealth of the society. Then how should wealth and income be distributed in a just society if not equally or skewed toward the rich? Again using their reason and logic, Rawls argued, the imaginary parties would adopt what philosophers call the maximum-minimum or "maximin" rule.
Under this rule, the best choice is the highest minimum. Those earning the average wage and above are doing pretty well as well. SOCIETY B with its higher average wage benefits those in the middle and at the top income levels, but largely ignores those at the bottom.
This is the flaw of the Average Utility social justice system, according to Rawls. Similarly, Rawls believed the persons in his experiment would rationally choose principles of social justice that maximized benefits for the "least advantaged. Any one of them might be Bill Gates or an unemployed high school dropout.
To be on the safe side, Rawls maintained, the rational-thinking members of the imaginary group would choose the principles of justice that most benefited those at the bottom.
In this way, Rawls believed, he had demonstrated that his Justice as Fairness principles, skewed toward the "least advantaged," were the best for building or reforming institutions for a just society. Rawls did not think the United States was yet a just society since it did not satisfy his Difference Principle.
However, while this is correct in principle, Rawls holds that in practice productive moral and political theorizing will proceed to a large extent independent of metaphysics and epistemology. Indeed, as a methodological presumption Rawls reverses the traditional order of priority.
Progress in metaethics will derive from progress in substantive moral and political theorizing, instead of as often assumed vice versa CP , — In a free society, citizens will have disparate worldviews.
They will believe in different religions or none at all; they will have differing conceptions of right and wrong; they will disagree on how to live and on what relationships to value. Citizens will have contrary commitments, yet within any country there can only be one law. The law must either establish a national church, or not; women must either have equal rights, or not; abortion and gay marriage must either be permissible, or not; the economy must be set up in one way or another.
Rawls holds that the need to impose a unified law on a diverse citizenry raises two fundamental challenges. The first is the challenge of legitimacy : the legitimate use of coercive political power. How can it be legitimate to coerce all citizens to follow just one law, given that citizens will inevitably hold divergent worldviews? The second challenge is the challenge of stability , which looks at political power from the receiving end. Why would a citizen willingly obey a law that is imposed on her by a collective body whose members have beliefs and values so different to her own?
Yet unless most citizens willingly obey the law, no social order can be stable for long. Rawls answers these challenges of legitimacy and stability with his theory of political liberalism. Political liberalism answers the conceptually prior questions of legitimacy and stability, so fixing the context and starting points for justice as fairness. In a democracy, political power is always the power of the people as a collective body.
In light of the diversity within a democracy, what would it mean for citizens legitimately to exercise coercive political power over one another? According to this principle, political power may only be used in ways that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of political power must fulfill a criterion of reciprocity : citizens must reasonably believe that all citizens can reasonably accept the enforcement of a particular set of basic laws.
The liberal principle of legitimacy intensifies the challenge of legitimacy: how can any particular set of basic laws legitimately be imposed upon a pluralistic citizenry? What constitution could all citizens reasonably be expected to endorse? Reasonable citizens want to live in a society in which they can cooperate with their fellow citizens on terms that are acceptable to all.
They are willing to propose and abide by mutually acceptable rules, given the assurance that others will also do so.
They will also honor these rules, even when this means sacrificing their own particular interests. Reasonable citizens want, in short, to belong to a society where political power is legitimately used. Each reasonable citizen has her own view about God and life, right and wrong, good and bad. Each has, that is, what Rawls calls her own comprehensive doctrine. Yet because reasonable citizens are reasonable, they are unwilling to impose their own comprehensive doctrines on others who are also willing to search for mutually agreeable rules.
Though each citizen may believe that she knows the truth about the best way to live, none is willing to force other reasonable citizens to live according to her beliefs, even if she belongs to a majority that has the power to enforce those beliefs on everyone. After all, Rawls says mentioning the Inquisition, oppressive use of state power will be necessary to unite a society around any comprehensive doctrine, including the comprehensive liberalism of Kant or Mill PL , One reason that reasonable citizens are so tolerant, Rawls says, is that they accept a certain explanation for the diversity of worldviews in their society.
Reasonable citizens accept the burdens of judgment. The deepest questions of religion, philosophy, and morality are very difficult to think through. Even conscientious people will answer these questions in different ways, because of their particular life experiences their upbringing, class, occupation, and so on. Reasonable citizens understand that these deep issues are ones on which people of good will can disagree, and so will be unwilling to impose their own worldviews on those who have reached conclusions different than their own.
Humans have at least the capacity for genuine toleration and mutual respect. This human capacity raises the hope that the diversity of worldviews in a democratic society may represent not merely pluralism, but reasonable pluralism.
Rawls hopes, that is, that the religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines that citizens accept will themselves endorse toleration and accept the essentials of a democratic regime. In the religious sphere, for example, a reasonable pluralism might contain a reasonable Catholicism, a reasonable interpretation of Islam, a reasonable atheism, and so on. Being reasonable, none of these doctrines will advocate the use of coercive political power to impose religious conformity on citizens with different beliefs.
The possibility of reasonable pluralism softens but does not solve the challenge of legitimacy: how one law can legitimately be imposed on diverse citizens. For even in a society of reasonable pluralism, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to endorse, say, a reasonable Catholicism as the basis for a constitutional settlement. Reasonable Muslims or atheists cannot be expected to endorse Catholicism as setting the basic terms for social life.
Nor, of course, can Catholics be expected to accept Islam or atheism as the fundamental basis of law. No comprehensive doctrine can be accepted by all reasonable citizens, and so no comprehensive doctrine can serve as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power. For Rawls, there is only one source of fundamental ideas that can serve as a focal point for all reasonable citizens of a liberal society.
These fundamental ideas from the public political culture can be crafted into a shared political conception of justice. A political conception is not derived from any particular comprehensive doctrine, nor is it a compromise among the worldviews that happen to exist in society at the moment. Rather, a political conception is freestanding: its content is set out independently of the comprehensive doctrines that citizens affirm.
Reasonable citizens, who want to cooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms, will see that a freestanding political conception generated from ideas in the public political culture is the only basis for cooperation that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. The use of coercive political power guided by the principles of a political conception of justice will therefore be legitimate. The three most fundamental ideas that Rawls finds in the public political culture of a democratic society are that citizens are free and equal , and that society should be a fair system of cooperation.
All liberal political conceptions of justice will therefore be centered on interpretations of these three fundamental ideas. Since all the members of this family interpret the same three fundamental ideas, however, all liberal political conceptions of justice will share certain basic features:.
These abstract features must, Rawls says, be realized in certain kinds of institutions. He mentions several demands that all liberal conceptions of justice will make on institutions: a decent distribution of income and wealth; fair opportunities for all citizens, especially in education and training; government as the employer of last resort; basic health care for all citizens; and public financing of elections.
The use of political power in a liberal society will be legitimate if it is employed in accordance with the principles of any liberal conception of justice. Libertarianism does not assure all citizens sufficient means to make use of their basic liberties, and it permits excessive inequalities of wealth and power. Political power is used legitimately in a liberal society when it is used in accordance with a political conception of justice.
Yet the challenge of stability remains. Legitimacy means that the law may be enforced, but Rawls still needs to explain why citizens are willing to abide by it. If citizens do not believe that they have reasons to abide by the law from within their own perspectives, social order may disintegrate. Rawls places his hopes for social stability on an overlapping consensus. In an overlapping consensus, citizens all endorse a core set of laws for different reasons.
In Rawlsian terms, each citizen supports a political conception of justice for reasons internal to her own comprehensive doctrine. Recall that the content of a political conception is freestanding: it is specified without reference to any comprehensive doctrine.
Here is an example. The quotation below from the second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church shows how a particular comprehensive doctrine Catholicism affirms one component of a liberal political conception a familiar individual liberty for its own reasons:. Catholic doctrine here supports the liberal right to religious freedom for reasons internal to Catholicism. A reasonable Islamic doctrine, and a reasonable atheistic doctrine, might also affirm this same right to religious freedom—not, of course, for the same reasons as Catholic doctrine, but each for its own reasons.
In an overlapping consensus, all reasonable comprehensive doctrines will support the right to religious freedom, each for its own reasons.
Indeed, in an overlapping consensus, all reasonable comprehensive doctrines will endorse all of a political conception of justice, each from within its own point of view. Some citizens may see liberalism as derived directly from their deepest beliefs, as in the quotation from Vatican II above. Others may accept a liberal conception as attractive in itself, but mostly separate from their other concerns.
What is crucial is that all citizens view the values of a political conception of justice as very great values, which normally outweigh their other values should these conflict on some particular issue.
Rawls sees an overlapping consensus as the most desirable form of stability in a free society. Stability in an overlapping consensus is better than a mere balance of power a modus vivendi among citizens who hold contending worldviews.
After all, power often shifts, and when it does the stability of a modus vivendi may be lost. In an overlapping consensus, citizens affirm a political conception wholeheartedly from within their own perspectives, and so will continue to do so even if their group gains or loses political power.
Rawls says that an overlapping consensus is stable for the right reasons : each citizen affirms a moral doctrine a liberal conception of justice for moral reasons as given by their comprehensive doctrine. Rawls does not assert that an overlapping consensus is achievable in every liberal society. Nor does he say that, once established, an overlapping consensus must forever endure. Citizens in some societies may have too little in common to converge on a liberal political conception of justice.
In other societies, unreasonable doctrines may spread until they overwhelm liberal institutions. Rawls does hold that history shows both convergence in beliefs and deepening trust among citizens in many liberal societies.
This gives hope that an overlapping consensus is at least possible. Where an overlapping consensus is possible, Rawls believes, it is the best support for social stability that a free society can achieve. Having seen how Rawls answers the challenges of legitimacy and stability, we can return to legitimacy and its criterion of reciprocity: citizens must reasonably believe that all citizens can reasonably accept the enforcement of a particular set of basic laws.
It is unreasonable for citizens to attempt to impose what they see as the whole truth on others—political power must be used in ways that all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse. With his doctrine of public reason , Rawls extends this requirement of reciprocity to apply directly to how citizens explain their political decisions to one another.
In essence, public reason requires citizens to be able to justify their political decisions to one another using publicly available values and standards. This is because not all members of society can reasonably be expected to accept Leviticus as stating an authoritative set of political values, nor can a religious premonition be a common standard for evaluating public policy.
These values and standards are not public. The public values that citizens must be able to appeal to are the values of a political conception of justice: those related to the freedom and equality of citizens, and society as a fair system of cooperation over time.
Among such public values are the freedom of religious practice, the political equality of women and of racial minorities, the efficiency of the economy, the preservation of a healthy environment, and the stability of the family which helps the orderly reproduction of society from one generation to the next. Nonpublic values include values internal to associations like churches e. Similarly, citizens should be able to justify their political decisions by public standards of inquiry.
Public standards are principles of reasoning and rules of evidence that all citizens can reasonably endorse. So citizens should not justify their political decisions by appeal to divination, or to complex and disputed economic or psychological theories. Rather, publicly acceptable standards are those that rely on common sense, on facts generally known, and on the conclusions of science that are well established and not controversial.
The duty to abide by public reason applies when the most fundamental political issues are at stake: issues such as who has the right to vote, which religions are to be tolerated, who will be eligible to own property, and what are suspect classifications for discrimination in hiring decisions.
These are what Rawls calls constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Public reason applies more weakly, if at all, to less momentous political questions, for example to most laws that set rates of taxation, or that put aside public money to maintain national parks.
Citizens have a duty to constrain their decisions by public reason only when they engage in certain political activities , usually when exercising powers of public office. So judges are bound by public reason when they issue their rulings, legislators should abide by public reason when speaking and voting in the legislature, and the executive and candidates for high office should respect public reason in their public pronouncements. Significantly, Rawls says that voters should also heed public reason when they vote.
All of these activities are or support exercises of political power, so by the liberal principle of legitimacy all must be justifiable in terms that all citizens might reasonably endorse.
However, citizens are not bound by any duties of public reason when they engage in other activities, for example when they worship in church, perform on stage, pursue scientific research, send letters to the editor, or talk politics around the dinner table. All citizens always have their full legal rights to free expression, and overstepping the bounds of public reason is never in itself a crime. Rather, citizens have a moral duty of mutual respect and civic friendship not to justify their political decisions on fundamental issues by appeal to partisan values or controversial standards of reasoning that cannot be publicly redeemed.
In an important proviso, Rawls adds that citizens may speak the language of their controversial comprehensive doctrines—even as public officials, and even on the most fundamental issues—so long as it can be shown that these assertions appeal to public values. So President Lincoln, for instance, could legitimately use Biblical imagery to condemn the evil of slavery, since his condemnations appealed to the public values of freedom and equality.
As a member of the family of liberal political conceptions of justice it provides a framework for the legitimate use of political power. Yet legitimacy is only the minimal standard of moral acceptability; a political order can be legitimate without being just. Justice sets the maximal standard: the arrangement of social institutions that is morally best.
Rawls constructs justice as fairness around specific interpretations of the ideas that citizens are free and equal, and that society should be fair. He sees it as resolving the tensions between the ideas of freedom and equality, which have been highlighted both by the socialist critique of liberal democracy and by the conservative critique of the modern welfare state.
Rawls also argues that justice as fairness is superior to the dominant tradition in modern political thought: utilitarianism.
Significant political and economic inequalities are often associated with inequalities of social status that encourage those of lower status to be viewed both by themselves and by others as inferior. This may arouse widespread attitudes of deference and servility, on one side, and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other.
These effects of social and economic inequalities can be serious evils and the attitudes they engender great vices Fixed status ascribed by birth, or by gender or race, is particularly odious JF , Justice as fairness aims to describe a just arrangement of the major political and social institutions of a liberal society: the political constitution, the legal system, the economy, the family, and so on. The basic structure is the location of justice because these institutions distribute the main benefits and burdens of social life: who will receive social recognition, who will have which basic rights, who will have opportunities to get what kind of work, what the distribution of income and wealth will be, and so on.
And since the rules of any basic structure will be coercively enforced, often with serious penalties, the demand to justify the imposition of any particular set of rules intensifies further. Rawls makes the simplifying assumption that the society is self-sufficient and closed, so that citizens enter it only by birth and leave it only at death. He also confines his attention mainly to ideal theory, putting aside non-ideal theory such as on criminal justice.
Social cooperation in some form is necessary for citizens to be able to lead decent lives. Yet citizens are not indifferent to how the benefits and burdens of cooperation will be divided amongst them. The distinctive interpretation that Rawls gives to these concepts can be seen as combining a negative and a positive thesis. Since these features of persons are morally arbitrary in this sense, citizens are not entitled to more of the benefits of social cooperation simply because of them.
For example, the fact that a citizen was born rich, white, and male provides no reason in itself for this citizen to be favored by social institutions. This negative thesis does not say how social goods should be distributed; it merely clears the decks. The guiding idea is that since citizens are fundamentally equal, reasoning about justice should begin from a presumption that cooperatively-produced goods should be equally divided.
Justice then requires that any inequalities must benefit all citizens, and particularly must benefit those who will have the least. These guiding ideas of justice as fairness are given institutional form by its two principles of justice:. First Principle : Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;.
Second Principle : Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:. The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to laws governing economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on.
The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances.
Two further features make this principle distinctive. First is its priority: the basic rights and liberties must not be traded off against other social goods. The first principle disallows, for instance, a policy that would give draft exemptions to college students on the grounds that educated civilians will increase economic productivity.
The draft is a drastic infringement on basic liberties, and if a draft is implemented then all who are able to serve must be equally subject to it, even if this means slower growth. The political liberties are a subset of the basic liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, Rawls requires that citizens should be not only formally but also substantively equal.
That is, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are.
This requirement of the fair value of the political liberties has major implications for how elections should be funded and run, as will be discussed below. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor.
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class of origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand.
The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. To illustrate, consider four hypothetical economic structures A—D, and the lifetime-average levels of income that these different economic structures would yield for representative members of three groups:.
Here the difference principle selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best. But the difference principle does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor Economy D. The difference principle embodies equality-based reciprocity: from an egalitarian baseline, it requires that any inequalities are good for all, and especially for the worst-off.
The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because she was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand.
Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better off. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. The difference principle thus expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of social unity.
The basic idea is that justice is only necessary where there are potential conflicts i. So society — and with it our system of justice — will break down.
See e. Related critiques have also been made with respect to other forms of injustice, such as gender-related injustice e. Okin, and injustice against people with disabilities e. Sen ; Nussbaum Later , he seems to suggest that some inequalities of opportunity are inevitable, and that they must therefore be turned to the benefit of those with the least opportunity: this view looks remarkably like a difference principle for opportunity.
Oxford University Press. MacMurrin ed. Cambridge University Press Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles Zalta ed. Download this essay in PDF. Social Contract Theory by David Antonini.
Moral Luck by Jonathan Spelman. Arguments for Capitalism and Socialism by Thomas Metcalf. Reparations for Historic Injustice by Joseph Frigault. He works mainly on moral and political issues in healthcare, as well as animal ethics, and why death is really bad.
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