Rawls — justice as fairness

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) is the most important work of political philosophy of the twentieth century, and the point of departure for almost every debate you will meet in this paper. Rawls revived normative political philosophy from a long period in which questions of justice had been thought either matters of taste or disguised emotion. His ambition was Kantian in scale: to identify principles of justice that free and equal citizens could accept as the fair terms of their cooperation, and to show that these principles are superior to the utilitarianism that had dominated Anglophone moral thought since Bentham and Mill.

The conception Rawls defends is called justice as fairness. Its central device is a thought experiment — the original position — in which rational agents choose principles to govern their society from behind a veil of ignorance that hides their class, talents, sex, race, and conception of the good. Rawls argues that agents so situated would choose two principles: one guaranteeing equal basic liberties, the other — the difference principle — permitting social and economic inequalities only where they work to the benefit of the least advantaged.

The subject of these principles is not individual conduct but what Rawls calls the basic structure of society — the constitution, the economy, the legal system, and the family, taken together as the institutions that distribute rights, duties, and life-chances. This focus on the basic structure, and the priority Rawls gives to liberty, distinguish his liberalism sharply from both the utilitarian and the libertarian alternatives you will study.

This note reconstructs the argument from the original position to the two principles, examines Rawls's later turn to political liberalism, and surveys the major lines of criticism — Nozick's libertarian challenge, G.A. Cohen's egalitarian critique, Sen's capability objection, and the communitarian attack on the Rawlsian self. The debate connects directly to your jurisprudence reading on rights and Raz and on punishment and theories of justice, and it frames the discussion of liberty, authority, and equality in the weeks that follow.

To understand what Rawls was doing, you must understand what he was reacting against. By the middle of the twentieth century the dominant view in moral and political philosophy was a form of utilitarianism: the right action or institution is the one that maximises the aggregate satisfaction of desires, or welfare, across society. Utilitarianism had real strengths — it was systematic, secular, and egalitarian in its insistence that each person counts for one and none for more than one.

But Rawls thought it contained a fatal flaw. By summing satisfactions across persons and seeking the largest total, utilitarianism treats society as if it were a single individual maximising its good over time, and is therefore prepared in principle to impose severe losses on some for the sake of greater gains to others. In his most quoted charge, utilitarianism 'does not take seriously the distinction between persons'. The separateness of persons — the fact that there is no social super-person who experiences a net balance of satisfaction, only distinct individuals each living one life — is the moral bedrock of Rawls's project.

Rawls's alternative drew on the social contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and above all Kant, but raised it, in his words, 'to a higher level of abstraction'. The contract is not a historical bargain, nor an agreement to enter society, but a hypothetical agreement on the principles of justice themselves. From Kant he took the idea that just principles are those that free and rational agents would legislate for themselves; the original position is, in effect, a procedural interpretation of Kantian autonomy, stripped of its transcendental apparatus.

It is worth stressing how unfashionable this ambition was in 1971. Anglophone philosophy had largely retreated to meta-ethics and the analysis of moral language, leaving substantive normative questions to one side. Rawls's achievement was to show that principles of justice could be argued for with rigour, and in doing so he almost single-handedly revived political philosophy as a living discipline.

The original position and the veil of ignorance

The heart of justice as fairness is a thought experiment. Rawls asks us to imagine the principles of justice being chosen by rational agents in an original position of equality, tasked with selecting, once and for all, the principles that will govern the basic structure of their society. The fairness of the outcome is guaranteed by the fairness of the conditions of choice — this is the meaning of 'justice as fairness': not that justice and fairness are the same idea, but that the principles of justice are the product of a fair procedure (what Rawls calls pure procedural justice, where there is no independent standard of the right result, only a fair process whose outcome is therefore just).

What makes the procedure fair is the veil of ignorance. The parties choose without knowing any particular facts about themselves: not their class or social status, their natural talents and abilities, their race or sex, their conception of the good or plan of life, nor even their particular psychology — their optimism, pessimism, or attitude to risk. They do know general facts: the laws of economics and psychology, and the 'circumstances of justice' (moderate scarcity and limited mutual concern). The veil's purpose is to nullify the influence of morally arbitrary contingencies: no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by 'the outcome of the natural lottery' or by their social starting point, since these are facts for which they can claim no credit.

The practice questions for this topic — with model answers and mark schemes across foundation, standard, and challenge tiers — are set out below. Attempt each under timed conditions before revealing the model answer, then mark your work against the scheme.

The primary texts and the best secondary literature are listed below. For a first pass, read Rawls's Restatement (the cleanest statement of the mature view) alongside Freeman's Rawls as a guide, then turn to Nozick, Cohen, and Sen for the major critiques.