John Rawls- Theory of Justice

Concept of Justice:- Justice is about treating like cases alike; no arbitrary distinctions should
be made.

Rawls begins his work with the idea of justice as fairness. He identifies the basic structure of
society as the primary subject of justice and identifies justice as the first social institutions.
He argues that the concepts of freedom and equality are not mutually exclusive. His
assessment of the justice system leads him to conclude that for justice to be truly just,
everyone must be afforded the same rights under the law.

Rawls asks: if everyone were stripped of their privileges and social status and made entirely
equal, what kind of justice system would they want to be subject to? He includes that the only
logical choice is to pick a system that treats people equally, regardless of their race, class,
gender, etc.

Two Principles of Justice:

John Rawls proposed two principles of justice which are

1. Liberty principle
2. Equal opportunity principle and Difference principle

1. Liberty principle means giving Equal Rights i.e each person is to be granted an equal right
to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for everyone else which
means each person should have equal rights to the most extensive liberties consistent with
other people enjoying the same liberties.

2. Equal opportunity principle and Difference principle gives us another aspect of principle of
justice which is Social Inequality: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that
they are

(a) attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of
opportunity (Equal Opportunity);

(b) to the greatest expected benefit of the least advantaged (The Difference Principle).

It means Socio-economic inequalities should be arranged in such a manner so that they would
be to everyone’s advantage and no person would be blocked from occupying any position.

He argues that inequality is unjust as the inequality affects the marginalised or weaker section
of society and if any inequality brings the marginalised or weaker section of society with
equal footing with other sections of society then it can be said as Just equality.

As per John Rawls, all social values like liberty, opportunities, wealth etc should be equally
distributed amongst the society by various means and the government should work as
Welfare state where the distribution should follow the principle of Fair distribution.
From these two principles Rawls derives an egalitarian conception of justice that would allow
the inequality of conditions implied by equality of opportunity but would also give more
attention to those born with fewer assets and into less favorable social positions.

Rawls attempts to establish a reasoned account of social justice through the social contract
approach. This approach holds that a society is in some sense has an agreement among all
those within that society.

This inspires Rawls’ claim that we should conceive of justice ‘as fairness.’ To identify
fairness, Rawls develops two important concepts: the original position and the veil of
ignorance:

The original position is a hypothetical situation: Rawls asks, If a society were an agreement,
what kind of arrangement would everyone agree to? He states that the contract is a purely
hypothetical one: He does not argue that people had existed outside the social state or had
made agreements to establish a particular type of society. what social rules and institutions
people would agree to, not in an actual discussion, but under fair conditions, where nobody
knows whether they are advantaged by luck. Fairness is achieved through the veil of
ignorance, an imagined device where the people choosing the basic structure of society have
morally arbitrary features hidden from them: since they have no knowledge of these features,
any decision they make can’t be biased in their own favour.

All parties in the Original Position are assumed to prefer more primary social goods to less;
be instrumentally rational (i.e., “taking effective means to ends with unified expectations); be
capable of a sense of justice (and this is public knowledge among them); only make
agreements they know they can follow through on.