Western Political Thought

John Rawls (1921-2002)

Introduction
 John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the 20th century.
 He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the 1950s and 60s that helped refocus Anglo-
American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do.
 His first book, a theory of Justice 1971, revitalized the social-contract tradition, using it to
articulate and define a detailed vision of egalitarian liberalism
 In Political Liberalism (1993), he recast the role of political philosophy, accommodating it to the
effective permanent “reasonable pluralism” of religious philosophical, and other comprehensive
doctrines or worldviews that characterize modern societies
 he explains how philosophers can characterize pubic justification and the legitimate, democratic
use of collective coercive power while accepting that pluralism

Theory of Justice (1971)

a) The Basic Structure of Society
 The subject matter of Rawls’s theory is societal practices and institutions.
 Some social institutions can provoke envy and resentment
 other can foster alienation and exploitation
 is there a way of organizing society that can keep these problems within livable limits?
 Can society be organized around fair principles of cooperation in a way the people would
stably accept?
 Rawls’s original thought is that equality; or a fair distribution of advantages, is to be
addressed as a background matter by constitutional and legal provision that structure social
institutions.
 while fair institutions will influence the life chances of everyone in society, they will leave
individuals free to exercise their basic liberties as they see fit within this fair set of rules
 To carry out this central idea, Rawls takes as the subject-matter of A Theory of Justice, “The
basic structure of society,” defined (as he later put it) as “the way in which the major social
institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties
and shape the division of advantages that arises through social cooperation.”
b) Utilitarianism as the Principle Opponent
 Rawls explain in the Preface to the first edition of A Theory of Justice that one of the book’s
main aims is to provide a “workable and systematic moral conception to oppose”
utilitarianism.
 Utilitarianism comes in various forms
 Classical Utilitarianism, the 19th century theory of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, is
the philosophy of “the greatest good of the greatest number.”
 The more modern version is average utilitarianism, which asks us not to maximize the
amount of good or happiness, but rather its average level in society
  The utilitarian idea, as Rawls confronts it, is that society is to be arranged so as to maximize
(the floral or average) aggregate utility or expected well-being
c) The Original Position
 Recognizing that social institutions distort our views ((by sometimes generating envy,
resentment, alienation, or false consciousness) and bias matters in their own favor (by
indoctrinating and habituating those who grow up under them), Rawls saw the need for a
justificatory device that would give us critical distance from them
 The original poison (OP) is his (Archimedean Point, “the fulcrum he uses to obtain critical
leverage
 The OP is a thought experiment that asks: What principles of social justice would be chosen
by parties thoroughly knowledgeable about human affairs in general but wholly deprived-by
the “veil of ignorance” of information about the particular person or persons they
represent?
I. The conditions and purpose of the Original position
 The OP, as Rawls designs it self-consciously builds on the long social-contract
tradition in Western Political philosophy
 IN classic presentations, such as John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil
Government (1690), the social contract was sometimes described as if it were
an actual historical event. By contrast, Rawls’s social-contract device, like his
earlier decision procedure, is frankly and completely hypothetical. while Rawls is
most emphatic about this in his later work, for example, Political liberalism at
75, it is clear already in A theory of Justice. He insists there that it is up to the
theorist to construct the social-contract thought—experiment in the way that
makes the most sense given its task of helping us select principles of justice
II. The Motivations of the Parties to the Original Position
 The parties in the hypothetical OP are to choose on behalf of person in society,
for whom they are, in effect, trustees. Political liberalism at 76, 106. The veil of
ignorance, however, prevents the parties from knowing anything particular
about the preferences, likes or dislikes, commitments or aversions of those
person. They also know nothing particular about the society for which they are
choosing. On what basis, then, can the parties choose? To ascribe to them a full
theory of the human good would fly in the face of the effects of pluralism, for
such theories are deeply controversial. Instead, Rawls suggest, we should
ascribe to them a “thinner” or less controversial set of commitments. At the
core of these are what he calls the “primary goods:” rights, liberties, and
opportunities; income and wealth; and the social bases of self-respect to give
the parties a definite basis on which to reason, Rawls postulates that the parties
“normally prefer more primary goods rather than less.” A Theory of Justice at
123. This is the only motivation that TJ ascribes to the parties
III. Kantian Influence and Interpretation of the Original Positon
 Rawls had long admitted Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, making it central
to his teaching of the subject. A theory of Justice aims to build on Kant’s central
ideas and to improve on them in certain respects. By insisting, as against
utilitarianism, on the “separateness of persons,” Rows carries on Kant’s theme
 of respect for persons. Kant held that the true principles of morality are not
imposed on us by our psyches or by eternal conceptual relations that hold true
independently of us; rather, Kant argued, the moral law is a law that our reason
gives to itself. it is, in this sense, self-chosen or autonomous law.
d) The Principles of Justice as Fairness
 “justice as Fairness” is Rawls’s name for the set of principles he defends in A
Theory of Justice. He refers to “The two principle of Justice as fairness,” but the
second has two parts. These principles address two different aspects of the
basic structure of society: the “First assures each citizen “an equal claim to the
fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is
compatible with the same scheme for all.” Political Liberalism at 5. The Second
principle addresses instead those aspects of the basic structure that shape the
distribution of opportunities, offices, income, wealth and in general social
advantages. The first part of the second Principle holds that the social structures
that shape this distribution must satisfy the requirements of “Fair equality of
opportunity.” The Second part of second principles is the famous—or
infamous— “Difference Principle”
e) The Argument from the Original Position
 The argument that the parties in the OP will prefer Justice as Fairness to
utilizations and to the various other alternative principles with which they are
presented divides into two parts. there is, first, the question whether the parties
will insist upon securing a scheme of equal basic liberties and upon giving the
top priority. Secondly, assuming that they will, there remains the question
whether social inequalities should be governed by Rawls’s “Second Principle,”
comprising Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle, or else
should be addressed in a utilitarian away. making the latter choice and so
inserting utilitarianism into a position subordinate to the First Principle, yields
what Rawls calls a “mixed conception.”
f) Reflective Equilibrium
 Although the OP attempts to collect and express a set of crucial constraints that
are appropriate to impose on each choice of principles of Justice, Rawls,
recognized from the beginning that we could never just hand over the
endorsement of those principles to this hypothetical device. Rather, he foresaw
the need to “work from both ends,” Pruning and adjusting things as we go. A
theory of justice at 18. That is, we need to stop and consider whether, on
reflection, we can endorse the results of the OP if those results clash with some
of our more concrete considered judgments about justice, then we have reason
to think about modifying the OP
g) Just Institutions
 Part Two of a Theory of Justice aims to show that justice as fairness fits our
considered judgements on whole range of more concrete topics immoral and
political philosophy, such as the idea of the rule of law, the problem of justice
between generations, and the justification of civil disobedience. Consistent with
the idea of reflective equilibrium, Rawls suggest pruning and adjusting those
 judgements in a number of places. One of the thorniest such issues, that of
tolerating the intolerant, recurs in Political Liberalism. In addition to serving its
main purpose of facilitating reflective equilibrium on justice as Fairness, Part
Two also offers a treasure trove of influential and insightful discussion of these
and other topics in Political Philosophy
h) Stability
 In pursuing his novel topic of the justice of the basic structure of society, Rawls
posed novel questions. One set of questions concerned what he calls the
“stability” of those societies whose institutions live up to the requirements of a
given set of principles of justice. the stability of the institutions called for by a
given set of principles of justice---their ability to endure over time and to re-
establish themselves after temporary disturbances—is a quality those principles
must have if they are to serve their purpose
I) congruence
 As we have seen, the veil of ignorance disconnects the argument from the OP
from any given individual’s full conception of the good. The final question
addressed by A Theory of Justice attempts to reconnect justice to each
individual’s good, not in general, but within the well-ordered society of Justice
as Fairness. A stable society is one that generates attitudes, such as are
encapsulated in an effective sense of justice, that support the just institutions of
that society. if, in the well-ordered society, having those attitudes is also a good
for the person who have them, then here is a “match between justice and
goodness” that Rawls calls “Congruence.”