Introduction to Rawls: A Theory of Justice

The American philosopher John Rawls was the most influential political thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in 1921 and died in 2002, he’s responsible for a renaissance in political philosophy.

In this introduction to Rawls, I look at A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus. It was published in 1971 and is a philosophy of what a just and fair society would look like. I like at concepts like the difference principle, justice as fairness, and maximin.

Before Rawls, the dominant political philosophy for at least the previous 100 years been utilitarianism. There were and are many different forms of utilitarianism, but they all have their foundations in a simple premise: the greatest good for the greatest number.

For Rawls, utilitarianism didn’t adequately account for the intuition that people have inalienable rights that cannot be violated for the greater happiness of others.

Rawls writes that the ‘higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society.’

It’s this difference principle, also referred to as maximin – maximise the minimum prospects – that leads Rawls to his formulation of the two principles of ‘justice as fairness'.

The principles are in lexical order; that is, that the first should always be prioritised over the second. They are:

First, each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all.

Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

The two principles might generally be summed up like this:

‘All social values—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 values is to everyone’s advantage.’

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