A Theory of Justice

"Now I have said that the basic structure is the primary subject of justice. Of course, any ethical theory recognizes the importance of the basic structure as a subject of justice, but not all theories regard its importance in the same way. In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage."

"The role of the principle of fair opportunity is to insure that the system of cooperation is one of pure procedural justice. Unless it is satisfied, distributive justice could not be left to take care of itself, even within a restricted range."

"A distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations."

"The difference principle tries to establish objective grounds for interpersonal comparisons in two ways. First of all, as long as we can identify the least advantaged representative man, only ordinal judgments of wellbeing are required from then on. We know from what position the social system is to be judged. It does not matter how much worse off this representative individual is than the others. The further difficulties of cardinal measurement do not arise since no other interpersonal comparisons are necessary. The difference principle, then, asks less of our judgments of welfare. We never have to calculate a sum of advantages involving a cardinal measure. While qualitative interpersonal comparisons are made in finding the bottom position, for the rest the ordinal judgments of one representative man suffice. Second, the difference principle introduces a simplification for the basis of interpersonal comparisons. These comparisons are made in terms of expectations of primary social goods. In fact, I define these expectations simply as the index of these goods which a representative individual can look forward to. One man’s expectations are greater than another’s if this index for some one in his position is greater. Now primary goods, as I have already remarked, are things which it is supposed a rational man wants whatever else he wants."

"Let us consider several difficulties. One problem clearly is the construction of the index of primary social goods. Assuming that the two principles of justice are serially ordered, this problem is greatly simplified. The basic liberties are always equal, and there is fair equality of opportunity; one does not need to balance these liberties and rights against other values. The primary social goods that vary in their distribution are the rights and prerogatives of authority, and income and wealth. But the difficulties are not so great as they might seem at first because of the nature of the difference principle."

"Another difficulty is this. It may be objected that expectations should not be defined as an index of primary goods anyway but rather as the satisfactions to be expected when plans are executed using these goods. After all, it is in the fulfillment of these plans that men gain happiness, and therefore the estimate of expectations should not be founded on the available means. Justice as fairness, however, takes a different view. For it does not look behind the use which persons make of the rights and opportunities available to them in order to measure, much less to maximize, the satisfactions they achieve."

"The relevant social positions specify, then, the general point of view from which the two principles of justice are to be applied to the basic structure. In this way everyone’s interests are taken into account, for each person is an equal citizen and all have a place in the distribution of income and wealth or in the range of fixed natural characteristics upon which distinctions are based. Some selection of relevant positions is necessary for a coherent theory of social justice and the ones chosen should accord with its first principles. By selecting the so-called starting places one follows out the idea of mitigating the effects of natural accident and social circumstance. No one is to benefit from these contingencies except in ways that redound to the well-being of others."

"The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts."

"We do not deserve our place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than we deserve our initial starting place in society. That we deserve the superior character that enables us to make the effort to cultivate our abilities is also problematic; for such character depends in good part upon fortunate family and social circumstances in early life for which we can claim no credit."

"Therefore, to establish a complete conception of right, the parties in the original position are to choose in a definite order not only a conception of justice but also principles to go with each major concept falling under the concept of right."

"From the standpoint of justice as fairness, a fundamental natural duty is the duty of justice."

"In fact, once the full set of principles, a complete conception of right, is on hand, we can simply forget about the conception of original position and apply these principles as we would any others."

"No work of modern political philosophy, in any language, has generated such an enormous output of learned commentary as John Rawls's Theory of Justice. After some twenty years of uninterrupted critical flow, Rawls's new book is billed as a correction of the original, in the light of subsequent discussion. Political Liberalism offers abundant – even super-abundant – evidence of careful response to the reception of A Theory of Justice, in a forest of footnotes to different readings of it. But the attention proves selective, and the result disconcerting. Rawls's pristine theory argued for two fundamental principles of justice: first in order – equal political rights and liberties for all, and second – only such social or economic inequalities as are compatible with equal opportunity, and yield most benefit to the least well-off. These principles, Rawls maintained, would infallibly be chosen by us if we were to imagine ourselves deciding the form of a just society from the hypothetical standpoint of an ‘original position’, without any knowledge of what might be our particular lot within it. Around this core doctrine, conceived as an updated variant of Kantian constructivism to supersede all latter-day forms of utilitarian calculus, Rawls developed a capacious intellectual edifice, culminating in ethical reflections of noble scope."

"In the advanced capitalist countries of today, the claims of absolute need are rarer than those of relative deprivation. How satisfactory is Rawls's formula for meeting these? The 'difference principle' – warranting only those inequalities which are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged – is the most memorable single thesis of A Theory of Justice. But what is its actual import? The massive ambiguity of the Rawlsian theory of justice lies at precisely this point. Is the difference principle a powerful call for an all but socialist redistribution of income – since, on one reading, so little of the glaring disparities of wealth that surround us contributes to the well-being of the poor? Or is it, on another reading, simply a sensible defence of the normal operation of capitalism – whose constant increase of productivity, raising general living standards, requires precisely the incentive structures, tried and tested by experience, we have today? To grasp the full depth of the indeterminacy at the crux of Rawls's construction, it is enough to note that it can be applauded imperturbably at one extreme by John Roemer on the Left, and at another by Friedrich Hayek on the Right, each contending that its message coincides with their own. Clearly, both cannot be right. But Rawls's Theory, in which the legitimacy of socialism can be mooted on one page and American society held nearly just on the next, leaves space for either view. It might be said that, within its framework, the difference principle is politically indifferent."

"It is impossible to say what institutions, laws, policies, and ideas are most likely to guide humanity in the future. In his later years, Hayek gave some consideration to the work of John Rawls, who would perhaps be considered, together with Hayek and Leo Strauss, one of the three greatest political philosophers of the twentieth century. Rawls had a highly liberal (in a twentieth-century sense) perspective. His idea of a “difference principle” (sometimes also referred to as “maximin”—maximizing the status of the minimum class) may prove lasting. This Rawlsian idea is that society’s laws and rules should be structured so that those who are least well off in the society in question would have the highest standard of living as in any other possible society at the point in time. While Rawls thought that this would, empirically, result in societies in which material rewards would be quite evenly possessed, there is no reason that this should necessarily be the case."

"The point of one of [Rawls’] main constructions—the introduction of the “veil of ignorance”—is precisely to exclude from consideration empirical information that might prejudice the overriding normative force of the outcome. It is, then, extremely striking, not to say astounding, to the lay reader that the complex theoretical apparatus of Theory of Justice, operating through over 500 pages of densely argued text, eventuates in a constitutional structure that is a virtual replica (with some extremely minor deviations) of the arrangements that exist in the United States."

"If the basic assumption of the theory of ideology is at all tenable, namely, that the general power relations embodied in our social structures can exert a distorting influence on the formation of our beliefs and preferences without our being aware of it, then we are definitely not going to put that kind of influence out of action by asking the agents in the society to imagine that they didn’t know their position. To think otherwise is to believe in magic: imagine you are “impartial” and you will be. In fact, doing that will be more likely to reinforce the power of these entrenched prejudices because it will explicitly present them as universal, warranted by reason, etc."

"Since the publication of John Rawls’s monumental book A Theory of Justice in 1971, such grand theories of distributive justice have gained momentum and depth. Rawls himself defended an egalitarian position. He articulated it in his famous difference principle, according to which deviations from strict equality may be allowed only if such deviations will work for the benefit of the worst-off. According to Rawls, perfect equality should have been the rule, but rewarding capable people with differential income will create an incentive for them to raise the production of the sum total of goods, which in a system of fair distribution might end up benefiting the people who are at the bottom of the economic ladder."

"Liberal theory, over the past quarter-century, has been dominated by the work of John Rawls. For the most part, political theorists have approached liberalism by considering the problems, methods, and conclusions developed by Rawls in A Theory of Justice."

"The most famous modern assertion of the conflict between utilitarian and justice-based considerations is contained in John Rawls's masterpiece, A Theory of Justice... Rawls begins from Hume's and Mill's premisses, but reaches very different conclusions. Like them, he sees justice as regulating the results of social co-operation; unlike Plato, he does not think of justice as operating 'within the soul'. Justice is institutional and political; we co-operate with one another within an institutional framework, and that framework dictates the broad outlines of the results."

"John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed everything. It showed not only that ethical theory could be treated with analytical sophistication and applied to issues of vital social concern but also that Kantian ideas were indispensable to doing this in the right way. Rawls’s thought never stagnated, however. He continued reflecting on how the Kantian liberal tradition can best be articulated in the late twentieth century."

"Rawls’s interpretation of Kant himself as a “constructivist” in moral theory has been very influential in the way Kant has been interpreted by his sympathizers and categorized by his critics. Dissenting from this, I regard the term “Kantian constructivism in ethics” as an oxymoron, whose interest ought to lie exclusively in its shock value. Kant might be accurately described as a ‘constructivist’ in the philosophy of mathematics, but he is no constructivist in ethics. When understood as an interpretive claim about Kantian ethics, “Kantian constructivism” gets Kant’s entire conception of ethical theory, as well as his conception of autonomy and his position in metaethics (or the metaphysics of value), basically wrong."

"John Rawls is well known for contrasting Kantian with utilitarian ethics by claiming that utilitarianism does not take seriously enough the differences between persons (Rawls, TJ 27). This way of looking at the contrast makes Kantian ethics appear “individualistic” by comparison with utilitarianism, though this is highly misleading. A better way to look at the contrast is to point out that Kantian ethics places a higher priority on human community – it values the conditions of rational cooperation among persons, and their sharing of common ends, more than it does the aggregate welfare of individuals considered in isolation. Hence, the point that Kantian ethics really has in mind in taking seriously the differences between persons is that this is necessary in order to develop a conception of ethical norms based on a true idea of human community (instead of reducing the common deliberation of different people to the deliberation of a single individual agent)."