Rawls

Background

1921-2002

Principle of Justice

2 principles: One, that each person should have equal rights to the most extensive liberties consistent with other people enjoying the same liberties. Two, that inequalities should be arranged so that the would be to everyone's advantage and no one person would be blocked from occupying any position. From these 2 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.

Lexical priority

Prioritizing in the order of the liberty, fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle. This order determines the priorities of the principles if they conflict in practice.

Social Justice

Rawls argues for the need to have a theory of goodness, and he makes a case for seeing goodness as rationality. Then, he turns to moral psychology and considers how people acquire a sentiment of justice. He examines the good of justice, or how justice is connected to goodness. Rawls argues that in a well-ordeed society, ideas of goodness and justice must be consistent with each other.

Implication of his view of Justice

Rawls discusses in detail equal liberty, economic distribution, and duties and obligations as well as the main characteristics of each that would make up a just society. He does not, however, identify any particular type of social or political system that would be consistent with his theory. He deals only with the demands that his version of justice places on institutions.

Second Principle: The Equality Principle

The Equality Principle is the component of Justice as Fairness establishing distributive justice. Rawls wards the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle lexical priority over the Difference Principle: a society cannot arrange inequalities to maximize the share of the least advantaged while not allowing access to certain offices or positions.

Utilitarian argument

The Utilitarian argument holds that societies should pursue the greatest good for the greatest number. This argument has a number of problems, including, especially, that it seems to be consistent with the idea of the tyranny of majorities over minorities.

Critique of veil of ignorance

The claim that rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance would chose the greatest possible equality has been challenged as arbitrary and unverifiable. Rational individuals might well choose a social structure with large rewards for the majority of people and small rewards for the minority on the grounds that one is more likely to end up as part of a majority than a minority. Moreover, the veil of ignorance of where one will be in a society also takes away all knowledge of what one will do. Legal justice is generally considered a matter of appropriate responses to actions. In the version offered by Rawls, justice is detached from anything that anyone has done and thus may have nothing to do with any idea of what people deserve.

Fair Equality of Opportunity

This principle maintains that offices and positions should be open to any individual, regardless of his or her social background, ethnicity or sex. It is stronger than 'Formal Equality of Opportunity' in that Rawls argus that an individual should not only have the right to opportunities, but should have an effective equal chance as another of similar natural ability.

Rawls' dissatisfaction

he's dissatisfied with the traditional philosophical arguments about what makes a social institution just and about what justifies political or social actions and policies.

Principles

intended as a single, comprehensive conception of justice - just as fairness - and not to function individually. They are always applied so as to ensure that the least advantaged are benefitted and not hurt or forgotten.

Social contract

this approach holds that a society is in some sense an agreement among all those within that society. He states that the contract is a purely hypothetical one: he does not argue that people and existed outside the social state or had made agreements to establish a particular type of society.

Justice as fairness

He identifies the basic structure of society as the primary subject of justice and identifies justice as the first virtue of social institutions. He considers justice a matter of the organization and internal divisions of a society. Rawls sees the state in which no one knows what place he or she would occupy in the society to be created as a hypothetical original position. Rawls offers two principles of social justice: The Principle of Equal Liberty: Each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for everyone. The Difference Principle: Practices that produce inequalities among individuals are allowable only if they work out to everyone's advantage and the positions that come with greater reward are open to all.

Original position

An original position behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes. Behind this veil, all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. You do know that in the "real world," however, there will be a wide variety in the natural distribution of natural assets and abilities, and that there will be differences of sex, race, and culture that will distinguish groups of people from each other. The only fundamental principles of society will be fair, for you do not know whether you would suffer or benefit from the structure of any biased institutions. Indeed the safest principles will provide for the highest minimum standards of justice in the projected society. This is a thought experiment ins which the parties select principles that will determine the basic structure of the society they will live in. This choice is made form behind a veil of ignorance, which would deprive participants of information about their particular characteristics: his or her ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially, their conception of The Good. This forces participants to select principles impartially and rationally.

Outside of Original Position

Rawls maintains that the choice to choose what arrangement of the society a rational person chooses would be for a social structure that would best benefit the unknowing chooser if she or he happened to end up in the least desirable position.

equal distribution objection

Rawls posits equal distribution of resources as the desirable state and then argues that inequality can be justified only by benefits for the least advantaged. Nozick points out that resources are produced by people and that people have rights to the things they produce. Thus, attempts to improve the condition o the least advantaged through redistribution are unjust because they make some people work involuntarily for others and deprive people of the goods and opportunities they have created through time and effort.

Motivating the Analysis

Rawls' supports these principles of social justice as those that would be selected by rational self interested agents reasoning from what he calls The Original Position. The Original Position Agents reasoning from the original position are assumed to be rational in the prudential sense. They seek to maximize their own interests. The principles of justice selected from the original position are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. Agents are unaware of personal traits like social position, race, wealth, strength, intelligence, handicaps, gender etc. The Veil of Ignorance The principles of justice that would be selected by rational self interested agents behind the veil of ignorance will be fair in the sense that they will not arbitrarily advantage any accidentally had individual traits or circumstances.

Difference Principle

Second principle that permits such inequalities and even suggests that it will be to the advantage of all (similar to the utility principle), but only if they meet two specific conditions. Thus, the principle are not strictly egalitarian, but they are not laissez faire either. Rawls is locating his vision of justice in between these two extremes. Regulates inequalities: It only permits inequalities that work to the advantage of the worst-off. This is often misinterpreted as trickle-down economics; Rawls' argument is more accurately expressed as a system where wealth diffuses up. By guaranteeing the worst-off in society a fair deal, Rawls compensates for naturally-occurring inequalities (talents that one is born with, such as a capacity for sport). Rawls justifies the Difference Principle on the basis that, since Fair Equality of Opportunity lexical priority, the Just Choice from Pareto optimal scenarios which could occur would be that benefitting the worst-off rather than the best-off. This principle allows practices that result in unequal distribution of social and economic benefits only if such practices benefit those who are least well off relative to the state of the least well off under other systems of practices. While the difference principle allows for inequalities in the distribution of social and economic benefits, it does not allow inequalities that benefit the well to do at the expense of those who are least well off. The difference principle also requires equality of opportunity. This principle would be selected in the original position because those who are least advantaged under acceptable practices would still be better off than those least advantaged under other practices (including those that guarantee equality). Those advantaged under acceptable practices are presumed to have no grounds for complaint.

Fundamental idea

The fundamental idea that justice is a matter of basic structure of society is also open to question. To say that the basic structure of society can be made just or fair is to say that it an be designed both hypothetically and actually. Some social thinkers argue that societies are not desired per se; they are produced through history and by complex webs of interaction among individuals and institutions. From this perspective, justice is a characteristic of specific acts or processes within social systems, such as legal actions or political mechanisms, and it is misleading to extend the concept of justice to a society as a whole.

Rawls' reluctance

To identify any particular type of society as just, especially in the second part of the book dealing with institutions, may leave Rawls open to the charge that he offers no guidance for the actual contact of justice. E.g., proponents of a highly unequal and competitive market economy may argue that the abundance of wealth produced by their preferred system contributes to the absolute standard of living of the poorest people in society. One the other hand, advocates of a highly redistributionist economy can maintain that radical redistribution of wealth will provide the greatest support for the poorest. Because no one can know - behind a veil of ignorance, which system would lead to the best possible lives for the poor, there can be no way of deciding what kind of society should be preferred.

The First Principle

aka Liberty Principle Very Kantian in that it provides for for basic and universal respect for persons as a minimum standard for all just institutions. But while all persons amy e morally equal, we also know that in the "real world" there are significant differences between individuals that under conditions of liberty will lead to social and economic inequalities. States that every individual has an equal right to basic liberties, claiming "that certain rights and freedoms are more important r basic than others." E.g., Freeman argues, Rawls believes that "personal property" - personal belongings, a home - constitutes a basic liberty, but an absolute right to unlimited private property is not. As basic liberties, they are inalienable: no government can amend, infringe or remove them from individuals. Rawls articulates the Liberty Principle as the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others; later, he amended the principle, stating, "each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties." According to the first principle, the liberty of individuals is restricted to that which is consistent with like liberty for all. This principle would be selected by rational prudential agents in the original position because none would accept the possibility of their liberty being restricted in ways not required for others to enjoy similar liberty.