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JOHN RAWL'S THEORY OF JUSTICE
Reasonable people often disagree about how to live, but we need to structure society in a way that the reasonable members of the society that can accept. Citizens could try to collectively agree on the basic rules.
A collective agreement on the basic structure of the society is an attractive ideal but some people are more powerful than the others some may be wealthier or part of the social majority. If people can dominate negotiation because of the qualities that are as Rawl’s put it morally arbitrary that is wrong. People don’t earn these advantages they get them back by luck. For anyone to use these unearned advantages to their own benefit is unfair and the source of main injustices.
This inspires Rawl’s central claim that we should conceive of justice as fairness. To identify fairness as Rawl’s develops two important concepts: the original position and the veil of ignorance:
The original position is the hypothetical situation: Rawl’s ask what social rules and institution people will agree to not in an actual discussion but under fair conditions where nobody knows whether they are advantages by luck. Fairness is achieved through the veil of ignorance an imagined device where the people choosing the basic structure of society have morally arbitrable features hidden from them since they have no knowledge of these features any decision they make can’t be biased in their own favors.
Deliberators are ignorant about anything though. They know they are self-interested i.e. want as much as possible of what Rawl’s calls primary goods. They are also motivated by a minimal sense of justice they will abide by rules that seem fair if others do too. They are also known with basic facts about science and human nature.
THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE
JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS
- Equal rights:
Each person is to be granted an equal right to be the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for everyone else.
- Social inequality:
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are.
Attached to the position and offices open to all under equal conditions of fair equality of opportunity (equal opportunities)
To the greatest expected benefit of the least advantaged. (the difference principle)
Examples of Equal basic liberties: political liberty (right to vote, right to hold public office) freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of person, right to property, freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure.
How to understand the second principle of justice
Interpretation of the second principle
|
“equally open” |
“principle of efficiency” |
“difference principle” |
|
Careers upon to all talent |
System of natural liberty |
Natural aristocracy |
|
Fair opportunity |
Liberal equality |
Democratic equality |
Liberal equality and natural aristocracy are unstable:
- If one’s life chances shouldn’t be determined by social circumstances beyond one’s control, then, because, how one fairs in the natural lottery is also beyond one’s control one’s life chances shouldn’t be determined by their natural assets either.
- If one’s life chances shouldn’t be determined by one faired in natural lottery then because one’s social circumstances are also morally arbitrary one’s life chances shouldn’t be determined by social circumstances.
THE ARGUMENT FROM THE ORIGINAL POSITION
The original position is a hypothetical bargaining situation in which we are tasked with picking the principle of justice that will guide us in setting up the basic structure of society. It has the following features:
- Constraints on the principle up for consideration- as here only considered principles that have the following formal features:
- Generality- it must be possible to formulate them without the use of what would be intuitively recognized as a proper name, or rigged definite descriptions.
- Universality- they must hold for everyone in virtue for their being morals persons.
- Publicity- the parties assume that they are choosing principles for public
- the conception of justice. They suppose that everyone will know about these principles all that he would know if their acceptance were the result of an agreement.
- Ordering- because the principles of justice should offer guidance in adjudicating between competing for the demands the principle must impose an ordering on conflicting claims.
- Finality- ‘the parties are to assess the system of principles as the final court of appeal in practice reasoning.”As here deciding only between a set of principles, general in form and universal in application, that is to be publicly recognized as the final court of appeal for ordering the conflicting claims of moral persons.
- The veil of ignorance – as all are behind a veil ignorance so no one knows:
- Ones place in the society one’s class position or one’s social status
- One’s fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities
- One’s conception of the good
- Anything about the special features of one’s psychology
- The particular circumstances of their own society
- What is known behind the veil of ignorance: society is subject to the circumstances of justice and general facts about human society
- Rationality- all parties in the original position are assumed to...
- Prefer more primary social goods to less
- Be instrumentally rational
- Not suffer from envy (“he is not downcast by the knowledge or perception that others have a larger index of primary social goods”).
- Be mutually disinterested
- Be capable of a sense of justice (and this is public knowledge among them)
- Only make agreements they know they can follow through on
- Agreement condition- as everyone should settle on a principle of justice by coming to a unanimous agreement.
