Justice as Fairness

Justice as fairness refers to the conception of justice that John Rawls presents in A Theory of Justice. This conception of justice concerns society’s basic structure—that is, “society’s main political, constitutional, social, and economic institutions and how they fit together to form a unified scheme of social cooperation over time.”1

Rawls constructs justice as fairness in a rather narrow framework and explicitly states, “Justice as fairness is not a complete contact theory.”2 Its purpose is to show how we ought to allocate a cooperative surplus of resources to individuals in society. As a result, justice as fairness relies on two implicit assumptions about the societies in question: first, social cooperation is possible and can work to everyone’s mutual advantage, and second, there exists a moderate surplus of available resources to be distributed. Justice as fairness cannot be used to determine the just distribution of sacrifices to be made by a society’s members when resources are scarce. More generally, it cannot help us identify just social policies in societies where background conditions (e.g., scarcity of natural resources, cultural barriers, war) have eliminated the possibility of mutually advantageous social cooperation.

The process for determining how the basic structure should be arranged is based on a thought experiment in which rational, mutually disinterested individuals choose principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance, a condition that specifies they do not know specific details about themselves (e.g., personal values, race, gender, level of income) or the society in which they live (e.g., societal stage of development, economic circumstances). However, when choosing these principles, the parties do possess general social, psychological, and economic knowledge, and they also know that the circumstances of justice obtain in the society to which they belong.

From this hypothetical initial situation, which Rawls calls the “original position,” these individuals will presumably endorse two principles of justice. The first, known as the equal liberty principle, is that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others,” and the second is that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and attached to offices and positions open to all.”3

Rawls’ primary argument for the two principles is that they would be chosen over any variation of utilitarianism, which he considers the strongest opposition to justice as fairness. Constrained by the veil of ignorance, the parties in the original position (as mutually disinterested rational agents) try to agree to the principles which bring about the best state of affairs for whatever citizen they represent within society. Since the parties are all unaware of precisely what social role they will occupy, they strive to maximize their individual shares of primary goods. These goods are defined as “things that every rational man is presumed to want” regardless of this person’s rational plan of life and include (among other things) rights, liberties, social opportunities, and income.4 Rawls argues, largely through the appeal to the maximin rule, that the parties in the original position would favor the equal liberty principle over variations of utilitarianism. He further argues that the parties would support using the difference principle to regulate the distribution of wealth and income instead of a principle of average utility
(constrained by a social minimum) because the difference principle provides a stronger basis for enduring cooperation among citizens.

The full application of justice as fairness can be regarded as a 4-stage sequence. The deliberations concerning the two principles occur at the first stage. With the two principles established, the parties then progressively thin the veil of ignorance and, as they acquire more specific knowledge about society at the subsequent stages, determine more specific principles of justice. At the second stage, the parties learn more about society’s political and economic circumstances and create a constitution that is consistent with the two principles. At the third stage, the parties agree to laws and policies which realize the two principles within the context of the agreed-upon constitutional framework. At the fourth stage, the parties possess all available information about their society and apply the established laws and policies to particular cases.

One of Rawls major tasks in presenting justice as fairness is to show that the society it generates can endure indefinitely over time. To achieve this aim, Rawls deploys the just savings principle, a rule of intergenerational savings designed to assure that future generations have sufficient capital to maintain just institutions. Additionally, Rawls argues that the society generated by the two principles is congruent with citizens’ good and that citizens can develop the necessary willingness to abide by these principles. As a result, the society generated by adherence to justice as fairness is stable and can be expected to endure indefinitely over time.

Notably, however, the arguments for the stability of justice as fairness that Rawls presents in A Theory of Justice do not prove convincing. Rawls does not account for reasonable pluralism, a critical aspect of any constitutional democracy with the guaranteed liberties that Rawls specifies. Thus, Rawls recasts his arguments for the stability of justice as fairness in Political Liberalism and strives to demonstrate that citizens, despite reasonable disagreement about many issues, will agree on a limited, political conception of justice through an overlapping consensus of their individual viewpoints.

  1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xli (fn 7).
  2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 15.
  3. Ibid., 53.
  4. Ibid., 54.

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