A Theory of Justice

The two principles of justice as fairness are preferable if they would be chosen in the original position over every other known alternative. Alternative theories of justice include mixed conceptions of justice, classical teleological conceptions of justice, intuitionistic conceptions of justice, and egoistic conceptions of justice.

The circumstances of justice are the conditions under which cooperation is both permissible and necessary. There are two kinds of circumstances: objective circumstances, which enable and necessitate cooperation; and the condition of moderate scarcity. Society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, but it suffers from conflict- and identity-of-interests. A person’s knowledge is incomplete; their powers of reasoning, memory, and attention are limited. Further, their judgment is distorted by anxiety, bias, and preoccupation with themselves. All the aforementioned comprise the circumstances of justice: “[T]he circumstances of justice obtain whenever persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity” (110).

The concept of right is the universally accepted moral position that determines who prevails in individual and institutional conflicts. The constraints of the concept of right limit the original persons’ knowledge of their circumstances and alternatives available. For this reason, the principles should be general and able to be formulated without precise descriptions, and the principles cannot be self-defeating when acted upon by all. Further, the principles should be public so all parties may evaluate them, they should incorporate a hierarchy for deciding on conflicting claims, and they should be final. After applying this practical reasoning, when a conclusion is reached, the question is settled and cannot be relitigated if the result is unsatisfactory.

The original position constructs a fair procedure to ensure agreement on principles via pure procedural justice. A necessary component of the procedure is the veil of ignorance, behind which the parties to the original position are situated: “They do not know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations” (118).

The veil of ignorance assumes the circumstances of their society are unknown to the parties in the original position. The only facts known to the parties are “that their society is subject to the circumstances of justice and whatever this implies” (119). The veil of ignorance presents the original position in a way that achieves the desired outcome and allows for unanimity among parties.

The persons in the original position know they have a rational plan of life but are ignorant of the details of such a plan. They assume they prefer a larger share of social goods and know they strive to protect their liberties, widen their opportunities, and promote whatever aims they have. The original position, the two principles, and the veil of ignorance eliminate the conditions required to develop disruptive attitudes, such as envy.

This section distinguishes between the choice of the two principles of justice and the principle of average utility. Being shielded from their position in society by the veil of ignorance, it is unreasonable for a person in the original position to expect more than an equal share of social primary goods, and it is also irrational for them to agree to less. Therefore, a person in the original position would agree to a principle of justice requiring an equal distribution of social goods, requiring equal basic liberties for all, fair equality of opportunity, and equal division of income and wealth.

Being mutually disinterested, a person in the original position would agree to inequalities in distribution only if they would result in an advantage to themselves, but because a person in the original position is ignorant of their social position and therefore cannot know if an inequality in distribution would be to their advantage or disadvantage, they would agree to the principle that inequalities in distribution can only be allowed if they improve everyone’s situation, including that of the least advantaged, and are consistent with the principles of equal liberty and fair opportunity already given priority by the parties to the original position. This is the origin of the difference principle.

The classical principle of utility requires institutions to maximize the expectations of “the relevant representative men” (140). This means that classical utility considers society as a whole rather than focusing on each individual’s needs. If the chosen representatives account for only a portion of the demographic, that is the demographic whose needs will be maximized.

The principle of average utility, by contrast, commands maximizing the per capita utility, rather than maximizing the total utility of a society. Shielded from their social position and interests by the veil of ignorance, the parties to the original position would choose to maximize the per capita utility and gain regardless of the social position in which then end up by choosing the average principle of utility over the classical principle of utility.

While preferable to the classical principle of utility, the average principle of utility poses several difficulties. First, the principle is taken from the standpoint of one rational individual who will do whatever is necessary to maximize their prospects. It can be contended that this situation allows for a large amount of risk in gambling on one’s fortunes: A person in the original position could hope to be a king but could then end up a slave.

However, this consideration is addressed in the two principles of justice by attributing to the persons in the original position an aversion to anything more than a moderate amount of risk. A rational, moderately risk-averse person would not risk becoming a slave for the chance at royalty when a third option is presented that would afford that person a moderate amount of social goods without the risk of ending up with none.

In defining the nature of agreement, Rawls writes that “for an agreement to be valid, the parties must be able to honor it under all relevant and foreseeable circumstances” (152). Because the original agreement follows the social contract theory, it has the condition of publicity and limits what can be agreed upon. The condition of finality dictates that there will be no second agreement, as the agreement must be honored even in the worst-case scenario. The two principles of justice are better suited than other schemes to this condition of finality because by protecting basic liberties for all, and requiring that inequality only exist when it is to the advantage of all, the two principles of justice guarantee that a person in the original position will always fare better in the worst-case scenario under the two principles of justice than any other conception.

The condition of publicity dictates that a “conception of justice is stable when the public recognition of its realization by the social system tends to bring about the corresponding sense of justice” (153). The principle of utility offers no assurance that everyone benefits. By contrast, the two principles of justice support a person’s self-respect and thereby increase social cooperation. “Self-respect is reciprocally self-supporting,” and the two principles of justice publicly express such self-respect by “manifest[ing] in the basic structure of society [a] desire to treat one another not as means only but as ends in themselves” (155). The two principles of justice achieve this by ensuring basic liberties to all and through the difference principle.

Assuming social cooperation among reciprocally self-respecting individuals is more effective than the alternative. The general level of expectations will then also be higher with the two principles of justice than with other conceptions, particularly when compared with utilitarianism, which asks the less fortunate to accept lower life prospects for the sake of others, and correspondingly sacrifice their own self-worth.

Utilitarian theory states that something is right when a rational and impartial spectator with a general perspective and possessing the relevant circumstantial knowledge would approve of it. This utilitarian theory of the right is one of sympathy; a detached observer with all relevant knowledge is to determine the right for another.

In this way, utilitarian theory is opposite to the method of determining the right in the original position, utilizing the two principles of justice. The parties to the original position are mutually disinterested, rather than sympathetic, and rather than possessing all relevant knowledge, they are deprived of all but the most general knowledge by the veil of ignorance.

These differences lead to the different outcomes of utilitarian theory and the two principles of justice. The utilitarian theory suffers because it does not account for differences between persons, and relies on the ethics of perfect altruists and benevolence:

[L]ove and benevolence are second-order notions: they seek to further the good of beloved individuals that is already given. If the claims of these goods clash, benevolence is at a loss as to how to proceed, as long […] as it treats these individuals as separate persons (166).

The two principles of justice by contrast permit—through the difference principle and the veil of ignorance—one representative person to decide the right for all persons to a satisfactory extent, and because of the aforementioned principles and the principle of mutual disinterest, it does not rely on altruism or benevolence. The two principles of justice are, therefore, the better method of determining the right: “[N]othing would have been gained by attributing benevolence to the parties in the original position” (166).