50 pages • 1 hour read
John RawlsJustice as Fairness: A Restatement
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
A Political Conception of Justice
It is possible to conceive of justice in a way that consistently regulates every aspect of society and the lives of its individuals. A religious society, for example, might posit a form of divine law that extends equally to public and private life or distributes social benefits based on particular notions of moral deserving. Fundamentalist regimes such as the Taliban forbid any behavior in the home that violates their sense of public decency, so that adultery or failure to pray are criminal offenses. Polygamist groups in the United States have historically denied young girls the chance to choose their partners, instead handing them over to a caste of privileged elders. These admittedly extreme examples nonetheless demonstrate that there is no way to impose a single moral doctrine upon all of society without “the oppressive use of state power, with all its official crimes and the inevitable brutality and cruelties, followed by the corruption of religion, philosophy, and science (34). This may not stop certain societies from trying, but for Rawls, a liberal society begins with the insight that it is based as much as possible on the voluntary consent of its members who cannot impose one all-encompassing view of what is good and just. Liberalism must also avoid the opposite danger of skepticism, which is that because there is not one prevailing view of the truth, the truth itself is unknowable, and anything is possible. Because a liberal society relies as little as possible on coercion, its citizens must have some set of unifying beliefs, or else society itself will collapse, and the victims of the resulting chaos may look to a firm hand to impose order without freedom.
Rawls’s solution to this dilemma is what he calls a political conception of justice, which is both absolute in its demands and limited in its scope. Justice, as a standard of what is fair and who is deserving, extends only to people in their role as citizens within a particular society. Society takes as a given that its members profess all kinds of different beliefs, none of which is going to dominate by purely persuasive methods, and so the purpose for society is to protect each citizen’s right to pursue the good as they understand it, without encroaching on someone else doing the same. Citizens come together based on the promise of mutual respect and protection of their private beliefs, as well as the right to bring those beliefs into the public sphere so long as they remain consistent with maintaining the equal rights and opportunities of all citizens.
The Basic Structure of a Just Society
Rawls uses the term “basic structure” to identify the key institutions and norms that make up the political life of a liberal society. Its most literal definition is what Rawls calls the “constitutional essentials” (49), the basic regime type of the government and its distribution of power across political institutions. To be considered just, these institutions must be democratic to the extent that sovereignty is vested in the public as a whole, everyone has the equal right to participate in political life, and political questions are addressed publicly according to a standard of reasoning that all citizens accept. However, Rawls prefers a constitutional democracy to a procedural democracy (145). The former secures a set of rights and liberties that are not subject to debate. A procedural democracy is more directly answerable to the popular will but opens up the danger of a majority taking away the rights of a minority. It is also important for a just society to regulate the distribution of economic power, without undue infringement on the right of citizens to make a living as they see fit. In his estimation, either a property-owning democracy or a system of liberal socialism would suffice to balance the good of free markets against the prospect of excessive inequality.
In addition to actual political institutions, the basic structure involves the principles of justice on which those institutions are based. Rawls insists that a society must have a specific notion of justice that its members have agreed upon after comparing it with the alternatives. As the title of the book indicates, he wants a society to adopt a view of justice as fairness, specifically the right of each person to participate in social life and to pursue what they believe to be morally correct, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others to do the same. Since even the most liberal and egalitarian society will invariably produce inequality of some kind, Rawls calls for addressing inequality in terms of “the difference principle” (42-43), which holds that the basic structure must provide the greatest possible benefit to the least advantaged, based on a comparison of available models. The basic structure cannot be utopian, and the “background rules” (51) that obtain for a specific society will never be able to solve all the political difficulties that come up, but as long as there is a consensus on fundamental principles of justice, the given society can achieve a basic level of social harmony that can reproduce itself from one generation to the next.
Freedom and Equality
In democracy, there is a tension between freedom and equality, its two most important values. Even if there is no aristocracy or other formal ranking of classes, a society based on individual freedom is going to generate unequal results because of individuals’ intrinsic talents, luck, and original social standing. One may assume that a society began on a basis of equal opportunity, but over time, those that develop advantages will have the power to ensconce their position. As the gaps between the advantaged and the disadvantaged widen, the latter will find it harder to access the social resources necessary for equal participation in political and economic life. The experience of inequality will “encourage those of lower status to be viewed both by themselves and by others as inferior. This may arouse widespread attitudes of deference and servility on one side and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other” (131). Such class conflict would undermine the social basis of a democracy, in which citizens must see themselves as free and equal and all engaged in a project of fair cooperation. Conversely, restrictions on individual freedom in the name of equality would produce its own resentments among those who believe themselves held back for the advantage of the less deserving.
A major part of Rawls’s project is to harmonize freedom and equality through the overarching concept of justice as fairness. People are free “in that they conceive of themselves and of one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good” (21) and that they may change their idea of the good with experience and reflection. They may then draw on their conceptions of the good to influence public policy, thereby signifying their own moral agency. Equality holds that all people possess the right to hold moral views and to change them, provided that they do not interfere with basic principles of political justice. They should enjoy equal opportunities and a basic expectation of “primary goods” (60) that enable their participation in society. There is no way to guarantee equality of results while still preserving freedom, but inequalities must benefit the least advantaged members of society as much as possible, and excessive concentrations of wealth and power should be liable to regulation. No one can be perfectly free either, as there is no way to come up with a comprehensive list of necessary freedoms, and freedoms often contradict one another, but Rawls believes that it is possible to rank the importance of liberties based on their objective necessity for participation in civic life. Each society will have to work out the particulars of balancing freedom and equality, such as by choosing socialism or capitalism for their economic system or deciding on which tax policies are the most equitable, but a constitutional commitment to justice as fairness should permit greater harmony between freedom and equality than democratic societies have thus far achieved.
Related Titles
By John Rawls
