John Rawls · Philosophy
Rawls’s founding move - to picture the principles of a just society as those that free and equal people would agree on in an ‘original position,’ behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that hides their place, class, talents, and beliefs - so that no one can rig the rules in their own favour.
In 1971 John Rawls published A Theory of Justice and, almost single-handedly, revived political philosophy in the English-speaking world. His question was the oldest one: what makes a society’s basic arrangements - its constitution, its laws, the way it hands out rights, wealth, and opportunity - just? Rawls answered by reaching back to the social-contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, but lifting it to a higher level of abstraction. Do not ask what rules people did or would agree to given their actual bargaining power, he said, for the strong will always dictate to the weak. Ask instead what principles they would agree to in a fair starting situation, one designed from the outset to rule out the advantages that let some dominate others. He named his theory justice as fairness, and its heart is a thought experiment: the original position. Justice, for Rawls, is not one virtue among many that a society may trade away for efficiency or wealth; it is the first thing a society must get right.
The original position is Rawls’s substitute for the old idea of a ‘state of nature.’ It is not a historical event and not a place; it is a device of reasoning, a perspective you can adopt at any time by imagining away everything about your situation that is morally arbitrary. In it sit representatives of citizens, charged with choosing, once and for all, the principles that will govern the ‘basic structure’ of society - the major institutions that distribute rights and duties and shape people’s life prospects from birth. Because the parties are mutually disinterested (each wants to do well for the person they represent) and rational, yet blinded to particulars, their agreement models what free and equal persons could accept as fair. Rawls is explicit that this is his reconstruction of the contract idea: the parties choose from behind the veil, and their choice defines justice.
The deep point of the veil is that it screens out what Rawls calls the ‘morally arbitrary’ - the facts about us that we did nothing to deserve. Whether you are born clever or slow, into a rich family or a poor one, with a temperament the market rewards or one it ignores, is a matter of natural and social luck, the outcome of a ‘natural lottery’ no one earns. A just society, Rawls thought, should not simply let these accidents decide who gets what. By hiding them, the veil prevents anyone from pressing their arbitrary advantages into principles of justice, and forces everyone to take up a genuinely shared, impartial standpoint. This is why the procedure is fair: it treats persons as free and equal by refusing to let the lottery of birth speak in the design of the rules. The result is meant to be principles that all could accept because none could complain the deck was stacked against them.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Rawls revived the social contract at a new level of abstraction: the ‘original position’ is a hypothetical choosing situation, and the ‘veil of ignorance’ strips the parties of all knowledge of their own place, so the principles they agree on cannot be tailored to anyone’s advantage. Explain why ignor…
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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