John Rawls (19212002)

John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century.
He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the 1950s and 60s that helped refocus
Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we
ought to do. His first book, A Theory of Justice [TJ] (1971), revitalized the social-contract
tradition, using it to articulate and defend a detailed vision of egalitarian liberalism. In
Political Liberalism [PL] (1993), he recast the role of political philosophy, accommodating
it to the effectively permanent reasonable pluralism of religious, philosophical, and other
comprehensive doctrines or worldviews that characterize modern societies. He explains
how philosophers can characterize public justification and the legitimate, democratic use
of collective coercive power while accepting that pluralism.

Although most of this article will be devoted to TJ, the exposition of that work will take
account of Political Liberalism and other later works of Rawls. TJ sets out and defends the
principles of Justice as Fairness. Rawls takes the basic structure of society as his subject
matter and utilitarianism as his principal opponent. Part One of TJ designs a social-
contract-type thought experiment, the Original Position (OP), and argues that parties in the
OP will prefer Justice as Fairness to utilitarianism and various other views. In order to
understand the argument from the OP, one must pay special attention to the motivation of
the parties to the OP, which is philosophically stipulated and provided with a Kantian
interpretation. Part Two of TJ checks the fit between the principles of Justice as Fairness
and our more concrete considered views about just institutions, thereby helping move us
towards a reflective equilibrium that supports those principles. Part Three of TJ addresses
the stability of a society organized around Justice as Fairness, arguing that there will be an
important congruence in such a society between peoples views about justice and what
they value. By the time he wrote Political Liberalism, however, Rawls had decided that an
inconsistency in TJ called for recasting the argument for stability. In other ways, the
argument of TJ rested on important simplifications, which had the effect of setting aside
questions about international justice, disability, and familial justice. Rawls turned to these
problems of extension, as he called them, at the end of his career.

Table of Contents
1.Biographical Sketch
2.Rawls's Mature Work: A Theory of Justice (1971)
a. The Basic Structure of Society
b. Utilitarianism as the Principal Opponent
c. The Original Position
i. The Conditions and Purpose of the Original Position
ii. The Motivations of the Parties to the Original Position
iii. Kantian Influence and Interpretation of the Original Position
d. The Principles of Justice as Fairness
e. The Argument from the Original Position
f. Reflective Equilibrium
g. Just Institutions
h. Stability
 i. Congruence
3.Recasting the Argument for Stability: Political Liberalism (1993)
4.Problems of Extension
5.References and Further Reading

1. Biographical Sketch
John Bordley Rawls was born and schooled in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Although his
family was of comfortable means, his youth was twice marked by tragedy. In two successive
years, his two younger brothers contracted an infectious disease from himdiphtheria in
one case and pneumonia in the otherand died. Rawlss vivid sense of the arbitrariness of
fortune may have stemmed in part from this early experience. His remaining, older brother
attended Princeton for undergraduate studies and was a great athlete. Rawls followed his
brother to Princeton. Although Rawls played baseball, he was, in later life at least,
excessively modest about his success at that or at any other endeavor.

Rawls continued for his Ph.D. studies at Princeton and came under the influence of the first
of a series of Wittgensteinean friends and mentors, Norman Malcolm. From them, he learned
to avoid entanglement in metaphysical controversies when possible. Rawlss doctoral
dissertation (1950) already showed, however, that he would not be content to deconstruct
our impulse to ask metaphysical questions; instead, he devoted himself to constructive
philosophical tasks. Turning away from the then-influential program of attempting to
analyze the meaning of the moral concepts, he replaced it with what wasfor a
philosophera more practically oriented task: that of characterizing a general method of
moral decision making. Part of this dissertation work was the basis of his first published
article, Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics. (1951). This was an early attempt to
tackle the central question of Rawlss mature theory: what sort of decision procedure can we
imagine that would help us resolve disputed claims in a fair way?

Of equal significance to Rawlss turn away from conceptual analysis and towards a more
practical conception of moral philosophy was his encounter, during a year (1952-3) as a
Fulbright Fellow in Oxford, with exciting, substantive work in legal and political
philosophy, especially that of H.L.A. Hart and Isaiah Berlin. Hart had made progress in legal
philosophy by connecting the idea of social practices with the institutions of the law. Rawlss
second published essay, Two Concepts of Rules (1955), uses a conception of social
practices influenced by Hart to explore a kind of rule-utilitarianism. Compare TJ at 48n.. In
Isaiah Berlin, Rawls met a brilliant historian of political thoughtsomeone who, by his own
account, had been driven away from philosophy by the aridity of mid-century conceptual
analysis. Berlin influentially traced the historical careers of competing, large-scale values,
such as liberty (which he distinguished as either negative or positive) and equality. Not long
after his time in Oxford, Rawls embarked on what was to become a life-long project of
finding a coherent and attractive way of combining freedom and equality into one conception
of political justice. Cf. PL at 327. This project first took the form of a series of widely-
discussed articles about justice published between 1958 and 1969.

After teaching at Cornell and MIT, Rawls took up a position in the philosophy department
at Harvard in 1962. There he remained, being named a University Professor in 1979.
Throughout his career, he devoted considerable attention to his teaching. In his lectures on
moral and political philosophy, Rawls focused meticulously on great philosophers of the
pastLocke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, and othersalways
approaching them deferentially and with an eye to what we could learn from them. Mentor
to countless graduate students over the years, Rawls inspired many who have become
influential interpreters of these philosophers.

The initial publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 brought Rawls considerable renown.
This complex book, which reveals Rawlss thorough study of economics as well as his
internalization of themes from the philosophers covered in his teaching, has since been
translated into 27 languages. While there are those who would claim a greater originality for
Political Liberalism, TJ remains the cornerstone of Rawlss reputation.

2. Rawls's Mature Work: A Theory of Justice (1971)

a. The Basic Structure of Society

The subject matter of Rawlss theory is societal practices and institutions. Some social
institutions can provoke envy and resentment. Others can foster alienation and exploitation.
Is there a way of organizing society that can keep these problems within livable limits? Can
society be organized around fair principles of cooperation in a way the people would stably
accept?

Rawlss original thought is that equality, or a fair distribution of advantages, is to be

addressed as a background matter by constitutional and legal provisions that structure social
institutions. While fair institutions will influence the life chances of everyone in society,
they will leave individuals free to exercise their basic liberties as they see fit within this fair
set of rules. To carry out this central idea, Rawls takes as the subject matter of TJ the basic
structure of society, defined (as he later put it) as the way in which the major social
institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties
and shape the division of advantages that arises through social cooperation. PL at 258.
Rawlss suggestion is, in effect, that we should put all our effort into seeing to it that the
rules of the game are fair. Once society has been organized around a set of fair rules, people
can set about freely playing the game, without interference.

b. Utilitarianism as the Principal Opponent

Rawls explains in the Preface to the first edition of TJ that one of the books main aims is to
provide a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose utilitarianism. TJ at xvii.
Utilitarianism comes in various forms. Classical utilitarianism, the nineteenth century theory
of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, is the philosophy of the greatest good of the
greatest number. The more modern version is average utilitarianism, which asks us not to
maximize the amount of good or happiness, but rather its average level in society. The
utilitarian idea, as Rawls confronts it, is that society is to be arranged so as to maximize (the
total or average) aggregate utility or expected well-being. Utilitarianism historically
dominated the landscape of moral philosophy, often being refuted, but always rising again
from the ashes. Rawlss view was that until a sufficiently complete and systematic
alternative is put on the table to compete with utilitarianism, its recurrence will be eternal.
In addition to developing that constructive alternative, however, Rawls also offered some
highly influential criticisms of utilitarianism. His critique of average utilitarianism will be
described below. About classical utilitarianism, he famously complains that it adopt[s] for
society as a whole the principle of choice for one man. In so doing, he suggests, it fails to
take seriously the distinction between persons. TJ at 24.

c. The Original Position

Recognizing that social institutions distort our views (by sometimes generating envy,
resentment, alienation, or false consciousness) and bias matters in their own favor (by
indoctrinating and habituating those who grow up under them), Rawls saw the need for a
justificatory device that would give us critical distance from them. The original position
(OP) is his Archimedean Point, the fulcrum he uses to obtain critical leverage. TJ at 230-
32. The OP is a thought experiment that asks: what principles of social justice would be
chosen by parties thoroughly knowledgeable about human affairs in general but wholly
deprivedby the veil of ignoranceof information about the particular person or persons
they represent?

i. The Conditions and Purpose of the Original Position

The OP, as Rawls designs it, self-consciously builds on the long social-contract tradition in
Western political philosophy. In classic presentations, such as John Lockes Second Treatise
of Civil Government (1690), the social contract was sometimes described as if it were an
actual historical event. By contrast, Rawlss social-contract device, like his earlier decision
procedure, is frankly and completely hypothetical. While Rawls is most emphatic about this
in his later work, for example, PL at 75, it is clear already in TJ. He insists there that it is up
to the theorist to construct the social-contract thought-experiment in the way that makes the
most sense given its task of helping us select principles of justice. Especially because of its
frankly hypothetical nature, Rawlss OP carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar
theory of the social contract as found, say in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. TJ at 10.

The idea is to help justify a set of principles of social justice by showing that they would be
selected in the OP. The OP is accordingly set up to build in the moral conditions deemed
necessary for the resulting choice to be fair and to insulate the results from the influence of
the extant social order. The veil of ignorance plays a crucial role in this set-up. TJ at sec. 23.
It assures that each party to the choice is equally or symmetrically situated, with none
enjoying greater power (or threat advantage) than any other. TJ at 116, 121. It also isolates
the parties choice from the contingenciesthe sheer luckunderlying the variations in
peoples natural abilities and talents, their social backgrounds, and their particular societys
historical circumstances. About their society, Rawls has the parties simply assume that it is
characterized by the circumstances of justice, which principally include (a) the fact that
material goods are scarce, but moderately so and (b) that there is, within society, a plurality
of worldviewsconceptions of the good moral, religious, and secular. TJ at sec. 22.

It would be too fanciful to think of the parties to the OP as having the capacity to invent
principles. The point of the thought experiment, rather, is to see which principles would be
chosen in a fair set-up. To use the OP this way, we must offer the parties a menu of principles
to choose from. Rawls offers them various principles to consider. Among them are his own
principles (to be described below) and the two versions of utilitarianism, classical and
average. The crux of Rawlss appeal to the OP is whether he can show that the parties will
prefer his principles to average utilitarianism.

Would rational parties behind a veil of ignorance choose average utilitarianism? The
economist John Harsanyi argues that they would because it would be rational for parties
lacking any other information to maximize their expectation of well-being. Harsanyi (1953)
Since they do not know who they will be, they will therefore want to maximize the average
level of well-being in society. Given Rawlss opposition to utilitarianism, it would be ironic
if Rawlss thought experiment supported it. Because Rawlss OP differs from Harsanyis
choice situation in important ways, however, its parties will not prefer average utilitarianism
to Rawlss competing principles. The most crucial difference concerns the motivation that
is attributed to the parties by stipulation. The veil deprives the parties of any knowledge of
the valuesthe conception of the goodof the person into whose shoes they are to imagine
stepping. What, then, are they to prefer? Since Harsanyi refuses to supply his parties with
any definite motivation, his answer is somewhat mysterious. Cf. TJ at 152. Rawls instead
defines the parties as having a determinate set of motivations.

ii. The Motivations of the Parties to the Original Position

The parties in the hypothetical OP are to choose on behalf of persons in society, for whom
they are, in effect, trustees. PL at 76, 106. The veil of ignorance, however, prevents the
parties from knowing anything particular about the preferences, likes or dislikes,
commitments or aversions of those persons. They also know nothing particular about the
society for which they are choosing. On what basis, then, can the parties choose? To ascribe
to them a full theory of the human good would fly in the face of the facts of pluralism, for
such theories are deeply controversial. Instead, Rawls suggests, we should ascribe to them a
thinner or less controversial set of commitments. At the core of these are what he calls the
primary goods: rights, liberties, and opportunities; income and wealth; and the social bases
of self-respect. To give the parties a definite basis on which to reason, Rawls postulates that
the parties normally prefer more primary goods rather than less. TJ at 123. This is the only
motivation that TJ ascribes to the parties.

In their pursuit of the primary goods, the parties are defined as being mutually
disinterested: each is motivated to obtain as many primary goods as he or she can and does
not care if others attain primary goods. TJ at 12. The parties are motivated neither by
benevolence nor by envy or spite. Many commentators think that this assumption of the
parties mutual disinterest reflects an unattractively individualistic view of human nature,
but, as with the motivations ascribed to the parties, the ascription of mutual disinterest is not
intended to mirror human nature. The assumption of mutual disinterest reflects Rawlss
development of, and reaction against, both the sympathetic-spectator tradition in ethics,
exemplified by David Hume and Adam Smith, and the more recent ideal-observer theory.
The former tradition attempts to imagine the point of view of a fully benevolent spectator of
the human scene who reacts impartially and sympathetically to all human travails and
successes. The ideal-observer theory typically imagines a somewhat more dispassionate or
impersonal, but still omniscient, observer of the human scene. Each of these approaches asks
us to imagine what such a spectator or observer would morally approve.

Against these theories, Rawls raises a number of objections, which can be boiled down to
this: either they involve neglecting the separateness of persons (in roughly the same way that
utilitarianism does when it adds up everyones happiness), TJ at 164, or, if they seek to avoid
utilitarian aggregation, they will find that benevolence is at sea as long as its many loves
are in opposition in the persons of its many objects. TJ at 166. In other words, all difficult
questions of human conflict will be simply reproduced within the sympathetic spectators
breast. Rawls was determined to get beyond this impasse. He suggests that the OP should
combine the mutual-disinterest assumption with the veil of ignorance. This combination, he
argues, will achieve the rough moral equivalence of universal benevolence without either
neglecting the separateness of persons or sacrificing definiteness of results. TJ at 128.

As we will see, the definite positive motivations that Rawls ascribes to the parties are crucial
to explaining why they will prefer his principles to average utilitarianism. Because the
parties motivations are essential to the arguments bearing on this central philosophical
contest, it is important to attend to Rawlss rationale for giving this motivation to the parties.

The primary goods are supposed to be uncontroversially worth seeking, albeit not for their
own sakes. Initially, TJ presented the primary goods simply as goods that normally have a
use whatever a persons plan of life. TJ at 54. Although this claim seems quite modest,
philosophers rebutted it by describing life plans or worldviews for which one or another of
the primary goods is not useful. These counterexamples revealed the need for a different
rationale for the primary goods. At roughly the same time, Rawls began to develop further
the Kantian strand in his view. These Kantian ideas ended up providing a new rationale for
the primary goods.

iii. Kantian Influence and Interpretation of the Original Position

Rawls had long admired Immanuel Kants moral philosophy, making it central to his
teaching of the subject. See CP essays 13, 16, 23. TJ aims to build on Kants central ideas
and to improve on them in certain respects. TJ at sec. 41. By insisting, as against
utilitarianism, on the separateness of persons, Rawls carries on Kants theme of respect
for persons. Kant held that the true principles of morality are not imposed on us by our
psyches or by eternal conceptual relations that hold true independently of us; rather, Kant
argued, the moral law is a law that our reason gives to itself. It is, in this sense, self-chosen
or autonomous law. Kants position is not that morality requires whatever Ms. Smith or Mr.
Jones chooses to believe it does. Rather, his claim is that the rational (or vernnftig) nature
that each person shares shapes a single moral law, valid for all: the categorical imperative.

Rawls suggests that the OP well models Kants central ideas. The OP is set up so that the
parties reflect our nature as reasonable and rationalRawlss dual way of rendering the
Kantian adjective vernnftig. Once it is so set up the parties are to choose principles. Their
task of choosing principles thus models the idea of autonomy. In designing the OP, Rawls
also aimed to resolve what he took to be two crucial difficulties with Kants moral theory:
the danger of empty abstractness early stressed by Hegel and the difficulty of assuring that
the moral laws dictates adequately express, as Kant thought they must, our nature as free
and equal reasonable and rational beings. Rawls addresses the issue of abstractness in many
waysperhaps most fundamentally by dropping Kants aim of finding an a priori basis for
morality. Although Rawlss use of the veil of ignorance keeps particular facts at a distance,
he insists, as against Kant, that moral theory must be free to use contingent assumptions
and general facts as it pleases. TJ at 44. Another feature that reduces the abstractness of
Rawlss view is his focus on institutionson the basic structure of society. In this light, we
can see his institutional focus as carrying forward Hegels insight that the idea of human
freedom can achieve an adequately concrete realization only by a unified social structure of
a certain kind.

The OP also addresses the second problem with Kants moral theorythe problem of
expression. The OP, Rawls suggests, may be viewed as a procedural interpretation of
Kants conception of autonomy and the categorical imperative within the framework of an
empirical theory. TJ at 226. To be autonomous, for Kant, is to act on a law that one gives
oneself, a law adequate to ones nature as a free and equal, reasonable and rational person.
The parties to the OP, in selecting principles, implement this idea of autonomy. How they
represent equality and rationality are obvious, for they are equally situated and are rational
by definition. Reasonableness enters the OP not principally by the rationality of the parties
but by the constraints on themmost especially the veil of ignorance. They are also
constrained in ways not yet mentioned and that we shall not discuss further, such as the
formal constraints of the concept of right. TJ at sec. 23. The veil also expresses (or
models) a crucial aspect of our freedom, namely our freedom to endorse principles in a
way that is not controlled by the historical contingencies of the society into which we are
born. TJ at 225.

Rawlss attempt to solve the problem of expression also led him towards a fuller articulation
of the parties motivations, ascribing to them certain highest-order interests. An
intermediate step in this direction is his characterization of our three highest-order powers,
the moral powers that persons have as reasonable and rational beings. The rational
corresponds to Kants hypothetical imperative with its directive to take effective means to
ones ends; the reasonable corresponds to Kants categorical imperative, the moral law
that demands that we do the right thing, irrespective of what our ends are. To conceive of
persons as reasonable and rational, then, is to conceive of them as having certain higher-
order powers. On the side of the rational, there is, first, the power to frame our endsour
conception of the goodand to pursue it by selecting effective means to satisfying them.
Second, we can also revise our ends when we see reason to do so. Third, on the side of the
reasonable, we have the power or capacity to act from an effective sense of justice: we
can do the right thing.

This Kantian conception of the powers of reasonable and rational persons directly supports
Rawlss later account of the motivations of the parties. The parties are conceived as having
highest-order interests that correspond directly to these highest-order powers. Although the
account of the moral powers was present in TJ, it is only in his later works that Rawls uses
this idea to defend and elaborate the motivation of the parties in the OP.

Rawlss account of the moral powers explains why it makes sense to postulate that the parties
are motivated to secure the primary goods. In various, complicated ways, in his later work,
Rawls defends the primary goods as being required for free and equal citizens to promote
and protect their three moral powers. This is to cast the primary goods as items objectively
needed by moral persons occupying the role of free and equal citizens. While the list of
primary goods may not be a perfect or complete account of what is needed to support this
aspect of moral personality, Rawls claims that it is the best available account that we can
muster in the face of the fact of reasonable pluralism. PL at 188-9.

In addition to providing a new rationale for the primary goods, Rawlss account of the moral
powers also became, in his later work, a basis for elaborating the motivations ascribed to the
parties. In Political Liberalism, Rawls describes the motivation as: The parties in the
original position have no direct interests except an interest in the person each of them
represents and they assess principles of justice in terms of primary goods. In addition, they
are concerned with securing for the person they represent the higher-order interests we have
in developing and exercising our moral powers and in securing the conditions under
which we can further our determinate conceptions of the good, whatever it is. PL at 105-6.
Here, the motivation of the parties is importantly extended by postulating that these
hypothetical beings care about the moral powers of persons in society and also, by extension,
about those persons ability to pursue what they particularly care about or are committed to.

Rawlss assumptions about the motivations of the parties involve frankly moral content and
are justified on openly moral grounds, as he had always avowed. His aim remains,
nonetheless, to assemble in the OP a series of relatively uncontroversial, relatively fixed
points among our considered moral judgments and to build an argument on that basis for the
superiority of some principles of justice over others.

d. The Principles of Justice as Fairness

Justice as Fairness is Rawlss name for the set of principles he defends in TJ. He refers to
the two principles of Justice as Fairness, but the second has two parts. These principles
address two different aspects of the basic structure of society: the First Principle addresses
the essentials of the constitutional structure. It holds that society must assure each citizen
an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme
is compatible with the same scheme for all. PL at 5. The second principle addresses instead
those aspects of the basic structure that shape the distribution of opportunities, offices,
income, wealth, and in general social advantages. The first part of the second principle holds
that the social structures that shape this distribution must satisfy the requirements of fair
equality of opportunity. The second part of the second principle is the famousor
infamousDifference Principle. It holds that social and economic inequalities are to
be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. PL at 6. Each of these
three centrally addresses a different set of primary goods: the First Principle concerns rights
and liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity concerns opportunities; and the
Difference Principle primarily concerns income and wealth. (That the view adequately
secures the social basis of self-respect is something that Rawls argues more holistically). TJ
at 477-8.

e. The Argument from the Original Position

The argument that the parties in the OP will prefer Justice as Fairness to utilitarianism and
to the various other alternative principles with which they are presented divides into two
parts. There is, first, the question whether the parties will insist upon securing a scheme of
equal basic liberties and upon giving them top priority. Secondly, assuming that they will,
there remains the question whether social inequalities should be governed by Rawlss
second principle, comprising Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle,
or else should be addressed in a utilitarian way. Making the latter choice, and so inserting
utilitarianism into a position subordinate to the First Principle, yields what Rawls calls a
mixed conception. TJ at 107.
Each of these parts of the argument from the OP is considerably aided by the clarified
account of the primary goods that emerges in Rawlss later work and that has been set out
above in the section on the motivation of the parties to the OP. Regarding the first part of
the argument from the OP, the crucial point is that the parties are stipulated to care about
rights and liberties. They further know, as a general fact about human beings, that the
determinate persons on whose behalf they are choosing are likely to have firmly and deeply-
held religious, philosophical, and moral views. PL at 311 They also have a higher-order
interest in protecting these persons abilities to advance these conceptions. Accordingly,
they cannot take chances by permitting a lesser liberty of conscience to minority religions,
say, on the possibility that those they represent espouse a majority or dominant religion.
PL at 311. Rawls admits that persons deeply-held views are not always set in stone, but he
insists that not all circumstances in which they may change are morally acceptable. He
argues that protecting ones ability to exercise ones highest-order power to change ones
mind about such things requires an adequate scheme of basic liberties. PL at 312-3. In
addition, he argues that securing the First Principle importantly serves the higher-order
interest in an effective sense of justiceand does so better than the pure utilitarian
alternativeby better promoting social stability, mutual respect, and social unity. PL at 317-
24.

The second part of the argument from the OP takes the First Principle for granted and
addresses the matter of social inequalities. Its sticking point has always been the Difference
Principle, which strikingly and influentially articulates a liberal-egalitarian socioeconomic
position. While there are questions about Rawlss precise formulation and implementation
of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity, it is far less controversial, both in theory
and in practice. It is the Difference Principle that would most clearly demand deep reforms
in existing societies. The set-up of the OP suggests the following, informal argument for the
difference principle: because equality is an ideal fundamentally relevant to the idea of fair
cooperation, the OP situates the parties symmetrically and deprives them of information that
could distinguish them or allow one to gain bargaining advantage over another. Given this
set-up, the parties will consider the situation of equal distribution a reasonable starting point
in their deliberations. Since they know all the general facts about human societies, however,
the parties will realize that society might depart from this starting point by instituting a
system of social rules that differentially reward the especially productive and could achieve
results that are better for everyone than are the results under rules guaranteeing full equality.
This is the kind of inequality that the Difference Principle allows and requires: departures
from full equality that make some better off and no one worse off.

While this is the intuitive idea behind the Difference Principle, Rawlss statement of the
principle is more careful and precise. Three main refinements are worth noting. First,
because the principle pertains to the basic structure of society and because the parties are
comparing different societies organized around different principles, the expectations that
matter are not those of particular people but those of representative members of broad social
classes. Second, to make his exposition a little simpler, Rawls makes some technical
assumptions that let him focus only on the expectations of the least-well-off representative
class in a given society. (These assumptionsof close-knitness and chain-connection
enable him to ignore, for instance, the possibility of increasing the inequality between the
rich and the middle-class without affecting those on the bottom. For those who find these
simplifying assumptions too restrictive, Rawls offers a multi-tiered, or lexical, version of
the Difference Principle. TJ at 72. Allowed by these simplifying assumptions to focus only
on the least well off representative persons, the Difference Principle thus holds that social
rules allowing for inequalities in income and wealth are acceptable just in case those who
are least well off under those rules are better off than the least-well-off representative
persons under any alternative sets of social rules. This formulation already takes account of
the third refinement, which recognizes that the people who are the worst off under one set
of social arrangements may not be the same people as those who are worst off under some
other set of social arrangements. Cf. PL at 7n.

The Difference Principle requires society to look out for the least well off. But would the
parties to the OP prefer the Difference Principle to a utilitarian principle of distribution?
Here, Rawlss interpretation of the OP matters. It took a while for commentators to grasp
the degree to which Rawlss characterization of the OP departed from the much simpler one
favored by Harsanyi, from the point of view of which Rawlss argument for the Difference
Principle appeared to be a plain mistake. For parties like Harsanyis, it would be irrational
to choose the Difference Principle. Harsanyis parties lack any determinate motivation: as
Rawls puts it, they are bare-persons. TJ at 152. With nothing but the bare idea of rationality
to guide them, they will naturally choose any principle that will maximize their utility
expectation. Since this is what the principle of Average Utilitarianism does, they will choose
it. Yet as we have seen, Rawls departs from Harsanyis version of the thought experiment
by attributing a determinate motivation to the parties, while denying that an index of the
primary goods provides an interpretation of what the parties conceive to be good. Rawls
never defends the primary goods as goods in themselves. Rather, he defends them as
versatile means. In the later theory, the primary goods are defended as facilitating the pursuit
and revision, by the persons the parties represent, of their conceptions of the good. While
the parties do not know what those conceptions of the good are, they do care about whether
the persons they represent can pursue and revise them.

With this departure from Harsanyi in mind, we may finally explain why the parties in the
OP will prefer the principles of Justice as Fairness, including the Difference Principle, to
average utilitarianism. In laying out the reasoning that favors the Difference Principle, Rawls
argues that the parties will have reason to use the maximin rule. The maximin rule is a
general rule for making choices under conditions of uncertainty. It is markedly different
from the rule of maximizing expected value, the more averaging sort of rule that
Harsanyis parties employ. The maximin rule directs one to select that alternative where the
minimum place is higher (on whatever the relevant measure is) than the minimum place in
any other alternative. Applied to the theory of social justice, maximin is an approach a
person would choose for the design of a society in which his enemy is to assign him his
place. TJ at 133.

The parties to Rawlss OP are not bare-persons but determinate-persons. TJ at 152. They
care about the primary goods and the highest-order moral powers, but they also know, in
effect, that the primary goods that they are motivated to seek are not what the persons they
represent ultimately care about. Accordingly, the parties will give special importance to
protecting the persons they represent against social allocations of primary goods that might
frustrate those persons ability to pursue their determinate conceptions of the good. If the
parties knew they had in hand an adequate sketch of the good, they might use that to assess
the gamble they face, choosing in a maximizing way like Harsanyis parties. But Rawlss
parties instead know that the primary goods that they are motivated to seek do not adequately
match anyones conception of the good. Accordingly, it is rational for them to take a cautious
approach. They must do what they can to assure to the persons they represent have a
sufficient supply of primary goods for those persons to be able to pursue whatever it is that
they do take to be good.
f. Reflective Equilibrium
Although the OP attempts to collect and express a set of crucial constraints that are
appropriate to impose on the choice of principles of justice, Rawls recognized from the
beginning that we could never just hand over the endorsement of those principles to this
hypothetical device. Rather, he foresaw the need to work from both ends, pruning and
adjusting things as we go. TJ at 18. That is, we need to stop and consider whether, on
reflection, we can endorse the results of the OP. If those results clash with some of our more
concrete considered judgments about justice, then we have reason to think about modifying
the OP.

Alternativelyand this is what Rawls means by working from both endsinstead of

modifying the OP, we might decide that the argument from the OP gives us good reason to
modify the considered judgments of justice with which its conclusions clash. Eventually, we
may hope that this process reaches a reflective equilibrium. If it does, Rawls wrote, we
shall find a description of the initial situation that matches our considered judgments duly
pruned and adjusted. Ibid.

The reflective equilibrium has been an immensely influential idea about moral justification.
It is not a full theory of justification. When it was introduced, however, it suggested a
different approach to justifying moral theories than was being commonly pursued. The idea
of reflective equilibrium takes two steps away from the sort of conceptual analysis that was
then prevalent. First, working on the basis of considered judgments suggests that it is not
necessary to build moral theories on necessary or a priori premises. What matters, rather, is
whether the premises are ones that we do, in fact, accept. TJ at 19. Rawls characterizes
considered judgments as simply judgments reached under conditions where our sense of
justice is likely to operate without distortion. TJ at 42. Second, the sort of pruning and
adjusting that Rawls assumes will be involved in the search for reflective equilibrium implies
that theories need not aim for a perfect fit with theory-independent data. Whereas the
practitioners of conceptual analysis had raised to a fine art the method of generating
counterexamples to a general theory, Rawls writes that objections by way of
counterexample are to be made with care. TJ at 45. Checking a theorys fit with ones more
concrete considered judgments is only a way-station on the route to reflective equilibrium.
Reaching it might involve revising some of those more concrete judgments. A third novel
idea about justification thus emerges from this picture: it involves arguments built in various
different directions at once. The resulting justification, as Rawls puts it, is a matter of the
mutual support of many considerations. TJ at 19, 507.

Eventually, the hope is that each person will reach a reflective equilibrium that coincides
with every other persons. Since it is up to each person, however, to determine which
arguments are most compelling, Rawls stresses that the reader must make up his or her own
mind, rather than trying to predict or anticipate what everyone else will think. TJ at 44.

g. Just Institutions
Part Two of TJ aims to show that Justice as Fairness fits our considered judgments on a
whole range of more concrete topics in moral and political philosophy, such as the idea of
the rule of law, the problem of justice between generations, and the justification of civil
disobedience. Consistent with the idea of reflective equilibrium, Rawls suggests pruning and
adjusting those judgments in a number of places. One of the thorniest such issues, that of
tolerating the intolerant, recurs in PL. In addition to serving its main purpose of facilitating
reflective equilibrium on Justice as Fairness, Part Two also offers a treasure trove of
influential and insightful discussion of these and other topics in political philosophy. There
is hardly space here even to summarize all the worthwhile points that Rawls makes about
these topics. A summary of his controversial and influential discussion of the idea of desert
(that is, getting what one deserves), however, will illustrate how he proceeds.

As we have seen, Rawls was deeply aware of the moral arbitrariness of fortune. He held that
no one deserves the social position into which he or she is born or the physical characteristics
with which he or she is endowed from birth. He also held that no one deserves the character
traits he or she is born with, such as his or her capacity for hard work. As he wrote, The
natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society
at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way
that institutions deal with these facts. TJ at 87.

In Part Two, Rawls sets out to square this stance on the moral arbitrariness of fortune with
our considered judgments about desert, which do hold that desert is relevant to distributive
claims. For instance, we tend to think that people who work harder deserve to be rewarded
for their effort. We may also think that the talented deserve to be rewarded for the use of
their talents, whether or not they deserved those talents in the first place. With these
common-sense precepts of justice, Rawls does not disagree; but he clarifies them by
responding to them dialectically. TJ at sec. 48. He questions whether these common-sense
claims are meant to stand independently of any assumptions about whether or not the basic
institutions of societyespecially those institutions of property law, contract law, and
taxation that, in effect, define the property claims and transfer rules that make up the
marketplaceare just. It is unreasonable, Rawls argues, to say that desert is a direct basis
for distributional claims even if the socio-economic system is unfair. It is much more
reasonable to hold, he suggests, that whether one deserves the compensation one can
command in the job marketplace, for instance, depends on whether the basic social
institutions are fair. Are they set up so as to assure, among other things, an appropriate
relationship between effort and reward? It is this justice of the basic structure that is Rawlss
topic.

Rawlss alternative proposal is that the common-sense precepts about desert generally
presuppose that the basic structure of society is itself fair. When they are qualified in line
with this presupposition, Rawls supports them. To prevent the unqualified and the qualified
claims from being confused with each other, however, he uses the term legitimate
expectations as a term of art to express the claims of desert appropriately so qualified. A
crucial idea of Justice as Fairness is that fundamental principles of justice must be respected
for the rules of social cooperation to be fair, and that when they are, we should allow the
free operation of the market largely to determine peoples legitimate expectations. (This
dialectical clarification of the moral import of desert, however, did not satisfy all
commentators. See Robert Nozick (1974).

h. Stability
In pursuing his novel topic of the justice of the basic structure of society, Rawls posed novel
questions. One set of questions concerned what he calls the stability of those societies
whose institutions live up to the requirements of a given set of principles of justice. The
stability of the institutions called for by a given set of principles of justicetheir ability to
endure over time and to re-establish themselves after temporary disturbancesis a quality
those principles must have if they are to serve their purposes.. TJ at 398-400. Unstable
institutions would not secure the liberties, rights, and opportunities that the parties care
about. If any set of institutions realizing a given set of principles were inherently unstable,
that would suggest a need to revise those principles. Accordingly, Rawls argues, in Part
Three of TJ, that institutions embodying Justice as Fairness would be stable even more
stable than institutions embodying the utilitarian principle.

In addressing the question of stability, Rawls never leaves behind the perspective of moral
justification. Stability of a kind might be achieved by arranging a stand-off of opposing but
equal armies. The results of such a balance of power are not of interest to Rawls. Rather, the
stability question he asks concerns whether, in a society that conforms to the principles,
citizens can wholeheartedly accept those principles. Wholeheartedness will require, for
instance, that the reasons on the basis of which the citizens accept the principles are reasons
affirmed by those very principles. PL at xlii. If stability can be grounded on such
wholeheartedly moral reasonsas opposed to ulterior reasonsthen it is stability for the
right reasons. PL at xxxix. In TJ, the account of stability for the right reasons involved
imagining that this wholeheartedness arose from individuals being thoroughly educated,
along Kantian lines, to think of fairness in terms of the principles of Justice as Fairness. Cf.
PL at lxii. As we will see, he later came to think that this account violated the assumption of
pluralism.

The imaginative exercise of assessing the comparative stability of different principles would
be useless and unfair if one were to compare, say, an enlightened and ideally-run set of
institutions embodying Justice as Fairness with the stupidest possible set of institutions
compatible with the utilitarian principle. In order to standardize the terms of comparison,
Rawls discusses only the well-ordered societies corresponding to each of the rival sets of
principles. His notion of a well-ordered society is complex. See CP at 232-5. The gist of it
is that the relevant principles of justice are publicly accepted by everyone and that the basic
social institutions are publicly known (or believed with good reason) to satisfy those
principles.

Assessing the comparative stability of alternative well-ordered societies requires a complex

imaginative effort at tracing likely phenomena of social psychology. As Rawls comments,
One conception of justice is more stable than another if the sense of justice that it tends to
generate is stronger and more likely to override disruptive inclinations and if the institutions
it allows foster weaker impulses and temptations to act justly. CP at 398. In order to address
the first of these issues, about the strength of the sense of justice, Chapter VIII develops a
rich and somewhat original account of moral education. Drawing upon empirical research
in developmental psychology, Rawls describes the gradual development of individuals
senses of justice as involving three stages: the morality of authority, which is fostered in
families; the morality of association; and the morality of principles. He argues that each of
these stages of moral education will work more effectively under Justice as Fairness than it
will under utilitarianism. TJ at chap. 8. He also argues that a society organized around the
two principles of Justice as Fairness will be less prone to the disruptive effects of envy than
will a utilitarian society. TJ at secs. 80-81.
i. Congruence
As we have seen, the veil of ignorance disconnects the argument from the OP from any given
individuals full conception of the good. The final question addressed by TJ attempts to
reconnect justice to each individuals good, not in general, but within the well-ordered
society of Justice as Fairness. A stable society is one that generates attitudes, such as are
encapsulated in an effective sense of justice, that support the just institutions of that society.
If, in the well-ordered society, having those attitudes is also a good for the persons who have
them, then there is a match between justice and goodness that Rawls calls congruence.
TJ at 350.

In order to address this question of congruence, TJ develops an account of the good for
individuals. Chapter VII of TJ, in fact, develops a quite general theory of goodnesscalled
goodness as rationalityand then applies it to the special case of the good of an individual
over a complete life. Rawls starts from the suggestion that A is a good X if and only if A
has the properties (to a higher degree than the average or standard X) which it is rational to
want in an X, given what Xs are used for, or expected to do, and the like (whichever rider
is appropriate). TJ at 350-1. This idea, developed in dialogue with the leading alternatives
from the middle of the 20th century, still repays attention. To work out this suggestion for
the case of the good for persons, Rawls influentially developed and deployed the notion of
a life plan. A rational plan of life for an individual, he argued, is answerable to certain
principles of deliberative rationality. These Rawls sets out in a low-key way that masks
the power and originality of his formulations. TJ at 359-72.

Rawlss argument for congruencethat having an effective sense of justice built around the
principles of Justice as Fairness will be a good for each individualis a complex and
philosophically deep one. It appeals to at least four types of intermediate good, each of which
may be presumed to be of value to just about everyone: (i) the development and exercise of
complex talents (which Rawlss Aristotelian Principle presumes to be a good for human
beings), TJ at 374, (ii) autonomy, (iii) community, and (iv) the unity of the self. Rawlss
argument for congruence is spread out across many sections of TJ. Some of its main threads
are pulled together by Samuel Freeman in his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to
Rawls. Freeman (2003). With regard to autonomy, to supplement the positive argument
flowing from the Kantian interpretation of the OP, Rawls argues that the type of objectivity
claimed for the principles of Justice as Fairness is not at odds with the idea of the
autonomous establishment of principles. TJ at sec. 78. He further argues that Justice as
Fairness supports the kind of tightly-knit community he calls a social union of social
unions, marked by the shared purpose or common aim of cooperating together to realize
their own and anothers nature in ways allowed by the principles of justice. TJ at 462. If
Rawls is right about the congruence of goodness and justice, these ways are hardly trivial.
(Not long after TJ was published, it came under attack by a set of critics who identified
themselves as communitarians, see for example MacIntyre (1984) and Sandel (1998).
Ironically, the communitarian critique focused largely on Parts One and Two of TJ, giving
short shrift to the powerful articulation of this ideal of community in Part Three.) Finally,
regarding the unity of the self, Rawls criticizes the Procrustean sort of unity that could come
from attaching oneself to a single dominant end. He notes the advantages of a conception
of the unity of the self that hangs, instead, on the regulative status of principles of justice.
TJ at secs. 83-85. The cumulative effect of these appeals to the development of talent,
autonomy, community, and the unity of the self is to support the claim of Justice as Fairness
to congruence. In a well-ordered society corresponding to Justice as Fairness, Rawls
concludes, an effective sense of justice is a good for the individual who has it. In TJ, this
congruence between justice and goodness is the main basis for concluding that individual
citizens will wholeheartedly accept the principles of justice as fairness.

3. Recasting the Argument for Stability: Political

Liberalism (1993)
Rawls has the parties to the OP assume that the society for which they are choosing
principles is in the circumstances of justice, which include the presence of a plurality of
irreconcilable moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines. But his argument for the
comparative stability and the congruence of Justice as Fairness, imagines a well-ordered
society in which everyone is brought up in ways deeply informed by the adherence by all
adults to the same principles of justice. Accordingly, his discussion of stability and
congruence in Part Three of TJ is at odds with the assumption of pluralism. In his second
book, Political Liberalism [PL], he set out to rectify this serious problem. PL at xvii.

PL clarifies that the only acceptable way to rectify the problem is to modify the account of
stability and congruence, because pluralism is no mere theoretical posit. Rather, pluralism
has been endemic among the liberal democracies since the 16th century wars of religion.
Moreover, pluralism is a permanent feature of liberal or non-repressive societies. It does not
rest on irrationality. On the contrary, within a wide range such pluralism is reasonable and
will not be erased by peoples attempts to cooperate reasonably. That is because a series of
intractable burdens of judgment all but preclude reasoned convergence on fundamental
and comprehensive principles about how to live. PL at 54-8. Accordingly, Rawls takes it as
a fact that the kind of uniformity in fundamental moral and political beliefs that he imagined
in Part Three of TJ can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state force. He calls this
the fact of oppression. PL at 37. Since he alsounsurprisinglyholds that oppression is
illegitimate, he refrains from offering fundamental and comprehensive principles of how to
live. In this way, his insistence on the fact of oppression prompts a marked scaling back of
the traditional aims of political philosophy.

The seminal idea of PL is overlapping consensus. In an overlapping consensus, each

citizenno matter which of societys many comprehensive conceptions he or she
endorsesends up endorsing the same limited, political conception of justice, each for his
or her own reasons. The principal role of the overlapping consensus is to replace TJs
description of wholehearted acceptance. Unlike TJs description, the overlapping consensus
conceptually reconciles wholehearted acceptance with the fact of reasonable pluralism.

Part of this newer approach is the distinction between comprehensive conceptions, which
address all questions about how to live, and political conceptions, which address only
political questions. This distinction has proven somewhat troublesome. The domain of the
political, as Rawls calls it, is not completely distinct from morality. In concerning himself
only with the political, he is not setting aside all moral principles and turning instead to mere
strategy or Realpolitik. On the contrary, a political conception is, of course, a moral
conception, but it is a moral conception that concerns itself only with the basic structure of
society. PL at 11. Further, a political conception is one that may be developed in a
freestanding way, drawing only upon the very great values of the political, rather than
being presented as deriving from any more comprehensive moral or religious doctrine. PL
at 139. A corollary of this approach is that such a political liberalism is not wholly neutral
about the good. PL at 191-3. While Justice as Fairness is one such political conception, in
PL Rawls makes a point of stressing that it is just one member of the broader family of views
he refers to as the reasonable liberal political conceptions.

Armed with the idea of an overlapping consensus on a reasonable political conception,

Rawls could have contented himself with describing the historical and sociological grounds
for hoping that a reasonable overlapping consensus on a political liberalism might be
reached. Hope is indeed the leitmotif of PL. E.g PL at,40, 65, 172, 246, 252, 392. But because
Rawls never drops his role as an advocate of political liberalism, he must go beyond such
disinterested sociological speculation. He must find and describe ways of advocating this
view that are compatible with his full, late recognition of the fact of reasonable pluralism.
This attempt is what makes PL so rich, difficult, and interesting.

The difficulty is this: to advocate Justice as Fairness or any other political liberalism as true
would be to clash with many comprehensive religious and moral doctrines, including those
that simply deny that truth or falsity apply to claims of political morality, as well as those
that insist that political-moral truths derive only from some divine revelation. To preserve
the possibility of an overlapping consensus on political liberalism, it might be thought that
its defenders must deny that political liberalism is simply true, severely hampering their
ability to defend it. To cope with this difficulty, Rawls pioneered a stance in political
philosophy that mirrored his general personal modesty: a stance of avoidance. Using the
method of avoidance, Rawls neither asserts nor denies such truth claims. CP at 395. The
central idea, he writes, is that political liberalism moves within the category of the political
and leaves philosophy as it is. PL at 375. Perhaps defending political liberalism as the most
reasonable political conception is to defend it as true; but, again, Rawls neither asserts nor
denies that this is so.

Developing a compelling freestanding presentation of political morality may be possible if

we may draw upon a shared set of relevant moral ideas implicit in the background culture
of democratic societies. PL at 14. Foremost among such shared ideas is the idea of fair
cooperation among free and equal citizens. Much of PL is accordingly devoted to recasting
the earlier argument for Justice as Fairness in terms that are political, not metaphysical.
Many of the revisions concern the arguments for various features of the OP. Although these
revisions occupy much of PL, they need not be covered further here, as most of them have
been already anticipated in the above exposition of TJ. To have structured the exposition in
this way is to have sided with those who see considerable unity in Rawlss work, for
example, Wenar (2004). One important change, however, is that PL goes to considerably
further lengths to show that the values to which the view appeals are political, rather than
being tied up in any particular comprehensive doctrine. For instance, that citizens are thought
of as free is defended, not by general metaphysical truths about human nature, but rather by
our widely shared political convictions. On the road to Damascus Saul of Tarsus becomes
Paul the Apostle. Yet such a conversion implies no change in our public or institutional
identity. PL at 31. On the contrary, our political rights ought not to vary with such changes.
To think of political rights in this way is to think of citizens as free, in a relevant, political
sense.

Instead of seeing a fundamental unity to Rawlss work, some commentators emphasize what
they take to be PLs new focus on political legitimacy, as distinct from political justice, for
example, Estlund (1998) and Dreben (2003). It is certainly true that Rawls prominently
deploys a liberal principle of legitimacy that was not present in TJ. This principle states
that

[O]ur exercise of political power is proper and hence justifiable only when it is
exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens
may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals
acceptable to them as reasonable and rational. PL at 217; cf. 137.

This principle thus appears to connect Rawlss view to that of others working in political
and democratic theory who lean on the notion of reasons that all can accept, for example,
Gutmann and Thompson (1996). Rawls, however, leans more heavily than most on the
notion of reasonableness. This is apparent in a late essay, where he writes that our exercise
of political power is proper only when we reasonably think that other citizens might also
reasonably accept those reasons [on which it is based]. CP at 579.

These further qualifications hint at the relatively limited purpose for which Rawls appeals,
within PL, to this principle of legitimacy. The principle is part of his account of public
reason in pluralist societies. This account answers the question: how can we, in political
society, reason with one another so as to set priorities and make political decisions, given
the fact of reasonable pluralism and the burdens of judgment that make it permanent?
Finding reasons that we reasonably think others might accept is a crucial part of the answer.
The demand that we do so makes up the core of the duty of civility that binds citizens acting
in any official capacity. Rawlss limits on public reasoning have been highly controversial,
but it is important to remember that they form part of his revised thought experiment about
stability. The overall question of PL is similar to that of Part Three of TJ: what grounds do
we have for thinking that a political liberalism would be stable? In this context, Rawlss duty
of civility may be seen as contributing his defense of the following conditional claim: if
citizens of a pluralist society would abide by such restraints of civility, and if a political
liberalism were the object of an overlapping consensus, then that political liberalism would
be stable.

To this observation, some of the critics of Rawlss account of public reason reply that
accepting this kind of restraint on public dialogue would be too high a price to pay for a
stable liberalism. See Richardson & Weithman vol. 5 (1999). Yet in his last essay on the
subject, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (in LP as well as CP), Rawls introduced
qualifications to his duty of civility that have mollified some. To begin with, he emphasizes
that this stricture is not meant to restrict public discussion in the background culture in
any way, but only to constrain certain official interactions. He further introduces a proviso
that allows one to rely, even in official contexts, on reasons dependent on one or another
comprehensive doctrine, so long as in due course one provides properly public reasons.
CP at 584. Even this revised account of civility remains highly debatable. Still, it should
make a difference to the debate whether we consider the restriction only as part of a
hypothetical consideration of the stability of a given well-ordered society (specifically, one
that has reached overlapping consensus on some political liberalism) or rather as a doctrine
about what civility requires in our society, here and now.

4. Problems of Extension
The modesty and restraint we have noted in Rawlss general approach is also revealed in the
way he set aside a number of difficult questions that properly arise within his self-assigned
topic. Complicated as his view is, he was keenly aware of the many simplifying assumptions
made by his argument. We need to be tolerant of simplifications. TJ at 45-6. His most
prominent simplifications are the following two: the assumption (for the time being) that
society is a closed system isolated from other societies, TJ at 7, and that all citizens are
fully cooperating members of a society over a complete life. CP at 332; cf. PL at 20. These
simplifications set aside questions about international justice and about justice for the
disabled. An additional simplifying assumption implicit in the account of moral
development in Part Three of TJ, is that families are just and caring. Relaxing each of these
three simplifying assumptions gives rise to important and challenging problems of
extension for a Rawlsian view.

In The Law of Peoples [LP] (1999), Rawls relaxes the assumption that society is a closed
system that coincides with a nation-state. Once this assumption is dropped, the question that
comes to the fore is: upon what principles should the foreign policy of a decent liberal regime
be founded? Rawls first looks at this question from the point of view of ideal theory, which
supposes that all peoples enjoy a decent liberal-democratic regime. At this level, with
reference to a rather thinly-described global original position, Rawls develops basic
principles concerning non-intervention, respect for human rights, and assistance for
countries lacking the conditions necessary for a decent or just regime to arise. These
principles govern one nation in its relations with others. He next discusses the principles that
should govern decent liberal societies in their relations with peoples who are not governed
by decent liberalisms. He articulates the idea of a decent consultation hierarchy to
illustrate the sort of non-liberal society that is owed considerable tolerance by the people of
a decent liberal society. In a part of the book devoted to non-ideal theory, Rawls impressively
defends quite restrictive positions on the right of war and on the moral conduct of warfare.
Surprisingly, questions of global distributive justice are confined to one brief section of LP.
In that section, Rawls treats quite dismissively two earlier attempts to extend his theoretical
framework to questions of international justice, those of Beitz (1979) and Pogge (1994).
Drawing on the ideas of TJ, these philosophers had developed quite demanding principles
of international distributive justice. In LP, Rawls instead favors a relatively minimal duty
of assistance, with a definite target and a cut-off point. LP at 119.

As to justice for the disabled, Rawls never attempted an extension of his theory. He did
direct some brief remarks to the topic in Political Liberalism, noting that the view generates
a salient distinction between those whose disabilities permanently prevent them from being
able to express their higher-order moral powers as fully cooperating citizens and those whose
do not. PL at 183-6. While Rawls limited himself to this observation, Norman Daniels work
on justice and health care may be viewed as an attempt to extend Rawlss view in the
direction the observation indicates. Daniels (1985). Nussbaum argues that Rawlsian social-
contract theory is a deeply flawed basis for addressing questions of justice for the disabled
and cannot be well extended to deal with them. Nussbaum (2005).

Responding to critics, Rawls did briefly address justice within the family in The Idea of
Public Reason Revisited. CP at 595-601; LP at 156-164. He writes that he had thought
that J. S. Mills landmark The Subjection of Women made clear that a decent liberal
conception of justice (including what I have called Justice as Fairness) implied equal justice
for women as well as men, but admits that he should have been more explicit about this.
CP at 595. He there affirms that the family is part of the basic structure and is subject to
 being regulated by the principles of political justice. The laws defining the rights of
marriage, divorce, and the ownership and inheritance of property by families and family
members are presumably all part of the basic structure of society, as are provisions of the
criminal law protecting the basic rights of family members not to be abused.

In the case of the family as in economic transactions, Rawlss stance illustrates once more
how his focus on institutional justice structures his attempt to reconcile freedom and
equality. Egalitarian concerns are addressed at the institutional level by assuring that
protection for the appropriate rights and liberties is assured by the basic structure of society.
Freedom is preserved by allowing individuals to pursue their reasonable conceptions of the
good, whatever they may be, within those constitutional constraints.

5. References and Further Reading

Principal Works by John Rawls:

A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as TJ].
Political Liberalism, rev. ed., Columbia University Press, 1996 [cited as PL].
Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman, Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as CP].
The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as LP].
Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman, Harvard University
Press, 2000.
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly, Harvard University Press, 2001.
Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman, Harvard University
Press, 2007.

Two useful gateways to the voluminous secondary literature on Rawls are the
following:

Henry S. Richardson and Paul J. Weithman, eds., The Philosophy of Rawls (5 vols., Garland,
1999).
Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge University Press,
2003).

On Rawlss Life

Thomas Pogge, A Brief Sketch of Rawlss Life, in Richardson & Weithman, eds., Vol. 1, pp.
1-15.

Other Works Cited:

Beitz, Charles. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton University
Press.
Daniels, Norman. 1985. Just Health Care. Cambridge University Press.
Dreben, Burton. 2003. On Rawls and Political Liberalism. In Freeman, 2003: 316-346.
Estlund, David. 1998. The Insularity of the Reasonable. Ethics 108: 252-75.
Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Harvard
University Press.
Harsanyi, John C. 1953. Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-
Taking. Journal of Political Economy 61: 453-5.
 MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue, 2d ed. (1st ed. 1981) (University of Notre Dame
Press).
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. NY: Basic Books.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2005. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species
Membership (Harvard University Press).
Okin, Susan. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. NY: Basic Books.
Pogge, Thomas. 1994. An Egalitarian Law of Peoples. Philosophy and Public Affairs 23: 195-
224.
Sandel, Michael. 1998. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2d ed. (1st ed. 1982) (Cambridge
University Press).
Richardson, Henry S. 2006. Rawlsian Social Contract Theory and the Severely
Disabled. Journal of Ethics 10: 419-462.
Urmson, J. O. 1950. On Grading. Mind 59: 526-29.
Wenar, Leif. 2004. The Unity of Rawlss Work. Journal of Moral Philosophy 1: 265-275.

Author Information
Henry S. Richardson
Email: richardh@georgetown.edu
Georgetown University
U.S.A.