NATIONAL LAW INSTITUTE

UNIVERSITY, BHOPAL

In partial fulfilment of the requirement of the project on the subject of

Jurisprudence II of B.A. LL.B. (Hons.), 12th Trimester

ACADEMIC YEAR: 2017-18

Submitted on 2nd april, 2018

A THEORY OF JUSTICE: RAWLS’ PERSPECTIVE

Submitted to: Submitted by:

ASST. PROF. RANJAN RAI Rohit Gatttani

2014BALLB89
 
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Method of Research:

The researcher has adopted a purely doctrinal method of research. The researcher has
made extensive use of the available resources at the library of the National Law institute
University and the internet sources.

Aims and Objectives:

The aim of the project is to present an overview of the much-celebrated books and
one of the outstanding works in philosophy written by John Rawls- A theory of justice.

Sources of Data:

The following sources of data have been primarily used in the project-

1. Books ( internet source )

2. Journals ( internet source )

Method of Writing:

The method of writing followed in the course of this research paper is

primarily analytical.

Mode of Citation:

The researcher has followed the bluebook method of citation (19th ed.) throughout
the course of this research paper.

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 Table of Contents

1) INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 4

2) THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS .......................................................................... 8

3) THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE .................................................................................................................... 10

4) RESEARCH QUESTION ........................................................................................................................... 12

5) ORIGINAL POSITION .............................................................................................................................. 13

6) CRITICISMS ............................................................................................................................................... 14

7) CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................ 16

8) BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................ 17

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 INTRODUCTION
Rawls theory of justice revolves around the adaptation of two fundamental principles of
justice, which would, in turn, guarantee a just and morally acceptable society.

The first principle guarantees the right of each person to have the most extensive basic liberty
compatible with the liberty of others. The second principle states that social and economic
positions are to be:

a) to everyone’s advantage and

b) open to all.

A key problem to Rawls is to show how such principles would be universally adopted and
here the work borders on general ethical issues. He introduces a theoretical “veil of
ignorance” in which all the “players” in the social game would be placed in a situation
which is called the “original position”. Having only a general knowledge of the facts of “life
and society”, each player is to abide based on their moral obligation. By denying the players
any specific information about themselves it forces them to adopt a generalized point of view
that bears a strong resemblance to the moral point of view.

“Moral conclusions can be reached without abandoning the prudential standpoint of positing,
a moral outlook merely by pursuing one’s own prudential reasoning under certain procedural
bargaining and knowledge constraints.”

His ambition is to offer a theory "which best approximates our considered judgements of
justice and constitutes the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society.

Rawls proposes that the most reasonable principles of justice for a society are those that
individuals would themselves agree to behind the “veil of ignorance”, in circumstances in
which each is represented as a moral person, endowed with the basic moral powers. What this
position supports is that while each person has different ends and goals, different
backgrounds and talents, each ought to have a fair chance to develop his or her talents and to
pursue those goals – fair equality for opportunity. It is not a race or contest where the talented
or gifted prevail, it should be complete cooperation among all so that there may be reasonable
life for all.

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With A Theory of Justice, John Rawls has systematized his work of at least fifteen years to
develop an account of a concept of justice which not only supplies the principles for a stable
political order but also is ethically superior to other conceptions, most notably to utilitarian
accounts. His claim for the superiority of his principles of justice rests on two distinct but
compatible appeals. First is an appeal that the sense of justice as fairness is the essence of the
idea of justice as it is ordinarily understood. Second is an appeal to a conception of rational
behavior in which the principles of justice are argued to be those which rational persons in a
position of equality would adopt. Both appeals are persuasive.

Rawls wants us to think of the principles that govern the basic structure as the object of an
original agreement. Social contract theory assumes that it is possible to take an extremely
difficult question-what are the principles of justice?-and reduce it to a simpler, more
manageable question-what principles would rational, self-interested men and women agree
to, in a situation of rough equality? Rawls sees himself as part of this tradition. He wants us
to imagine a meeting at which "those who engage in social cooperation choose together, in
one joint act, the principles which are to assign basic rights and duties.

I. DISTINCTION BETWEEN RIGHT AND GOOD

The distinction between the Right and the Good is basic to Rawls's theory. He interprets these
crucial terms as follows: The Right applies to actions and circumstances in accordance with
principles "which rational persons concerned to advance their interests would accept in [a]
position of equality to settle the basic terms of their association"1. By The Good, Rawls
understands that if "an object has the properties that it is rational for someone with a rational
plan of life to want, then it is good for him. And if certain sorts of things satisfy this condition
for persons generally, then these things are human goods"2

II. CONTRAST TO UTILITARIANISM

1
Pp(118-119)
2
Pp 319

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The central thesis of the work is that utilitarianism, whether it recommends the maximization
of utility simpliciter or the maximization of average utility, does a totally in- adequate job of
accounting for our judgments as to what is just and unjust. Justice, Rawls contends, is a value
that we rightly believe to take precedence over utilitarian considerations-- which frequently
"Justify" the most outrageous injustices.

In contrast to the utilitarian, for Rawls political philosophy is not simply applied moral
philosophy. The utilitarian holds to one universal moral principle (“maximize utility”), which
she applies to individual actions, political constitutions, international relations, and all other
subjects as required. Rawls has no universal principle: “The correct regulative principle for
anything,” he says, “depends on the nature of that thing”. Rawls confines his theorizing to the
political domain, and within this domain he holds that the correct principles for each sub-
domain depend on its particular agents and constraints.

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III. JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS: JUSTICE WITHIN A LIBERAL SOCIETY

Justice as fairness is Rawls's theory of justice for a liberal society. As a member of the family
of liberal political conceptions of justice it provides a framework for the legitimate use of
political power. Yet legitimacy is only the minimal standard of moral acceptability; a
political order can be legitimate without being just. Justice sets the maximal standard: the
arrangement of social institutions that is morally best.

Rawls constructs justice as fairness around specific interpretations of the ideas that citizens
are free and equal and that society should be fair. He sees it as resolving the tensions between
the ideas of freedom and equality, which have been highlighted both by the socialist critique
of liberal democracy and by the conservative critique of the modern welfare state. Rawls
holds that justice as fairness is the most egalitarian, and also the most plausible, interpretation
of these fundamental concepts of liberalism. He also argues that justice as fairness provides a
superior understanding of justice to that of the dominant tradition in modern political thought:
utilitarianism.

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 The Two Principles of Justice as Fairness
These guiding ideas of justice as fairness are given institutional form by its two principles of
justice:

First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of
equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;

Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

a. They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair
equality of opportunity;

b. They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the
difference principle).

The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while
the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first
principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second
principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle.

The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties:
liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person,
the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and
so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. Unequal
rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires
equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances.

Rawls's first principle confirms widespread convictions about the importance of equal basic
rights and liberties. Two further features make this principle distinctive. First is its priority:
the basic rights and liberties must not be traded off against other social goods. The first
principle disallows, for instance, a policy that would give draft exemptions to college
students on the grounds that educated civilians will increase economic productivity. The draft
is a drastic infringement on basic liberties, and if a draft is implemented then all who are able
to serve must be equally subject to it, even if this means slower growth. Citizens' equal
liberty must have priority over economic policy.

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The second distinctive feature of Rawls's first principle is that it requires fair value of the
political liberties. The political liberties are a subset of the basic liberties, concerned with the
right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For
these liberties, Rawls requires that citizens should be not only formally but also substantively
equal. That is, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar
opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor
they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded
and run, as will be discussed below.

Rawls's second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity,
requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same
educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor.
“In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement
for those similarly motivated and endowed”.

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 The Veil of Ignorance
Rawls supposes that a (virtual) committee of rational but not envious persons will exhibit
mutual disinterest in a situation of moderate scarcity as they consider the concept of right:

general in form
universal in application
publicly recognized
final authority
prioritizes conflicting claims

Rawls claims that rational people will unanimously adopt his principles of justice if their
reasoning is based on general considerations, without knowing anything about their own
personal situation. Such personal knowledge might tempt them to select principles of justice
that gave them unfair advantage - rigging the rules of the game. This procedure of reasoning
without personal biases Rawls refers to as "The Veil of Ignorance."

Rawls' Veil of Ignorance can be described this way in the midst of presenting wide-ranging
evidence that a significant fraction of the variability among human beings, including
variations in mental abilities, must be attributed to genetic, rather than purely environmental,
factors:

So if we imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested agents negotiating under a veil

of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will inherit at birth. He argues that a just
society is one that these disembodied souls would agree to be born into, knowing that they
might be dealt a lousy social or genetic hand. If you agree that this is a reasonable conception
of justice, and that the agents would insist on a broad social safety net and redistributive
taxation (short of eliminating incentives that make everyone better off), then you can justify
compensatory social policies even if you think differences in social status are 100 percent
genetic. The policies would be, quite literally, a matter of justice, not a consequence of the
indistinguishability of individuals.

Indeed, the existence of innate differences in ability makes Rawls's conception of social
justice especially acute and eternally relevant. If we were blank slates, and if a society ever
did eliminate discrimination, the poorest could be said to deserve their station because they
must have chosen to do less with their standard-issue talents. But if people differ in talents,

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people might find themselves in poverty in a non-prejudiced society even if they applied
themselves to the fullest. That is an injustice that, a Rawlsian would argue, ought to be rectified,
and it would be overlooked if we didn't recognize that people differ in their abilities.

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 RESEARCH QUESTION

Q:- Are the assumptions introduced by Rawls practically applicable in the existing
society or are they just a platonic set of ideas?

. Let us grant that some people value justice as highly as Rawls claims: Why should they? If
they were situated behind the veil of ignorance, perhaps they should, for it would be rational
for them to do so--unless they are gamblers, perhaps? But people are not so situated. Justice
as fairness is invoked to remedy the defects of nature and history which have made human
beings unequal. But if a person is favoured by nature or history, why should he forgo his
advantages? I think that Rawls fails to give an adequate answer to this question. Perhaps no
adequate answer can be given, though I hope not. A second difficulty is the vagueness that
affects Rawls' conception of the boundaries of the moral community. Apparently these
extend beyond the boundaries of one's country, though why they should is not made clear.
Indeed, Rawls attempts to define the moral community in terms of the possession of
potentialities for adopting and pursuing a rational plan of life. Thirdly, the first part of
principle II gives us no practical direction unless the notion of "the least advantaged" is
clarified. Least advantaged in what respects? Income? Prestige? Or what? And where is the
boundary line to be drawn between the least and the next to least advantaged? Different ways
of classifying the least advantaged may result in quite different social policies. Finally, by
allowing liberty to be sacrificed for greater liberty, and by allowing economic inequalities in
order to "raise" the lowest group, one wonders if Rawls has not exposed his theory of justice
to the same kind of difficulty afflicting utilitarianism.

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 ORIGINAL POSITION
What do those in the original position know about societies and about themselves?

Very little indeed: they are, as Rawls puts it, under the veil of ignorance; they know that
societies are able to distribute primary goods without knowing, as we do, that these goods are
called wealth, prestige, power, or authority for instance. They know very little about
themselves, except that they have the above mentioned passions. But they do not know to
which generation they belong, which and how high their aptitudes are, what their family
background is. They know, however, that the society they are going to enter is characterized
by a moderate level of scarcity. More- over, they are sufficiently well trained sociologists to
know that the production and distribution of goods are two mutually inter- related
phenomena. If they did not have this knowledge, the problem of legitimacy would have a
trivial solution: they would require institutions producing the highest possible quantity of
goods and distributing them equally, since there would be no reason for inequality. Finally,
those in the original position know that, given scarcity and given the interrelation between
production and distribution, some are going to be better off and some worse off than others.

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 CRITICISMS
He said, he knew no reason, why those who entertain opinions prejudicial to the public,
should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And, as it was tyranny
in any Government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: for, a
man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about as cordials.3

General health and happiness, perfection of character, social progress, and economic growth,
are also considerations that have weight, even if we admit that considerations of justice are
those that should have the most weight. It follows that a practice can be right even though to
some extent unjust, and that we can sometimes be justified, all things considered, in treating
some persons to some extent unjustly.

Advocates of strict equality argue that inequalities permitted by the Difference Principle are
unacceptable even if they do benefit the least advantaged. The problem for these advocates is
to explain in a satisfactory way why the relative position of the least advantaged is more
important than their absolute position, and hence why society should be prevented from
materially benefiting the least advantaged when this is possible. The most common
explanation appeals to solidarity: that being materially equal is an important expression of the
equality of persons. Another common explanation appeals to the power some may have over
others, if they are better off materially. Rawls’ response to this latter criticism appeals to the
priority of his first principle: The inequalities consistent with the Difference Principle are
only permitted so long as they do not result in unequal liberty. So, for instance, power
differentials resulting from unequal income are not permitted if they violate the first principle
of equal liberty, even if they increase the material position of the least advantaged group.

2. The Utilitarian objection to the Difference Principle is that it does not maximize utility. In
A Theory of Justice, Rawls uses Utilitarianism as the main theory for comparison with his
own, and hence he responds at length to this Utilitarian objection and argues for his own
theory in preference to Utilitarianism. Libertarians object that the Difference Principle
involves unacceptable infringements on liberty. For instance, the Difference Principle may

3
The King of Brobdingnag, as recalled by Gulliver

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require redistributive taxation to the poor, and Libertarians commonly object that such
taxation involves the immoral taking of just holdings.

4. The Difference Principle is also criticized as a primary distributive principle on the

grounds that it mostly ignores claims that people deserve certain economic benefits in light of
their actions

5. There is also the difficulty in applying the theory to practice. It is difficult if not
impossible for people to place themselves under the Veil of Ignorance in the Original
Position in order to formulate what conduct would be required of them by the MAXI MIN
Principle.

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 CONCLUSION
There is no one single main point of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, but one of its main points is
to try to move from equality to justice (hence justice as fairness) by measured steps that
rational persons would be able to embrace. In this regard it may be the most plausible theory
of justice that doesn't depend on emotion, upbringing, self-serving prejudice, class
consciousness, and so on.

Rawls construes the task to be choosing principles for a "well-ordered society," a society that
is (a) effectively regulated by a public conception of justice and (b) whose members
understand and give allegiance to this public conception. Moreover, a third condition, (c),
holds: it is common knowledge among all members of society that a and b hold. Why this
idealization? Rawls thinks we need to get clear about first-best theory before we can be in a
position to think through problems that arise when institutions are not just and some persons
are not disposed to comply with requirements of justice.

1) All theories of human action, social organization, morality rest on idealized or schematic
persons and not real individuals. They are not fully scientific in the contemporary sense but
they are as close as you can get in morally relevant contexts. Hence Rawls deals with
representative persons and invests them with several qualities - rationality, and reasonable
self-interest being two salient features.

2) Rawls does not advocate in any form the equal distribution of resources or their blind
redistribution to the disadvantaged. Everyone who has thought the matter through knows that
these are socially wasteful distributions. The idea behind Rawls' difference principle is to
arrange before-hand (behind a veil of ignorance) for a system of distribution of resources
which will differentially reward the socially useful so long as it will always also be to the
advantage of the least well off. So. e.g. if we determine that a sanitation engineer is necessary
to a well ordered society because his/her activities will be to everyone's advantage we have
reasonable grounds to award him/her a disproportionate portion of the available pool of social
wealth, and then so on down the line of socially useful pursuits (we want to reward all
socially useful activities, discourage the opposite and improve the lot of those who may
contribute little or even nothing). This we do theoretically beforehand so we can in the blind
determine what a 'just' distribution would be like. Then we are in position to criticize actual
distributions that substantially vary from the distribution we selected as 'unjust'.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

WEBSITES
1. http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Rawlschaps1and2.pdf
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/
3. http://www.univpgri-palembang.ac.id

ARTICLES.

1) CAN THE MAXIMIN PRINCIPLE SERVE AS A BASIS FOR MORALITY? A CRITIQUE OF JOHN
RAWLS'S THEORY BY JOHN C. HARSANYI

2) A BRIEF AGAINST JOHN RAWLS' "THEORY OF JUSTICE" BY: LEON H. CRAIG

3) THE LIBERAL THEORY OF JUSTICE: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE PRINCIPAL

DOCTRINES IN THEORY OF JUSTICE BY JOHN RAWLS. BY BRIAN BARRY

BOOKS

1) A theory of justice by John Rawls( 1971)

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