Rawls’ theory of justice

Rawls claims that a society is just—and that the authority of the state is therefore justified—if two conditions obtain:

First Principle: Each person has an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.

Second Principle: If there are inequalities in liberty or in income,

a) they work out to the advantage of the worst-off, and

b)     the positions that are better off are open to all qualified people.

Rawls defends this theory by arguing that people in a suitably con­structed bargaining game would choose his conception of justice over the other available options, including the state of nature.

But Rawls adds two more requirements, which move his theory away from prudentialism—away, that is, from the assumption that the justification of the state can appeal only to rational self-interest.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways in which you might bring moral considerations into play in using this route to get from the state of nature to the state. One would be to forbid any strategy in which a player acted immorally—and I shall return to this possibil­ity again in considering the work of Robert Nozick. But another, perhaps more subtle way would be to construct the bargaining game in such a way that people were forced to take certain moral princi­ples into account. John Rawls' proposal involves extra constraints of both these kinds.

The first constraint, which Rawls calls the “veil of ignorance,” effectively forces self-interested bargainers to consider other peo­ple's interests. It is the requirement that the participants do not know what their own position—or anyone else's—will be in the society that results from the bargaining game, and know very little about their own talents and abilities either. Not only are players in the bargaining game ignorant of their own skills and capacities, they do not know what their interests, their goals, or their conception of the good life will be. Apart from these limitations on their knowl­edge of their own position, the players in the bargaining game are extremely well informed: “They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organ­ization and the laws of human psychology.” But all this is general knowledge; what they lack is specific information about themselves. Let us reduce this requirement to a formula and say that behind the veil of ignorance all people are ignorant of their goals and their rel­ative positions.

The reason for this requirement is that self-interested bargainers who knew too much about their own goals and positions would obvi­ously seek to set up the rules so that they could profit from them.

This, then, is a way of getting a certain moral principle

EQUALITY: Everybody should be taken equally into account built into the outcome of the bargaining game—by constraining the players' knowledge, while still allowing them enough information to make some sort of choice between theories of justice. But, as I said, Rawls also builds into the bargaining game a requirement that rules out any strategy that fails to conform to a certain moral principle, namely, the principle that the participants should not be envious. He does this not directly, by ruling out strategies motivated by envy, but indirectly, by saying that the participants in the game are not subject to envy.

One reason Rawls makes this requirement is, of course, that we do not want envy, which is an emotion that most of us think is morally reprehensible, to be part of the basis for judging the politi­cal institutions of the state. If we are ruling out morally unaccept­able emotions in the participants in the game, however, we would surely also not want bare self-interest, which is also morally repre­hensible, to be the basis for judgment either. Rawls needs a special reason for ruling out envy. And, as the American philosopher Robert Paul Wolff has argued, there is a much more telling reason why Rawls has to require that his bargainers are not envious. Explaining what that reason is allows us to see some of the advantages and problems of Rawls's theory.

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