MIDTERM- Week 7
JOHN RAWL’S ETHICS
LIFE AND BACKGROUND:
John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921–November 24, 2002) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Lee Rawls, a
prominent lawyer, and Anna Abell Stump. After attending the Kent School in Connecticut, he entered Princeton
University in 1939. Although Rawls had intended to pursue a major in the natural sciences, he found himself drawn to
philosophy.
Rawls immersed himself in the works of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. As a practicing Christian, he was especially
drawn to moral philosophy, and came under the tutelage of Norman Malcolm. Rawl’s senior thesis (made available in
print by Harvard University Press in 2010) was titled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.” The thesis
contains and anticipates many of the themes present in Rawls’s professional publications, such as a concern with
morality and a critique of inequality. But as the editors of the volume note, it also discloses “a deep religious
temperament,” one that is obscured in Rawls’s mature works and neglected by scholarly studies of his thought.
In the months leading up to his graduation in 1943, Rawls considered entering an Episcopal seminary to study for the
priesthood. However, with the United States now engaged in World War II, most of his classmates were enlisting in the
armed forces, and Rawls followed suit. He served with the infantry in the South Pacific, first in New Guinea, where he
earned a Bronze Star, and then in the Philippines. In late 1945, following the defeat of Japan, he was sent to serve with
occupying forces in that country. Based on the account that Rawls provides in his semi-autobiographical “On My
Religion” (apparently written in the 1990s, but published posthumously in the volume containing “A Brief Inquiry”), by
this time Rawls’s orthodox Christian beliefs had started to erode in the face of the tragedy of the war and the Holocaust,
and he abandoned plans to study for the priesthood. Instead, financed by the GI Bill, he began graduate studies in
philosophy at Princeton. After four years of study, which included a year at Cornell, he received a Ph.D. from Princeton
in 1950. His dissertation was “A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on
the Moral Worth of Character.”
John Rawls is best known for his liberal theory of justice, or justice as fairness.
Its defining characteristic is its acknowledg-ment that society is made up of individuals who espouse many disparate
beliefs and conceptions of 'the good.' Government of a society which is based on certain conceptions of the good-religious, moral, etc-- causes problems because people whose views differ end up straight disrespected by law.
The principals Rawls arrives at are:
1) Each person shall be allowed the most extensive scheme of liberty compatible with a similar scheme for everyone
else.
2) Offices of power shall be attached to positions open to all.
3) Inequality must benefit the least advantaged.
For example, the practice of grading students for their performance in academic courses now includes a merit principle
for determining most grades: the grade a student receives should reflect the quantity and quality of her work. It might
be said in defense of such traditions that they have survived because they have proven more satisfactory to the parties
affected, considered collectively, than other conceivable alternatives, such as giving everyone the same grade or
handing out grades in accordance with the student's ability to pay.
THE THEORY OF JUSTICE
In a modern society, all goods will be distributed through society by some means. This is not a concept that is universal
throughout history. In kingdoms and empires, the monarch would own all goods, but permit his or her people to enjoy
them in his or her name. There is no central power which owns all goods in Western society. Distributive justice
addresses who owns these goods and how they are acquired.
Distributive justice is a concept that addresses the ownership of goods in a society. It assumes that there is a large
amount of fairness in the distribution of goods. Equal work should provide individuals with an equal outcome in terms of
goods acquired or the ability to acquire goods. Distributive justice is absent when equal work does not produce equal
outcomes or when an individual or a group acquires a disproportionate amount of goods.
Principles of distributive justice are therefore best thought of as providing moral guidance for the political processes
and structures that affect the distribution of economic benefits and burdens in societies.
Relatively simple principle of distributive justice is Strict Egalitarianism, which calls for the allocation of equal material
goods to all members of society. John Rawls provides an alternative distributive principle.
A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls attempts to solve the problem of
distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society) by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the
social contract.
Justice as fairness aims to describe a just arrangement of the major political and social institutions of a liberal society:
the political constitution, the legal system, the economy, the family, and so on. Rawls calls the arrangement of these
institutions a society's basic structure.
The basic structure is the location of justice because these institutions distribute the main benefits and burdens of
social life: who will receive social recognition, who will have which basic rights, who will have opportunities to get what
kind of work, what the distribution of income and wealth will be, and so on.
The form of a society's basic structure will have profound effects on the lives of citizens. The basic structure will
influence not only their life prospects, but more deeply their goals, their attitudes, their relationships, and their
characters.
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: They are to be attached to
offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; They are to be to the greatest benefit
of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).
ORIGINAL ACTORS/POSITION
Rawls's conceptions of citizens and society are quite abstract, and some might think innocuous. Hence, the original
position aims to move from these abstract conceptions to determinate principles of social justice.
The original position is a thought experiment: an imaginary situation in which each real citizen has a representative, and
all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order the political institutions of
the real citizens. This thought experiment is better than trying to get all real citizens actually to assemble in person to try
to agree to principles of justice for their society.
The original position is a fair situation in which each citizen is represented as only a free and equal citizen: each
representative wants only what free and equal citizens want, and each tries to agree to principles for the basic structure
while situated fairly with respect to the other representatives. The design of the original position thus models the ideas
of freedom, equality and fairness.
No one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstances in the choice principles.
VEIL OF IGNORANCE
The most striking feature of the original position is the veil of ignorance, which prevents arbitrary facts about citizens
from influencing the agreement among their representatives.
Each representative in the original position is therefore deprived of knowledge of the race, class, and gender of the real
citizen that they represent. In fact, the veil of ignorance deprives the parties of all facts about citizens that are irrelevant
to the choice of principles of justice: not only facts about their race, class, and gender but also facts about their age,
natural endowments, and more.
Moreover the veil of ignorance also screens out specific information about what society is like right now, so as to get a
clearer view of the permanent features of a just social system.
Behind the veil of ignorance, the informational situation of the parties that represent real citizens is as follows:
Parties do not know:

The race, ethnicity, gender, age, income, wealth, natural endowments, comprehensive doctrine, etc. of any of
the citizens in society, or to which generation in the history of the society these citizens belong.

The political system of the society, its class structure, economic system, or level of economic development.
Parties do know:

That citizens in the society have different comprehensive doctrines and plans of life; that all citizens have
interests in more primary goods.

That the society is under conditions of moderate scarcity: there is enough to go around, but not enough for
everyone to get what they want;

General facts and common sense about human social life; general conclusions of science (including
economics and psychology) that are uncontroversial.
The veil of ignorance situates the representatives of free and equal citizens fairly with respect to one another. No party
can press for agreement on principles that will arbitrarily favor the particular citizen they represent, because no party
knows the specific attributes of the citizen they represent. The situation of the parties thus embodies reasonable
conditions, within which the parties can make a rational agreement. Each party tries to agree to principles that will be
best for the citizen they represent.
RATIONAL SELF – INTEREST

To say that we are behind a Veil of Ignorance is to say we do not know the following sorts of things: our sex,
race, physical handicaps, generation, social class of our parents, etc. But self-interested rational persons are not
ignorant of:
(1) the general types of possible situations in which humans can find themselves;
(2) general facts about human psychology and "human nature".

Self-interested rational persons behind the Veil of Ignorance are given the task of choosing the principles that
shall govern actual world. Rawls believes that he has set up an inherently fair procedure.

A self-interested rational person behind the Veil of Ignorance would not want to belong to a race or gender or
sexual orientation that turns out to be discriminated-against. Such a person would not wish to be a handicapped
person in a society where handicapped are treated without respect. So principles would be adopted that oppose
discrimination.

Likewise, a self-interested rational person would not want to belong to a generation which has been
allocated a lower than average quantity of resources. So (s)he would endorse the principle: "Each generation
should have roughly equal resources" or "Each generation should leave to the next at least as many resources as
they possessed at the start."
CRITICISMS
Michael Sandel wrote Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which criticized A Theory of Justice for asking us to think
about justice while divorced from the values and aspirations that define who we are as persons, and which allow us to
determine what justice is.
Collectivists argue that Rawls has discovered the ground for the justification of the existing capitalist system. He has
shown that if the rich have the freedom to accumulate wealth, the poor would be automatically benefitted. Even if his
principle of fair equality of opportunity is strictly enforced, the existing disparities between the rich and poor will not be
substantially reduced. A slight improvement in the condition of the most disadvantaged sections will be treated as an
excuse to permit vast socio-economic inequalities.
Robert Paul Wolff wrote Understanding Rawls: A Critique and Reconstruction of A Theory of Justice, which criticized
Rawls from a Marxist perspective. Wolff argues in this work that Rawls' theory is an apology for the status quo insofar as
it constructs justice from existing practice and forecloses the possibility that there may be problems of injustice
embedded in capitalist social relations, private property or the market economy.