Notes on Rawls on Justice
Rawls argues that:
1. The basic idea of the social contract tradition is a good one. This idea is that we can determine what the basic social rules ought to be by asking the following question: What rules would it be reasonable for people to accept, if they were trying to negotiate a ‘social contract’ in order to escape the ‘state of nature’ (a condition in which there is no government) and thereby gain the benefits that flow from social cooperation? But we need to make one adjustment: the choice of basic rules will be fair only if it is made from behind "a veil of ignorance." That is, we should imagine that the people who are trying to agree on a contract (a set of rules) are ignorant of what their specific place or role in society will be. We should imagine that they don't know what race or gender or class they will belong to, what talents or disabilities they will have, or even what their personal tastes and preferences will be. If they were ignorant of all these things, then they would not be tempted to try to skew the social rules to benefit themselves, and they could agree on rules that were fair to everyone. (Note: Rawls knows that people cannot really rid themselves of these biases. The idea of the 'veil of ignorance' is a purely hypothetical or theoretical construct, like the physicist's imaginary 'frictionless plane'. In the real world, there is always friction. But we can learn something about the laws of motion by asking what would happen if objects were sliding around on a frictionless surface. In the real world people are always biased in ways that reflect their self-interest and their social group identities. But we can learn something about the principles of justice by asking what people would choose if those biases were taken out of play by a veil of ignorance.)
2. If people were choosing fundamental principles 'behind a veil of ignorance,' it would be rational for them to use the very conservative (risk-avoiding) 'maximin' rule of choice. This rule says that you should choose the option that has the best ‘worst case outcome’. That is, for each option on your menu, consider what is the worst possible outcome that might result if you choose that option. Then choose the option where that worst possible outcome is as good as it can be.
3. If they followed this rule, they would choose Rawls' two principles of justice. That is they would choose principles that called for:
1. Protection of civil and political liberties (because these are of fundamental importance to one's ability to pursue one's own plan of life, whatever it is)
2. Minimization of inequalities of wealth, power, authority, and so on, except when these inequalities are:
a. To everyone's benefit -- as when the possibility of earning greater rewards motivates individuals to work harder and contribute more to a socially useful enterprise (Rawls calls this “the difference principle” – presumably because it is about when differences in income, wealth, and power are justified. Note that this principle requires taxing and spending to prevent anyone from falling into poverty and to make sure that the increases in productivity, etc., really do benefit everyone.)
b. Open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. This seems to require:
i. strict rules against discrimination and
ii. public provision of education and training, otherwise opportunities to ‘move up’ will not be genuinely equal.
4. Taxes to support programs that expand opportunities (like public education) and provide what Rawls calls a 'social minimum' (what others sometimes call a 'social safety net') are not unfair to those who are better off, because their ability to earn high incomes is only partly a result of their own effort. It is very significantly a result of the fact that we have a cooperative social order going. (The same effort would have yielded much less if it had been expended by a solitary individual or an individual in a less advanced society.) It is also largely a result of good fortune: either inherited social advantages like wealth, connections, or access to better-than-average education or inherited natural advantages like intelligence, creativity, or athletic ability. (According to Rawls, even your ability to develop your natural talents by working hard, practicing, studying, etc. is dependent on a kind of luck. You will have acquired the character traits necessary to do these things, he says, only if you were lucky enough to be born into "happy family or social circumstances.")