John Rawls’s Theory of Justice: Principles and Impact
John Rawls: A Pivotal 20th-Century Philosopher
John Rawls was a 20th-century American philosopher who worked chiefly in the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. Rawls is considered by many to be the most important political philosopher of the 20th century, and his landmark book, A Theory of Justice, is praised for having attempted to unite many competing political theories that many had judged incompatible. Rawls rejected both Marx’s communism and Mill’s utilitarianism to return to the social contract model of the early modern period, drawing influence from Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant to form his own version of the theory.
Justice as Fairness and the Veil of Ignorance
While Locke emphasized personal liberty as the most important factor in the social contract and Rousseau prioritized social autonomy, Rawls based his contract on a different principle. Rawls claimed that his contract was based on “justice as fairness” and then set out to define what exactly fairness meant. While previous social contract theorists had used “the state of nature” as a starting point for their argument, Rawls rejected this thought experiment for a different one that he called “the veil of ignorance.”
The veil of ignorance would be a state where each individual in society would be blind to any of the benefits or disadvantages they would possess in such a society. They would not know their talents, potential disabilities, whether they would be born rich or poor, their parentage, or their race, gender, or religion. For Rawls, this point was essential for evaluating fairness, as it removed the bias of arguing for one’s own self-interests.
Rawls’s Two Principles of Justice
The first principle he believed they would choose was the concept of individual rights, similar to those argued for by Kant and, to a certain extent, Locke. Rights such as free speech, property, and protest would be universally granted. Rawls acknowledged that these were basic rights, not absolute ones. Limitations to these rights, including absolute property rights, would arise when they began to infringe upon the rights of others.
The second principle is equality of opportunity. Rawls argued that every effort must be made to provide the least advantaged in society with an opportunity to succeed. He also argued that public offices responsible for policy decisions must be open to all people, regardless of their station in life, through the democratic process. Rawls contended that society should compensate for naturally occurring inequalities, disabilities, racism, generational poverty, and similar disadvantages that are not dependent on an individual’s willingness and effort to succeed.
The Role of Justice and Reflective Equilibrium
Rawls agreed with Hume that principles of justice are inherent in our basic human nature. For a society to exist that bases its laws and political beliefs on justice, there must be a fundamental balance within society. This forms the basis of the social contract idea among individuals in society. We form agreements based on our ideas of justice derived from these principles, and we use our reflective equilibrium to determine when it is appropriate to apply one principle over another.
This explains how competing principles—such as personal liberty and equality of opportunity, the rule of law and civil protest, democracy and individuality, and other directly contradictory principles—can be valued simultaneously by the same society, often in equal measure, without causing the political system to collapse under the weight of these contradictions.