A Theory of Justice

Overview

A Theory of Justice, published in 1971 and issued in a revised edition in 1999, is the work that restored political philosophy to the center of Anglophone thought. Its author, John Rawls, sought to develop a systematic alternative to utilitarianism, which he argued could not adequately account for the moral separateness of persons, and to intuitionism, which offered no principled method for resolving moral conflict. The result is a theory of justice as fairness: a conception whose principles would be chosen by free and equal persons in an original position of equality, behind a veil of ignorance that deprives them of the knowledge that could bias their choice.

The book is not a brief for any particular policy. It is a work of fundamental theory, concerned with the principles that should govern the basic structure of society, its major political, social, and economic institutions. Rawls asks what principles rational persons would agree to as regulating their common life, under conditions that model their freedom and equality, and argues that the answer is a pair of principles protecting equal basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the position of the least advantaged. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the work as the most important contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century, and its framework continues to define the terms in which questions of distributive justice are debated.

Author

John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American philosopher who spent most of his career at Harvard University. He wrote A Theory of Justice over more than a decade, drawing on a series of articles published in the late 1950s and 1960s, including "Justice as Fairness" (1958) and "Distributive Justice" (1967). Rawls self-consciously positioned himself within the social contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, recasting the contract as a hypothetical device of representation rather than a historical event. His deepest philosophical debt was to Kant, whose conception of persons as free and equal autonomous agents supplies the moral architecture of the original position. Rawls revised the book substantially for the 1999 edition, correcting what he regarded as errors and incorporating developments from his later work, and that edition is now the standard reference.

Historical Background

Rawls wrote in a period when political philosophy was widely considered exhausted. Logical positivism had cast normative claims into doubt, and the dominant framework for evaluating public policy was the utilitarianism inherited from Bentham and Mill, as transmitted through welfare economics. The cold war rivalry between liberal democracy and state socialism gave urgency to the question of whether a principled defense of liberal institutions, one that did not collapse into either utilitarian aggregation or mere modus vivendi, could be given at all. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and debates over poverty and redistribution pressed the same question from within American society.

A Theory of Justice answered by recovering the contract tradition and giving it a rigorous analytic form. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the book's reception was immediate and extraordinary: within a few years it had become the focal point of political philosophy, generating a vast literature of commentary, criticism, and application. Its success lay partly in providing a common framework against which rival theories, utilitarian, libertarian, communitarian, and feminist, could define themselves, and partly in the moral seriousness with which it took the ideals of freedom and equality.

Key Ideas

The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance

The original position is the heart of the theory. It is a hypothetical choice situation in which parties select the principles of justice for the basic structure of society. To ensure fairness, the parties are placed behind a veil of ignorance: no one knows their class position or social status, their natural talents or intelligence, their conception of the good, or the particular features of their own society. Stripped of the knowledge that could bias them toward their own advantage, the parties must choose as if they might be anyone. Rawls argues that rational parties under these conditions would reject utilitarianism, since it would permit sacrificing some for the benefit of others, and would instead choose principles that protect the worst-off position, because they cannot risk being that position themselves.

The Two Principles of Justice

Rawls argues that the parties would choose two principles. The first guarantees to each person an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme for all, encompassing political liberty, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of the person, and the rights to hold property and to be free from arbitrary arrest. The second principle governs social and economic inequalities: they must be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. The first principle has lexical priority over the second, so that liberty cannot be traded for economic gain, and fair equality of opportunity has priority over the difference principle.

The Difference Principle

The difference principle is the most distinctive and contested element. It permits social and economic inequalities only insofar as they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. Rawls argues that natural talents and the social circumstances of birth are morally arbitrary, matters of luck rather than desert, and that the benefits they confer should be treated as a common asset arranged to benefit everyone, especially the worst-off. This does not demand strict equality: inequalities that provide incentives and raise the position of the least advantaged are permitted. But it rejects the claim that the talented are entitled to the full product of their natural endowments, and it sets distributive justice against both laissez-faire and utilitarian aggregation.

Important Passages

The book opens with one of the most famous sentences in modern philosophy: justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. The passage frames the priority of justice over efficiency and aggregate welfare, insisting that laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. The description of the veil of ignorance, in which Rawls states that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, and that the principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance, has become the most widely cited device in contemporary political theory. These passages, drawn from Part I of the revised edition, should be consulted in context and with attention to the 1999 pagination, since the revised edition supersedes the original.

Influence

The influence of A Theory of Justice has been decisive. It established the framework within which debates over distributive justice are conducted and supplied the benchmark against which rival theories define themselves. Robert Nozick's libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was written in direct response, defending entitlement against patterned distribution. Communitarian critics, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel, challenged the theory's conception of the unencumbered self and its proceduralism. Feminist theorists questioned whether the original position adequately captures the structure of the family and gender. Cosmopolitan theorists pressed the question of whether justice as fairness should be extended globally, a challenge Rawls himself addressed in The Law of Peoples (1999) with a deliberately limited, non-cosmopolitan answer.

Beyond academic philosophy, the theory has shaped debates over taxation, welfare, healthcare, education, and constitutional rights. The difference principle has been invoked in arguments for progressive taxation and social insurance, while the priority of liberty has informed constitutional jurisprudence on basic rights. Rawls himself extended the theory in Political Liberalism (1993) to address the stability of a just society under conditions of reasonable pluralism, arguing that the conception of justice must be freestanding and secured by an overlapping consensus among comprehensive doctrines. The continuing vitality of the questions Rawls raised, about what freedom and equality require of institutions, and about whether a just order can be justified to each person as a free and equal citizen, testifies to the enduring power of the framework he constructed.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "John Rawls." Comprehensive survey of the theory of justice, the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the two principles.
2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "John Rawls." Accessible account of the theory's central arguments and their reception.
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard University Press, 1999). The primary text; the revised edition incorporates Rawls's corrections and is the standard reference.