A Theory of Justice
“What is justice?”
• The Code of Hammurabi (Babylon, 18th c. BCE)
• Judaism, Christianity, Islam: scales (balance,
regulation, harmony), measured judgment
(rewards / punishment), placing something in
its rightful place, lex talionis (an eye for an eye
/ law of retaliation)
• Greek mythology: Dike, harmonic mean, with
arithmetic mean (peace) and geometric mean (fair
order) make up the cosmic law (Themis)
• People are to receive what they are due
To render to each person her due
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What do we actually owe to each other?
Equality in the law or equality before the law?
Is the legal conception of justice self-sufficient?
Religious, moral, political grounds
Properly philosophical sense of justice: suspend
any religious or cosmological approach to this
problem and focus on the specifically political
conception of justice, so as to better articulate it
with its correlated moral and legal dimensions
John Rawls (1921-2002)
• A Theory of Justice, Harvard U Press, 1971.
• Political Liberalism, Columbia U Press, 1993.
• The Law of Peoples, Harvard U Press, 1999.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice
An ethical-political conception
• “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as
truth is of systems of thought.”
• “A conception of justice which generalizes and
carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar
theory of the social contract in Locke, Rousseau,
and Kant.”
• Contractarianism: state of nature → civil society
• “Distributive justice ...the role of its principles in
assigning rights and duties.”
“Justice as Fairness”
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Political Obligation
Social Contract
Distributive Justice
Deontological Argument vs. Utilitarianism
Procedural vs. Substantive Virtue Ethics
Rules and rights chosen by fair procedures
are themselves fair, as they take into account
our moral nature as equal, free persons
“Justice of Fairness”:
An ethical-political theory
 Ideal theory ↔ Nonideal theory
OP – WOS
↔ “we” (concrete, real citizens)
 Original position: parties from behind a veil of
ignorance choose the principles of justice to distribute
the social primary goods for a well-ordered society, in
which public criteria for judging the feasible, basic
structure of society would be publicly recognized and
accepted by all. (thought-experiment)
 Reflective equilibrium: OP – WOS – “WE”
 Primacy of Right over Goods ( Thick / Thin )
TJ: Principles of Justice
• First: Each person is to have an equal right to
the most extensive scheme of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar scheme of
liberties for others. (Equal Liberty Principle)
• Second: Social and economic inequalities are to be
arranged so that : a) they are to be of the greatest
benefit to the least-advantaged members of society
(Difference Principle); b) offices and positions must
be open to everyone under conditions of Fair
Equality of Opportunity.
Maximin = maximum minimorum
choice produces highest payoff for the worst outcome
• Property-owning democracy vs. Welfare state
• Society: fair system of social cooperation
among free, equal citizens from one
generation to the other
• All social primary goods (liberty and opportunity,
income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect)
are to be distributed equally unless an unequal
distribution of any of these goods is to the
advantage of the less favored.
Procedural Devices of
Representation
• TJ § 40 : Kantian “noumenal selves”
• OP : Free and equal persons with two moral powers
(sense of justice and conception of the good)
• WOS : Primacy of the right over the good
• Reflective Equilibrium: coherence method in which a
set of beliefs is arrived at by a process of deliberative
mutual adjustment among particular moral judgments
(“we”), general principles & theoretical constructions
• PL – TJ : “WE” – WOS – OP /overlapping consensus
Rawls’s "Kantian interpretation"
 A Theory of Justice (§ 40) can be ultimately
reconciled with his later writings (esp. Dewey
Lectures and Political Liberalism) : conception of
political constructivism.
 Rawls revisits, reviews, and recasts his coherentist
conception of justice as fairness so as to turn
political constructivism into the groundwork of a
political liberalism that distances itself from a
moral constructivism (comprehensive doctrine)
just as TJ did in relation to moral realism and
intuitionism.
TJ - PL
 Even as one starts from the fact of political
pluralism --in PL, as opposed to the original
position in TJ-- within a given public political
culture, one still resorts to a contractarian device
of representation on the level of reasonable,
intersubjectively shared values and norms
without hastily identifying the latter with the
main source of morality or asserting the primacy
of particularized traditions over universalizable
normativity – communitarian critique (e.g.
Sandel’s) of “unencumbered self”
J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples
• OP – Society of Peoples – “Realistic Utopia”
• Foreign Policy for Liberal, Democratic Peoples
• “Peoples (as organized by their government) are free
and independent, and their freedom and
independence is to be respected by other peoples.”
• “Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right
to war.”
• “Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.”
• “Peoples are to honor human rights.”