john rawls

1. Mr. Anthony Caezar F. Aya-ay
GE 114 Ethics

2. Theory of justice as
fairness describes a society of free
citizens holding equal basic rights
and cooperating within an egalitarian
economic system.
Justice as fairness is Rawls’s theory
of justice for a liberal society.
Rawls constructs justice as fairness
around specific interpretations of the
ideas that citizens are free and
equal, and that society should be fair.

3. Rawls also argues that justice
as fairness is superior to the
dominant tradition in modern
political thought: utilitarianism.
In Rawls’s egalitarian
liberalism, citizens relate to
each other as equals within a
social order defined by
reciprocity, instead of within
the unjust status hierarchies
familiar from today.

4. Rawls realized that a society could not
avoid inequalities among its people.
Inequalities result from such things as
one's inherited characteristics, social
class, personal motivation, and even
luck. Even so, Rawls insisted that a just
society should find ways to reduce
inequalities in areas where it can act.

5. Two Guiding Ideas of Justice as Fairness
Rawls’s negative thesis starts with the idea that citizens
do not deserve to be born into a rich or a poor family, to
be born naturally more or less gifted than others, to be
born female or male, to be born a member of a
particular racial group, and so on.
Rawls’s positive distributive thesis is equality-based
reciprocity. All social goods are to be distributed
equally, unless an unequal distribution would be to
everyone’s advantage. The guiding idea is that since
citizens are fundamentally equal, reasoning about
justice should begin from a presumption that
cooperatively-produced goods should be equally
divided.

6. The Two Principles of Justice as Fairness
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:
a.They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions
of fair equality of opportunity;
b.They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of
society (the difference principle)

7. Egalitarianism is the false belief
that everyone is equal – that
everyone has equal abilities,
equal potential, equal
intelligence, equal moral and
spiritual uprightness, etc. If
everyone is equal, then the logic
follows that the results should
be equal – everyone should be
equally wealthy, everyone should
follow the same moral and
spiritual codes,

8. We should imagine we sit behind a veil of
ignorance that keeps us from knowing who we are
and identifying with our personal circumstances.
By being ignorant of our circumstances, we can
more objectively consider how societies should
operate.
Rawls uses the idea of a veil of ignorance to
argue that fair and just distribution can be
defended on rational grounds. He says that if a
person keeps herself/himself under the 'veil of
ignorance' then s/he would come up with the just
distribution, fair laws and policies that would affect
the whole society.

10. REFERENCES:
• https://www.hoover.org/research/god-and-john-rawls
• https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-23-3-c-justice-as-
fairness-john-rawls-and-his-theory-of-justice#:~:text=Rawls%20argue
d%20that%20only%20under,social%20justice%20for%20their%20soci
ety
.
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/
• 2001 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement ]JF], E. Kelly (ed.),
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1971 A Theory of Justice [TJ], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. Revised edition, 1999. The page citations in this entry are to the
1971 edition.