John Rawls – “Justice as Fairness”

John Rawls• 1921 – 2002

• Served in WWII in the Pacific; witnessed aftermath of Hiroshima bombing

• Went back to college to get doctorate in Moral Philosophy (Princeton)

A Theory of Justice (1971)

• Book written by Rawls as an exploration of distributive justice

• Distributive Justice – how do we fairly organize society and give out opportunity and material wealth?

• Rawls was interested in the question of how we could design a fair society that everyone could agree on.

• But this is really hard to do, because people have different goals, and different strengths and weaknesses. Agreement is hard to achieve.

A Thought Experiment

• Rawls works through a thought experiment to reach his conclusion of how we can fairly distribute the goods of society.

• His thought experiment includes a kind of social contract.

• Social contract – an agreement entered into by individuals, that creates society

A Question for You!

X 60Which ONE person should be in charge of dividing up the candy among the 3 bags?

Row 1 Row 2 Row 3

Can you change the situation to ensure a fair outcome with only ONE person dividing the goods?

Row 1 Row 2 Row 3

X 60

The Thought Experiment

• The Original Position:• Imagine yourself before society was created.

You’re all just individuals living free and independent, without society to organize and guide you.

• You decide to create society with other individuals, because you think life will be better with society.

• You will pick the principles that will guide your society, but how do we make sure they’re fair, and that everyone will agree to them?

• Some strong people might push others to make a society where the strong are better off (advantaged)

• Males might try to make a society where males are advantaged. The rich might try to make sure the rich will have advantage.

• And if people are pushing to make themselves more advantaged, it will probably be really difficult to select a system that everyone will agree to.

• Therefore, we add to the Original Position another concept: The Veil of Ignorance

• Veil of Ignorance – condition where the people don’t know anything about themselves.

• Under the veil of ignorance, you don’t know if you are rich or poor, male or female, Korean, Canadian, African, etc., you don’t even know what your goals and wants are in life.

• What kinds of society do you think people will create if they are in the original position, but WITH the veil of ignorance? Why do you think so?

Maximin Strategy

• People will employ a specific strategy in this situation.

• People will try to maximize the benefit for those groups in the worst situation. (maximizing the minimum)

• B/c of FEAR of ending up in the worst situation.

• AFTER the decisions on society are made, then the veil of ignorance is lifted, and people find out who they are.

• By now they have already agreed to the setup for society, and can’t argue with what they agreed to before.

Rawls’ Expected Results

• Rawls believed that people would agree to the following under the veil of ignorance:

• Liberty Principle – equal right to basic liberties, shared by all. (e.g. right to property, right to vote)

• No one would want to end up without these rights, so they’d agree everyone should have them.

• Equality Principle: (Two pieces)

• Fair Equality of Opportunity: (first piece) offices and positions should be open to any individual, regardless of sex, social background, ethnicity,

• Strong: Not just “right” of opportunity, but an effectively equal chance if you’ve got the same natural abilities.

• Equality Principle: (Two pieces)

• Difference Principle: (second piece) Any inequalities in starting position should be designed to benefit the LESS advantaged in society.

• Maximin Strategy: People are afraid they’ll end up being in a disadvantaged group in society, so they will agree they should be given some help.

• Difference Principle example: (and Maximin)

• In Canada, Native peoples are very disadvantaged economically, and face strong racism and prejudice in Canadian society.

• So in the original position, people would be happy to allow Native peoples to get special scholarships to university. They would think “If I am a native person I will face many hardships, and help in education will be fair”

Order of Priority:• Rawls has the principles take priority over

each other if they conflict.

• Liberty Principle is the strongest, and wins over the others.

• Next is Equality of Opportunity• And last is Difference Principle

• E.g. You can’t have as a difference that some can own property and others can’t.

Three Theories of Justice:

• Ideas about distributive justice from 3 perspectives:

• I.e. Should the gov’t redistribute wealth from the rich to the poorer people?

• Nozick, Utilitarians, Rawls

Nozick

• As a liberalist, believes that the market will bring the best results for the most people.

• Therefore, the government should not interfere to redistribute wealth.

Utilitarians

• Law of diminishing marginal utility: As you get more and more, you get less and less utility (happiness) from it.

$500 making a big difference, or a small difference.

Utilitarianism

• Because utilitarian thinkers want to maximize the total utility across all people, the government should redistribute some wealth.

• Poor people will gain a LOT of utility from 500,000 won, but rich people probably won’t even notice it’s gone. So moving 500,000 from a rich to a poor person is desired by utilitarians.

Rawls

• Because of the Difference Principle, it is just to redistribute some wealth from the rich to the poor,

• Because of the maximin strategy, where people will allow the most disadvantaged group to gain some benefit.