John rawls what makes a society just

The talents you choose to develop, and the amount of effort you put in, are heavily affected by education; so it might seem unfair to judge people if they have had very different educational experiences.

Finally, the Difference Principle sets a further restriction on inequalities. Even if a particular inequality does not affect equality of opportunities, the Difference Principle tells us that it must be beneficial for the very worst off. For instance, it might be that by allowing inequalities, we motivate people to work harder, generating more Primary Goods overall.

If these then benefit the worst off in society, making them better off than they would have been in a more equal distribution, the Difference Principle will allow that inequality. As with any influential philosopher, Rawls has been the subject of much criticism and disagreement. We have already noted that Rawls explicitly makes several assumptions that shape the nature of the discussion behind the Veil of Ignorance, and the outcomes that are likely to come out of it.

However, one might challenge Rawls by disputing the fairness or intuitiveness of one or more of his assumptions. Probably the most famous example of this comes from Robert Nozick. He thinks that if we work out what those institutions would look like in a perfectly just society, using the Veil of Ignorance, we can then start to move our current society in that direction.

Nozick notes that in reality, most goods are already owned. In some cases, we find that the person who owns those goods worked for them. In other cases, the individual will have inherited those goods, but they will have come from an ancestor who worked for them.

In both cases, we cannot simply redistribute these goods to fit our pattern, because people have rights. The fact that taking money you earned would benefit someone else cannot be the basis for government forcibly taking your money.

The reason for this is that your body is owned by you and nobody else. That principle extends, Nozick says, to what you do with your body: your labour. One problem with this argument, to which Rawls might appeal, is that my ability to work and therefore gain property depends on many other things:.

A second criticism also concerns the fact that, behind the Veil, various facts are hidden from you. Rather than worrying about the substantive conclusions Rawls reaches, as Nozick does, this criticism worries about the very coherence of reasoned discussion behind the Veil of Ignorance. Since one of the facts that is hidden by the veil is the nature of the society you live in, we may assume that the resulting principles are supposed to be applicable in all societies, though this is a view that Rawls attempted to reject in later work.

In addition, people behind the Veil are supposed to come up with a view of how society should be structured while knowing almost nothing about themselves, and their lives. Even if Rawls is right that people behind the Veil would agree on his two principles, communitarians think that the hypothetical agreement ignores much that is important. Individuals behind the Veil are assumed to be largely self-interested, and to have a strong interest in retaining the ability to abandon their current social roles and pursuits and take up new ones.

A Theory of Justice was both radical and conservative. At the same time, it described the principles of reconstruction as ones that Americans already held. This strategy of squaring the circle might seem odd: How can a country be committed to principles it routinely and pervasively defies and ignores? Constitutional redemption was the defining ideal of Cold War liberal patriotism.

Its strategies became, by subtle philosophical transformation, the strategy of A Theory of Justice : to say that Americans already are what they have never yet been—and that this ideal is also incipiently universal, if other peoples can make their way to it.

Forrester is a subtle intellectual historian as well as a political theorist, and she does not imply that one book, even a work as field-defining as A Theory of Justice , can in fact define a field. These thinkers continued a search for the impersonal perspective on politics that Rawls had put at the heart of the field. Ironically, however, the consensus Rawls had counted on was already gone by the polarized late s, which saw violent backlash against the civil rights movement, vicious clashes over the Vietnam War, and acts of domestic terrorism from both the militant left and the racist right.

There was little more reason in to think that Americans shared an abiding consensus than there is in Those dissenters who disobeyed because they considered the U. Rawls similarly hurried past segregation in his work; he reasoned that it was so manifestly unjust that there was nothing a philosopher should say about it except that it should be abolished completely. What did the vicious and often successful resistance to the civil rights movement reveal about the American grammar of justice?

A similar ahistorical impulse governed when Rawls and others turned to the problem of international justice. Colonialism and empire largely receded from sight, as did postcolonial political efforts to develop redistributive regimes such as the short-lived New International Economic Order.

In The Law of Peoples , Rawls imagined an original position for representatives of nation-states, interested in fair rules of international order. There is a fine line between distilling problems to issues of principle and losing track of the settings altogether. The discipline became increasingly remote from moral and political experience.

What, asked some next-generation Rawlsians, would be the result of an original position for the whole world? Where was the consensus, what were the institutions, for a philosophy of global justice? What, for instance, would be the ethical course for a soldier or commander to take in wartime, deciding whether to bomb a city to induce surrender, or whether to obey an order to drop that bomb?

It is good at getting undergraduates to think about tricky questions, but it tends to take the world as it is and attend to the perplexities of navigating it—understandable training for aspiring elites, but a diminished warrant for a tradition that began by trying to call a country to transformative standards of justice.

In , Rawls along with fellow philosopher Stanley Cavell made the formal proposal to the Harvard faculty to adopt an African American Studies program, and student radicals recall that he personally bailed them out of jail during a student strike against the Vietnam War and in favor of a panoply of radicalisms.

In his later writing, he condemned the role of corporate money in American politics and worried that a society drenched in consumerism could not achieve self-government. This implies that, while Rawls allows that people are free to form their own private conceptions of the good, the pursuit of such conceptions must remain a private affair; the only purpose for which humans may engage in legitimate public cooperation is the furtherance of human equality and liberty.

Likewise, our liberty is a means to a greater, God-given end: that of freely serving and submitting to the divine Lordship and, as a consequence, freely serving others. While almost all other potentially constituent qualities are stripped away in the Original Position, human rationality is taken to be a universal element which is shared by all. A Christian perspective must take issue both with the privileged position Rawls gives to human rationality, as well as with the particular form of reason that he advances.

Rawls also assumes that people in the Original Position—people who are acting rationally, as people really ought to act in an ideal world—are essentially risk-averse. This assumption is erroneous because it fails to recognise that authentic human existence is, in fact, defined by such concrete, differentiating factors as social relations, not in the absence of them. Our unique identities are inseparably bound up with the concrete contexts in which God has placed us.

A better approach would be to recognise that human diversity is not a problem, but as much a foundation of healthy human community life as our similarities. In Eden as well as in the church, human differences are ordered to the goal of complementarity; they help us to live together more effectively. When human social life is reduced to merely focussing on our universal similarities to create a stable overlapping consensus, a static view of human society results in which there is no impetus for change or improvement.

As Habermas emphasises, it is characterised more by flux, movement and debate than by agreement on a few universally shared basics and by agreement that all other things should not matter or even be seriously discussed in the public forum.

Christians would want to affirm the central place that Rawls gives to justice, [43] as well as his assumption that all people ought to be treated as if they are fundamentally equal.

Although justice always ought to be administered fairly and impartially, it also needs to judge rightly and mercifully. Justice judges rightly when it recognises that its decisions must reflect the underlying structure of reality.

It is for this reason that Rawls excludes such considerations: unlike fairness, rectitude in judgement is the preserve of the competing ideological positions which he wishes to bring together on the neutral ground of liberal democracy. For it is possible, indeed common, for fair decisions to still appear manifestly unjust, even to liberals like Rawls.

The sense of injustice is sharpened further if it is the case that the former beneficiary has done little for the deceased, while the latter cared for her at great cost for many years. He cites Kant in asserting that a world government would either be a global despotism or beleaguered by groups fighting to gain their political independence. So the law of peoples will be international, not cosmopolitan: it will be a foreign policy that guides a liberal society in its interactions with other societies, both liberal and non-liberal.

The most important condition for this realistic utopia to come about is that all societies are internally well-ordered: that all have just, or at least decent, domestic political institutions. As a liberal society has a basic structure of institutions so, Rawls says, there is an international basic structure LP , 33, 62, , , , The principles that should regulate this international basic structure thus require justification.

The justification of these principles must accommodate the fact that there is even more pluralism in worldviews among contemporary societies than there is within a single liberal society. Rawls also leaves room for his law of peoples to accommodate various organizations that may help societies to increase their political and economic coordination, such as idealized versions of a United Nations, a World Trade Organization, and a World Bank.

A people is a group of individuals ruled by a common government, bound together by common sympathies, and firmly attached to a common conception of right and justice. Peoples see themselves as free in the sense of being rightfully politically independent; and as equal in regarding themselves as equally deserving of recognition and respect.

Peoples are reasonable in that they will honor fair terms of cooperation with other peoples, even at cost to their own interests, given that other peoples will also honor those terms. Reasonable peoples are thus unwilling to try to impose their political or social ideals on other reasonable peoples. They satisfy the criterion of reciprocity with respect to one another. Rawls contrasts peoples with states.

A state, Rawls says, is moved by the desires to enlarge its territory, or to convert other societies to its religion, or to enjoy the power of ruling over others, or to increase its relative economic strength. Peoples are not states, and as we will see peoples may treat societies that act like states as international outlaws.

Peoples are of two types, depending on the nature of their domestic political institutions. Liberal peoples satisfy the requirements of political liberalism: they have legitimate liberal constitutions, and they have governments that are under popular control and not driven by large concentration of private economic power.

Decent peoples are not internally just from a liberal perspective. Their basic institutions do not recognize reasonable pluralism or embody any interpretation of the liberal ideas of free and equal citizens cooperating fairly. The institutions of a decent society may be organized around a single comprehensive doctrine, such as a dominant religion. The political system may not be democratic, and women or members of minority religions may be excluded from public office. Nevertheless, decent peoples are well-ordered enough, Rawls says, to merit equal membership in international society.

Like all peoples, decent peoples do not have aggressive foreign policies. Beyond this, Rawls describes one type of decent society—a decent hierarchical society —to illustrate what decency requires.

First, it secures a core list of human rights. Second, its political system takes the fundamental interests of all persons into account through a decent consultation hierarchy. This means that the government genuinely consults with the representatives of all social groups, which together represent all persons in the society, and that the government justifies its laws and policies to these groups.

The government does not close down protests, and responds to any protests with conscientious replies. The government also supports the right of citizens to emigrate. However non-Muslim religions may be practiced without fear, and believers in them are encouraged to take part in the civic culture of the wider society. Minorities are not subject to arbitrary discrimination by law, or treated as inferior by Muslims.

Kazanistan would qualify, Rawls says, as a decent, well-ordered member of the society of peoples, entitled to respectful toleration and equal treatment by other peoples. Liberal peoples tolerate decent peoples, and indeed treat them as equals.

Not to do so, Rawls says, would be to fail to express sufficient respect for acceptable ways of ordering a society. Liberal peoples should recognize the good of national self-determination, and let decent societies decide their futures for themselves. The government of a liberal people should not criticize decent peoples for failing to be liberal, or set up incentives for them to become more so. Criticism and inducements may cause bitterness and resentment within decent peoples, and so be counter-productive.

Indeed public reason imposes duties of civility upon the members of international society, just as it does upon members of a liberal society. Government officials and candidates for high office should explain their foreign policy positions to other peoples in terms of the principles and values of the law of peoples, and should avoid reliance on contentious parochial reasons that all peoples cannot reasonably share.

One major reason that liberal peoples tolerate decent peoples, Rawls says, is that decent peoples secure for all persons within their territory a core list of human rights. These core human rights include rights to subsistence, security, personal property, and formal equality before the law, as well as freedoms from slavery, protections of ethnic groups against genocide, and some measure of liberty of conscience but not, as we have seen, a right to democratic participation.

These core human rights are the minimal conditions required for persons to be able to engage in social cooperation in any real sense, so any well-ordered society must protect them.

The role of human rights in the law of peoples is thus to set limits on international toleration. Societies that violate human rights overstep the limits of toleration, and may rightly be subject to economic sanctions or even military intervention. The international original position parallels the domestic original position of justice as fairness. The strategy, that is, is to describe reasonable conditions under which a rational agreement on principles can be made.

In the international original position, representatives of each people agree on principles for the international basic structure. Each party is behind a veil of ignorance, deprived of information about the people they represent, such as the size of its territory and population, and its relative political and economic strength. Each party tries to do the best they can for the people they represent, in terms of the fundamental interests that all peoples have.

Rawls claims that the parties in the international original position would favor the eight principles listed above. Starting from a baseline of equality and independence, the parties would see no reason to introduce inequalities into the relationships among peoples beyond certain functional inequalities in the design of cooperative organizations, such as richer countries contributing more to an idealized United Nations. The parties would reject international utilitarian principles, as no people is prepared to accept that it should sacrifice its fundamental interests for the sake of greater total global utility.

After selecting the eight principles of the law of peoples, the parties next check that these principles can stably order international relations over time.

Analogously to the domestic case, the parties will see that the principles of the law of peoples affirm the good of peoples, and that peoples will develop trust and confidence in one another as all willingly continue to abide by these principles. The stability of the international political order will thus be stability for the right reasons and not a mere modus vivendi , since each people will affirm the principles as its first-best option whatever the international balance of power might become.

Rawls also attempts to draw empirical support for his stability argument from the literature on the democratic peace. Social scientists have found that historically democracies have tended not to go to war with one another. Rawls explains this by saying that liberal societies are, because of their internal political structures, satisfied. Liberal peoples have no desires for imperial glory, territorial expansion, or to convert others to their religion, and whatever goods and services they need from other countries they can obtain through trade.

Liberal peoples, Rawls says, have no reasons to fight aggressive wars, so a genuine peace can endure among them. And since decent peoples are defined as non-aggressive, any decent people can join this liberal peace as well. Once the parties have agreed to the eight principles of the law of peoples, they then continue to specify these principles more precisely in a process analogous to the domestic four-stage sequence.

The principles selected in the international original position contain provisions for non-ideal situations: situations in which nations are unwilling to comply with the ideal principles, or are unable to cooperate on their terms.

These provisions are embedded in principles 4 through 8 of the law of peoples. Outlaw states are non-compliant: they threaten the peace by attempting to expand their power and influence, or by violating the human rights of those within their territory. The principles of the law of peoples allow peoples to fight these outlaw states in self-defense, and to take coercive actions against them to stop their violations of human rights.

In any military confrontations with outlaw states, peoples must obey the principles of the just prosecution of war, such as avoiding direct attacks on enemy civilians in all but the most desperate circumstances. The aim of war, Rawls says, must be to bring all societies to honor the law of peoples, and eventually to become fully participating members of international society. Burdened societies struggle with social and economic conditions that make it difficult for them to maintain either liberal or decent institutions.

It is the basic structure and political culture of a society that are most crucial for its self-sufficiency; the international community must help a burdened society to rise above this threshold. The law of peoples eighth principle requires that burdened peoples be assisted until they can handle their own affairs i. Accepting this duty would require significant changes in how nations respond to global poverty and failed states.

Officials of democratic societies can do little more than hope that decent societies will become internally more tolerant and democratic. Once the duty to assist burdened peoples is satisfied, there are no further requirements on international economic distributions: for Rawls, international economic inequalities are of no political concern as such.

Moreover, individuals around the world may suffer greatly from bad luck, and they may be haunted by spiritual emptiness. These are not concerns reached by a Rawlsian foreign policy. Affirming the possibility of a just and peaceful future can inoculate us against a cynicism that undermines the decency, reciprocity, and reasonableness that exist now and that may grow from now on.

More advanced students wanting a guide to A Theory of Justice may wish to read Mandle Mandle and Reidy is a lexicon with short entries on important concepts, issues, influences, and critics, from Abortion to Maximin to Wittgenstein. Historically, the most influential volume of essays on justice as fairness has been Daniels Older collections on political liberalism include Davion and Wolf , Griffin and Solum and Lloyd Martin and Reidy focuses on the law of peoples.

Hinton is a collection on the original position. Young is a selection of more critical articles. A debate over Rawls and race is between Mills , chs. Bailey and Gentile is an anthology that explore how extensively religious believers can engage in the political life of a Rawlsian society.

Brooks and Fleming are collections on Rawls and the law. Edmundson argues that Rawlsian justice requires socialism. Gregory and Nelson , ch. Botti situates Rawls within American pragmatism. Readers without access to the Richardson and Weithman volumes can follow the links, in the Other Internet Resources section below, to their tables of contents and can then locate the articles in their original places of publication.

Life and Work 2. Aims and Method 2. Justice as Fairness: Justice within a Liberal Society 4. Life and Work Rawls was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Political Liberalism: Legitimacy and Stability within a Liberal Society In a free society, citizens will have disparate worldviews.

Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin from shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgment PL , — Since all the members of this family interpret the same three fundamental ideas, however, all liberal political conceptions of justice will share certain basic features: A liberal political conception of justice will ascribe to all citizens familiar individual rights and liberties, such as rights of free expression, liberty of conscience, and free choice of occupation; A political conception will give special priority to these rights and liberties, especially over demands to further the general good e.

The quotation below from the second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church shows how a particular comprehensive doctrine Catholicism affirms one component of a liberal political conception a familiar individual liberty for its own reasons: This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom.

This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits. The council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person, as this dignity is known through the revealed Word of God and by reason itself.

This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right. Each of the highlighted terms in this doctrine can be further elucidated as follows: The public values that citizens must be able to appeal to are the values of a political conception of justice: those related to the freedom and equality of citizens, and society as a fair system of cooperation over time.

To illustrate, consider four hypothetical economic structures A—D, and the lifetime-average levels of income that these different economic structures would yield for representative members of three groups: Economy Least-Advantaged Group Middle Group Most-Advantaged Group A 10, 10, 10, B 12, 30, 80, C 30, 90, , D 20, , , Here the difference principle selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best.

Primary goods are these: The basic rights and liberties; Freedom of movement, and free choice among a wide range of occupations; The powers of offices and positions of responsibility; Income and wealth; The social bases of self-respect: the recognition by social institutions that gives citizens a sense of self-worth and the confidence to carry out their plans JF , 58— Behind the veil of ignorance, the informational situation of the parties that represent real citizens is as follows: Parties do not know The race, ethnicity, gender, age, income, wealth, natural endowments, comprehensive doctrine, etc.

Parties do know That citizens in the society have different comprehensive doctrines and plans of life; that all citizens have interests in more primary goods; That the society is under conditions of moderate scarcity: there is enough to go around, but not enough for everyone to get what they want; General facts and common sense about human social life; general conclusions of science including economics and psychology that are uncontroversial.

The Law of Peoples: Liberal Foreign Policy With the theories of legitimacy and justice for a self-contained liberal society completed, Rawls then extends his approach to international relations with the next in his sequence of theories: the law of peoples. Rawls describes the main ideas motivating his law of peoples as follows: Two main ideas motivate the Law of Peoples. One is that the great evils of human history—unjust war and oppression, religious persecution and the denial of liberty of conscience, starvation and poverty, not to mention genocide and mass murder—follow from political injustice, with its own cruelties and callousness… The other main idea, obviously connected with the first, is that, once the gravest forms of political injustice are eliminated by following just or at least decent social policies and establishing just or at least decent basic institutions, these great evils will eventually disappear LP , 6—7.

Rawls puts forward eight principles for ordering the international basic structure: Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings. Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them. Peoples are to observe the duty of nonintervention except to address grave violations of human rights. Peoples have a right of self-defense, but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defense.

Peoples are to honor human rights. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime LP , The scholarly literature on Rawls is vast; below are some entry points that may be useful.

Revised edition, The page citations in this entry are to the edition. Paperback edition, ; Second edition, Freeman ed. Herman ed.