By Dr. Pradeep N
| Course | Level | Theme | Primary Texts |
| Contemporary Political Theory | Graduate / Ph.D. Core | Liberal Egalitarianism & Contractarianism | A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) |
Download Kannada Practice Points here.
1. Introduction: The Contractarian Revival and the Basic Structure
The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) revitalized Anglo-American normative political philosophy, which had been paralyzed by logical positivism and dominated by utilitarianism. Rawls constructed a systematic, deontological, Kantian contractarian alternative to utilitarianism, arguing that utilitarian frameworks fail to take the distinction between persons seriously by allowing the rights and welfare of minorities to be sacrificed for aggregate societal surplus.
In Justice as Fairness, Rawls defines justice as the first virtue of social institutions. The primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society—the arrangement of major political, social, and economic institutions (such as the constitution, the legal system, private property, the family, and competitive markets) into one unified system of social cooperation. Because the basic structure profoundly distributes fundamental rights, duties, and life prospects from birth, its rules cannot be left to natural or historical accident; they must be justified through impartial moral principles.
“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”
— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
2. Foundational Methodology: Constructivism & Procedural Impartiality
Rawls’s methodology relies on Kantian constructivism and pure procedural justice. Rather than intuiting self-evident moral truths, Rawls constructs a representational device where rational agents select the principles of justice under conditions of fairness.
[ THE ORIGINAL POSITION ]
│
▼
[ VEIL OF IGNORANCE ]
(Strips morally arbitrary contingences:
class, race, natural talent, gender,
conception of the good)
│
▼
[ MAXIMIN RULE ]
(Maximize the minimum: choose the society
where the least advantaged fare best)
│
▼
[ TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE ]
1. Equal Basic Liberties (Lexical 1st)
2a. Fair Equality of Opportunity (Lexical 2nd)
2b. The Difference Principle
2.1 Society as a Fair System of Cooperation
Rawls models society as a system of cooperation among free and equal citizens possessing two moral powers:
- The Capacity for a Sense of Justice: The ability to understand, apply, and act from principles of political justice.
- The Capacity for a Conception of the Good: The ability to form, revise, and rationally pursue a coherent conception of value and a meaningful life.
2.2 The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance
To prevent parties from tailoring principles to favor their own social or natural advantages, Rawls replaces the classical “State of Nature” with the Original Position (OP)—a hypothetical deliberative forum.
Parties in the OP sit behind a Veil of Ignorance, which strips them of specific knowledge regarding:
- Their social class, wealth, and status.
- Their natural endowments (intelligence, physical strength, artistic or mathematical talent).
- Their race, ethnicity, gender, and biological sex.
- Their specific conception of the good, religious beliefs, or moral psychology.
- The generation to which they belong (ensuring intergenerational savings).
Deliberators know only general facts about human society: basic political sociology, economic theory, human psychology, and that society operates under circumstances of justice (moderate scarcity and competing demands).
2.3 Rationality and the Maximin Decision Rule
Operating under extreme uncertainty behind the Veil of Ignorance, mutually disinterested rational agents avoid probabilistic gambling. Instead, they adopt the maximin rule of rational choice: ranking alternatives by their worst-case outcomes and selecting the system whose worst outcome is superior to the worst outcomes of all other systems. In political terms, parties design society as if their worst enemy were assigning them their place within it—maximizing the expectations of the least advantaged social position.
3. The Two Principles of Justice & Lexical Priority
Rawls argues that deliberators in the Original Position would reject utilitarianism and endorse two principles of justice, ordered in lexical priority (a strict hierarchy where the first principle must be fully satisfied before the second is applied).
3.1 The First Principle: Equal Basic Liberties
The Equal Basic Liberties 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.
- Scope: Covers political liberty (the right to vote and hold public office), freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of the person along with the right to hold personal property, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure.
- Lexical Priority (First over Second): Basic liberties can only be restricted for the sake of liberty itself (to prevent collisions among basic liberties), never to generate economic surplus or administrative efficiency.
3.2 The Second Principle: Distributive Equity
The Distributive Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:
(a) Fair Equality of Opportunity (FEO): They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and
(b) The Difference Principle: They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.
A. Fair Equality of Opportunity (Lexical Priority over the Difference Principle)
- Rawls rejects mere formal equality of opportunity (careers open to talents without legal barriers) because it allows social class and birth circumstances to dictate life outcomes.
- Substantive Fair Equality of Opportunity requires that individuals with the same natural talent and the same willingness to use it should have identical prospects of success, regardless of their initial social class. This demands robust public investments in education, healthcare, and anti-discrimination frameworks.
B. The Difference Principle
- Natural endowments (genetic talents) and social birth are morally arbitrary; no one deserves their starting place in society.
- Rather than attempting to eliminate natural inequalities, the Difference Principle treats the distribution of natural talents as a common asset. Social and economic inequalities (e.g., higher compensation for surgeons or entrepreneurs) are morally justifiable if and only if the incentive structures generate an economic surplus that lifts the absolute expectations of the least advantaged higher than they would be under an strictly equal distribution.
welfare of
least advantaged
▲
│ / Difference Principle Optimum
│ / (Inequalities benefit least advantaged)
│ /
│ /───\
│ / \ Unjust Inequality
│ / \ (Rich gain while poor stagnate/lose)
│ / \
└──────────────────────────► inequality
4. The Currency of Justice: Primary Social Goods
To measure distributive shares without judging which citizens’ conceptions of the good are superior, Rawls introduces Primary Social Goods—all-purpose resources that any rational person needs to pursue a complete life.
| Category of Primary Good | Content & Structural Function in Justice as Fairness |
| 1. Basic Rights & Liberties | Freedom of speech, conscience, voting, and bodily integrity (First Principle). |
| 2. Freedom of Movement & Occupation | Liberty to pursue career choices against a background of diverse opportunities. |
| 3. Powers & Prerogatives of Office | Authority and responsibility attached to institutional roles and economic leadership. |
| 4. Income & Wealth | All-purpose financial means necessary to achieve diverse material ends. |
| 5. Social Bases of Self-Respect | Institutional aspects of the basic structure that give citizens a secure sense of self-worth and confidence in their moral powers (the most important primary good). |
5. The Political Turn: Political Liberalism (1993)
In his later work, Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls revised his framework to resolve an internal flaw in A Theory of Justice: the assumption that all citizens in a well-ordered society would endorse Justice as Fairness as a comprehensive moral doctrine (like Kantianism or Enlightenment liberalism).
5.1 Reasonable Pluralism and the Problem of Stability
- In any free society, the exercise of human reason under conditions of liberty inevitably produces reasonable pluralism—an irreconcilable diversity of reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral comprehensive doctrines.
- Therefore, a stable democracy cannot rest on a comprehensive moral philosophy without using state coercion to suppress dissent.
5.2 A Freestanding Political Conception of Justice
- Rawls reframed Justice as Fairness not as a comprehensive moral truth, but as a freestanding political conception derived from the fundamental ideas embedded in the public political culture of a democratic society (specifically, the idea of citizens as free and equal, and society as a fair system of cooperation).
5.3 The Overlapping Consensus
- Stability is achieved when citizens holding different reasonable comprehensive doctrines endorse Justice as Fairness from within their own worldviews—a convergence Rawls terms an Overlapping Consensus.
- For example: A religious citizen endorses basic liberties because their faith commands respect for human dignity; a secular Kantian endorses the same liberties from autonomous moral duty.
5.4 Public Reason
- When constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake, citizens and officials must justify their political decisions using Public Reason—arguments and evidence that all reasonable citizens can be expected to endorse, rather than appeals to private religious texts or sectarian dogmas.
6. Contemporary Critical Debates & Rejoinders
In graduate seminars, Justice as Fairness is routinely evaluated against six major critical frontiers in contemporary political theory:
6.1 The Libertarian Critique (Robert Nozick)
- The Challenge: In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick argues that Rawls’s Difference Principle is a patterned end-state theory that requires constant, coercive state intervention to maintain. Nozick asserts that “liberty upsets patterns” (the Wilt Chamberlain example) and that taxing earnings to benefit the least advantaged violates self-ownership and historical entitlement.
- Rawlsian Rejoinder: Property rights are not pre-social natural facts; they are conventions defined by the basic structure. Individual earnings depend entirely on social cooperation, legal infrastructure, and public institutions.
6.2 The Communitarian Critique (Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer)
- The Challenge: Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982) argues that the Original Position relies on an “unencumbered self” stripped of social ties, communal commitments, and constitutive attachments. Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983) argues that justice cannot be abstractly universal; goods carry distinct social meanings and must be distributed across autonomous “spheres.”
- Rawlsian Rejoinder: The Original Position is not a metaphysical claim about human nature; it is a representational device of political impartiality. In their private lives, citizens remain deeply attached to their communities and traditions.
6.3 The Capability Critique (Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum)
- The Challenge: Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) argues that Rawls suffers from “primary goods fetishism.” Because individuals possess different physiological needs and environmental constraints (e.g., a person with a severe disability vs. an able-bodied person), distributing equal primary goods fails to equalize substantive freedom. Justice must focus on Capabilities and Functionings—what people can actually do and be.
- Rawlsian Rejoinder: In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls acknowledges variations in physical capability but insists that political justice must evaluate citizens as cooperative participants over a complete life, handling extreme disability through specialized health and social insurance frameworks rather than altering the constitutional baseline of basic justice.
6.4 The Feminist Critique (Susan Moller Okin)
- The Challenge: In Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), Okin critiques Rawls for treating the family as a foundational institution of the basic structure while assuming the family is inherently just, ignoring gendered divisions of labor, domestic vulnerability, and intra-household exploitation.
- Rawlsian Rejoinder: Rawls later explicitly clarified that while the principles of justice do not apply internally to family governance (just as they do not apply internally to churches or universities), they constrain the basic structure to guarantee equal rights, economic security, and exit rights for adult members of families.
6.5 The Critical Race & Decolonial Critique (Charles Mills)
- The Challenge: In The Racial Contract (1997) and Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017), Mills argues that Rawlsian ideal theory is a form of white bourgeois epistemology. By starting from an assumption of “strict compliance” in a well-ordered society, Rawls methodologically evades the foundational real-world injustices of racial slavery, indigenous dispossession, and structural white supremacy.
- Rawlsian Rejoinder: Ideal theory is conceptually necessary to establish a clear normative benchmark of what a truly just society looks like before attempting to design non-ideal theories of rectification, reparations, and transition.
7. Graduate Seminar Discussion Prompts
- Contractarian Impartiality vs. Historical Entitlement:Does the thought experiment of the Original Position successfully neutralize moral arbitrariness, or does Nozick’s historical entitlement theory correctly expose patterned redistribution as a violation of individual self-ownership?
- The Lexical Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity:Why does Rawls place Fair Equality of Opportunity in lexical priority ahead of the Difference Principle? If a policy could significantly increase the wealth of the poorest citizens by permitting elite educational segregation, why would Justice as Fairness forbid it?
- Ideal vs. Non-Ideal Theory:Is Charles Mills correct that Rawlsian ideal theory serves as an “epistemic evasion” of racial and colonial injustice? Can the tools of Justice as Fairness (such as the Difference Principle and public reason) be retooled to theorize historical reparations and structural decolonization?
- Primary Goods vs. Capabilities:In policy design, does Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach provide a more robust metric for assessing socio-economic justice than Rawls’s index of Primary Social Goods, or does Sen’s model introduce intractable problems of interpersonal comparison?
- The Viability of Political Liberalism:In an era of deepening ideological polarization and illiberal populism, is Rawls’s concept of an “Overlapping Consensus” achievable, or does “Public Reason” exclude too many deeply held religious and moral convictions from democratic discourse?
8. Essential Seminar Bibliography
- Primary Texts:
- Rawls, John. (1971 / 1999). A Theory of Justice (Original & Revised Editions). Harvard University Press.
- Rawls, John. (1993). Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press.
- Rawls, John. (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Ed. Erin Kelly). Harvard University Press.
- Key Critical & Secondary Literature:
- Barry, Brian. (1989). Theories of Justice. University of California Press.
- Daniels, Norman (Ed.). (1989). Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on A Theory of Justice. Stanford University Press.
- Freeman, Samuel (Ed.). (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge University Press.
- Mills, Charles W. (2017). Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford University Press.
- Nozick, Robert. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books. (Specifically Chapter 7: “Distributive Justice”).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. (2006). Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard University Press.
- Okin, Susan Moller. (1989). Justice, Gender, and the Family. Basic Books.
- Sandel, Michael J. (1982). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge University Press.
- Sen, Amartya. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Harvard University Press.
- Walzer, Michael. (1983). Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books.