The original position and the veil of ignorance
Imagine choosing society's rules without knowing who you will be. The thought experiment builds fairness into the procedure of choice; no one can rig it in their own favour.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1921 – 2002
John Rawls
罗尔斯 · John Bordley Rawls
Justice as fairness: behind a veil of ignorance, rational persons would choose equal liberty and only those inequalities that benefit the least advantaged. A Theory of Justice revived normative political philosophy.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
Source: A Theory of Justice, §1
Rawls was born in Baltimore to a lawyer's family. As a boy he lost two younger brothers who caught diphtheria and pneumonia from him and died, an undeserved difference of fortune said to have shaped his thinking about distributive justice. He studied philosophy at Princeton, graduated in 1943, joined the army and fought in New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan, visiting Hiroshima soon after the bomb; after the war he declined a commission, gave up plans for the Episcopal priesthood and lost his religious faith.
He took his doctorate at Princeton in 1950 on the grounds of ethical knowledge, then spent a year at Oxford under the influence of Berlin and Hart. After Cornell and MIT he went to Harvard in 1962 and stayed until his retirement in 1991. He stammered, was shy, prepared his lectures with extreme care, avoided public events and almost never gave interviews. Students said he wrote every objection into the next version of his lecture notes.
A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971 after twenty years of revision. Its design is a thought experiment: imagine people choosing the basic principles of society in an 'original position' behind a 'veil of ignorance', not knowing their class, talents, sex, religion or conception of the good. They would, he argued, choose two principles: first, each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same for all; second, social and economic inequalities are just only if positions are open to all and the inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle). In an age dominated by analytic philosophy the book returned normative political philosophy to the centre, provoked replies from Nozick, Sandel, Walzer and Cohen, and was translated into more than twenty languages.
Political Liberalism (1993) revised the theory: in a society with many reasonable but incompatible religious and philosophical doctrines, principles of justice cannot rest on any one comprehensive doctrine but must be an 'overlapping consensus' each doctrine can support from its own standpoint, and public reason may appeal only to political values citizens share. The Law of Peoples (1999) extended the theory to international relations. He suffered several strokes in his last years and died at home in 2002. Widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, he was told by President Clinton, awarding him the National Humanities Medal, that he had 'helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself'.
Key Ideas
The two principles of justice
First, equal basic liberties; second, inequalities are just only under fair equality of opportunity and when they most benefit the least advantaged. The first principle has priority over the second.
The difference principle
Talents and birth are morally arbitrary, and no one deserves their advantages. Society should be arranged so that even these differences of luck work to the benefit of the worst off.
Reflective equilibrium
The method of justifying a theory of justice: adjust principles and our considered judgements back and forth until they cohere. There is no Archimedean point.
Overlapping consensus
In a pluralist society, principles of justice must be supportable by the various reasonable religious and philosophical doctrines each from its own standpoint, depending on none. This is the condition of a stable free society.
Public reason
In discussing constitutional essentials and basic justice, citizens and officials should appeal only to political values all could reasonably accept, not to their own comprehensive doctrines.
Influenced by
- Immanuel Kant
The original position is a procedural rendering of Kant's autonomy: those who choose principles behind the veil of ignorance treat themselves as free and equal rational beings.
- John Locke
He raised the contract theory of Locke, Rousseau and Kant to 'a higher level of abstraction': the contract is not to found a government but to choose principles of justice for the basic structure of society.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism was his chief adversary: it lets the happiness of the many sacrifice the few, whereas justice denies that the loss of freedom for some can be made right by a greater good shared by others.
- David Hume
- Aristotle
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Late in life he acknowledged Hegel's 'reconciliation': one task of political philosophy is to let citizens see their institutions as reasonable and so be reconciled to their social world.
Influenced
- Jürgen Habermas
Their 1995 exchange in the Journal of Philosophy was a direct dialogue between political liberalism and discourse theory, which he called 'a family quarrel'.
- Thomas Nagel
His Harvard dissertation was supervised by Rawls, and The Possibility of Altruism carried on Rawls's Kantian project: deriving concern for others from the structure of practical reason.
- Robert Nozick
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is the most famous reply to A Theory of Justice: two colleagues in the same Harvard corridor, one for redistribution, the other for the minimal state.
- Derek Parfit
- Peter Singer