John Rawls
Political liberalism / justice as fairness · United States, 1921–2002
The lens
The Rawlsian lens reads an event by asking whether an arrangement could be justified to everyone from a fair starting point—the original position, in which parties choose principles behind a veil of ignorance that hides their place, class, and talents. Its vocabulary is justice as fairness, the two principles, the difference principle, primary goods, and public reason. This lens asks, from A Theory of Justice, whether inequalities are arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, since Rawls permits only those disparities that improve the position of those at the bottom. It evaluates institutions by the distribution of basic liberties and opportunities rather than by aggregate welfare, refusing to let the good of some be traded against the rights of others. From Political Liberalism it asks whether public decisions are justified in terms of public reason that citizens holding different comprehensive doctrines could accept, rather than by appeal to one contested worldview. Where other lenses ask what maximizes utility or rewards desert, the Rawlsian lens asks what free and equal persons could agree to in advance. It notices the moral arbitrariness of the natural and social lottery, the tendency to mistake advantage for merit, and the difference between a modus vivendi and a genuinely shared conception of justice.
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