When was john rawls born

The second principle addresses instead those aspects of the basic structure that shape the distribution of opportunities, offices, income, wealth, and in general social advantages. Each of these three centrally addresses a different set of primary goods: the First Principle concerns rights and liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity concerns opportunities; and the Difference Principle primarily concerns income and wealth.

That the view adequately secures the social basis of self-respect is something that Rawls argues more holistically. The argument that the parties in the OP will prefer Justice as Fairness to utilitarianism and to the various other alternative principles with which they are presented divides into two parts.

There is, first, the question whether the parties will insist upon securing a scheme of equal basic liberties and upon giving them top priority.

Regarding the first part of the argument from the OP, the crucial point is that the parties are stipulated to care about rights and liberties.

In addition, he argues that securing the First Principle importantly serves the higher-order interest in an effective sense of justice—and does so better than the pure utilitarian alternative—by better promoting social stability, mutual respect, and social unity. The second part of the argument from the OP takes the First Principle for granted and addresses the matter of social inequalities. Its sticking point has always been the Difference Principle, which strikingly and influentially articulates a liberal-egalitarian socioeconomic position.

It is the Difference Principle that would most clearly demand deep reforms in existing societies. The set-up of the OP suggests the following, informal argument for the difference principle: because equality is an ideal fundamentally relevant to the idea of fair cooperation, the OP situates the parties symmetrically and deprives them of information that could distinguish them or allow one to gain bargaining advantage over another.

Given this set-up, the parties will consider the situation of equal distribution a reasonable starting point in their deliberations. Since they know all the general facts about human societies, however, the parties will realize that society might depart from this starting point by instituting a system of social rules that differentially reward the especially productive and could achieve results that are better for everyone than are the results under rules guaranteeing full equality.

This is the kind of inequality that the Difference Principle allows and requires: departures from full equality that make some better off and no one worse off. Three main refinements are worth noting. First, because the principle pertains to the basic structure of society and because the parties are comparing different societies organized around different principles, the expectations that matter are not those of particular people but those of representative members of broad social classes.

Second, to make his exposition a little simpler, Rawls makes some technical assumptions that let him focus only on the expectations of the least-well-off representative class in a given society.

Allowed by these simplifying assumptions to focus only on the least well off representative persons, the Difference Principle thus holds that social rules allowing for inequalities in income and wealth are acceptable just in case those who are least well off under those rules are better off than the least-well-off representative persons under any alternative sets of social rules. This formulation already takes account of the third refinement, which recognizes that the people who are the worst off under one set of social arrangements may not be the same people as those who are worst off under some other set of social arrangements.

PL at 7n. The Difference Principle requires society to look out for the least well off. But would the parties to the OP prefer the Difference Principle to a utilitarian principle of distribution? With nothing but the bare idea of rationality to guide them, they will naturally choose any principle that will maximize their utility expectation.

Since this is what the principle of Average Utilitarianism does, they will choose it. Rawls never defends the primary goods as goods in themselves. Rather, he defends them as versatile means.

In the later theory, the primary goods are defended as facilitating the pursuit and revision, by the persons the parties represent, of their conceptions of the good. While the parties do not know what those conceptions of the good are, they do care about whether the persons they represent can pursue and revise them.

With this departure from Harsanyi in mind, we may finally explain why the parties in the OP will prefer the principles of Justice as Fairness, including the Difference Principle, to average utilitarianism. The maximin rule is a general rule for making choices under conditions of uncertainty.

The maximin rule directs one to select that alternative where the minimum place is higher on whatever the relevant measure is than the minimum place in any other alternative. They care about the primary goods and the highest-order moral powers, but they also know, in effect, that the primary goods that they are motivated to seek are not what the persons they represent ultimately care about.

Accordingly, it is rational for them to take a cautious approach. They must do what they can to assure to the persons they represent have a sufficient supply of primary goods for those persons to be able to pursue whatever it is that they do take to be good. Although the OP attempts to collect and express a set of crucial constraints that are appropriate to impose on the choice of principles of justice, Rawls recognized from the beginning that we could never just hand over the endorsement of those principles to this hypothetical device.

That is, we need to stop and consider whether, on reflection, we can endorse the results of the OP. If those results clash with some of our more concrete considered judgments about justice, then we have reason to think about modifying the OP. The reflective equilibrium has been an immensely influential idea about moral justification. It is not a full theory of justification. When it was introduced, however, it suggested a different approach to justifying moral theories than was being commonly pursued.

The idea of reflective equilibrium takes two steps away from the sort of conceptual analysis that was then prevalent.

First, working on the basis of considered judgments suggests that it is not necessary to build moral theories on necessary or a priori premises. Rawls characterizes considered judgments as simply judgments reached under conditions where our sense of justice is likely to operate without distortion. Reaching it might involve revising some of those more concrete judgments. A third novel idea about justification thus emerges from this picture: it involves arguments built in various different directions at once.

Since it is up to each person, however, to determine which arguments are most compelling, Rawls stresses that the reader must make up his or her own mind, rather than trying to predict or anticipate what everyone else will think. Part Two of TJ aims to show that Justice as Fairness fits our considered judgments on a whole range of more concrete topics in moral and political philosophy, such as the idea of the rule of law, the problem of justice between generations, and the justification of civil disobedience.

Consistent with the idea of reflective equilibrium, Rawls suggests pruning and adjusting those judgments in a number of places. One of the thorniest such issues, that of tolerating the intolerant, recurs in PL. In addition to serving its main purpose of facilitating reflective equilibrium on Justice as Fairness, Part Two also offers a treasure trove of influential and insightful discussion of these and other topics in political philosophy.

There is hardly space here even to summarize all the worthwhile points that Rawls makes about these topics. A summary of his controversial and influential discussion of the idea of desert that is, getting what one deserves , however, will illustrate how he proceeds. As we have seen, Rawls was deeply aware of the moral arbitrariness of fortune. He held that no one deserves the social position into which he or she is born or the physical characteristics with which he or she is endowed from birth.

He also held that no one deserves the character traits he or she is born with, such as his or her capacity for hard work. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. In Part Two, Rawls sets out to square this stance on the moral arbitrariness of fortune with our considered judgments about desert, which do hold that desert is relevant to distributive claims.

For instance, we tend to think that people who work harder deserve to be rewarded for their effort. We may also think that the talented deserve to be rewarded for the use of their talents, whether or not they deserved those talents in the first place. With these common-sense precepts of justice, Rawls does not disagree; but he clarifies them by responding to them dialectically. He questions whether these common-sense claims are meant to stand independently of any assumptions about whether or not the basic institutions of society—especially those institutions of property law, contract law, and taxation that, in effect, define the property claims and transfer rules that make up the marketplace—are just.

It is unreasonable, Rawls argues, to say that desert is a direct basis for distributional claims even if the socio-economic system is unfair. It is much more reasonable to hold, he suggests, that whether one deserves the compensation one can command in the job marketplace, for instance, depends on whether the basic social institutions are fair.

Are they set up so as to assure, among other things, an appropriate relationship between effort and reward? When they are qualified in line with this presupposition, Rawls supports them. This dialectical clarification of the moral import of desert, however, did not satisfy all commentators.

See Robert Nozick In pursuing his novel topic of the justice of the basic structure of society, Rawls posed novel questions.

The stability of the institutions called for by a given set of principles of justice—their ability to endure over time and to re-establish themselves after temporary disturbances—is a quality those principles must have if they are to serve their purposes.. Unstable institutions would not secure the liberties, rights, and opportunities that the parties care about.

If any set of institutions realizing a given set of principles were inherently unstable, that would suggest a need to revise those principles. Accordingly, Rawls argues, in Part Three of TJ , that institutions embodying Justice as Fairness would be stable — even more stable than institutions embodying the utilitarian principle.

In addressing the question of stability, Rawls never leaves behind the perspective of moral justification. Stability of a kind might be achieved by arranging a stand-off of opposing but equal armies. The results of such a balance of power are not of interest to Rawls. Rather, the stability question he asks concerns whether, in a society that conforms to the principles, citizens can wholeheartedly accept those principles. Wholeheartedness will require, for instance, that the reasons on the basis of which the citizens accept the principles are reasons affirmed by those very principles.

PL at xlii. In TJ , the account of stability for the right reasons involved imagining that this wholeheartedness arose from individuals being thoroughly educated, along Kantian lines, to think of fairness in terms of the principles of Justice as Fairness. PL at lxii. As we will see, he later came to think that this account violated the assumption of pluralism. The imaginative exercise of assessing the comparative stability of different principles would be useless and unfair if one were to compare, say, an enlightened and ideally-run set of institutions embodying Justice as Fairness with the stupidest possible set of institutions compatible with the utilitarian principle.

His notion of a well-ordered society is complex. See CP at The gist of it is that the relevant principles of justice are publicly accepted by everyone and that the basic social institutions are publicly known or believed with good reason to satisfy those principles.

Assessing the comparative stability of alternative well-ordered societies requires a complex imaginative effort at tracing likely phenomena of social psychology.

In order to address the first of these issues, about the strength of the sense of justice, Chapter VIII develops a rich and somewhat original account of moral education. He argues that each of these stages of moral education will work more effectively under Justice as Fairness than it will under utilitarianism. TJ at chap. He also argues that a society organized around the two principles of Justice as Fairness will be less prone to the disruptive effects of envy than will a utilitarian society.

TJ at secs. A stable society is one that generates attitudes, such as are encapsulated in an effective sense of justice, that support the just institutions of that society. In order to address this question of congruence, TJ develops an account of the good for individuals.

This idea, developed in dialogue with the leading alternatives from the middle of the 20th century, still repays attention. Some of its main threads are pulled together by Samuel Freeman in his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Freeman With regard to autonomy, to supplement the positive argument flowing from the Kantian interpretation of the OP, Rawls argues that the type of objectivity claimed for the principles of Justice as Fairness is not at odds with the idea of the autonomous establishment of principles.

Ironically, the communitarian critique focused largely on Parts One and Two of TJ , giving short shrift to the powerful articulation of this ideal of community in Part Three. The cumulative effect of these appeals to the development of talent, autonomy, community, and the unity of the self is to support the claim of Justice as Fairness to congruence. In a well-ordered society corresponding to Justice as Fairness, Rawls concludes, an effective sense of justice is a good for the individual who has it.

In TJ , this congruence between justice and goodness is the main basis for concluding that individual citizens will wholeheartedly accept the principles of justice as fairness.

But his argument for the comparative stability and the congruence of Justice as Fairness, imagines a well-ordered society in which everyone is brought up in ways deeply informed by the adherence by all adults to the same principles of justice. Accordingly, his discussion of stability and congruence in Part Three of TJ is at odds with the assumption of pluralism.

PL clarifies that the only acceptable way to rectify the problem is to modify the account of stability and congruence, because pluralism is no mere theoretical posit. Rather, pluralism has been endemic among the liberal democracies since the 16th century wars of religion.

Moreover, pluralism is a permanent feature of liberal or non-repressive societies. It does not rest on irrationality. Accordingly, Rawls takes it as a fact that the kind of uniformity in fundamental moral and political beliefs that he imagined in Part Three of TJ can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state force.

Rawls rejected traditional contractarian arguments about a primitive state of nature which generates the need for human political association. He developed an argument for what he called the "original position" noting that in "justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in traditional theory of the social contract. Rather, it is a hypothetical notion characterized in order to lead to a certain idea of justice. Since it is not a primitive condition or historical reality, the original position can be entered conceptually any time in order to explore the principles of justice.

Rawls depicted the original position as one in which persons are ignorant of social status, differences in ability, fortunes, and even intelligence. Behind this "veil of ignorance," as he calls it, the principles of justice are chosen. Thus "justice as fairness" generates from that hypothetical situation wherein persons are asked to make decisions about what is just ignorant of the impact of these decisions and the possible benefits or cost to them.

In such a situation of radical equality, the principles of justice as fairness are chosen. These principles, Rawls argued, are motivated by a "thin theory of good" since all are ignorant of specific character traits, abilities, or needs that would prompt one to argue for certain goods. Behind the "veil" that would be chosen as good are rational life plans and the conditions for self respect.

The principles of justice regulate the distribution of these and other primary goods. In the original position two principles of justice emerge. As Rawls noted, the first "requires equality in assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic injustices … are just only if they result in compensating benefits for every one, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.

His concern here was with distributive justice within the social good of liberty and the demands for justice as fairness. Given the demand for equality, the goods of society, and especially liberty, had to be distributed fairly. Justice as fairness, Rawls says, favors either a property-owning democracy or liberal democratic socialism.

The government of a property-owning democracy takes steps to encourage widespread ownership of productive assets and broad access to education and training. Liberal socialism is similar, but features worker-managed firms. The aim of both systems of political economy is to enable all citizens, even the least advantaged, to manage their own affairs within a context of significant social and economic equality.

Rawls describes the original position as a useful device for reaching greater reflective equilibrium. In this way, the original position first confirms and then extends common judgments about justice. For Rawls it is important that the same method of reasoning that explains the equal basic liberties also justifies more political and economic equality than many people might have initially expected.

The momentum of the argument for the first principle carries through to the argument for the second principle. Those who believe in equal basic liberties, but who reject the other egalitarian features of justice as fairness, must try to find some other route to justifying those basic liberties. The original position embodies, Rawls says, all of the relevant conceptions of person and society, and principles of practical reasoning, for making judgments about justice.

Judgments made from this perspective are then objectively correct, in the sense of giving reasons to citizens to act regardless of their actual motivations, or the reasons they think they have within their particular points of view. Political constructivism does not maintain that the original position shows that the principles of justice as fairness are true. Questions of truth are ones about which reasonable citizens may disagree, and are to be addressed by each citizen from within her own comprehensive doctrine.

Judgments made from the original position are, however, valid, or as Rawls says, reasonable. 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 assumes that no tolerable world state could be stable. 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. Kelly ed. Nagel ed. Audard, C. Bailey, T. Bok, P. Brooks, T. Daniels, N. Reissued with new Preface, Davion, V. Edmundson, W. Fleming, J. Forrester, K. Freeman, S. Galisanka, A. Gregory, E. Griffin, S. Hinton, T. Hobbes, T. Curley trans. Kukathas, C. Lloyd, S. Maffettone, S. Mandle, J. Martin, R. Mills, C. Nozick, R.