John Rawls I: Framing and Methodology

Posted: Mon, Mar 30, 2026

Today

• Pick up on last time’s activity: What could Pre-Rawlsian political philosophy say about the political demands and critiques of the social movements of the 50s–70s?
• Murray, King, and Malcolm X on violence
• Rawls on the subject matter of justice
• Rawls on the original position
• Announcement: Zine reading + launch party (April 11)

Rawls’ project

	Hobbes	Locke	Rousseau	Rawls
Original state	More or less nonfictional natural state		Fictional primitive condition	Abstract “perspective” to take on
Object of social contract	Establish political society			Moral principles of justice
Distinction between in/justice	Created by social contract			Determined by moral principles
What is un/just?	Individual actions, states of affairs, etc.			Primarily social institutions

Rawls’ social ontology

• Society =_df “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” (p. 4).
• This society has institutions which distribute rights, duties, and dis/advantages.
• An “intuitive” way to talk about this is that there is a hierarchy of “social positions” such that “men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined”—“starting points” in life, so to speak.
• The basic structure of society is the arrangement (~form) of “major” social institutions such as “the legal protection of freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, competitive markets, private property in the means of production, and the monogamous family” (p. 7).

Rawls’ thesis: “Justice as fairness”

• Justice chiefly concerns the basic structure of society.
• “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions” (p. 3).
  • Not: Efficiency, security, stability, wisdom, diversity, fun, etc.
• Principles of justice are the most fundamental terms of our cooperative venture for mutual advantage.
  • “[T]hey provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation” (p. 4).
  • They function “in the first instance [as] a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed” (p. 9).
  • They are the first principles according to which a constitution is then chosen.
  • Examples: One person one vote, equality of wealth, utilitarianism, etc.
  • These differing principles express differing conceptions (interpretations) of the concept of justice.
• Principles of justice, not a decision to enter into civil society, would be chosen in the original position.
  • Principles of justice are both justified and identified this way: Principles of justice are those that would be chosen in the original position.
  • “The aim is to use the notion of pure procedural justice as a basis of theory” (p. 136).

More precisely, “the principles of justice for the basis structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association” (p. 11).

• This “purely hypothetical situation” (p. 12) that is the original position is an abstract “perspective” which “one can at any time adopt”; indeed, “[i]t must make no difference when one takes up this viewpoint, or who does so: the restrictions [of the original position] must be such that the same principles are always chosen” (p. 139).
• This choice is fair by design: The principles of justice are those “to which [one] would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with respect to one another were fair” (p. 13).
  • All parties in the original position “have the same rights in the procedure for choosing principles; each can make proposals, submit reasons for their acceptance, and so on” (p. 19).
  • All parties in the original position are moral equals by virtue of “having a conception of their good and capable of a sense of justice” (p. 19). [cf. Hobbes]
  • All parties in the original position are means-ends rational (they “tak[e] the most effective means to given ends”) (p. 14).
  • All parties in the original position are “mutually disinterested” in the sense that “they are conceived as not taking an interest in one another’s interest” (p. 13).
  • All parties in the original position are unlimited in their knowledge of “the general facts about human society”—economics, politics, moral psychology, etc. (pp. 137–38)
  • But “the only particular facts which the parties know is that their society is subject to the circumstances of justice and whatever this implies” (p. 137).
    • No particular information about yourself: Your social position, your abilities, your risk aversion, etc. (Intuition: “You would understand if you were a mother of three with a job that doesn’t pay you well”)
    • No particular information about your society: Economic, political, cultural, technological, etc.
    • No particular information about to which generation you belong.
• Rawls: His two principles of justice would be chosen.

These principles of justice have normative force.

• “No society can, of course, be a scheme of cooperation which men enter voluntarily in a literal sense; each person finds himself placed at birth in some particular position in some particular society. Yet a society satisfying the principles of justice as fairness comes as close as a society can to being a voluntary scheme, for it meets the principles which free and equal persons would assent to under circumstances that are fair” (p. 13).
• They are principles of justice we ought to accept even if individuals in fact publicly reject them.
• The justice/injustice of existing social institutions is grounded in the two principles of justice.

Features of Rawls’ framing & methodology

• Political philosophy is always already interdisciplinary: For Rawls, theory of justice is continuous with theory of rational choice.
• The social contract is itself transformed: It is not the state itself but an ordered set of abstract moral principles that free and equal persons who are fairly-situated with respect to one another would agree to for the governance of their cooperative venture for mutual advantage.
• Justice as fairness as a framework/concept vs. as a theory/conception.