John Rawls: Justice as Fairness

What rules would you choose for society if you didn’t know in advance whether you’d end up rich or poor, healthy or sick? John Rawls used this simple question to build one of the most influential theories of justice in modern philosophy.

MCQ Questions

Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude

Rawls: Justice as Fairness

From a thought experiment to two ranked principles

Step 1

Original Position

Choose society’s rules before it exists, not knowing your future role.

→

Step 2

Veil of Ignorance

You don’t know your future race, gender, wealth, talents, or class.

→

Principle 1 — priority

Equal Basic Liberties

Equal basic rights and freedoms, never traded for economic gain.

Principle 2

Difference Principle

Inequality is just only if it improves things for the worst-off.

📑 Contents

1Must Know
2Good to Know
3Test Yourself
4Great to Know

Must Know

John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American philosopher whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice remains one of the most studied works in modern political philosophy. He called his theory “justice as fairness.”
His key thought experiment is the “original position.” Imagine a group of people choosing the basic rules for their society before it exists — without knowing what role they’ll personally end up in.
The “veil of ignorance” is what makes this fair: the people choosing don’t know their own future race, gender, wealth, talents, or social class. Rawls argued that people in this position would naturally choose fair rules, since they might end up anywhere in society.
From this, Rawls derived two main principles of justice. First, everyone should have equal basic rights and liberties. Second, any social or economic inequality must benefit the worst-off members of society — this is called the “difference principle.”

Good to Know

The difference principle does not demand perfect equality. Rawls accepted that some inequality can be fair — higher pay for a doctor, for example. But this only works if that inequality also improves the position of the poorest, not just the person receiving the higher reward.
Rawls’s first principle — equal basic liberties — takes priority over the second, the difference principle. He argued that basic rights like free speech cannot be traded away, even for a large economic gain for the worst-off.
Rawls’s theory is a form of social contract thinking, already covered on this site through Locke and Hobbes. But Rawls’s version is explicitly hypothetical. No one has to imagine they actually lived through this original agreement — only that it’s the fair standard for judging real institutions.
Rawls’s approach is often contrasted with utilitarianism, already covered on this site. A strict utilitarian could accept an outcome where a majority is better off, even if a minority suffers greatly. Rawls’s theory specifically protects the worst-off from that kind of trade-off.

Test Yourself

Great to Know

Philosopher Robert Nozick, in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, was Rawls’s most famous critic. Nozick argued that Rawls’s difference principle can justify too much redistribution, violating an individual’s right to freely keep what they earned through fair exchange.
Rawls later refined his theory in Political Liberalism (1993). He was responding to a criticism: his original theory assumed too much agreement on values, in a society that actually holds many different religious and moral views.
Rawls’s ideas are frequently applied in Indian policy debates on reservation and welfare targeting. The difference principle offers one philosophical justification for policies that specifically aim to improve outcomes for the most disadvantaged — rather than treating equal treatment alone as sufficient for fairness.

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