11.2: John Rawls

Rawls’ theory of justice is captured in terms of these two principles:

The Equal Liberty Principle: Each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for everyone.

The Difference Principle: Social practices that produce inequalities amon individuals are just only if they work out to everyone’s advantage and the positions that come with greater reward are open to all.

The Equal Liberty Principle has a longer history. The idea that everyone should be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for others is defended at length in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. In fact we could take some variation on this principle as the core tenet of Liberalism as a political theory. This principle doesn’t tell us that people should be free to do as they please no matter what. At some points, my being free to do something is liable to interfere with your being free to do something. For instance, my being free to host parties with live bands into the early hours of the morning might interfere with my neighbor’s being free to get a decent night’s sleep. In the interest of maximizing equal liberty for all, we would be justified in restricting people from activities that would interfere with the liberty of others. This has many familiar applications. Neighborhood zoning regulations are one example. Much environmental regulation would be another. Maximizing liberty for all equally might require that we restrict businesses from being free to pollute where doing so would adversely affect the health of others.

The Equal Liberty Principle is only concerned with equality of liberty. But we can be equal or unequal in many other ways. In fact, being equally free is liable to lead to other sorts of inequalities. If we are all free to plant apple trees or to do something else as we see fit, the end result likely to be a very unequal distribution of apples. So long as this is merely the result of people exercising their equal liberties, there is nothing unfair about this. If I’d wanted more apples, I could have spent more time growing apple trees and less time playing chess.

Among the principles of social justice Rawl’s would have guide the development of our social institutions (including property rights) is the difference principle which allows that packages of social institutions that generate inequalities (like those that include a market economy) are just so long as they don’t allow some individuals to profit at the expense of others. Another way to formulate this principle is as holding a just set of social institutions to be one under which the least well off are better off than the least well off would be under alternative arrangements. This allows for inequalities in a society, so long as they are not enjoyed by some at the cost of the least well off being worse off than they might have been.

Specific social policies produce different results depending on the circumstances of the community and other policies. So, for instance, universal health care in a soviet style command economy might bankrupt everyone. But it might be compatible with a high degree of affluence in an economy that has a healthy market based private sector (think Japan or Sweden). For this reason, social policies must ultimately be evaluated for justness as parts of comprehensive packages of social institutions. This leads to lots of abstract technicalities in Rawl’s writing (it is not recommended for the novice). But we can get the general idea by looking at pretty familiar practices and comparing how they perform in the context of different societies having different comprehensive sets of social institutions. Looking at property rights and the market economy, we might consider East and West Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany had a Soviet style command economy that dictated a high degree of equality and sharply restricted property rights. West Germany had a mixed economy with a healthy market based private sector. The result was less equality in West Germany. But still, the least well off were substantially better off than the least well off (pretty much everybody) in East Germany. What this indicates is that while, on the one hand, the market economy with its institutions of private property inevitably generates inequalities, it is, still, so much more effective at generating wealth that the least well off will be better off in spite of the inequalities.

The example of the market economy and its institutions of private property provides a major motivating factor for Rawl’s difference principle. So the 20th century’s reigning liberal political philosopher is a fan of market economies and institutions of private property. This may come as a surprise to some.

Where Rawls is going to differ from Locke and Nozick is that for Rawls, property rights are not inviolable sacrosanct extensions of natural human liberty, rather they are social arrangements that will be limited in various ways as a part of a more comprehensive package of social arrangements that aims at fairness. Indeed, the very title of Rawl’s major work on social justice is “Justice as Fairness.” The kind of fairness that Rawls conception of justice aims at is not guaranteed equality of outcome for all, but rather a system of social arrangements that doesn’t advantage any particular group of individuals at the expense of others. Inequalities that result from excellence, helpful innovation or hard work are fair in this sense. But inequalities that result from social institutions that are biased in one way or another towards the interests of some at the expense of others are not. Within this context, property rights are seen as social arrangements that aim at fairness by allowing the excellent and diligent to enjoy the rewards of their efforts. But property rights on the Rawlsian approach are not inviolable natural rights to be secured even to the detriment of maintaining the social institutions that make an affluent society possible.

So far, it should be clear how the a Rawlsian approach to property rights allows for taxing the well off in order to provide things like education, health care and a social safety net for others. But to what degree will this be just on Rawls’ view. Clearly taxing the successful members of society to the point where they are no better off than those who are largely unproductive will not meet the Rawlsian ideal under the difference principle. If people are not rewarded for hard work and innovation, then it’s liable not to happen and everyone suffers as a result. Too much taxation of the well off will be unjust on Rawl’s view precisely because it doesn’t work out to benefit of least well off (or anyone else). Rather, Rawls would aim for that sweet spot where the hard working and innovative are well rewarded, so everyone has a reason to do their best, and yet those who fail for whatever reason, are not left by the wayside, but still have opportunity and enjoy some modest quality of life.

I won’t try to get more specific about just where that sweet spot lies (say in terms of top marginal tax rates on income or capital gains), nor will I try to get more specific about just what benefits and opportunities should be secured for the least well off. But I will finish with a bit about how Rawls’ motivates the general approach to social justice. And this will ultimately provide the best guide to what set of social arrangements would be just.

Recall that Rawls is aiming at a conception of justice as fairness in the sense that social institutions won’t advantage any particular kind of person at the expense of others. Rawls’proposes that we can get onto the ideal of justice as fairness in this sense by means of a thought experiment that involves reasoning from what he calls "the original position." From the original position, we imagine that we are perfectly rational agents with full information about the consequences of the various possible social arrangements. We are then given the task of designing the principles of justice that will structure our society and we are expected to do so with an eye to what will be in our own best interest. But there is a catch. In reasoning from the original, we operate behind a veil of ignorance about our own personal circumstances and characteristics. So in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, I must think about what set of social institutions will work out best for me without knowing whether I will be weak or strong, healthy or diseased, clever or dull, beautiful or ugly, black or white, born to a wealthy family or a poor one and so forth. If I am rational and self interested, I will want to set things up so that I can substantially enjoy the benefits if I have characteristics that are highly valued in my society and I put them to good use. But at the same time, I will want to hedge my bets to assure that I still have a decent life in case I am not so lucky or my best efforts fail.

An excerpt from John Rawls, Justice as Fairness, can be found here: http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/readings/rawl_justice.pdf