Justice As Fairness: A Restatement

by Rawls, John; Kelly, Erin

• ISBN13: 9780674005112
• ISBN10: 0674005112
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-05-16
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s. In time the lectures became a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise Political Liberalism (1993). As Rawls writes in the preface, the restatement presents "in one place an account of justice as fairness as I now see it, drawing on all [my previous] works." He offers a broad overview of his main lines of thought and also explores specific issues never before addressed in any of his writings. Rawls is well aware that since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, American society has moved farther away from the idea of justice as fairness. Yet his ideas retain their power and relevance to debates in a pluralistic society about the meaning and theoretical viability of liberalism. This book demonstrates that moral clarity can be achieved even when a collective commitment to justice is uncertain.

Author Biography

Jonn Rawls is James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University Erin Kelly is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University

Table of Contents

Editor's Foreword	xi
Preface	xv
PART I Fundamental Ideas	1	(38)
Four Roles of Political Philosophy	1	(4)
Society as a Fair System of Cooperation	5	(3)
The Idea of a Well-Ordered Society	8	(2)
The Idea of the Basic Structure	10	(2)
Limits to Our Inquiry	12	(2)
The Idea of the Original Position	14	(4)
The Idea of Free and Equal Persons	18	(6)
Relations between the Fundamental Ideas	24	(2)
The Idea of Public Justification	26	(3)
The Idea of Reflective Equilibrium	29	(3)
The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus	32	(7)
PART II Principles of Justice	39	(41)
Three Basic Points	39	(3)
Two Principles of Justice	42	(8)
The Problem of Distributive Justice	50	(2)
The Basic Structure as Subject: First Kind of Reason	52	(3)
The Basic Structure as Subject: Second Kind of Reason	55	(2)
Who Are the Least Advantaged?	57	(4)
The Difference Principle: Its Meaning	61	(5)
Objections via Counterexamples	66	(6)
Legitimate Expectations, Entitlement, and Desert	72	(2)
On Viewing Native Endowments as a Common Asset	74	(3)
Summary Comments on Distributive Justice and Desert	77	(3)
PART III The Argument from the Original Position	80	(55)
The Original Position: The Set-Up	80	(4)
The Circumstances of Justice	84	(1)
Formal Constraints and the Veil of Ignorance	85	(4)
The Idea of Public Reason	89	(5)
First Fundamental Comparison	94	(3)
The Structure of the Argument and the Maximin Rule	97	(4)
The Argument Stressing the Third Condition	101	(3)
The Priority of the Basic Liberties	104	(2)
An Objection about Aversion to Uncertainty	106	(5)
The Equal Basic Liberties Revisited	111	(4)
The Argument Stressing the Second Condition	115	(4)
Second Fundamental Comparison: Introduction	119	(1)
Grounds Falling under Publicity	120	(2)
Grounds Falling under Reciprocity	122	(2)
Grounds Falling under Stability	124	(2)
Grounds against the Principle of Restricted Utility	126	(4)
Comments on Equality	130	(2)
Concluding Remarks	132	(3)
PART IV Institutions of a Just Basic Structure	135	(45)
Property-Owning Democracy: Introductory Remarks	135	(3)
Some Basic Contrasts between Regimes	138	(2)
Ideas of the Good in Justice as Fairness	140	(5)
Constitutional versus Procedural Democracy	145	(3)
The Fair Value of the Equal Political Liberties	148	(2)
Denial of the Fair Value for Other Basic Liberties	150	(3)
Political and Comprehensive Liberalism: A Contrast	153	(4)
A Note on Head Taxes and the Priority of Liberty	157	(1)
Economic Institutions of a Property-Owning Democracy	158	(4)
The Family as a Basic Institution	162	(6)
The Flexibility of an Index of Primary Goods	168	(8)
Addressing Marx's Critique of Liberalism	176	(3)
Brief Comments on Leisure Time	179	(1)
PART V The Question of Stability	180	(23)
The Domain of the Political	180	(4)
The Question of Stability	184	(4)
Is Justice as Fairness Political in the Wrong Way?	188	(1)
How Is Political Liberalism Possible?	189	(3)
An Overlapping Consensus Not Utopian	192	(3)
A Reasonable Moral Psychology	195	(3)
The Good of Political Society	198	(5)
Index	203