During the century-and-a-half slumber of social contract theory the idea of universal adult suffrage became commonplace. It had long been assumed that formal political equality would more than suffice to defend the less advantaged against class legislation (although the worry shared by Ireton and Mill, that majority rule would enable class legislation favoring the less advantaged, has never disappeared). Rawls argued that a well-ordered constitutional democracy must guarantee the fair value of the equal political liberties (and those liberties alone: The others come within the difference principle in its special form). Rawls complained that this position seemed “never to have been taken seriously.” Rawls suggested a number of devices to secure fair value: promotion devices, such as subsidies of political parties and public debate; insulation devices, such as limits upon campaign contributions and expenditures; and anti-accumulation devices, such as inheritance taxes and public ownership of the means of production. Why, though, would parties in the original position insist on the fair-value guarantee? One argument extends the argument for the priority of the whole family of basic liberties, with special emphasis on stability “for the right reasons” and the shared sense of justice essential to it.

Rawls had misgivings about the account of stability he gave in A Theory of Justice. It ignored “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” that is, that the social contract has to attract people who disagree about fundamental values of the kind embraced in “comprehensive” doctrines. The contract doctrine welcomes reasonable comprehensive doctrines but forbids the use of state power to promote a comprehensive liberalism, which he confessed he had assumed. There is also a “fact of oppression,” that no state can stabilize itself by imposing a comprehensive doctrine without resorting to the tactics of Torquemada or Stalin. A “liberal principle of legitimacy” forbids this. One must hope for an “overlapping consensus” of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines to settle upon a “political conception of justice.” Rawls’s concessions may lead even further, amounting to a “fact of justice pluralism,” that is, that there are multiple, incompatible, but equally reasonable political conceptions of justice – including ones that reject political equality as Rawls conceives it. Rawls admitted there was a “family” of such conceptions but insisted that each must satisfy a “criterion of reciprocity.” This chapter ekes out Rawls’s published remarks to construct a “reciprocity” argument for fair value, complementing the “stability” argument of Chapter 15.

Rawls expounded “a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract.” His theory applies to society’s basic structure, a system of productive cooperation over generations. The state of nature was reconfigured as an “original position” which “incorporates certain procedural constraints on arguments.” The “parties” in the original position have general knowledge but no knowledge specific to themselves: their strengths, weaknesses, values, desires, social position, and so on. The “parties” choose principles that will maximize their fund of “primary goods,” or all-purpose means – means useful to all, whatever their particular interests, talents, etc. Two principles would be chosen: a maximum-equal-liberties principle, and a principle governing the distribution of opportunities, wealth, and income. These are in “lexical” order: equal basic liberties, then fair equal opportunity, then the “difference principle,” viz. distribute so to maximize the resources of the least-advantaged class. The chapter describes the “fact of reasonable pluralism” the social contract must accommodate, and the “well-ordered society” the social contract is to stabilize “for the right reasons,” securing the three great achievements of the tradition: toleration, limited government by popular consent, and “the winning of the working classes to democracy.”

The original-position setup and argument for Rawls’s two principles are the focus of this chapter. Economic inequality is inevitable because the parties accept economic inequalities that benefit all classes. The equal basic liberties can be of unequal worth to persons, under the difference principle. But the political liberties (and they alone) are guaranteed to be of “fair value,” that is, individuals equally motivated and adept are to have roughly equal political influence. Universal adult suffrage is an inadequate measure to prevent money distorting political results. The difference principle in its “general form” could endorse Mill’s plural voting scheme, and would be indifferent to substantive political inequality if, on balance, the least advantaged realized a greater worth of their basket of primary goods. Robert Nozick’s objection to Rawls’s attention to patterns of wealth distribution is taken up, and Rawls’s ambition to render unequal distributions as acceptable as a matter of “pure procedural justice” is explained. John Harsanyi and Kenneth Arrow objected to the difference principle as applied to wealth and income. Rawls’s answer depends on establishing the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties, the argument for which was made toward the end of Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice.

Rawls’s primary aim was to show that his two principles are superior to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism does not take individuals seriously, treating them as mere “container persons” in the “calculus of social interests.” Rawls emphasized that the original position was one of uncertainty, not mere risk. Harsanyi had earlier derived the utilitarian principle from an original position much like Rawls’s. The difference was that Rawls applied the maximin principle of choice under uncertainty, which picks the option having the least bad worst outcome. Harsanyi instead assumed the equiprobability of all outcomes and maximized expected utility. Rawls recognized that maximin is not a good choice strategy in general use, but argued that special features of the original position favored it over the equiprobability assumption. Chief among these are those that he argued establish the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties. In the 1999 revision of A Theory of Justice, Rawls recast the argument by appealing to two moral powers – a capacity to share a sense of justice and a capacity to choose and revise one’s life plan – and a highest-order interest in setting one’s own aims and in shaping the social world in which they must be pursued.

This chapter deals with the topic of inequality in the healthcare sector. The chapter begins by looking at some summary data and the inequality in various measures of health that are obvious from simple differences. Then the chapter discusses some basic social philosophy on the topic of how to judge fairness in an abstract society. More detailed data on health outcomes is then explored, highlighted inequality along different demographic lines. Then there is a discussion of theories that fit the facts presented: why do these inequalities exist, and what do we learn by unpacking them: both social implications as well as clinical. Finally, inequalities in the labor market for healthcare workers are discussed.

The final chapter examines Cavell’s theory of democratic perfectionism. Traditional perfectionist political philosophy views the purpose of the polity as the promotion of human flourishing. Contemporary liberals rejected perfectionism on two grounds. John Rawls believed perfectionism was antidemocratic because it was elitist. Isaiah Berlin claimed perfectionism was illiberal because it posited a singular end to life at the expense of all others. Against these claims, Cavell’s later work recovered an inherently egalitarian variety of perfectionism from the American Transcendentalist tradition. While agreeing with Cavell’s defense of perfectionism against liberal critiques, the chapter raises two limits to perfectionism. The first is that it runs the risk of turning into “debased perfectionism,” where striving for an unattained yet attainable self can lead to status anxiety. Second, Cavell pays insufficient attention to the economic conditions necessary for one to lead a perfectionist life. The chapter concludes by reading Thoreau’s writings on economics against Cavell’s reading of Thoreau. It argues that a greater attention to the economic dimension in perfectionism would address some of the concerns that liberal critics raise about perfectionism elitism.

Political philosophy is shaped by an understanding of the circumstances of justice, which describe the need for justice. This chapter argues that the circumstances of justice should be understood to include contingent facts about the history of the society to be governed, ideally, by principles of justice. In locating structures of domination within the circumstances of justice that motivate the theoretical task, I depart from the approach taken by John Rawls. Though I will not dispute the content of Rawls’s favored principles of justice, I show that when we revise the description of the circumstances of justice, we revise our understanding of the importance of those principles. We can thus add something to what Rawls has to say about the good of justice. One aspect of the good of distributive justice is that it provides a basis for moral repair in the wake of collective wrongdoing.

This chapter offers a reassessment of two familiar lines of criticism against Rawls’s Original Position (OP): the idealization critique and the fact-sensitivity critique. The former holds that the OP is too detached from the real world to deliver the right principles for us. The latter holds that the OP concedes too much to empirical reality for the resulting principles to tell us what “true justice” requires. I argue that we can blunt the force of these critiques once we fully appreciate the role that the OP plays in Rawls’s work. I distinguish between (i) Rawls’s theory, (ii) the arguments offered in support of it, and (iii) the desiderata applying to that theory, given its function. I then show that the idealization critique partly misfires, since the idealizations Rawls appeals to operate at the level of the argument offered in support of his theory, not at the level of the theory itself. Similarly, we can see that the fact-sensitivity critique does little damage to Rawls’s theory, once the theory’s function, hence the desiderata applying to it, are fully appreciated.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.