Rawls game

But the difference principle does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor Economy D. The difference principle embodies equality-based reciprocity: from an egalitarian baseline, it requires that any inequalities are good for all, and especially for the worst-off. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved.

A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because she was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand.

Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better off. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. The difference principle thus expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of social unity.

Rawls uses these conceptions of citizens and society to construct the official justification for the two principles: the argument from the original position. Citizens are free in that each sees herself as being entitled to make claims on social institutions in her own right—citizens are not slaves or serfs, dependent for their social status on others.

Citizens are also free in that they see their public identities as independent of any particular comprehensive doctrine: a citizen who converts to Islam, or who recants her faith, will expect, for example, to retain all her political rights and liberties throughout the transition.

Finally, citizens are free in being able to take responsibility for planning their own lives, given the opportunities and resources that they can reasonably expect. Citizens are equal, Rawls says, in virtue of having the capacities to participate in social cooperation over a complete life.

Rawlsian citizens are not only free and equal, they are also reasonable and rational. The idea that citizens are reasonable is familiar from political liberalism. Reasonable citizens have the capacity to abide by fair terms of cooperation, even at the expense of their own interests, provided that others are also willing to do so.

In justice as fairness, Rawls calls this reasonableness the capacity for a sense of justice. Citizens are also rational: they have the capacity to pursue and revise their own view of what is valuable in human life. Rawls calls this the capacity for a conception of the good. Together these capacities are called the two moral powers. Rawls derives his account of primary goods from the conception of the citizen as free and equal, reasonable and rational. Primary goods are essential for developing and exercising the two moral powers, and are useful for pursuing a wide range of specific conceptions of the good life.

Primary goods are these:. All citizens are assumed to have fundamental interests in getting more of these primary goods, and political institutions are to evaluate how well citizens are doing according to what primary goods they have.

It is equalities and inequalities of these primary goods that, Rawls claims, are of the greatest political significance.

Rawls also emphasizes publicity as an aspect of fairness. In what he calls a well-ordered society all citizens accept the principles of justice and know that their fellow citizens also do so, and all citizens recognize that the basic structure is just.

The full philosophical justifications for the principles of justice are also knowable by and acceptable to all reasonable citizens. The idea behind publicity is that since the principles for the basic structure will be coercively enforced on free citizens, they should stand up to public scrutiny. The original position aims to move from these abstract conceptions to determinate principles of social justice.

The strategy of the original position is to construct a method of reasoning that models abstract ideas about justice so as to focus their power together onto the choice of principles.

The original position is a thought experiment: an imaginary situation in which each real citizen has a representative, and all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order the political institutions of the real citizens.

This thought experiment is better than trying to get all real citizens actually to assemble in person to try to agree to principles of justice for their society. Even if that were possible, the bargaining among real citizens would be influenced by all sorts of factors irrelevant to justice, such as who could threaten the others most, or who could hold out for longest.

The original position abstracts from all such irrelevant factors. The original position is a fair situation in which each citizen is represented as only a free and equal citizen: each representative wants only what free and equal citizens want, and each tries to agree to principles for the basic structure while situated fairly with respect to the other representatives.

The design of the original position thus models the ideas of freedom, equality, and fairness. The most striking feature of the original position is the veil of ignorance , which prevents arbitrary facts about citizens from influencing the agreement among their representatives.

As we have seen, Rawls holds that the fact that a citizen is of a certain race, class, and gender is no reason for social institutions to favor or disfavor her.

Each representative in the original position is therefore deprived of knowledge of the race, class, and gender of the real citizen that they represent. In fact, the veil of ignorance deprives the parties of all facts about citizens that are irrelevant to the choice of principles of justice: not only facts about their race, class, and gender but also facts about their age, natural endowments, and more.

Moreover the veil of ignorance also screens out specific information about what society is like right now, so as to get a clearer view of the permanent features of a just social system. Behind the veil of ignorance, the informational situation of the parties that represent real citizens is as follows:. The veil of ignorance situates the representatives of free and equal citizens fairly with respect to one another. No party can press for agreement on principles that will arbitrarily favor the particular citizen they represent, because no party knows the specific attributes of the citizen they represent.

The situation of the parties thus embodies reasonable conditions, within which the parties can make a rational agreement. Each party tries to agree to principles that will be best for the citizen they represent i. Since the parties are fairly situated, the agreement they reach will be fair to all actual citizens.

For example, the publicity of a well-ordered society is modeled by the fact that the parties must choose among principles that can be publicly endorsed by all citizens. There are also some assumptions that make the hypothetical agreement determinate and decisive: the parties are not motivated by envy i.

The argument from the original position has two parts. In the first part, the parties agree to principles of justice. In the second part, the parties check that a society ordered by these principles could be stable over time.

Rawls only attempts to show that his two principles of justice as fairness would be favored over utilitarian principles, since he sees utilitarianism as the main competing tradition of reasoning about justice.

Rawls argues that the parties would favor his principles in this comparison, because the first principle of justice as fairness secures equal liberties for all citizens.

In this first comparison, Rawls argues that it is rational for the parties to use maximin reasoning: to maximize the minimum level of primary goods that the citizens they represent might find themselves with.

And maximin reasoning, he says, favors justice as fairness. Under average utilitarianism, Rawls argues, the basic liberties of some citizens might be restricted for the sake of greater benefits to other citizens. For example, restricting the political and religious liberties of a weak minority might work to the benefit of the majority, and so produce a higher average level of utility in the society.

A party in the original position will find the possibility that their citizen might be denied political and religious liberties intolerable, given that the party could instead secure equal liberties for their citizen by choosing justice as fairness.

A party will not be willing to gamble with the political standing and deepest commitments of the citizen they represent, Rawls says, when they could safeguard the standing and commitments of their citizen even if their citizen turns out to be in a weak minority. Moreover, Rawls says, a society ordered by the principles of justice as fairness has other advantages over a utilitarian society.

Securing equal basic liberties for all encourages a spirit of cooperation among citizens on a basis of mutual respect, and takes divisive conflicts about whether to deny liberties to some citizens off of the political agenda. By contrast, a utilitarian society would be riven by mutual suspicions, as different groups put forward highly speculative arguments that average utility could be increased by implementing their partisan policies. The balance of considerations in favor of justice as fairness over average utility here is, Rawls claims, decisive.

In the second fundamental comparison, the parties are offered a choice between justice as fairness and the principle of restricted utility.

Maximin reasoning plays no role in the argument for the difference principle. Nor does aversion to uncertainty JF , xvii, 43, 95, In this second comparison, Rawls argues that the parties will favor justice as fairness because its principles provide a better basis for enduring cooperation among all citizens. The difference principle, he says, asks less of the better-off than restricted utility asks of the worst-off.

Under the difference principle, he says, those who are better endowed are permitted to gain more wealth and income, on the condition that their doing so also benefits their fellow citizens. Under restricted utility, by contrast, those living at the minimum will suspect that their interests have been sacrificed to make the better-off better off still. These citizens at the minimum may become cynical about their society, and withdraw from active participation in public life.

Moreover, it is again difficult to maintain a public agreement as to which economic policies actually will maximize average utility, and debates over where to set the guaranteed minimum may lead to mistrust among social classes.

The difference principle instead encourages mutual trust and the cooperative virtues by instantiating an ideal of economic reciprocity. Each party will see the advantages for the citizen they represent of securing the more harmonious social world of justice as fairness. Having selected the two principles of justice as fairness, the parties turn to the second part of the original position: the check that these principles can order a society stably over time.

The parties check, that is, whether those who grow up under institutions arranged by these principles will develop sufficient willingness to abide by them that the principles can serve as the focus of an enduring overlapping consensus. This public basis of self-respect is vital for citizens to be able to pursue their life plans with energy and confidence.

Citizens will also see that the basic liberties allow sufficient social space for them to pursue their reasonable conceptions of the good.

Whether poor or rich, citizens will tend not to be envious or imperious, as they will see how the economy works toward the reciprocal advantage of all.

And citizens may be satisfied by reflecting on the collective good that they can achieve with each other, by working together to maintain just institutions over time. People become attached to people and institutions that they see benefiting them, and the two principles create a social world in which each citizen can pursue her own ends on a basis of mutual respect with other citizens. The two parts of the argument for justice as fairness above occur at the first stage of the original position.

At this first stage, the parties also agree to a principle of just savings to regulate how much each generation must save for future generations. Since the parties do not know which era the citizens they represent live in, it is rational for them to choose a savings principle that is fair to all generations. Rawls says that the parties need not choose a savings principle that requires endless economic growth.

After agreeing on the two principles and a principle of just savings, the parties then proceed further through the four-stage sequence , tailoring these general principles to the particular conditions of the society of the citizens they represent. The parties, that is, progressively fill in the institutional details of what justice requires in the real world.

At the third stage, the parties learn still more about the details of society, and agree to specific legislation that realize the two principles within the constitutional framework decided at the second stage. At the fourth stage, the parties have full information about society, and reason as judges and administrators to apply the previously-agreed legislation to particular cases. The right to political speech is itself then further specified as the right to criticize the government, the rights protecting the press from political interference, and so on.

Through the four-stage sequence, the parties also adjust the basic liberties to fit with one another and with other values, always aiming for an overall scheme of liberties that will best enable citizens to develop and exercise their two moral powers and pursue their determinate conceptions of the good PL , — At the later stages, the parties also work out the institutions that will be necessary to realize the fair value of the equal political liberties.

On this topic, Rawls is adamant: unless there are public funds for elections, restrictions on campaign contributions, and substantially equal access to the media, politics will be captured by concentrations of private economic power.

This will make it impossible for equally-able citizens to have equal opportunities to influence politics regardless of their wealth, as fair value demands. The parties attempt to realize the second principle of justice at the legislative stage, by shaping the laws that regulate property, contract, taxation, inheritance, hiring, minimum wages, and so on. Their task is not to allocate some fixed set of goods that appear from nowhere, but rather to devise a set of institutions for education, production, and distribution whose operation will realize fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle over time.

For fair equality of opportunity, Rawls emphasizes that laws and policies must go beyond merely preventing discrimination in education and hiring. To ensure fair opportunity regardless of social class of origin, the state must also fund high-quality education for the less well-off. Moreover, the state must also guarantee both a basic minimum income and health care for all. On realizing the difference principle, Rawls says that the goal is an economic order that maximizes the position of the worst-off group e.

Given that institutions realizing the prior principles are already in place, this should be approximately achievable by, for example, varying marginal rates of tax and tax exemptions. Rawls explicitly rejects the welfare state JF , — Welfare-state capitalism leaves control of the economy in the hands of a group of rich private actors. It therefore fails to ensure for all citizens enough resources to have roughly equal chances of influencing politics, or to have sufficiently equal opportunities in education and employment.

The welfare state therefore tends to generate a demoralized under-class. Laissez-faire capitalism is even worse for equality than the welfare state along these dimensions. And a socialist command economy would put too much power in the hands of the state, again endangering political equality and also threatening basic liberties such as free choice of employment. Justice as fairness, Rawls says, favors either a property-owning democracy or liberal democratic socialism.

The government of a property-owning democracy takes steps to encourage widespread ownership of productive assets and broad access to education and training.

Liberal socialism is similar, but features worker-managed firms. The aim of both systems of political economy is to enable all citizens, even the least advantaged, to manage their own affairs within a context of significant social and economic equality.

Rawls describes the original position as a useful device for reaching greater reflective equilibrium. In this way, the original position first confirms and then extends common judgments about justice. For Rawls it is important that the same method of reasoning that explains the equal basic liberties also justifies more political and economic equality than many people might have initially expected. The momentum of the argument for the first principle carries through to the argument for the second principle.

Those who believe in equal basic liberties, but who reject the other egalitarian features of justice as fairness, must try to find some other route to justifying those basic liberties. The original position embodies, Rawls says, all of the relevant conceptions of person and society, and principles of practical reasoning, for making judgments about justice.

Judgments made from this perspective are then objectively correct, in the sense of giving reasons to citizens to act regardless of their actual motivations, or the reasons they think they have within their particular points of view. Political constructivism does not maintain that the original position shows that the principles of justice as fairness are true. Questions of truth are ones about which reasonable citizens may disagree, and are to be addressed by each citizen from within her own comprehensive doctrine.

Judgments made from the original position are, however, valid, or as Rawls says, reasonable. With the theories of legitimacy and justice for a self-contained liberal society completed, Rawls then extends his approach to international relations with the next in his sequence of theories: the law of peoples. Rawls assumes that no tolerable world state could be stable.

He cites Kant in asserting that a world government would either be a global despotism or beleaguered by groups fighting to gain their political independence. So the law of peoples will be international, not cosmopolitan: it will be a foreign policy that guides a liberal society in its interactions with other societies, both liberal and non-liberal. The most important condition for this realistic utopia to come about is that all societies are internally well-ordered: that all have just, or at least decent, domestic political institutions.

As a liberal society has a basic structure of institutions so, Rawls says, there is an international basic structure LP , 33, 62, , , , The principles that should regulate this international basic structure thus require justification.

The justification of these principles must accommodate the fact that there is even more pluralism in worldviews among contemporary societies than there is within a single liberal society. Rawls also leaves room for his law of peoples to accommodate various organizations that may help societies to increase their political and economic coordination, such as idealized versions of a United Nations, a World Trade Organization, and a World Bank. A people is a group of individuals ruled by a common government, bound together by common sympathies, and firmly attached to a common conception of right and justice.

Peoples see themselves as free in the sense of being rightfully politically independent; and as equal in regarding themselves as equally deserving of recognition and respect. Peoples are reasonable in that they will honor fair terms of cooperation with other peoples, even at cost to their own interests, given that other peoples will also honor those terms. Reasonable peoples are thus unwilling to try to impose their political or social ideals on other reasonable peoples. They satisfy the criterion of reciprocity with respect to one another.

Rawls contrasts peoples with states. A state, Rawls says, is moved by the desires to enlarge its territory, or to convert other societies to its religion, or to enjoy the power of ruling over others, or to increase its relative economic strength.

Peoples are not states, and as we will see peoples may treat societies that act like states as international outlaws. Peoples are of two types, depending on the nature of their domestic political institutions. Liberal peoples satisfy the requirements of political liberalism: they have legitimate liberal constitutions, and they have governments that are under popular control and not driven by large concentration of private economic power.

Decent peoples are not internally just from a liberal perspective. Their basic institutions do not recognize reasonable pluralism or embody any interpretation of the liberal ideas of free and equal citizens cooperating fairly. The institutions of a decent society may be organized around a single comprehensive doctrine, such as a dominant religion.

The political system may not be democratic, and women or members of minority religions may be excluded from public office. Nevertheless, decent peoples are well-ordered enough, Rawls says, to merit equal membership in international society.

Like all peoples, decent peoples do not have aggressive foreign policies. Beyond this, Rawls describes one type of decent society—a decent hierarchical society —to illustrate what decency requires. First, it secures a core list of human rights. Second, its political system takes the fundamental interests of all persons into account through a decent consultation hierarchy.

This means that the government genuinely consults with the representatives of all social groups, which together represent all persons in the society, and that the government justifies its laws and policies to these groups.

The government does not close down protests, and responds to any protests with conscientious replies. The government also supports the right of citizens to emigrate. However non-Muslim religions may be practiced without fear, and believers in them are encouraged to take part in the civic culture of the wider society. Minorities are not subject to arbitrary discrimination by law, or treated as inferior by Muslims. Kazanistan would qualify, Rawls says, as a decent, well-ordered member of the society of peoples, entitled to respectful toleration and equal treatment by other peoples.

Liberal peoples tolerate decent peoples, and indeed treat them as equals. Not to do so, Rawls says, would be to fail to express sufficient respect for acceptable ways of ordering a society. Liberal peoples should recognize the good of national self-determination, and let decent societies decide their futures for themselves.

The government of a liberal people should not criticize decent peoples for failing to be liberal, or set up incentives for them to become more so. Criticism and inducements may cause bitterness and resentment within decent peoples, and so be counter-productive. Indeed public reason imposes duties of civility upon the members of international society, just as it does upon members of a liberal society. Government officials and candidates for high office should explain their foreign policy positions to other peoples in terms of the principles and values of the law of peoples, and should avoid reliance on contentious parochial reasons that all peoples cannot reasonably share.

One major reason that liberal peoples tolerate decent peoples, Rawls says, is that decent peoples secure for all persons within their territory a core list of human rights.

These core human rights include rights to subsistence, security, personal property, and formal equality before the law, as well as freedoms from slavery, protections of ethnic groups against genocide, and some measure of liberty of conscience but not, as we have seen, a right to democratic participation. The veil of ignorance plays a crucial role in this set-up. TJ at sec. TJ at , It would be too fanciful to think of the parties to the OP as having the capacity to invent principles.

The point of the thought experiment, rather, is to see which principles would be chosen in a fair set-up. To use the OP this way, we must offer the parties a menu of principles to choose from.

Rawls offers them various principles to consider. Among them are his own principles to be described below and the two versions of utilitarianism, classical and average. Would rational parties behind a veil of ignorance choose average utilitarianism?

The economist John Harsanyi argues that they would because it would be rational for parties lacking any other information to maximize their expectation of well-being.

Harsanyi Since they do not know who they will be, they will therefore want to maximize the average level of well-being in society. The most crucial difference concerns the motivation that is attributed to the parties by stipulation.

The veil deprives the parties of any knowledge of the values—the conception of the good—of the person into whose shoes they are to imagine stepping. What, then, are they to prefer? Since Harsanyi refuses to supply his parties with any definite motivation, his answer is somewhat mysterious. Rawls instead defines the parties as having a determinate set of motivations. The parties in the hypothetical OP are to choose on behalf of persons in society, for whom they are, in effect, trustees.

PL at 76, The veil of ignorance, however, prevents the parties from knowing anything particular about the preferences, likes or dislikes, commitments or aversions of those persons. They also know nothing particular about the society for which they are choosing.

On what basis, then, can the parties choose? To ascribe to them a full theory of the human good would fly in the face of the facts of pluralism, for such theories are deeply controversial. This is the only motivation that TJ ascribes to the parties. The parties are motivated neither by benevolence nor by envy or spite. The former tradition attempts to imagine the point of view of a fully benevolent spectator of the human scene who reacts impartially and sympathetically to all human travails and successes.

The ideal-observer theory typically imagines a somewhat more dispassionate or impersonal, but still omniscient, observer of the human scene. Each of these approaches asks us to imagine what such a spectator or observer would morally approve. Rawls was determined to get beyond this impasse. He suggests that the OP should combine the mutual-disinterest assumption with the veil of ignorance.

This combination, he argues, will achieve the rough moral equivalence of universal benevolence without either neglecting the separateness of persons or sacrificing definiteness of results.

As we will see, the definite positive motivations that Rawls ascribes to the parties are crucial to explaining why they will prefer his principles to average utilitarianism. The primary goods are supposed to be uncontroversially worth seeking, albeit not for their own sakes.

Although this claim seems quite modest, philosophers rebutted it by describing life plans or worldviews for which one or another of the primary goods is not useful. These counterexamples revealed the need for a different rationale for the primary goods.

At roughly the same time, Rawls began to develop further the Kantian strand in his view. These Kantian ideas ended up providing a new rationale for the primary goods. See CP essays 13, 16, Kant held that the true principles of morality are not imposed on us by our psyches or by eternal conceptual relations that hold true independently of us; rather, Kant argued, the moral law is a law that our reason gives to itself.

It is, in this sense, self-chosen or autonomous law. Smith or Mr. Jones chooses to believe it does. Once it is so set up the parties are to choose principles.

Their task of choosing principles thus models the idea of autonomy. The parties to the OP, in selecting principles, implement this idea of autonomy. How they represent equality and rationality are obvious, for they are equally situated and are rational by definition. Reasonableness enters the OP not principally by the rationality of the parties but by the constraints on them—most especially the veil of ignorance. To conceive of persons as reasonable and rational, then, is to conceive of them as having certain higher-order powers.

Second, we can also revise our ends when we see reason to do so. The parties are conceived as having highest-order interests that correspond directly to these highest-order powers. Although the account of the moral powers was present in TJ , it is only in his later works that Rawls uses this idea to defend and elaborate the motivation of the parties in the OP.

In various, complicated ways, in his later work, Rawls defends the primary goods as being required for free and equal citizens to promote and protect their three moral powers. This is to cast the primary goods as items objectively needed by moral persons occupying the role of free and equal citizens.

In addition, they are concerned with securing for the person they represent the higher-order interests we have in developing and exercising our … moral powers and in securing the conditions under which we can further our determinate conceptions of the good, whatever it is. His aim remains, nonetheless, to assemble in the OP a series of relatively uncontroversial, relatively fixed points among our considered moral judgments and to build an argument on that basis for the superiority of some principles of justice over others.

The second principle addresses instead those aspects of the basic structure that shape the distribution of opportunities, offices, income, wealth, and in general social advantages. Each of these three centrally addresses a different set of primary goods: the First Principle concerns rights and liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity concerns opportunities; and the Difference Principle primarily concerns income and wealth.

That the view adequately secures the social basis of self-respect is something that Rawls argues more holistically.

The argument that the parties in the OP will prefer Justice as Fairness to utilitarianism and to the various other alternative principles with which they are presented divides into two parts. There is, first, the question whether the parties will insist upon securing a scheme of equal basic liberties and upon giving them top priority.

Regarding the first part of the argument from the OP, the crucial point is that the parties are stipulated to care about rights and liberties. In addition, he argues that securing the First Principle importantly serves the higher-order interest in an effective sense of justice—and does so better than the pure utilitarian alternative—by better promoting social stability, mutual respect, and social unity.

The second part of the argument from the OP takes the First Principle for granted and addresses the matter of social inequalities. Its sticking point has always been the Difference Principle, which strikingly and influentially articulates a liberal-egalitarian socioeconomic position.

It is the Difference Principle that would most clearly demand deep reforms in existing societies. The set-up of the OP suggests the following, informal argument for the difference principle: because equality is an ideal fundamentally relevant to the idea of fair cooperation, the OP situates the parties symmetrically and deprives them of information that could distinguish them or allow one to gain bargaining advantage over another.

Given this set-up, the parties will consider the situation of equal distribution a reasonable starting point in their deliberations. Since they know all the general facts about human societies, however, the parties will realize that society might depart from this starting point by instituting a system of social rules that differentially reward the especially productive and could achieve results that are better for everyone than are the results under rules guaranteeing full equality.

This is the kind of inequality that the Difference Principle allows and requires: departures from full equality that make some better off and no one worse off. Three main refinements are worth noting. First, because the principle pertains to the basic structure of society and because the parties are comparing different societies organized around different principles, the expectations that matter are not those of particular people but those of representative members of broad social classes.

Second, to make his exposition a little simpler, Rawls makes some technical assumptions that let him focus only on the expectations of the least-well-off representative class in a given society.

Allowed by these simplifying assumptions to focus only on the least well off representative persons, the Difference Principle thus holds that social rules allowing for inequalities in income and wealth are acceptable just in case those who are least well off under those rules are better off than the least-well-off representative persons under any alternative sets of social rules.

This formulation already takes account of the third refinement, which recognizes that the people who are the worst off under one set of social arrangements may not be the same people as those who are worst off under some other set of social arrangements. PL at 7n.

The Difference Principle requires society to look out for the least well off. But would the parties to the OP prefer the Difference Principle to a utilitarian principle of distribution? With nothing but the bare idea of rationality to guide them, they will naturally choose any principle that will maximize their utility expectation.

Since this is what the principle of Average Utilitarianism does, they will choose it. Rawls never defends the primary goods as goods in themselves.

Rather, he defends them as versatile means. In the later theory, the primary goods are defended as facilitating the pursuit and revision, by the persons the parties represent, of their conceptions of the good. While the parties do not know what those conceptions of the good are, they do care about whether the persons they represent can pursue and revise them.

With this departure from Harsanyi in mind, we may finally explain why the parties in the OP will prefer the principles of Justice as Fairness, including the Difference Principle, to average utilitarianism. The maximin rule is a general rule for making choices under conditions of uncertainty. The maximin rule directs one to select that alternative where the minimum place is higher on whatever the relevant measure is than the minimum place in any other alternative. They care about the primary goods and the highest-order moral powers, but they also know, in effect, that the primary goods that they are motivated to seek are not what the persons they represent ultimately care about.

Accordingly, it is rational for them to take a cautious approach. They must do what they can to assure to the persons they represent have a sufficient supply of primary goods for those persons to be able to pursue whatever it is that they do take to be good. Although the OP attempts to collect and express a set of crucial constraints that are appropriate to impose on the choice of principles of justice, Rawls recognized from the beginning that we could never just hand over the endorsement of those principles to this hypothetical device.

That is, we need to stop and consider whether, on reflection, we can endorse the results of the OP. If those results clash with some of our more concrete considered judgments about justice, then we have reason to think about modifying the OP. The reflective equilibrium has been an immensely influential idea about moral justification. It is not a full theory of justification. When it was introduced, however, it suggested a different approach to justifying moral theories than was being commonly pursued.

The idea of reflective equilibrium takes two steps away from the sort of conceptual analysis that was then prevalent. First, working on the basis of considered judgments suggests that it is not necessary to build moral theories on necessary or a priori premises. Rawls characterizes considered judgments as simply judgments reached under conditions where our sense of justice is likely to operate without distortion. Reaching it might involve revising some of those more concrete judgments.

A third novel idea about justification thus emerges from this picture: it involves arguments built in various different directions at once. Since it is up to each person, however, to determine which arguments are most compelling, Rawls stresses that the reader must make up his or her own mind, rather than trying to predict or anticipate what everyone else will think. Part Two of TJ aims to show that Justice as Fairness fits our considered judgments on a whole range of more concrete topics in moral and political philosophy, such as the idea of the rule of law, the problem of justice between generations, and the justification of civil disobedience.

Consistent with the idea of reflective equilibrium, Rawls suggests pruning and adjusting those judgments in a number of places. One of the thorniest such issues, that of tolerating the intolerant, recurs in PL. In addition to serving its main purpose of facilitating reflective equilibrium on Justice as Fairness, Part Two also offers a treasure trove of influential and insightful discussion of these and other topics in political philosophy.

There is hardly space here even to summarize all the worthwhile points that Rawls makes about these topics. A summary of his controversial and influential discussion of the idea of desert that is, getting what one deserves , however, will illustrate how he proceeds.

As we have seen, Rawls was deeply aware of the moral arbitrariness of fortune. He held that no one deserves the social position into which he or she is born or the physical characteristics with which he or she is endowed from birth. He also held that no one deserves the character traits he or she is born with, such as his or her capacity for hard work. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. Reacting classes typically consist of two or three "games" a semester.

The Hobbes Game. This game, designed by Victor Asal , illustrates Thomas Hobbes' description of the state of nature. Students are given a 'life card' and told the object of the game is to survive by still having a card at the end of the game. They are told how to challenge other players for their cards, and that if challenged, they must fight.

Although they are never told they must challenge someone, students immediately do so. Even after being told they can stop fighting and still win the game, students frequently wish to continue fighting, sometimes for the glory of winning. This simple game serves as an excellent introduction to Hobbes for a political theory or international relations class. An online "support group" for game theory instructors. Students can play the prisoner's dilemma game against five different personalities.