Justice as Fairness

Rawls's primary target is utilitarianism — the dominant liberal theory of his time. Utilitarianism licenses the sacrifice of some for the benefit of the many: the aggregation of welfare across persons ignores the separateness of persons, treating the individual as a mere vessel of utility rather than a rights-bearing agent whose dignity cannot be traded away. Justice as fairness restores the individual to the centre of political philosophy.

A crucial premise of Rawls's argument is that natural talents — intelligence, strength, creativity — are morally arbitrary. We do not deserve our talents; they are the product of the natural lottery. A just society does not allow the distribution of the fruits of natural talents to track those talents unequally, because no one deserves to be born talented. The difference principle redistributes the fruits of the natural lottery to the least advantaged.

Rawls's method is not to derive his principles from first principles but to achieve reflective equilibrium between considered moral judgments and theoretical principles. We start from our strongest intuitions about particular cases — that slavery is unjust, that fair trials matter — and construct principles that systematise and, where necessary, revise those intuitions. The result is a theory that must answer to our moral experience, not replace it.

Rawls first developed the phrase "justice as fairness" in a 1958 article of the same name; A Theory of Justice (1971) provides the full systematic statement.