A Theory of Justice

Rating:
Summary: Not that bad
Review: My fellow reviewer overstated Rawls's failings. Rawls must be given credit (perhaps more than I give him-- four stars for effort) for producing something almost unique in political philosophy: a robust, complete theory that he derives from as few premises as possible. Nozick argues against Rawls, but he doesn't disprove him.

That said, the premises he does assume are questionable. The veil is a neat trick, but not convincing. Rawls never pretends that anything like it historically takes place, but even as an heuristic model it's hard to imagine anyone making important decisions with NO information. He assumes that people are risk-averse (try as he might to sweep that under the rug). Most damning of all though is his own determinism: if nobody deserves anything anyway, what's wrong with inequality?

Rating:
Summary: Monumental!
Review: Rawls defines human society as an association, guided by a common conception of justice, which attempts to advance the good of its members. He states that justice concerns the distribution of the greatest good over the broadest possible extent of the membership base. The author describes the principle of utility as holding that a society is rightly ordered and just when its institutions are organized in such manner that the greatest sum of satisfactions is realized. However, this utilitarian notion of justice does not prescribe any requirements as to how the sum of satisfactions is to be distributed among its members. Rawls notes that depriving some members of satisfactions so that a larger number may enjoy those satisfactions is not justified.

Rawls says that the most rational alternative to utilitarianism is the Kantian theory of the social contract. A major problem with this social contract is the irrational assumption that the contractors will agree to limit their freedoms so that others may enjoy a greater amount of satisfactions. Utilitarianism is free from this irrationality. Rawls advocates the incorporation of two principles of justice into utilitarianism: 1) each person should have equal rights in institutional dealings (most likely a constitutional democracy); and 2) any institutional inequalities should be arbitrary and not directed at any specific individual or group. These principles will tend to minimize the structural favoritism of society to certain people over others which affect their life-prospects. The second principle, referred to as the difference principle, further states that any chronic inequalities are just only if they work to the advantage of the least powerful member. Adoption of this difference principle will benefit the larger society by fostering the widest possible distribution of natural talents and abilities through the minimization of the advantages of birth-fortune. A perfectly just society is an efficient society - the optimal distribution of resources, welfare, and justice will promote the greatest sum of happiness.

The message contained in this modern classic is a fundamental building block in our quest for the creation of just, equitable, and good society.

Rating:
Summary: A thorough analytic treatment of social ethics.
Review: Rawls exposition is clear; He defines Justice as the first virtue of society, and then defines Justice as Fairness, and proceeds from there to a description of a set of formally fair procedures for constructing a just society. Chief among those is his doctrine of "The Original Position", i.e. the situation in which a person takes no thought for personal advantage, including one's own in-born abilities, and then attempts to construct an ethical framework to guide the constitution of society. Although the work is vague, it is because he necessarily works at a very high level of abstraction. I also believe his work is -wrong- (because I think valuing human life is the first virtue of human society, not justice), but it is the clearest description of Kantian analytic social theory ever presented. As such, if it -is- wrong, it is because analytic social theories are wrong as a class, not because Rawls made mistakes. A very good book.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but question begging nonetheless
Review: Rawls has a good conception of Justice (That is, Justice as fairness, which trumps Justice as equality, which means people with higher abilities ought to have higher salaries, not a right to higher salaries though). However, he does beg the question (like so many other liberal philosophers trying to define justice). He expects us to assume that most people agree with his conception of what the ideal world is. I give it 4, because if we accept his ideas of what an ideal world is, and his intuitions, then it logically follows that all the rest ought to happen. It loses one, because of the fact should we accept his assumptions and intuitions? In calssic pragmatic style, he has touched into an area which a lot of common folk would agree with, just using 800 pages of academic explanations to say why it should be done. His variation on Pascal's wager to show why people wouldn't gamble is incorrect, i beleive if they had a high chance of winning, and only a modest gain or loss, most people would be willing to take the plunge as it were.

Rating:
Summary: In an Ideal World
Review: Rawls manages to redefine the idea of moral ethics. By creating an ideal world--a world without knowledge of any other-- he idealizes a true liberal democracy. This book is considered the handbook for the new morality.

Rating:
Summary: Latter Day Kantian
Review: Rawls TOJ is a wonderful book. His original positon under a veil of ignorance boils down to what an impartial rational mind would choose... which is betrayed by his insistance on unanimity for certain kinds of things. This is Kantianism by any other name. I think Michael Berumen's Do No Evil: Ethics, Economics, and Business is an even better book, not only on economics and business, but even in relation to pure ethics and political philosophy; he is also greatly influenced by Kant, but his is a much more realistic or doable system. His justification of liberty and of property is one of the best I have ever come across. His emphasis on the importance of irrationality in formulating moral princples is very enlightening, as is his emphasis of evil.

Rating:
Summary: The Soul of Liberalism
Review: Rawls' book is the Bible of Modern liberalism....a Kantian view of justice. Most critics and admirers put a disproportinate amount of emphasis on his so-called "difference principle," the idea that the least advantaged ought to benefit from any improvment in the station of the most advanataged. A more important and oft overlooked principle, however, is one to which Rawls gives precedence, namely, individual liberty. For those who are looking for a better sysnthesis of both Rawls' and Robert Nozick's most important ideas on liberty, read Michael Berumen's Do No Evil: Ethics with Applications to Economic Theory. Berumen does a much better job of giving a philsophical justification for liberty, democracy, and capitalism.

Rating:
Summary: Justice as envy, jealousy, and covetousness
Review: Rawls' definition of Justice is so broad (Marxist) that if someone has more intelligence, better skills, natural blonde hair, stronger, and of course, more money, they are unjust (by birth!). Ridiculous. This isn't a theory of Justice. It's a rationalized excuse to justify jealousy, envy, and coveting thy neighbors goods, particularly their bank account via taxation.

Marxism is dead. That's Justice!

Rating:
Summary: The theories are wildly wrong
Review: Rawls'es theories are completely rebuked in Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick. Briefly, social justice assumes a defined set of moral principles, fails to refute their subjectivity, and goes on to assume an infallible political system capable of upholding them. Rawls'es basic premise is that justice implies that coercive actions to be taken against private individuals in the name of a community that is neither contractual nor consentual. Two emphatic thumbs down.

Rating:
Summary: Misreading Rawls
Review: Surely, A Theory of Justice is among the most important and influential texts in contemporary philosophy. And it is, of course, the central text in contemporary political philosophy. Want just a few reasons to think this is an important text that you ought to read? Here you go: Rawls develops and defends a new theory of justice, he provides a new way to extend some of the basic ideas in the social contract tradition, his text was crucial in resurrecting Kantian moral theory, his work has helped to bring constructivist meta-ethical positions back into prominence, the book develops some new and influential criticisms of utilitarianism, and it includes an explication of the method of reflective equilibrium and demonstrates how it can be applied in moral theory, etc.

This is a long, intricate, and densely argued book, and there's no hope of summarizing even its main claims in this review. Consequently, I'll simply aim to give a very sketchy account of the structure of his main argument here.

Rawls's theory is a theory of justice as it applies to the basic institutions of a single society. He calls his theory "justice as fairness." It is not that he thinks justice is simply fairness, or that a just society is a fair one. Rather, people choose principles of justice in a position that is supposed to be fair; their choices in this fair position determine the correct principles of justice. The principles of justice determine the nature of a just society; they apply to the basic structure of society--to its fundamental institutions. They will be understood by people who accept them as principles telling them how their society should be structured with respect to how it provides people with their basic rights and liberties, how it determines people's opportunities in life, and how it structures the institutions in which people acquire wealth and income.

The fair position for choosing these principles is what Rawls calls "the original position." His argument has the following structure: he describes the original position, and then he argues that parties in the original position would choose a particular set of principles of justice. The principles chosen constitute the correct theory of justice.

The first part of the argument is a detailed account of the original position. Parties in the original position are placed behind a veil of ignorance, where they are stripped of certain types of knowledge. In particular, they lose all the knowledge of the contingent facts concerning their own standing in life and the details of life in their society. Furthermore, they lose knowledge of their particular talents, desires, psychological traits, skills, etc. Why prefer this as a position in which principles of justice are to be chosen? The main idea is that it allows us to see the people as coming to fair terms for social cooperation, for this is supposed to be a fair situation for selecting the principles. Parties behind the veil are unable to rig the principles of justice to benefit themselves rather than others; they aren't allowed to use their position or talents to strongarm people into selecting principles that aren't to those people's benefit; and they aren't allowed to craft the principles to suit their actual needs, aims, desires, etc. However, parties in the original position do possess the sort of general knowledge about human psychology, human societies, and the natural world that would be required to choose between principles of justice.

Now, importantly, placing individuals in the original position depends on a particular moral view; this is supposed to reflect our considered judgments about justice and fairness. It is a way of drawing out what we actually think about these things. This is not a historical argument: the original position isn't supposed to be a description of some situation people were once in. Nor is this an argument grounded in some account of human nature and psychology: the parties in the original position aren't supposed to reflect something of importance about human psychology. (One should see section 40 for an account of this as a Kantian conception of justice, though. Here Rawls may be resting his theory on an account of us as beings of a certain sort. But, again, this is a philosophical and moral account of persons; this isn't the sort of thing you're going to find out about by doing ordinary sociology, anthropology, or psychology.)

In the next part of his argument Rawls claims that parties in the original position would agree upon the following principles of justice. The first principle is that individuals are to possess greatest amount of basic rights and liberties compatible with similar rights and liberties for others. The relevant rights and liberties are the right to vote and to hold public office, freedom of thought, freedom of speech and assembly, the right to own property and to avoid unreasonable search and seizure, etc. The second principle is that there is to be fair equality of opportunity with respect to positions of authority and responsibility, and that inequalities in wealth and income are be for the benefit of all, and particularly for the benefit of the worst-off group. The first principle is to be satisfied before the second one, so rights and liberties cannot be sacrificed in the interest of securing more wealth or income for any or all people. And one should notice that these principles do not clearly imply anything about how the institutions in which people acquire wealth and income are to be ordered or regulated. This will depend on which set of institutions would actually meet the requirements set by the second principles, and this will depend on empirical facts about how the world works. Moreover, it should be pointed out that many ways of ordering and regulating these institutions will be ruled out by the first principle, irrespective of how well off they would make the worst-off group.

This, clearly, should be read by anyone interested in contemporary analytic philosophy, and it is an absolutely crucial text for people studying ethics or political philosophy.