John Rawls and the Original Postion
Rawls and the Original Position Proclaiming justice as fairness and the first virtue of social institutions, John Rawls created a comprehensive theory of justice with the monumental work Theory of Justice. He argued that the two basic principles of justice which should govern a just society could be found in an imaginary constructed concept called the original position. The original position and the veil of ignorance are a state-of-nature procedure Rawls creates which is structured to yield fair principles of justice through reflective equilibrium. ... However, Rawls scenario is flawed in that he assumes his conclusions to be universal despite the inability to imagine a disembodied being free from conceptions of the good. ... The original position is basically Rawls’ version of the state-of-nature and is similar to Hobbes in that it is a hypothetical situation. ... The people he envisions in the original position are instrumentally rational, or they have the ability to efficiently determine means to ends; and they are mutually disinterested, or they do not care whether others will do well or poor compared to them. ... Such an idea does not seem completely different than what Hobbes had in mind, and similar to Hobbes, Rawls believed that because people are motivated by self-interest, the people in the original position would create principles which would benefit or favor themselves. Since such a society would not be just in the Rawlsian sense of justice as fairness, Rawls is compelled to add the stipulation that the persons in the original position are behind what he calls “the veil of ignorance”. ... Rawls believes that people would base their design of society using the maximin rule, which follows thus: since a person does not know who they are in the real world, they must be prepared to end up being anyone. ... From the use of the maximin rule in the original position he comes up with two principles of justice which are lexically ordered. ... It is important to note that the persons in the original position do not simply come up with these two principles out of nowhere, but are given a list of alternatives which represent various conceptions of justice, such as classical utilitarianism, average utilitarianism, etc. Rawls believes that the persons in the original position would reject these alternatives and choose his two principles to govern society. It is also important to note that inequalities in society are acceptable to Rawls, as long the inequalities comply with the two principles of justice. ... According to Rawls, the adoption of the two principles of justice is the only rational conclusion and since he assumes that people are rational agents, the adoption of the two principles is a choice and is not forced upon anyone. Thus according to Rawls, taxation would not be a violation of one’s rights, because one agreed to put the least well off in the best situation in the original position, and agreements made in the original position are permanent.