Justice as Fairness is the political philosopher John Rawls ' conception of justice.

Political Liberalism is an update to John Rawls ' Theory of Justice ( 1971 ) in which he attempts to show that his theory of justice is not a " comprehensive conception of the good ", but is instead compatible with a liberal conception of the role of justice: namely, that government should be neutral between competing conceptions of the good.

* Robert Nozick: Criticized Rawls, and argued for libertarianism, by appeal to a hypothetical history of the state and of property.

John Rawls ( 1921 – 2002 ) proposed a contractarian approach that has a decidedly Kantian flavour, in A Theory of Justice ( 1971 ), whereby rational people in a hypothetical " original position ", setting aside their individual preferences and capacities under a " veil of ignorance ", would agree to certain general principles of justice and legal organization.

Rawls constructed an argument for a two-stage process to determine a citizen's hypothetical agreement:

The original position is a hypothetical situation developed by American philosopher John Rawls as a thought experiment to replace the imagery of a savage state of nature of prior political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes.

Rawls seeks to use an argument that the principles of justice are what would be agreed upon if people were in the hypothetical situation of the original position and that those principles have moral weight as a result of that.

The original position is a hypothetical state of nature used as a thought experiment to develop Rawls ' theory of justice.

Rawls argues from this ' original position ' that we would choose exactly the same political liberties for everyone, like freedom of speech, the right to vote and so on.

Rawls used a thought experiment, the original position, in which representative parties choose principles of justice for the basic structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance.

Rawls specifies that the parties in the original position are concerned only with citizens ' share of what he calls primary social goods, which include basic rights as well as economic and social advantages.

Rawls also argues that the representatives in the original position would adopt the maximin rule as their principle for evaluating the choices before them.

Rawls argues that the representative parties in the original position would select two principles of justice:

Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation ( the original position with its veil of ignorance ) within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice.

Rawls claims that the parties in the original position would adopt two such principles, which would then govern the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages across society.

Rawls believes that this principle would be a rational choice for the representatives in the original position for the following reason: Each member of society has an equal claim on their society ’ s goods.

The assumptions of the original position, and in particular, the use of maximin reasoning, have also been criticized ( most notably by Kenneth Arrow and John Harsanyi ), with the implication either that Rawls designed the original position to derive the two principles, or that an original position more faithful to its initial purpose would not lead to his favored principles.

In reply Rawls has emphasized the role of the original position as a " device of representation " for making sense of the idea of a fair choice situation for free and equal citizens.

To develop his theory of Justice, Rawls places everyone in the original position.

Rawls reasons that people in the original position would want a society where they had their basic liberties protected and where they had some economic guarantees as well.

In his work the Law of Peoples, Rawls applies a modified version of his original position thought experiment to international relationships.

A key component of Rawls ' argument is his claim that his Principles of Justice would be chosen by parties in the original position.

Noting that Rawls himself acknowledged the failure of his theory of justice to comprehensively address these three frontiers, Nussbaum claims that Rawls's attempt to expand his theory to address one of these areas — transnational justice — is " ultimately unsatisfying " because he fails to follow through with the essential elements developed in A Theory of Justice, namely, by relaxing some of the key assumptions about the parties to the original contract.

The veil of ignorance and the original position are concepts introduced by John Harsanyi and later appropriated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice.

* John Rawls – political philosopher, author of A Theory of Justice, originator of the concepts of original position and veil of ignorance

Bad faith is important to the concept of original position in John Rawls ’ theory of justice, where mutual commitment of the parties requires that the parties cannot choose and agree to principles in bad faith, in that they have to be able, not just to live with and grudgingly accept, but to sincerely endorse the principles of justice ; a party cannot take risks with principles he knows he will have difficulty voluntarily complying with, or they would be making an agreement in bad faith which is ruled out by the conditions of the original position.

Moral constructivists like John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard may also be realists in this minimalist sense ; the latter describes her own position as procedural realism.

It is worth noting that for many contemporary political philosophers, the rigidity of a particular set of norms, rules, or fixed boundaries about either the way that subjects who would qualify for deliberation are constituted ( a position perhaps epitomized by John Rawls ) or regarding the kinds of argument which qualify as deliberation ( a position perhaps epitomized by Jürgen Habermas ) constitute a foreclosure of deliberation, making it impossible.

Specifically, Rawls develops what he claims are principles of justice through the use of an artificial device he calls the Original position in which everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance.

These approaches include the notion that individuals in a society accept rules from legitimate authority in exchange for security and economic advantage ( as in Rawls ) – a social contract.

Robert Nozick's 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which won a National Book Award, responded to Rawls from a libertarian perspective and gained academic respectability for libertarian viewpoints.

The telethon featured comedy and musical performances from various artists in support of the UNCF's and Rawls ' efforts.

Social justice as a secular concept, distinct from religious teachings, emerged mainly in the late twentieth century, influenced primarily by philosopher John Rawls.

To emphasise the general principle that justice should rise from the people and not be dictated by the law-making powers of governments, Rawls asserted that, " There is ... a general presumption against imposing legal and other restrictions on conduct without sufficient reason.

John Rawls in his Theory of Justice defines a conscientious objector as an individual prepared to undertake, in public ( and often despite widespread condemnation ), an action of civil disobedience to a legal rule justifying it ( also in public ) by reference to contrary foundational social virtues ( such as justice as liberty or fairness ) and the principles of morality and law derived from them.

He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil from the University of Oxford in 1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls.

This last field he expanded in a separate volume, where he adopted a constructivist approach that attempted to derive his fundamental ethical principles from the presuppositions of moral discourse, in a manner that put him, as he said, " between Rawls and Habermas ".

According to Wilbur Hardee, Gardner and Rawls won a controlling share of the company from him in a game of poker.

The resultant theory is known as " Justice as Fairness ", from which Rawls derives his two principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.

However, Rawls ' social contract takes a different view from that of previous thinkers.

Rawls ' claim in ( a ) is that departures from equality of a list of what he calls primary goods —" things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants " 1971, pg.

Rawls is also keying on an intuition that a person does not morally deserve their inborn talents ; thus that one is not entitled to all the benefits they could possibly receive from them ; hence, at least one of the criteria which could provide an alternative to equality in assessing the justice of distributions is eliminated.

Although Rawls never retreated from the core argument of A Theory of Justice, he modified his theory substantially in subsequent works such as Justice as Fairness: A Restatement ( 2001 ), in which he clarified and re-organised much of the argument of A Theory of Justice.

Robert Paul Wolff wrote Understanding Rawls: A Critique and Reconstruction of A Theory of Justice, which criticized Rawls from a Marxist perspective, immediately following the publication of A Theory of Justice.

Wolff argues in this work that Rawls ' theory is an apology for the status quo insofar as it constructs justice from existing practice and forecloses the possibility that there may be problems of injustice embedded in capitalist social relations, private property or the market economy.

Other criticisms of Rawls ' theory have come from the philosopher Gerald Cohen.

In 2000, following a $ 25 million gift from alumnus Jerry S. Rawls, the school was formally renamed the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration.