The school offers Juris Doctor degrees which can be earned in conjunction with Master of Business Administration or Master of Science degrees through the adjacent Rawls College of Business.

According to Rawls, ignorance of these details about oneself will lead to principles that are fair to all.

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.

By guaranteeing the worst-off in society a fair deal, Rawls compensates for naturally-occurring inequalities ( talents that one is born with, such as a capacity for sport ).

Others, in particular John Rawls, make the distinction between the Good, that is actively creating a better world however that may be defined, and the Just, which creates a fair, liberal social infrastructure that allows the pursuit of virtue, but does not prescribe what the common good actually is.

Procedurally fair processes of the type used by Rawls may not leave enough room for judgment, and therefore, reduce the totality of goodness.

Among those criticizing the decision on this line was philosopher John Rawls, who wrote that the Court's decision " runs the risk of endorsing the view that fair representation is representation according to the amount of influence effectively exerted.

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.

Rawls has also emphasized the relatively modest role that maximin plays in his argument: it is " a useful heuristic rule of thumb " given the curious features of choice behind the veil of ignorance.

Rawls justifies the Difference Principle on the basis that, since Fair Equality of Opportunity has lexical priority, the Just choice from Pareto optimal scenarios which could occur would be that benefiting the worst-off rather than the best-off.

For example, John Rawls asks us to imagine a group of persons in a situation where they know nothing about themselves, and are charged with devising a social or political organization ( See the veil of ignorance ).

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 " danger " of misunderstanding here, as Rawls notes, is that CA in this sense, becomes just another formal analytic enterprise, like any other formal method which brings an analytical toolbox of preconceptions, formal definitions, and operational procedures to the situation / setting under study.

In many cases, merit goods provide services which it is argued should apply universally to everyone in a particular situation, a view that is close to the concept of primary goods found in work by philosopher John Rawls or discussions about social inclusion.

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.

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 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 applied this technique to his conception of a hypothetical original position from which people would agree to a social contract.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

John Rawls, a critic of utilitarianism, argues that utilitarianism, in common with other forms of consequentialism, relies on the perspective of such an ideal observer.

* John Rawls: Revitalized the study of normative political philosophy in Anglo-American universities with his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, which uses a version of social contract theory to answer fundamental questions about justice and to criticise utilitarianism.

The objection that ‘ utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons ’ came to prominence in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls ’ A Theory of Justice.

In January 2004, Rawls was honored by the United Negro College Fund for his more than 25 years of charity work with the organization.

Before his death in January 2006, Rawls ' last performance was a taping for the 2006 telethon that honored Wonder, months before entering the hospital after being diagnosed with cancer earlier in the year.

It reached # 2 on the Billboard pop chart and was followed by more hits, including " Sad Mood ", " Bring it on Home to Me " ( with Lou Rawls on backing vocals ), " Another Saturday Night " and " Twistin ' the Night Away ".

During his time with Nine Network he provided backing guitar for performances by artists including Tom Jones and Lou Rawls.

* 1997, " Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers ' Brief " ( with R. Dworkin, R. Nozick, J. Rawls, T. Scanlon, and J. J. Thomson ), New York Review of Books, March 27, 1997.

Notable performers include James Booker, Duke Ellington, Kermit Ruffins, King Oliver, Jerry Reed, Artie Shaw, Lead Belly, Big Mama Thornton, Jack Teagarden, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Cassandra Wilson, Stan Kenton, Josh White, Lou Rawls, Bobby Bland, Ramblin ' Jack Elliott, Doc Watson, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Van Ronk, " Spider " John Koerner, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Paul Butterfield, The Animals, The Standells, and more recently The White Stripes, the Stray Cats, the Tarbox Ramblers, Snooks Eaglin, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, and Tom Jones with Jools Holland.

Cohen's criticisms are leveled against Rawls ' avowal of inequality under the difference principle, against his application of the principle only to social institutions, and against Rawlsian obsession with the using primary goods as his currency of equality.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls articulates the Liberty Principle as the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others ; he later amended this in Political Liberalism, stating instead that " each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties " ( emphasis added ).

" Diverse groups learn to tolerate one another by developing " what Rawls calls ' overlapping consensus ': individuals and groups with diverse metaphysical views or ' comprehensive schemes ' will find reasons to agree about certain principles of justice that will include principles of toleration.

However, Rawls also insists, like Popper, that society has a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance: " While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger.

One problem with the thinkings of Rawls is that it is overly procedural.

Her more serious and academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin.

Analyst Paul Krugman writing in The New York Times agreed with Rawls ' position in which both equality of opportunity and equality of outcome were linked, and suggested that " we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn ’ t know in advance who we ’ d be.

Philosopher John Rawls offered this variant of substantive equality of opportunity, and explained that it happens when individuals with the same " native talent and the same ambition " have the same prospects of success in competitions.

Overall, the Democratic Party advocates economic policies pretty close to " liberalism " in the sense of John Rawls ( rather than, say, of Robert Nozick or Friedrich Hayek, as commonly accepted outside North America ), in sharp contrast with the traditional radical free-market orientation of Hong Kong.