Philosophy of John Rawls: Justice as Fairness, Original Position and the Two Principles of Justice Explained in Simple Words

Imagine you are asked to write the rules for a brand new country. You decide the laws, the rights people get and how wealth is shared. There is only one catch. You do not know who you will be in that country. You could be rich or poor, healthy or sick, part of the majority or part of a tiny minority.

This simple puzzle sits at the heart of the philosophy of John Rawls, one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. His answer to it is called justice as fairness, and it still shapes how lawyers, judges, students and policy makers talk about fair laws today.

This guide explains the whole philosophy of John Rawls in simple words: his life, his method of thinking, his theory of justice, his ideas on how people with different beliefs can live under one law, and his views on peace between nations. It is based on the detailed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Rawls by Leif Wenar, rewritten here in plain language for law students and general readers.

John Rawls in One Minute

• Who he was: John Rawls (1921 to 2002) was an American political philosopher who taught at Harvard for more than thirty years.

• Most famous book: A Theory of Justice (1971).

• Core idea: A society is just when its main institutions are fair to everyone, who are all treated as free and equal citizens.

• Famous thought experiment: The original position and the veil of ignorance.

• Two principles of justice: Equal basic liberties for everyone, and economic inequality allowed only if opportunities are fair and the least advantaged benefit the most.

• Later work: Political Liberalism (1993) on living together despite deep disagreements, and The Law of Peoples (1999) on peace between nations.

Who Was John Rawls?

Rawls was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a well known lawyer and his mother led a chapter of the League of Women Voters. He studied at Princeton and Cornell, and then at Oxford, where he worked with thinkers such as H. L. A. Hart and Isaiah Berlin. He taught at Cornell and MIT before joining Harvard in 1962.

Two wars shaped his thinking. As a young soldier in the Second World War, Rawls lost his Christian faith after seeing how random death in combat can be and after learning about the Holocaust. He had once thought about becoming a priest. Later, in the 1960s, he spoke out against the draft for the Vietnam War because it treated Black and poor Americans unfairly. That experience pushed him to ask how a democracy can go wrong, and how citizens can resist unjust government policies in good conscience.

Rawls lived a quiet scholarly life, and the big events of that life happened inside his books. He kept reworking one theory of justice across four major works:

• A Theory of Justice (1971)

• Political Liberalism (1993)

• The Law of Peoples (1999)

• Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001)

What Was Rawls Trying to Do?

Rawls believed political philosophy does four useful jobs for a society:

• A practical job: It offers reasons that people can agree on when sharp political divisions could turn violent. Thinkers like Hobbes and Locke wrote in exactly such times.

• An orientation job: It helps citizens understand what it means to be an equal member of a democracy.

• A job of exploring what is possible: It shows the best society we can realistically hope for, given people as they are and laws as they might be.

• A job of reconciliation: It calms our anger at our society and its history by showing that its institutions can be reasonable, and that human life is not only cruelty and corruption.

Rawls saw his own work as a practical attempt to settle an old tension in democratic thought: the pull between liberty and equality.

How Rawls Thinks: His Method in Simple Terms

He Was Not a Utilitarian

A utilitarian uses one rule for everything: do what creates the most happiness overall. Rawls disagreed. He said the right rule for anything depends on what that thing is. So he built his theory step by step. First he worked out principles for one self-contained democratic society. Then he moved to principles for a society of nations.

Ideal Theory First, Real World Second

Rawls started with ideal theory. It assumes that people are generally willing to follow whatever rules are chosen, and that conditions are reasonably favourable, so nobody is so hungry that they cannot think about right and wrong. Once we know what a fully just society looks like, he said, we can do non-ideal theory and work out how to deal with crime, war, illness and disability in the real world.

Reflective Equilibrium

How do we know our political beliefs are justified? Rawls's answer is reflective equilibrium. You begin with judgments you are very sure about, such as 'slavery is wrong' or 'all citizens are political equals'. You treat them as temporary fixed points. Then you test them against wider principles and adjust whichever belief does not fit, until everything supports everything else. The final goal is a wide reflective equilibrium, where your beliefs still hold together after you have considered the major rival theories. No belief is untouchable.

Justice as Fairness: The Heart of Rawls' Theory

Justice as fairness is Rawls' theory of a just liberal society. It focuses on what he calls the basic structure of society: the constitution, the legal system, the economy, the family and other major institutions. These institutions decide who gets which rights, who gets which opportunities and how income and wealth are shared. They shape not only our life chances but also our goals, our relationships and our character.

Because most people cannot simply leave their country, and because the rules are enforced with real penalties, Rawls said the basic structure must be justified to everyone who lives under it.

Two guiding ideas sit behind the theory:

• The negative idea: Nobody deserves to be born rich or poor, more or less talented, male or female, or into any particular racial group. These facts are morally arbitrary, so nobody is entitled to a bigger share of society's benefits just because of them.

• The positive idea: Start from equality. Social goods should be shared equally unless an unequal share works to everyone's advantage, and especially to the advantage of those who have the least.

The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance

How do we work out fair rules? Rawls turns the question into a thought experiment. Instead of asking 'what is fair?', he asks: what rules would free and equal citizens agree to under fair conditions?

This thought experiment is called the original position. Every citizen has a representative, and all the representatives meet to choose the principles of justice for the society. Rawls does not use real citizens because real bargaining is shaped by things that have nothing to do with justice, such as who can threaten the others or who can hold out the longest.

The key feature is the veil of ignorance. It stops the representatives from knowing anything that could bias them.

• What they do not know: the race, gender, age, wealth, talents or beliefs of the person they represent, which generation that person belongs to, and even what political or economic system their society has.

• What they do know: that people have different plans for life, that everyone wants more of the basic goods needed to pursue those plans, that resources are moderately scarce, and that general facts of science and common sense are true.

Since no representative knows who they are speaking for, nobody can rig the rules in favour of a particular person. Whatever they agree on is fair to all. Rawls adds a few more conditions: the representatives are not driven by envy, they are neither reckless nor overly cautious about risk, and there are no do-overs once the veil is lifted.

For a shorter walkthrough of this idea, read our article on John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance in Jurisprudence Explained.

The Two Principles of Justice

From behind the veil, Rawls argued that the representatives would choose two principles.

First Principle: Equal Basic Liberties

Everyone has the same claim to a full set of equal basic liberties. These include freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of speech, liberty of the person, the right to vote and to hold public office, and the right to be treated under the rule of law. Two features make this principle special:

• Priority: Basic liberties cannot be traded away for economic gains. For example, Rawls says a country cannot give draft exemptions to college students just because educated civilians boost the economy. If there is a draft, everyone able to serve must be equally subject to it.

• Fair value of political liberties: Formal equality is not enough. People with similar talent and motivation should have similar chances to hold office and influence elections, whether they are rich or poor. This needs public funding of elections, limits on campaign contributions and roughly equal access to the media.

Second Principle, Part One: Fair Equality of Opportunity

People with the same talents and the same willingness to work should have the same educational and job opportunities, whether they were born rich or poor. This goes further than banning discrimination. The state must also fund good education for the less well off and guarantee a basic income and health care.

Second Principle, Part Two: The Difference Principle

Some inequality in income and wealth can be useful. Higher pay can cover the cost of training and give people a reason to take up jobs that are in demand. The difference principle allows such inequality only if it works to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

Here is a simple example. Imagine four economies and the average lifetime income of three groups in each: the least advantaged, the middle group and the most advantaged.

• Economy A: 10,000 / 10,000 / 10,000

• Economy B: 12,000 / 30,000 / 80,000

• Economy C: 30,000 / 90,000 / 150,000

• Economy D: 20,000 / 100,000 / 500,000

The difference principle picks Economy C, because the least advantaged group does best there. Economy D has far more total wealth, but the poorest do worse than in C. Rawls does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor.

The two principles come with a strict order. The first principle comes before the second, and within the second principle, fair equality of opportunity comes before the difference principle.

Behind the difference principle is an ideal of social unity. Talents are treated as a shared asset, so people who are lucky enough to be gifted may gain from them, as long as that also helps those who are less fortunate. In Rawls' own words, citizens in such a society 'agree to share one another's fate.'

Why Rawls Rejected Utilitarianism

Rawls compared his two principles with utilitarian principles inside the original position and argued that the representatives would prefer his.

• Against average utility: A rule that aims at the highest average happiness could take away the liberties of a weak minority if the majority gains more. No representative would gamble with the basic freedoms of the person they represent when they could secure equal liberties for everyone. Rawls uses 'maximin' reasoning here, which means choosing the option whose worst outcome is the best possible. Equal liberty also builds mutual respect and takes divisive fights about whose rights to cut off the political agenda.

• Against restricted utility: This rule keeps a guaranteed minimum income but then maximises average happiness. Rawls says the difference principle asks less of the better off than this rule asks of the worst off. People stuck at the minimum may feel their interests were sacrificed and may become cynical and withdraw from public life.

A common student mistake is to think the difference principle comes from maximin. According to the Stanford entry, Rawls' formal argument for the difference principle does not rely on maximin or on fear of risk. It rests on the idea of stable, reciprocal cooperation between citizens.

Which Economic System Fits Rawls' Idea of Justice?

Rawls did not simply back the welfare state. He said welfare state capitalism leaves control of the economy in the hands of a few rich private players and tends to create a demoralised underclass. He thought laissez-faire capitalism was worse for equality. He also rejected a socialist command economy, because it puts too much power in the hands of the state and threatens freedoms such as free choice of work.

Justice as fairness, he said, fits either a property-owning democracy, where ownership of productive assets and access to education are spread widely, or liberal democratic socialism, where firms are managed by workers. In both, the least advantaged are not objects of charity or pity. They are people to whom reciprocity is owed as a matter of basic justice.

Political Liberalism: How Different People Live Under One Law

In a free society people follow different religions and different views of right and wrong, yet the country can have only one law. Rawls said this creates two big challenges: legitimacy (when is it fair to force everyone to follow the law?) and stability (why would people willingly obey a law made by people who believe very different things?). His answer is called political liberalism.

Legitimacy and the Criterion of Reciprocity

Rawls says political power is properly used only when it follows a constitution whose essentials all citizens, as free and equal people, can reasonably be expected to accept. The test is reciprocity: citizens must reasonably believe that everyone else can reasonably accept the rules being enforced.

Reasonable Citizens and the Burdens of Judgment

Reasonable citizens want to cooperate on fair terms and will follow fair rules even when it costs them something, as long as others do the same. Each holds a personal 'comprehensive doctrine', which is a full view about God, life, right and wrong. But reasonable citizens do not force that view on others. One reason is the burdens of judgment: the deepest questions of religion, philosophy and morality are very hard, and honest people reach different answers because of their different life experiences.

Public Political Culture

Since no single religion or philosophy can be accepted by everyone, Rawls looks somewhere else for shared ideas: a society's public political culture. This includes the constitution, the traditions of interpreting it (including court decisions) and well known historic documents. He finds three basic ideas there: citizens are free, citizens are equal, and society should be a fair system of cooperation.

Overlapping Consensus

Stability comes from an overlapping consensus. Citizens support the same core political values, but each for reasons found inside their own beliefs. A believer may back religious freedom because of faith, and a non-believer may back it for entirely different reasons. This is better than a mere balance of power between rival groups, which can fall apart the moment power shifts. Rawls calls such stability 'stable for the right reasons'. He does not promise that it is possible in every society.

Public Reason

Public reason is the part of Rawls' theory that matters most to lawyers. It says that when people act in certain political roles, they should be able to justify decisions on the most basic issues using public values and public standards that everyone can accept.

• Who it applies to: Judges when they give rulings, lawmakers when they speak and vote, top office holders and candidates, and voters when they vote. It does not apply to worship, private conversations or scientific research.

• An example: A judge deciding a major constitutional question should not rest the decision on a religious text or a personal spiritual vision, because not everyone in society can accept those as a common standard.

• Which issues: The most fundamental ones, such as who can vote, which religions are tolerated and what counts as unfair discrimination.

• A moral duty, not a legal one: Rawls calls it a duty of civility. Going beyond public reason is never a crime.

• A generous exception: People may use religious language if their message also supports public values. Rawls' example is Abraham Lincoln, who used Biblical imagery to condemn slavery on grounds of freedom and equality.

The Law of Peoples: Rawls on Peace Between Nations

After his theories for one society, Rawls moved to international relations. He did not want a world government, because he thought it would end up either as a global tyranny or as a mess of groups fighting for independence. Instead, he offered a foreign policy for liberal societies dealing with other societies. He proposed eight principles:

• Peoples are free and independent, and others must respect that.

• Peoples must keep their treaties.

• Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.

• Peoples must not interfere in each other's affairs, except to stop grave human rights violations.

• Peoples may defend themselves but have no right to start a war for any other reason.

• Peoples must honour human rights.

• Peoples must follow limits on how war is fought.

• Peoples have a duty to help other peoples living in conditions that stop them from having a just or decent society.

Rawls speaks of peoples rather than states. He splits them into two groups. Liberal peoples have legitimate liberal constitutions. Decent peoples are not liberal, but they respect core human rights, consult their different social groups in a genuine way and do not pursue aggressive wars. Liberal peoples should tolerate and respect decent peoples, and should not criticise them for not being liberal. To show what he meant, Rawls imagined a decent society called Kazanistan, where Islam is the favoured religion and only Muslims hold the highest offices, yet other faiths are practised freely and minorities face no arbitrary discrimination.

Human rights set the limit of tolerance. The core rights he lists include the rights to subsistence and security, personal property, equality before the law, freedom from slavery, protection from genocide and some liberty of conscience. A society that breaks these rights can rightly face sanctions or even military intervention.

Rawls also dealt with the real, imperfect world. Outlaw states threaten peace or violate human rights, and other peoples may resist them. Burdened societies lack the resources or institutions to be well ordered, and other peoples must help them until they can manage their own affairs. This duty of assistance is where Rawls departs most from today's international law. He also kept his ambitions limited. Once burdened societies are helped, global economic inequality as such is not a concern for his theory.

His goal was a 'realistic utopia': a world where the great evils of history, such as unjust war, oppression, religious persecution, starvation and genocide, no longer happen. Believing that this is possible, he suggested, is believing that people are not doomed to be selfish and that international relations can be more than a contest for power.

Common Criticisms of Rawls

• The libertarian view: Robert Nozick argued for very strong property rights. By Rawls' standards, a libertarian theory is not a liberal theory of justice because it allows very large inequalities and does not make sure everyone has the means to use their freedoms.

• The community view: Critics such as Michael Sandel say the original position removes people from the social and cultural background that shapes their values.

• The feminist and race debates: Scholars have asked whether Rawls dealt properly with gender, the family and racial injustice. The Stanford entry points to a debate on Rawls and race between Charles Mills and Tommie Shelby.

• The global view: Some say the Law of Peoples asks too little of rich countries on global inequality, since it does not treat inequality between nations as a problem in itself.

• The direction of his ideas: Other scholars argue that Rawls' own principles point further, and that true Rawlsian justice needs a form of socialism.

Why Rawls Matters for Law Students and Lawyers

Rawls gives lawyers a clear way to ask whether a law is not only legal but also fair. Readers in India will notice how close his questions are to the promise of justice, liberty and equality in the Preamble of the Constitution, and to everyday debates on welfare, education, free speech and opportunity. Rawls does not hand out ready answers to those debates. What he offers is a test.

Here is how you can use Rawlsian thinking in an exam answer, a moot court argument or a policy note:

• Ask whether a person who did not know their own position in society could accept this rule as fair.

• Check whether the rule protects the basic liberties of every person equally.

• Check whether jobs and education are open to people of equal talent, whatever family they were born into.

• Check whether any inequality the rule allows actually helps the least advantaged.

• Check whether the reasons given for the decision are public reasons that people of all beliefs can understand and weigh.

Key Terms to Remember

• Justice as fairness: Rawls' theory that society's main institutions must be fair to citizens seen as free and equal.

• Basic structure: The major institutions that together decide rights, opportunities and the sharing of wealth.

• Original position: The imagined meeting where representatives choose principles of justice.

• Veil of ignorance: The rule that stops representatives from knowing facts that could bias their choice.

• Primary goods: Things every citizen needs whatever their life plan: basic rights and liberties, freedom of movement and choice of occupation, powers of office and positions of responsibility, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect.

• Two moral powers: The capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity to form and revise a personal idea of a good life.

• Difference principle: Inequalities are allowed only if they benefit the least advantaged the most.

• Fair equality of opportunity: Equal chances for equally talented and motivated people, regardless of class of birth.

• Reflective equilibrium: A state in which beliefs at every level fit together and support each other.

• Overlapping consensus: Citizens with different worldviews back the same political values for their own reasons.

• Public reason: The duty of officials and voters to explain fundamental political decisions using reasons everyone can accept.

• Well-ordered society: A society where everyone accepts the same principles of justice and knows that others do too.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the philosophy of John Rawls in simple words?

Rawls believed a fair society is one whose main institutions would be accepted by everyone if they had to choose the rules without knowing their own place in society. He called this justice as fairness. It puts equal basic liberties first and allows inequality only when it gives fair opportunities to all and helps the least advantaged the most.

What is the veil of ignorance?

It is a thought experiment in which the people choosing the rules of society do not know their own race, gender, wealth, talents or beliefs. Because they could end up in any position, they are pushed to choose rules that are fair to everyone.

What are the two principles of justice in Rawls' theory?

The first principle gives every person equal basic liberties. The second principle allows social and economic inequalities only if positions are open to all under fair equality of opportunity and if the inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, which is called the difference principle.

What is the difference between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism?

A Theory of Justice (1971) sets out justice as fairness, meaning what a fair society looks like. Political Liberalism (1993) asks a follow-up question: how can a society full of different religions and beliefs agree on one set of laws that is both legitimate and stable? Its answers are the overlapping consensus and public reason.

Why is John Rawls important for law students?

Rawls gives students a clear framework to test whether laws, policies and court decisions are fair. His idea of public reason also explains why judges should justify important decisions with reasons that people of every belief can accept.

Keywords

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Source: Leif Wenar, 'John Rawls', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 25 March 2008, substantive revision 3 September 2025): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/