Led by John Rawls
About this course
The seventh module completes Rawls's theory of justice and tests it against its great rivals. Module 6 showed how the two principles would be chosen behind the veil of ignorance; this module asks what they actually require, and whether they survive objection.
The two principles are ordered. First come the equal basic liberties, and they come first absolutely — liberty may be limited only for liberty, never traded for prosperity, the move that secures freedom in a way Mill's utilitarianism could not. Then, within that framework, fair equality of opportunity (real chances regardless of the class one is born into), and the difference principle: inequalities are just only where they improve the lot of the least advantaged. The deep ground is the natural lottery — since no one earns their starting place or their native talents, the lucky may profit from their gifts only on terms that also help the unlucky, so talents function as a kind of common asset. Then the rivals press in. The libertarian Nozick argues that justice is about how holdings arose, not their shape, that liberty upsets any pattern, and that treating talents as common assets violates self-ownership. The communitarians argue that the self behind the veil — stripped of every attachment — is a fiction, and that justice cannot be defined apart from a community's shared goods. The module weighs Rawls's replies, including his later move that justice as fairness is political, not metaphysical.
The student leaves holding the two principles and the three great rivalries, poised at the fault line between Rawls's liberal proceduralism and the Aristotelian conception of the good — which the final module takes up. They read Rawls's A Theory of Justice, with Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
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Led by John Rawls
The question
What does justice as fairness actually demand, and can it withstand its critics? Rawls's two principles secure equal basic liberties first and absolutely, then fair opportunity, then only those inequalities that benefit the least advantaged — on the ground that no one deserves the natural talents or the starting place the lottery of birth assigned them. From the right, Nozick objects that this tramples liberty and treats people's talents as if they belonged to everyone; from the communitarian side, critics object that the self imagined behind the veil, with no attachments or community, is no real person at all. The module asks the student to assess both the theory and the objections — and so to locate justice as fairness against its rivals and against the Aristotelian view that the good is prior to the right.