Rawls offers two principles of social justice:

The Principle of Equal Liberty: Each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty consistent with similar liberty for everyone.

The Difference Principle: Practices that produce inequalities among individuals are allowable only if they work out to everyone’s advantage and the positions that come with greater reward are open to all.

According to the first principle, the liberty of individuals is restricted to that which is consistent with like liberty for all.

This principle allows practices that result in unequal distribution of social and economic benefits only if such practices benefit those who are least well off relative to the state of the least well off under other systems of practices. While the difference principle allows for inequalities in the distribution of social and economic benefits, it does not allow inequalities that benefit the well to do at the expense of those who are least well off.

The difference principle also requires equality of opportunity.

Rawls’ supports these principles of social justice as those that would be selected by rational self interested agents reasoning from what he calls The Original Position.

The Original Position

Agents reasoning from the original position are assumed to be rational in the prudential sense. They seek to maximize their own interests.

The principles of justice selected from the original position are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. Agents are unaware of personal traits like social position, race, wealth, strength, intelligence, handicaps, gender etc.

The Veil of Ignorance

The principles of justice that would be selected by rational self interested agents behind the veil of ignorance will be fair in the sense that they will not arbitrarily advantage any accidentally had individual traits or circumstances.

Supporting the principle of Equal Liberty
This principle would be selected by rational prudential agents in the original position because none would accept the possibility of their liberty being restricted in ways not required for others to enjoy similar liberty.

This principle would be selected in the original position because those who are least advantaged under acceptable practices would still be better off than those least advantaged under other practices (including those that guarantee equality). Those advantaged under acceptable practices are presumed to have no grounds for complaint.

Paying higher than average wages to doctors and nurses.

Granting teachers the exclusive power to assign grades to students.

Granting special powers of surveillance to government security agencies.

Inequalities resulting from institutions of private property.

According to Rawls’ difference principle, what we can’t have are practices that produce unequal distribution of social and economic goods by benefiting some individuals at the expense of others.

Capitalist exploitation of workers.

Life saving drugs available only to those who can pay.

Building the toxic waste dump in the poor minority neighborhood.

Intergenerational inequalities (a few generations using up irreplaceable natural resources at the expense of future generations.)

Challenges to Rawl’s: Robert Nozick offers an alternative in his entitlement conception of justice. For Nozick, any distributive state arrived at from a just initial state by means of just transfers will itself be just. This has the result that one person might be justified in living in luxury while others around him are in dire poverty or even starving.

Rawl’s view is not utilitarian. When a company puts a hazardous waste site in a poor neighborhood, it may maximize its own interests. Conceivably, it may even maximize utility for the society as a whole, though obviously not through equal distribution of benefits. But even in this case, it may violate Rawls’ second principle of social justice. That principle does not allow us to adopt whatever practices produce the greatest social benefit overall. Rather, according to Rawls’ second principle, practices that result in inequalities in the distribution of social and economic benefits are only just when they improves the lot of all, including those who get the smallest slice of the good produced. And this is what fails to happen in typical cases of environmental injustice.

Sources

John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness", in Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell Philosophical Anthologies, Goodin and Pettit eds., 1997.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.