One main problem in Rawl’s defense of “justice as fairness” is that Rawls believes that no one can deserve his or her advantages or assets in life—it’s all a matter of luck. As he puts it, “No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting point in society.” The reason? Because even a person’s character (i.e., the virtues he or she practices that may provide him with ways of getting ahead of others) “depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit”…
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Philosopher Tibor R. Machen, “What is Morally Right With Insider Trading,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 10 (April 1996), pp.135-142.John Rawls
To make concrete what [Rawls's] theory regards as justice, compare two of our society's worst-off. The first, a mugger who has never held a job, is vicious when he can get away with it and spends his ill-gotten gains on drugs. The second, a mother of three, has been abandoned by her husband; she earns the minimum wage at a menial job and is trying hard to raise her children well. According to what Rawls calls justice, these two are entitled to the same resources from society simply because they are among the worst-off. The mugger's viciousness and lack of effort and the mother's decency and struggle create no morally relevant difference between them. [¶] Now change the scenario a bit. The mugger continues as before, but the mother's efforts have borne fruit. She has found a better job and is doing well at it. Her family now is moderately secure and comfortable but hardly affluent. On Rawls's view, justice requires taking some of the mother's resources in order to give them to the mugger. [¶] in deeming this blatant injustice just, Rawls repudiates the conception—accepted from the Old Testament to recent times—that justice consists in giving people what they deserve: reward for good conduct and punishment for bad. [...] awls is explicit about his repudiation...
John Rawls
One obvious way to specify what it is that is “due” to someone is to appeal to existing legal codes, but what they will prescribe will vary enormously from one time and place to another. A second account of justice might appeal to some notion of merit or desert. The third approach is Aristotle’s “general” conception, which simply identified “justice” with the sum of all the virtues and excellences. A fourth conception of justice is the idea that justice is in some way to be connected to equality of shares, resources, or outcomes. Finally there is the idea of fairness or impartiality of procedure. One might think that Rawls’s view derives some of its apparent plausibility because of a gradual slide between the various senses of “justice.” People start from a vague intuition that justice as a “general” concept (in the third sense above) is extremely important for the proper functioning of a society; they then find it easy to shift from this to a particular conception that connects “justice” with fairness of procedure and (a certain kind of limited) equality.
Raymond Geuss
The freedom to conduct different types of life is reflected in all the alternative combinations of functionings from which a person can choose, this can be called the 'capacity' of a person. The ability of a person depends on a variety of factors, including personal and social arrangements. A social commitment to individual liberty must be that it attaches importance to the objective of increasing the capacity that many people actually possess, and the choice between different social arrangements should be influenced by their ability to promote human capabilities. A full account of individual freedom must go beyond the capabilities related to privacy, and must pay attention to other objectives of the person, such as certain social purposes not directly related to the individual's life, increase human capacity must be a part importance of promoting individual freedom. (Ch. 1.5, p. 25)
Amartya Sen
A Theory of Justice begins with this assertion: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust .... Truth and justice are uncompromising”. How, one might ask. do we know that justice has this preeminence? Rawls’s second basic claim is that we have a particular kind of access to this preeminence: we have an “intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice” over all other considerations including welfare, efficiency, democratic choice, transparency, dignity, international competitiveness, or freedom, and, of course, over any rooted moral, philosophical, or religious conceptions. There is no account of where these intuitions came from, whether they might be in any way historically or sociologically variable, or what role they play in society.
Raymond Geuss
The ultimate merit of Rawls’s work did not lie only in his own theory, but in the extraordinarily broad discussion that it generated. Rawls’s work provided a framework for a flurry of counter-theories, such as G.A. Cohen’s in Rescuing Justice and Equality, which challenged Rawls from the left and advocated a stricter egalitarianism; and Robert Nozick’s sophisticated libertarian response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia; and Michael Walzer’s development, in Spheres of Justice, of a communitarian approach to the problem.
John Rawls
Rawls, John
Ray, Dixie Lee
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