A THEORY OF JUSTICE

John Rawls is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is the author of the well-known and
path breaking A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) and the more recent work Political Liberalism
(Columbia, 1996). These excerpts from A Theory of Justice provide a skeletal account of Rawls’s
project of using social contract theory to generate principles of justice for assigning basic rights
and duties and determining the division of social benefits in a society. Rawls argues that the two
principles that would be reached through an agreement in an original position of fairness and
equality are 1) each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty
compatible with a similar liberty for others and 2) social and economic inequalities are to be
arranged so that they are both a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage; and b)
attached to positions and offices open to all.

1. The Role of Justice

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. Each
person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole
cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by
a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are
outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the
liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to
political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to
acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable
only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human
activities, truth and justice are uncompromising. These propositions seem to express our intuitive
conviction of the primacy of justice. No doubt they are expressed too strongly. In any event I
wish to inquire whether these contentions or others similar to them are sound, and if so how they
can be accounted for. To this end it is necessary to work out a theory of justice in the light of
which these assertions can be interpreted and assessed….

2. The Subject of Justice

Many different kinds of things are said to be just and unjust: not only laws, institutions, and
social systems, but also particular actions of many kinds, including decisions, judgments, and
imputations. We also call the attitudes and dispositions of persons, and persons themselves, just
and unjust. Our topic, however, is that of social justice. For us the primary subject of justice is
the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions
distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social
cooperation. By major institutions I understand the political constitution and the principal
economic and social arrangements. Thus the legal protection of freedom of thought and liberty of
conscience, competitive markets, private property in the means of production, and the
monogamous family are examples of major social institutions. Taken together as one scheme, the
major institutions define men’s rights and duties and influence their life-prospects, what they can

expect to be and how well they can hope to do. The basic structure is the primary subject of
justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start. The intuitive notion here is
that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different positions
have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by
economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting
places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they
affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the
notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of
any society to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply. These
principles, then, regulate the choice of a political constitution and the main elements of the
economic and social system. The justice of a social scheme depends essentially on how
fundamental rights and duties are assigned and on the economic opportunities and social
conditions in the various sectors of society …

3. The Main Idea of The Theory of Justice

My aim is to present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of
abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.
In order to do this we are not to think of the original contract as one to enter a particular society
or to set up a particular form of government. Rather, the guiding idea is that the principles of
justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the
principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in
an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. These
principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social cooperation that
can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established. This way of regarding
the principles of justice I shall call justice as fairness. Thus we are to imagine that those who
engage in social cooperation choose together, in one joint act, the principles which are to assign
basic rights and duties and to determine the division of social benefits. Men are to decide in
advance how they are to regulate their claims against one another and what is to be the
foundation charter of their society. Just as each person must decide by rational reflection what
constitutes his good, that is, the system of ends which it is rational for him to pursue, so a group
of persons must decide once and for all what is to count among them as just and unjust. The
choice which rational men would make in this hypothetical situation of equal liberty, assuming
for the present that this choice problem has a solution, determines the principles of justice.

Injustice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the
traditional theory of the social contract. This original position is not, of course, thought of as an
actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as
a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice?
Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class
position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets
and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not
know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of
justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or
disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of

social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to
favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or
bargain. For given the circumstances of the original position, the symmetry of everyone’s relation
to each other, this initial situation is fair between individuals as moral persons, that is, as rational
beings with their own ends and capable, I shall assume, of a sense of justice. The original
position is, one might say, the appropriate initial status quo, and the fundamental agreements
reached in it are fair. This explains the propriety of the name “justice as fairness”: it conveys the
idea that the principles of justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair. The name does
not mean that the concepts of justice and fairness are the same, any more that the phrase “poetry
as metaphor” means that the concepts of poetry and metaphor are the same. Justice as fairness
begins, as I have said, with one of the most general of all choices which persons might make
together, namely, with the choice of the first principles of a conception of justice which is to
regulate all subsequent criticism and reform of institutions.

Then, having chosen a conception of justice, we can suppose that they are to choose a
constitution and a legislature to enact laws, and so on, all in accordance with the principles of
justice initially agreed upon. Our social situation is just if it is such that by this sequence of
hypothetical agreements we would have contracted into the general system of rules which defines
it. Moreover, assuming that the original position does determine a set of principles(that is, that a
particular conception of justice would be chosen), it will then be true that whenever social
institutions satisfy these principles those engaged in them can say to one another that they are
cooperating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose
relations with respect to one another were fair. They could all view their arrangements as meeting
the stipulations which they would acknowledge in an initial situation that embodies widely
accepted and reasonable constraints on the choice of principles. The general recognition of this
fact would provide the basis for a public acceptance of the corresponding principles of justice.
No society can, of course, be a scheme of cooperation which men enter voluntarily in a literal
sense; each person finds himself placed at birth in some particular position in some particular
society, and the nature of this position materially affects his life prospects. Yet a society
satisfying the principles of justice as fairness comes as close as a society can to being a voluntary
scheme, for it meets the principles which free and equal persons would assent to under
circumstances that are fair. In this sense its members are autonomous and the obligations they
recognize self-imposed.

One feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational and
mutually disinterested. This does not mean that the parties are egoists, that is, individuals with
only certain kinds of interests, say in wealth, prestige, and domination. But they are conceived as
not taking an interest in one another’s interests. They are to presume that even their spiritual aims
may be opposed, in the way that the aims of those of different religions maybe opposed.
Moreover, the concept of rationality must be interpreted as far as possible in the narrow sense,
standard in economic theory, of taking the most effective means to given ends. I shall modify this
concept to some extent, as explained later, but one must try to avoid introducing into it any
controversial ethical elements. The initial situation must be characterized by stipulations that are
widely accepted.

In working out the conception of justice as fairness one main task clearly is to determine which
principles of justice would be chosen in the original position. To do this we must describe this
situation in some detail and formulate with care the problem of choice which it presents. These
matters I shall take up in the immediately succeeding chapters. It may be observed, however, that
once the principles of justice are thought of as arising from an original agreement in a situation of
equality, it is an open question whether the principle of utility would be acknowledged. Offhand
it hardly seems likely that persons who view themselves as equals, entitled to press their claims
upon one another, would agree to a principle which may require lesser life prospects for some
simply for the sake of a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by others. Since each desires to protec
this interests, his capacity to advance his conception of the good, no one has a reason to
acquiesce in an enduring loss for himself in order to bring about a greater net balance of
satisfaction. In the absence of strong and lasting benevolent impulses, a rational man would not
accept a basic structure merely because it maximized the algebraic sum of advantages
irrespective of its permanent effects on his own basic rights and interests. Thus it seems that the
principle of utility is incompatible with the conception of social cooperation among equals for
mutual advantage. It appears to be inconsistent with the idea or reciprocity implicit in the notion
of a well-ordered society. Or, at any rate, so I shall argue. I shall maintain instead that the
persons in the initial situation would choose two rather different principles: the first requires
equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and
economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they
result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members
of society. These principles rule out justifying institutions on the grounds that the hardships of
some are offset by a greater good in the aggregate. It may be expedient but it is not just that some
should have less in order that others may prosper. But there is no injustice in the greater benefits
earned by a few provided that the situation of persons not so fortunate is thereby improved. The
intuitive idea is that since everyone’s well-being depends upon a scheme of cooperation without
which no one could have a satisfactory life, the division of advantages should be such as to draw
forth the willing cooperation of everyone taking part in it, including those less well situated. Yet
this can be expected only if reasonable terms are proposed. The two principles mentioned seem
to be a fair agreement on the basis of which those better endowed, or more fortunate in their
social position, neither of which we can be said to deserve, could expect the willing cooperation
of others when some workable scheme is a necessary condition of the welfare of all.

Once we decide to look for a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural
endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance as counters in quest for political and
economic advantage, we are led to these principles. They express the result of leaving aside those
aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view….

The Original Position and Justification

I have said that the original position is the appropriate initial status quo which insures that the
fundamental agreements reached in it are fair. This fact yields the name “justice as fairness.” It is
clear, then, that I want to say that one conception of justice is more reasonable than another, or
justifiable with respect to it, if rational persons in the initial situation would choose its principles
over those of the other for the role of justice. Conceptions of justice are to be ranked by their

acceptability to persons so circumstanced. Understood in this way the question of justification is
settled by working out a problem of deliberation: we have to ascertain which principles it would
be rational to adopt given the contractual situation. This connects the theory of justice with the
theory of rational choice. If this view of the problem of justification is to succeed, we must, of
course, describe in some detail the nature of this choice problem. A problem of rational decision
has a definite answer only if we know the beliefs and interests of the parties, their relations with
respect to one another, the alternatives between which they are to choose, the procedure whereby
they make up their minds, and so on. As the circumstances are presented in different ways,
correspondingly different principles are accepted.

The concept of the original position, as I shall refer to it, is that of the most philosophically
favored interpretation of this initial choice situation for the purposes of a theory of justice. But
how are we to decide what is the most favored interpretation? I assume, for one thing, that there
is abroad measure of agreement that principles of justice should be chosen under certain
conditions. To justify a particular description of the initial situation one shows that it
incorporates these commonly shared presumptions. One argues from widely accepted but weak
premises to more specific conclusions. Each of the presumptions should by itself be natural and
plausible; some of them may seem innocuous or even trivial. The aim of the contract approach is
to establish that taken together they impose significant bounds on acceptable principles of justice.
The ideal outcome would be that these conditions determine a unique set of principles; but I shall
be satisfied if they suffice to rank the main traditional conceptions of social justice. One should
not be misled, then, by the somewhat unusual conditions which characterize the original position.
The idea here is simply to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to
impose on arguments for principles of justice, and therefore on these principles themselves. Thus
it seems reasonable and generally acceptable that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged
by natural fortune or social circumstances in the choice of principles. It also seems widely agreed
that it should be impossible to tailor principles to the circumstances of one’s own case. We
should insure further that particular inclinations and aspirations, and persons’ conceptions of their
good do not affect the principles adopted. The aim is to rule out those principles that it would be
rational to propose for acceptance, however little the chance of success, only if one knew certain
things that are irrelevant from the standpoint of justice. For example, if a man knew that he was
wealthy, he might find it rational to advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures
be counted unjust; if he knew that he was poor, he would most likely propose the contrary
principle. To represent the desired restrictions one imagines a situation in which everyone is
deprived of this sort of information. One excludes the knowledge of those contingencies which
sets men at odds and allows them to be guided by their prejudices. In this manner the veil of
ignorance is arrived at in a natural way. This concept should cause no difficulty if we keep in
mind the constraints on arguments that it is meant to express. At any time we can enter the
original position, so to speak, simply by following a certain procedure, namely, by arguing for
principles of justice in accordance with these restrictions. It seems reasonable to suppose that the
parties in the original position are equal. That is, all have the same rights in the procedure for
choosing principles; each can make proposals, submit reasons for their acceptance, and so on.
Obviously the purpose of these conditions is to represent equality between human beings as
moral persons, as creatures having a conception of their good and capable of a sense of justice.
The basis of equality is taken to be similarity in these two respects. Systems of ends are not

ranked in value; and each man is presumed to have the requisite ability to understand and to act
upon whatever principles are adopted. Together with the veil of ignorance, these conditions
define the principles of justice as those which rational persons concerned to advance their
interests would consent to as equals when none are known to be advantaged or disadvantaged by
social and natural contingencies.

There is, however, another side to justifying a particular description of the original position. This
is to see if the principles which would be chosen match our considered convictions of justice or
extend them in an acceptable way. We can note whether applying these principles would lead us
to make the same judgments about the basic structure of society which we now make intuitively
and in which we have the greatest confidence; or whether, in cases where our present judgments
are in doubt and given with hesitation, these principles offer a resolution which we can affirm on
reflection. There are questions which we feel sure must be answered in a certain way. For
example, we are confident that religious intolerance and racial discrimination are unjust. We
think that we have examined these things with care and have reached what we believe is an
impartial judgment not likely to be distorted by an excessive attention to our own interests. These
convictions are provisional fixed points which we presume any conception of justice must fit.
But we have much less assurance as to what is the correct distribution of wealth and authority.
Here we may be looking for a way to remove our doubts. We can check an interpretation of the
initial situation, then, by the capacity of its principles to accommodate our firmest convictions
and to provide guidance where guidance is needed. In searching for the most favored description
of this situation we work from both ends. We begin by describing it so that it represents generally
shared and preferably weak conditions. We then see if these conditions are strong enough to yield
a significant set of principles. If not, we look for further premises equally reasonable. But if so,
and these principles match our considered convictions of justice, then so far well and good. But
presumably there will be discrepancies. In this case we have a choice. We can either modify the
account of the initial situation or we can revise our existing judgments, for even the judgements
we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes
altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and
conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial
situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our
considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective
equilibrium.

It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective
since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. At
the moment everything is in order. But this equilibrium is not necessarily stable. It is liable to be
upset by further examination of the conditions which should be imposed on the contractual
situation and by particular cases which may lead us to revise our judgments. Yet for the time
being we have done what we can to render coherent and to justify our convictions of social
justice. We have reached a conception of the original position. I shall not, of course, actually
work through this process. Still, we may think of the interpretation of the original position that I
shall present as the result of such a hypothetical course of reflection. It represents the attempt to
accommodate within one scheme both reasonable philosophical conditions on principles as well
as our considered judgments of justice. In arriving at the favored interpretation of the initial

situation there is no point at which an appeal is made to self-evidence in the traditional sense
either of general conceptions or particular convictions. I do not claim for the principles of justice
proposed that they are necessary truths or derivable from such truths. A conception of justice
cannot be deduced from self-evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its
justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting
together into one coherent view.

A final comment. We shall want to say that certain principles of justice are justified because they
would be agreed to in an initial situation of equality. I have emphasized that this original position
is purely hypothetical. It is natural to ask why, if this agreement is never actually entered into, we
should take any interest in these principles, moral or otherwise. The answer is that the conditions
embodied in the description of the original position are ones that we do in fact accept. Or if we
do not, then perhaps we can be persuaded to do so by philosophical reflection. Each aspect of the
contractual situation can be given supporting grounds. Thus what we shall do is to collect
together into one conception a number of conditions on principles that we are ready upon due
consideration to recognize as reasonable. These constraints express what we are prepared to
regard as limits on fair terms of social cooperation. One way to look at the idea or the original
position, therefore, is to see it as an expository device which sums up the meaning of these
conditions and helps us to extract their consequences. On the other hand, this conception is also
an intuitive notion that suggests its own elaboration, so that led on by it we are drawn to define
more clearly the standpoint from which we can best interpret moral relationships. We need a
conception that enables us to envision our objective from afar: the intuitive notion of the original
position is to do this for us…..

Two Principles of Justice

I shall now in a provisional form the two principles of justice that I believe would be chosen in
the original position. In this section I wish to make only the most general comments, and
therefore the first formulation of these principles is tentative. As we go on I shall run through
several formulations and approximate step by step the final statement to be given much later. I
believe that doing this allows the exposition to proceed in a natural way. The first statement of
the two principles read as follows.

First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible
with similar liberty for others.

Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)
reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and
offices open to all….

By way of general comment, these principles primarily apply, as I have said, to the basic
structure of society. They are to govern the assignment of rights and duties and to regulate the
distribution of social and economic advantages. As their formulation suggests, these principles
presuppose that the social structure can be divided into two more or less distinct parts, the first
principle applying to the one, the second to the other. They distinguish between those aspects of

the social system that define and secure the equal liberties of citizenship and those that specify
and establish social and economic inequalities. The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly
speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with
freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the
person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and
seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are all required to be equal by
the first principle, since citizens of a just society are to have the same basic rights.

The second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth
and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility, or
chains of command. While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it must be to
everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and offices of command must
be accessible to all. One applies the second principle by holding positions open, and then, subject
to this constraint, arranges social and economic inequalities so that everyone benefits.

These principles are to be arranged in a serial order with the first principle prior to the second.
This ordering means that a departure from the institutions of equal liberty required by the first
principle cannot be justified by, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages.
The distribution of wealth and income, and the hierarchies of authority, must be consistent with
both the liberties of equal citizenship and equality of opportunity.

It is clear that these principles are rather specific in their content, and their acceptance rests on
certain assumptions that I must eventually try to explain and justify. A theory of justice depends
upon a theory of society in ways that will become evident as we proceed. For the present, it
should be observed that the two principles (and this holds for all formulations)are a special case
of a more general conception of justice that can be expressed as follows.

All social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of
self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of
these values is to everyone’s advantage.

Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all. Of course, this conception
is extremely vague and requires interpretation.

As a first step, suppose that the basic structure of society distributes certain primary goods, that
is, things that every rational man is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever
a person’s rational plan of life. For simplicity, assume that the chief primary goods at the
disposition of society are rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and …