Rawls’ Theory of Justice: Original Position, Veil of Ignorance and the Two Principles

Rawls theory of justice is the most influential account of political fairness produced in the 20th century. Published in A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls (1921–2002) — a Harvard philosopher who served in the US Army in the Pacific during the Second World War — proposed that the principles governing a just society are those rational persons would choose for themselves if they did not know which position they would occupy in that society. The thought experiment, the original position behind a veil of ignorance, generates two principles: equal basic liberties for all, and social-economic inequalities permitted only when they benefit the worst-off. For UPSC GS Paper IV, Rawls theory of justice is the structured liberal alternative to utilitarianism — a framework that protects individuals against being averaged into an aggregate.

Rawls began the book during his Princeton doctorate in the late 1940s and worked on it for over two decades. His central conviction: justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. An institution that runs efficiently but treats some people unjustly fails at its primary task and ought to be reformed even at the cost of efficiency. This is the conviction that distinguishes Rawls theory of justice from the utilitarianism he was reacting against — and from the libertarian alternatives (Nozick, Hayek) that arose to challenge him.

The Problem Rawls Tries to Solve

Rawls saw 20th-century moral philosophy as dominated by utilitarianism — the doctrine that society is just when it maximises aggregate welfare. He found this morally inadequate. Utilitarianism, he wrote, “does not take seriously the distinction between persons.” If one person’s intense suffering can in principle be outweighed by many other people’s small pleasures, individuals are not really respected — they are merely vessels of utility, fungible with one another.

Rawls wanted a theory that took persons as separate, distinct individuals seriously — each with their own life to lead, their own ends to pursue. He called his alternative justice as fairness: principles of justice are fair because they would be chosen under conditions that are themselves fair. The whole architecture of Rawls theory of justice — the original position, the veil of ignorance, the two principles — exists to spell out what those fair conditions are and what choices they generate.

The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance

The original position is Rawls’s central thought experiment. Imagine rational persons gathering to choose the basic principles for organising their society. To prevent anyone from rigging the rules in their own favour, Rawls puts the choosers behind a veil of ignorance.

Behind the veil, you do not know:

• Your social class, race, gender, caste, or religion
• Your natural talents — intelligence, strength, beauty, health
• Your conception of the good life — what you find meaningful or valuable
• Even the historical period or society you will live in

You know only general facts about human psychology, economics, and social organisation. You know there will be a society with various social positions, but not which one you will occupy.

Under these conditions of radical ignorance, Rawls argues, rational people would choose principles that protect everyone — because the principle you choose might apply to you in the worst possible social position. You would not gamble on being a winner; you would insure against being a loser. This is the maximin rule — choose the option whose worst outcome is least bad — and it underwrites Rawls’s two principles.

The veil of ignorance is a device for filtering out partiality, self-interest, and contingent advantage. It converts the question “what is fair?” into the question “what would you choose if you did not know who you would be?” — a transformation that, Rawls believed, models the moral point of view itself. The connection to deontology Kant developed is direct: Rawls saw the original position as a constructivist procedure that operationalises Kantian universalizability. Rational agents legislating from a position that strips away contingent advantage are doing, in a structured way, what Kant asked moral agents to do when they universalise maxims.

The Two Principles of Justice

From the original position, Rawls argues, rational choosers would unanimously select two principles, ranked lexically — the first taking absolute priority over the second.

Principle 1: Equal Basic Liberties

“Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.”

The basic liberties include:

• Political liberty (right to vote, to hold office)
• Freedom of speech and assembly
• Liberty of conscience and thought
• Freedom of the person (against assault, arbitrary detention)
• Right to hold personal property
• Freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure

These are equal and inviolable. No social or economic gain can justify reducing one person’s basic liberties below the level enjoyed by others. This is Rawls’s most direct rejection of utilitarianism Bentham constructed: even a massive aggregate welfare gain cannot purchase the smallest infringement of basic liberty.

Principle 2: The Difference Principle and Fair Equality of Opportunity

“Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”

Part (b), fair equality of opportunity, demands more than formal non-discrimination. It requires that people with similar talents and willingness to use them should have similar life chances regardless of the class they were born into. This justifies state action against caste discrimination, gender exclusion, regional disadvantage, and inherited privilege.

Part (a), the difference principle, is Rawls’s most distinctive contribution. Inequalities of income, wealth, and authority are permitted only when they make the worst-off social position better than it would be under any alternative arrangement. A society with vast inequality is just only if the bottom is higher than it would be under more equal arrangements (perhaps because inequality creates incentives that raise overall productivity, some of which is redistributed). A society without growth-creating inequality but with a higher floor is preferred to a richer society with a lower floor.

The difference principle institutionalises solidarity. Talented individuals do not own their talents in the libertarian sense — talents are partly a lottery of birth, a “natural asset” of society. The talented are entitled to use their talents and to enjoy unequal rewards, but only on terms that benefit those least favoured by the same lottery. This is the deepest moral move in Rawls theory of justice: a fusion of liberty (protected by Principle 1) and solidarity (operationalised by Principle 2).

Reflective Equilibrium

How do we know the two principles are correct? Rawls’s method is reflective equilibrium. We start with our considered moral judgements about clear cases (slavery is wrong, torture of innocents is wrong) and with proposed principles that might justify them. We move back and forth, adjusting principles to fit considered judgements and revising judgements that proposed principles cannot accommodate, until both sides are in coherent balance.

Reflective equilibrium is not foundationalism — there is no incorrigible bedrock — but it is not relativism either. The method is constrained by what we cannot revise without losing moral seriousness. It is the actual procedure most thoughtful people use when they reason carefully about hard cases, including UPSC ethics case studies where pre-theoretical judgements about right action are tested against principles like dignity, fairness, and welfare.

Justice as Fairness vs Utilitarianism

The contrast is sharpest on minority rights. Utilitarianism can in principle justify oppressing a minority if the majority’s gain is large enough; Rawls’s first principle forbids it absolutely. This is why Rawls theory of justice has been so influential in constitutional liberalism, including Indian fundamental-rights jurisprudence which treats certain protections as inviolable even when overriding them would serve a public-interest argument.

Amartya Sen’s Critique: The Capability Approach

The most important critique of Rawls from within the liberal tradition comes from Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In The Idea of Justice (2009) and earlier essays, Sen argues that Rawls focuses on the wrong metric. Rawls measures distributive justice in terms of primary goods — income, wealth, opportunities, rights — but two persons with identical primary goods may have very different abilities to convert them into actual flourishing. A disabled person needs more income to achieve the same mobility as an able-bodied one; a woman in a patriarchal society needs more education to achieve the same agency.

Sen proposes a capability approach: justice should be measured in terms of substantive freedoms — what people are actually able to do and be. This is a friendly amendment to Rawls, not a rejection, and has profoundly shaped Indian welfare policy, including the Human Development Index, the right to education, the right to food, and the discourse around women’s empowerment. The capability frame appears in discussions of ethics in public administration whenever the question is whether a programme has actually expanded freedoms, not merely transferred resources.

Sen also challenges Rawls’s procedural focus. Rawls asks “what ideal institutions would rational choosers select?” Sen asks “how can we move from manifest injustice toward less injustice, here, now, given the world we have?” The first is transcendental institutionalism; the second is comparative justice. Sen prefers the second because actual policy work is always comparative — choosing among feasible alternatives, not building from scratch.

Other Critiques

1. Communitarian critique (Sandel, MacIntyre). The unencumbered self behind the veil of ignorance is a philosophical fiction — real persons are constituted by their community, traditions, and roles. A theory that abstracts from these cannot guide actual moral life.

1. Libertarian critique (Nozick). Rawls treats talents as a common asset; Nozick rejected this — a person owns themselves and their talents, and forced redistribution is a form of confiscation. Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) is the classic response.

1. Feminist critique (Susan Moller Okin). Rawls placed the family in the “basic structure” of society but did not extend justice principles fully into the household. Patriarchal family arrangements escape his scrutiny in ways that undermine the rest of the theory.

1. Cultural relativism. Rawls’s two principles look suspiciously like the constitutional priorities of liberal democracies. Are they universal, or culturally local? Rawls’s later work, The Law of Peoples (1999) and Political Liberalism (1993), tried to respond by distinguishing political from comprehensive doctrines.

Rawls and the Indian Constitution

Rawls theory of justice maps remarkably well onto India’s constitutional architecture. Part III (Fundamental Rights) operationalises Principle 1 — equal basic liberties. The Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV) aim at the substantive equality Principle 2 demands. The reservation regime is a recognisable institutional response to the difference-principle requirement that inequalities be arranged to benefit the worst-off — though debates continue on whether reservations are correctly designed and adequately reviewed.

Supreme Court decisions on dignity (Puttaswamy, NALSA), substantive equality (IRA Sailo, Indra Sawhney), and access to justice (PUCL) read like applied Rawlsian reasoning. Civil servants engaging with these decisions are, knowingly or not, working within the conceptual world Rawls constructed. Connecting this to operational ethics, emotional intelligence (Goleman) gives the affective skill that Rawlsian institutional design needs from the people who run the institutions.

Rawls in UPSC Case Studies

For GS Paper IV case studies, Rawls theory of justice is the natural lens when:

• Distributive choices affect multiple groups with different starting positions.
• A policy benefits the majority but burdens an already disadvantaged minority.
• The question is what institutional arrangement (not what individual act) is just.
• You need to argue against an aggregate-welfare argument that would override minority rights.

Strong UPSC answers often invoke the veil of ignorance as a discipline of impartiality: ask yourself whether you would endorse the policy under consideration if you did not know which side of it you would land on. This question, sharply applied, dissolves much partisan reasoning and clarifies what fairness actually demands.

Frequently Asked Questions

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