Rawls’ theory of justice is both contractual and distributive. Examine. (2017, 20 Marks)
John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971) seeks principles for a well-ordered society that any rational person could accept. It joins two traditions usually kept apart: the social contract, asking what could be agreed, and distributive justice, asking who gets what. The contract is the method, distribution the content — and the claim holds, with qualifications.
The contractual strand
- Lineage: Rawls carries the contract of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant “to a higher level of abstraction”. Its object is not founding a state but fixing principles for the basic structure.
- Hypothetical choice: in the original position, free and equal parties behind a veil of ignorance choose among conceptions of justice, reasoning by maximin.
- Agreement as justification: principles bind because rational persons would choose them under fair conditions — chosen, not imposed, an expression of Kantian autonomy. Hence “justice as fairness”, and pure procedural justice: no criterion of the right outcome exists apart from the fair procedure.
The distributive strand
- Subject: the basic structure, which shapes life chances from birth.
- Currency: primary goods — liberties, opportunities, income and wealth, the social bases of self-respect.
- Premise: endowments are “simply natural facts”; only the way institutions handle them is just or unjust.
- Principles: equal basic liberty; fair equality of opportunity; the difference principle, favouring the least advantaged — in lexical order.
- Institutions: progressive taxation, a social minimum and, in the Restatement (2001), property-owning democracy or liberal socialism rather than welfare-state capitalism.
How the two connect
The contract settles the process, the principles the output. The link also runs back: once the basic structure is just, Rawls treats resulting shares as pure procedural justice (§14). The contract selects the rules; the rules, not a planner, generate the distribution.
Examining the claim
Is it genuinely contractual?
- Ronald Dworkin (1973): “A hypothetical contract … is no contract at all.” Its force comes from a prior right to equal concern and respect.
- Identical parties do not bargain. Michael Sandel reads the “agreement” as one chooser’s discovery, and the chooser as an unencumbered self; communitarians deny that persons abstracted from community can settle anything binding on real ones.
Is the distribution procedural, or patterned?
- Robert Nozick (1974): the principles are end-state and patterned, treating goods as manna from heaven and ignoring historical entitlement.
- G. A. Cohen: confining justice to the basic structure leaves incentive-seeking behaviour, which shapes actual shares, untouched.
Are process and outcome the right ones?
- Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) faults both. The contract seeks a perfectly just arrangement among idealised parties; justice should compare realisable states of real people, and primary goods ignore unequal conversion into capabilities.
Does the contract travel? The Law of Peoples (1999) repeats the contract among peoples but not the distribution: a duty of assistance replaces the global difference principle that Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge think his premises require.
Indian anchor
India’s Constitution is an actual compact — “We, the People … give to ourselves” — with a distributive programme in Articles 38 and 39(b)–(c). In Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (2024) the majority of a nine-judge bench held that not every private resource is a “material resource of the community”, refusing to tie the clause to one economic ideology: the mandate stays, its content left to democratic choice.
Conclusion
The theory is contractual in justification and distributive in substance, and its originality lies in deriving the second from the first. But the contract is thinner than the word suggests — a single impartial choice — and the distribution more procedural than Nozick allows. Sen’s challenge is the deepest: a flawless procedure does not guarantee just lives.