A Theory of Justice

By John Rawls. 1971

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.

Subfields: Philosophy

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Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment (2020, background): “Behind the veil, ‘the parties... do not know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations’ (Rawls, 1971, 137).”
Unsolved Problems in ML Safety (2021, background): “Other work could build systems to help extrapolate the end products of “reﬂective equilibrium” [149], or what objectives we would endorse by simulating a process of deliberation about competing values.”
Agnostic Federated Learning (2019, background): “This is called the maxmin principle (Rawls, 2009), a special case of the CVar fairness risk (Williamson & Menon, 2019).”
Prediction-Based Decisions and Fairness: A Catalogue of Choices, Assumptions, and Definitions (2018, background): “This assumption resembles beliefs from utilitarianism, which represents social welfare as a sum of individual utilities [108].”
On formalizing fairness in prediction with machine learning (2017, background): “In the social sciences literature, the corresponding notion was presented by Rawls (37).”
Fairness in Machine Learning: Lessons from Political Philosophy (2017, background): “…articulated various competing views, including welfare, understood in terms of pleasure or preference-satisfaction Cohen (1989); resources such as income and assets Rawls (2009); Dworkin (1981); or capabilities, understood as both the ability and resources necessary to do certain things Sen (1992).”
"Wrong side of the tracks": Big Data and Protected Categories (2014, neutral): “I need not know why group a and group b have the difference they do—only that Ic n gain predictive knowledge of their risk profiles by distinct methods.”
Occam's razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents (2017, background): “There have been many suggested philosophical avenues for finding such a reward (such as reflective equilibrium [Rawls, 1971]), but all have been underdefined and disputed.”
The Price of Fairness (2011, background): “In particular, see Young (1995) and Sen and Foster (1997) for a thorough overview of this work.”
Should unemployment benefits decrease with the unemployment spell (2000, background): “Moreover, they argue that a flat sequence satisfies the Rawls (1971) justice criterion, which requires the maximization of the welfare of the individuals in the most disadvantageous position.”
Discourse-based valuation of ecosystem services: establishing fair outcomes through group deliberation (2002, background): “Building on the insights of Rawls (1971) and Habermas (1984, 1998), the notion is that a fair outcome is one that results from a fair process.”
Fairness at the Group Level: Justice Climate and Intraunit Justice Climate (2009, background): “Philosophers have long maintained that justice is an attribute of social systems as well as a perception by individuals (cf. Nozick, 1974; Rawls, 1971).”
Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods (2002, background): “By moral, we refer to issues that pertain to fairness, justice, human welfare and virtue, encompassing within moral philosophical theory deontology [Dworkin 1978; Gewirth 1978; Kant 1785/1964; Rawls 1971], consequentialism ([Smart and Williams 1973]; see Scheffler [1982] for an analysis), and virtue”
The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction (2002, background): “The paradox can be explained by the bounded rationality of self-interested actors and the veil of ignorance (Rawls, 1971: 136–142) that obscure future outcomes of current choices.”
Climate Change as a Predictable Surprise (2006, unknown): “Philosopher John Rawls (1971) proposed that fairness should be assessed under a " veil of ignorance.”
Applying the Theory of Affective Intelligence to Support for Authoritarian Policies and Parties (2019, background): “Each mode of judgment has its advocates: those who advance the value of deliberation (Habermas, 1984; Rawls, 1971, 1997) and those who advance the value of steadfast loyalties to achieving partisan goals (Rosenblum, 2008; Shapiro, 1999).”
GROUPS AND MORALITY (2014, background): “to a conception of morality that is defined objectively by principle or shared practice (Blasi, 1990; for discussions in philosophy, see MacIntyre, 1984; Rawls, 1971).”