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The principle is part of justice that established distributive justice.Rawls awards the fair equality of opportunity principle lexical priority over the difference principle: Society cannot adjust inequality to maximize the proportion of those who are most vulnerable without providing positions and the opportunities that are necessary for the worse-off to achieve them.
A Theory of Justice is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society).
In its broadest sense, justice is the idea that individuals should be treated fairly. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the Institutes of Justinian, a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as "the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due".
In Anglo-American academic political philosophy, the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971 is considered a milestone. Rawls used a thought experiment, the original position, in which representative parties choose principles of justice for the basic structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance. Rawls also offered a ...
The second principle, the difference principle, addresses how the arrangement of social and economic inequalities, and thus the just distribution should look. Firstly, Rawls argues that such distribution should be based on a reasonable expectation of advantage for all, but also to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged in society.
Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) includes a thought experiment he called the "original position." The intuition motivating its employment is this: the enterprise of political philosophy will be greatly benefited by a specification of the correct standpoint a person should take in their thinking about justice.
Rawls arranged the fundamental principles of the Original Position in lexical priority: the liberty principle, fair equality of opportunity and lastly the difference principle. This prioritisation encounters criticism, as the importance of the first principle is awarded greater weighting and must be satisfied prior to subsequent principles.
The finding that a much less demanding distributive principle of justice is agreed upon in a (simulated) original position than Rawls's specification of the "difference principle", implies that the (rational) resistance to a cosmopolitan application of justice as fairness could be less forceful than its critics imagine. [18]