A person’s “natural talents,” as Rawls uses the term, are roughly the set of abilities that they were “born with” that affect their success in life. Our opportunities to succeed in life have a number of sources. The sources that are purely genetic are our natural talents. For instance, genetic dispositions to be successful at sport, to do math, to maintain good health, and soon all affect a person’s chance of success and thus are natural talents in this broad sense. Whether these dispositions are manifested depends on the social conditions someone is born into. For instance, whether someone actually becomes good at sports will depend on whether they are suitably nurtured, trained, and so on.

Rawls considers whether it is just for these natural talents to affect an individual’s success in life. The mere fact that some people are born with greater natural talents than others, Rawls claims, is neither just nor unjust. But it is unjust, Rawls argues, if social and political institutions inappropriately favor those who have greater natural talents with greater material advantages (hence referred to as just “advantages”) (TJ 87).

One reason why we cannot use differences of natural talents as a basis for assigning advantages is that, as I noted earlier, natural talents are mere genetic potentials to be successful at certain tasks, if particular social conditions obtain. How much value we are willing to place on a particular natural talent depends on the ways in which that disposition is likely to be manifested given the social conditions we live in. For instance, we care about the disposition to be good at sport because we happen to live in a society where that disposition tends to be nurtured and where there are various social structures, such as organized, commercial sports teams, which make it useful. But when we are considering questions of social justice we are deciding how to design these background conditions, so we can’t take it for granted that they are going to be as they currently are. So we can’t assign values to particular natural talents, for the purposes of assessing questions of social justice, without already assuming, unacceptably, that a particular conception of social justice will be implemented.