JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice tells us what justice requires, what a just society should look like, and how justice fits into the overall good of the members of a just society. But it does not tell us much about the politics of a just society: about the processes of public argument, political mobilization, electoral competition, organized movements, legislative decision making, or administration comprised within the politics of a modern democracy. Indeed, neither the term “democracy” nor any of its cognates has an entry in the index to A Theory of Justice. The only traditional problem of democracy that receives much sustained attention is the basis of majority rule, which is itself addressed principally in the context of a normative model of legislative decisions with an uncertain relation to actual legislative processes. This relative inattention to democracy – to politics more generally – may leave the impression that Rawls's theory of justice in some way denigrates democracy, perhaps subordinating it to a conception of justice that is defended through philosophical reasoning and is to be implemented by judges and administrators insulated from politics.

So it comes as something of a surprise when Rawls says, in the preface to the first edition of Theory of Justice, that his conception of justice as fairness “constitutes the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society.” To be sure, the idea that justice as fairness has a particularly intimate democratic connection is prominent from the 1980 Dewey Lectures forward.