Richard Arneson (b. 1945) is an important igure in contemporary political philosophy, and a critic of Rawls’s and Rawlsian theories of justice. Arneson’s views diverge in three important ways from Rawlsian approaches.

First, Arneson rejects Rawls’s two principles in favor of a weightedmaximizing welfarist conception of political justice. In particular, Arneson is critical of the two lexical priorities found in Rawls’s principles: the lexical priority of the irst principle to the second, and the lexical priority of beneits to the worse-off in comparison to the better-off. With regard to the irst, Arneson holds that the freedoms guaranteed by the irst principle of justice (such as the freedom of speech, say) are only important to justice insofar as they allow citizens to live better lives than they otherwise would. Hence to say that such freedoms lexically dominate other concerns of justice is to grant these freedoms a level of priority that is insensitive to concerns about life quality, and is hence unjustiied. This applies, according to Arneson, also in the case of democratic freedoms, or the right of political participation (Arneson 1993). Furthermore, Arneson rejects Rawls’s difference principle. According to Arneson, the difference principle would require massive transfers from the better off to the worse off, even in cases in which the beneits to the worse-off will be comparatively small. According to Arneson, Rawls’s maximin approach is “implausibly extreme.” Instead, Arneson accepts what he deems a “broadly egalitarian” understanding of distributive justice, in which beneits to the worse-off are given some, but not lexical, priority to beneits for the better off (Arneson 2000b).