Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2025
The original-position setup and argument for Rawls’s two principles are the focus of this chapter. Economic inequality is inevitable because the parties accept economic inequalities that benefit all classes. The equal basic liberties can be of unequal worth to persons, under the difference principle. But the political liberties (and they alone) are guaranteed to be of “fair value,” that is, individuals equally motivated and adept are to have roughly equal political influence. Universal adult suffrage is an inadequate measure to prevent money distorting political results. The difference principle in its “general form” could endorse Mill’s plural voting scheme, and would be indifferent to substantive political inequality if, on balance, the least advantaged realized a greater worth of their basket of primary goods. Robert Nozick’s objection to Rawls’s attention to patterns of wealth distribution is taken up, and Rawls’s ambition to render unequal distributions as acceptable as a matter of “pure procedural justice” is explained. John Harsanyi and Kenneth Arrow objected to the difference principle as applied to wealth and income. Rawls’s answer depends on establishing the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties, the argument for which was made toward the end of Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice.
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