Rawls included the family, understood as the primary venue for the rearing and educating of future citizens, as an essential part of society’s basic structure. Ideally, the family serves as what John Stuart Mill called the first school of social justice by raising children through affection, example, and guidance to develop the cooperative virtues and sentiments upon which the just society depends (TJ §70). These include the desires to interact with their fellow citizens on fair terms, and also to participate as fully cooperating members of society. Children’s education should further include practical measures to prepare them to become self-supporting, and knowledge of their equal constitutional and civic rights (PL 199), although these sorts of education may be provided outside the home by schools. It is the family’s role in the formation of future citizens that justiies its inclusion among the institutions of the basic structure. In Rawls’s words in “Public Reason Revisited,” “the family is part of the basic structure, since one of its main roles is to be the basis of orderly production and reproduction of society and its culture from one generation to the next” (CP 595).

Rawls speciies a society’s basic structure as the system of interaction among the main political, economic, and social institutions – how they operate together to form the background conditions against which associational and personal ends are pursued. Rawls’s principles of justice apply directly to this system, but only indirectly to the basic structure’s component institutions. So although the basic structure must satisfy the difference principle, requiring that inequalities work to the greatest advantage of the least well off, it is neither required nor appropriate for judges to apply the difference principle in deciding cases between litigants.