Rawls writes that in selecting among alternate principles of justice we are to view the parties in the original position as permanently consigning those they represent to a particular scheme of cooperation; that is, to a basic structure for society that distributes rights and liberties, opportunities, and social and economic goods in specific ways. It is crucial, therefore, that the parties only select principles of justice that they believe actual people can fully endorse, or more precisely, principles to which agents who view society as a fair system of cooperation in which all are treated as free and equal can remain committed in thought and action over the course of an entire lifetime. Principles of justice that do not meet this criterion impose (excessive) strains of commitment on those who inhabit the society whose basic structure they specify, and therefore manifest two distinct, albeit related, defects in virtue of which they ought to be rejected. First, the selection of such principles in the original position exhibits bad faith. We ought not to endorse as standards regulating the basic structure of society principles of justice to which we are unlikely to remain true, since to do so is to display an inadequate (not to mention morally reprehensible) commitment to treating others justly. Rawls’s use of contract terminology such as “commitment” and “bad faith” to make this argument reflects a conception of the principles of justice as the object of agreement between free and equal persons, and not (merely) as the object of rational choice by agents behind the veil of ignorance aiming to maximize the position of the worst off in society, as has sometimes been thought. Second, principles of justice that impose strains of commitment fail to generate stability for the right reasons. People who grow up in a society structured by such principles will not acquire a reasoned and informed allegiance to them; rather, whatever degree of stability that society enjoys will result largely from a combination of coercion, false consciousness, and alienation.