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I am very attracted to the theory Rawls has put forth in A Theory of Justice. I feel that he gives a good explanation of how principles of justice can to be arrived at in order to have a fair and just society. However, I do not think that Rawls’s way of doing this is the only way. In many ways, it seems that utilitarianism can be used to justify the same principles that Rawls is advocating. Specifically, it seems that his notion of the veil of ignorance is just a tool used to decide principles in an essentially utilitarian manner. So, for the purpose of this paper, I will note the similarities between Rawls’s notion of the veil of ignorance and utilitarianism, and I will argue that by using this concept, Rawls is really advocating a kind of utilitarian reasoning.

Three interlocking features appear to underpin Rawls’s justification of political compliance within the context of political liberalism: namely, a specific territory; a specific society; and a specific conception of what it is to be reasonable. When any one feature is subject to critical examination, while presupposing that the other two are acceptable, Rawls’s argument for political compliance may seem persuasive. But when all three features are critically examined together, his justification of political compliance within political liberalism can be seen to lack cogency. Thus, political compliance fails to be justified by a free-standing political liberalism. Key Words: philosophical anarchism • political duties • political liberalism • political obligation • Rawls.

As Rawls's thought evolved from his 1958 article ‘Justice as Fairness’ to the 1996 edition of his book Political Liberalism, his response to the problem of political compliance would seem to have undergone a number of changes. This article critically evaluates the development of Rawls's various explicit or implied arguments that serve to justify compliance to just social arrangements, and concludes that the problem of political compliance remains without any cogent solution within the vast corpus of Rawls's work. Key Words: liberalism • philosophical anarchism • political duties • political obligation • Rawls.

Rawls’ theory of justice builds on the social contract tradition to offer an alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls singles out justice – not maximum welfare or efficiency – as “the first virtue of social institutions”. Economists were quick to realize the relevance of Rawls’ theory of justice for economics. Early contributions in welfare economics and social choice theory typically attempted to incorporate Rawls’ ideas into a welfarist framework. Current research in normative economics comes closer to Rawls’ original proposal of a non-consequentialist theory of justice. In my article, I shall first introduce Rawls’ theory of justice and then address some of the debates his theory has triggered in normative economics.

In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, the burden of which was strongly egalitarian. But Rawls eventually came to the conclusion that the project of working out a stable, well?ordered society as argued in A Theory of Justice had failed. In 1993, in Political Liberalism, Rawls sought to establish a sounder theoretical foundation for a stable, well?ordered society. Rawls was widely viewed, however, as having given up egalitarianism in Political Liberalism ? the commitment to a fair distribution, or ?justice as fairness?, along lines originally developed in A Theory of Justice. I argue, by contrast, that Political Liberalism does not in fact repudiate the egalitarianism of A Theory of Justice. Political liberalism has many variants, including variant conceptions of justice. In the first part of what follows, the question is raised whether political liberalism can defend a conception of justice that is as egalitarian as ?justice as fairness?. Such a conception would guarantee the fair value of political liberties and would also contain the so?called ?difference principal?, which states that social and economic inequalities are to be adjusted so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Although it seems possible to defend such an egalitarian conception of justice, it does not seem necessary, all the same, that all variants of political liberalism should be as egalitarian as justice as fairness. Thus, in the second part of my argument, I seek to overturn, or at least substantially to qualify, the idea that there is no need for political liberalism to be strongly egalitarian. I conclude that the egalitarian credentials of political liberalism have to be bolstered, even more so than Rawls himself seems to think.

A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls, is widely regarded as the most important twentieth-century work of Anglo-American political philosophy. It transformed the field by offering a compelling alternative to the dominant utilitarian conception of social justice. The argument for this alternative is, however, complicated and often confusing. In this book Jon Mandle carefully reconstructs Rawls's argument, showing that the most common interpretations of it are often mistaken. For example, Rawls does not endorse welfare-state capitalism, and he is not a 'luck egalitarian' as is widely believed. Mandle also explores the relationship between A Theory of Justice and the developments in Rawls's later work, Political Liberalism, as well as discussing some of the most influential criticisms in the secondary literature. His book will be an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to engage with this ground-breaking philosophical work.

We use the term “justice” in many different ways. In this essay, I consider justice only as it used in Anglo-American political and legal theory. In this realm of discourse, all forms of justice consist of non-utilitarian allocative principles, i.e., principles governing, to put it as broadly as possible, who gets how much of what. Some may wish to treat utilitarian principles as principles of justice. As a matter of nomenclatural pedantry, this is surely reasonable. But, perhaps as a consequence of John Rawls’ arguments in Theory of Justice,2 or perhaps as a result of Aristotle’s classifications of two forms of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics,3 or perhaps as a result of John Stuart Mill’s appreciation of the need for reconciling utilitarianism with justice,4 we generally think of justice as consisting of principles that are sensitive to factors shielded from any stable form of utilitarianism. Furthermore, thanks to Rawls, we generally think of distributive justice as being primarily applicable to political and social institutions and not to individual actors (this, though, has been challenged by those who would still recognize a sharp distinction between utilitarianism and justice5). Regardless of whether this distinction between justice and utilitarian principles is sustainable in the long term, I shall presume it, if only to make clear what is at stake if we are to treat utilitarianism as just one form of justice.

Each volume of this series of companions to major philosophers contains specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars and will serve as a reference work for students and nonspecialists. John Rawls is the most significant and influential philosopher and moral philosopher of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly shaped contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice in philosophy, law, political science, economics and other social disciplines. In this exciting collection of new essays, many of the world's leading political and moral theorists discuss the full range of Rawls's contribution to the concepts of political and economic justice, democracy, liberalism, constitutionalism, and international justice. There are also assessments of Rawls's controversial relationships with feminism, utilitarianism and communitarianism. New readers will find this the most accessible guide to Rawls currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Rawls.

The utlitiarian economist and Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi and the liberal egalitarian philosopher John Rawls were two of the most eminent scholars writing on problems of social justice in the last century. The contributions to this volume, addressed to an interdisciplinary audience, pay tribute to them by investigating themes that figure prominently in their work. In some cases, the contributors explore issues considered by Harsanyi and Rawls in more depth and from novel perspectives. In others, the contributors use the work of Harsanyi and Rawls as points of departure for pursuing the construction of new theories for the evaluation of social justice.

John Rawls's claim to have demonstrated the superiority of his own two principles of justice to the principle of utility has generated fairly extensive critical discussion. However, this discussion has almost completely disregarded those of Rawls's arguments that are concerned with practicability, despite the significance accorded to them by Rawls himself. This article addresses the three most important of Rawls's objections against the practicability of utilitarianism: (1) that utilitarianism would generate too much disagreement to be politically workable, (2) that a utilitarian society would be vulnerable to social instability, and (3) that publicly adopting the principle of utility as the ultimate criterion of right and wrong would undermine the self-respect of some citizens. It is argued that Rawls's objections are either exaggerated or mistaken, and that this may have an impact on the assessment of `justice as fairness' as well as the utilitarian doctrine. Key Words: justice as fairness • feasibility • disagreement • stability • self-respect.