Revista (PDF) - Universidade do Minho

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Legitimacy
It is Rawls’ argument for principles of justice from an imagined
contract position that made him most famous. When does a government
have moral claim to be obeyed by citizens? Only if the social
institutions can be defended as a fair system of cooperation among
free and equal citizens with different philosophies and world views,
satisfying certain principles of distribution of social benefits. Rawls
developed the contractualist tradition in response to this answer,
drawing in particular on the work of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
and Immanuel Kant. Rawls insisted that justice should be understood
as fairness, in the sense that voluntary cooperation among
equals must offer fair terms to all. In the same way, institutions
of a fair society must secure the equal worth of all. A legitimate
society must offer all members such terms that they would have
chosen to join. Only if society is fair in this sense do we treat each
other as free and equal participants in the systems of cooperation for
mutual advantage.
«A Veil of Ignorance»
DIACRÍTICA
To bring order to our muddled thoughts and strong convictions
about distributive justice, Rawls suggested a thought experiment that
may well be referred to 300 years from now. Rawls asks us to imagine
an «Original Position», a contracting situation where parties are to
agree to criteria for a just society. But the parties do not know which
talents and world view they have, their race or gender, nor which place
they will end up in in society. They must therefore agree behind a «Veil
of Ignorance». Such a veil prevents them from taking inappropriate
considerations into account when arguing about how institutions
should affect the distribution of benefits and burdens, and which
talents should be furthered. But why should we care what would be
chosen under such weird conditions? Rawls’ answer was that the arguments
voiced in this hypothetical Original Position are those we do on
reflection accept as appropriate and fair regarding how to use state
power among us on a footing of freedom and equality. For instance,
on reflection we agree that certain talents or world views should not
in themselves justify differential treatment among people committed
to treating each other as equals.
Thus we, here and now, can argue better about principles of
distributive justice by considering the principles that would be favored