PHIL 4230 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Justice As Fairness
12 Apr 2016
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He was an american philosopher who taught at harvard university. Theoretical background: social contract theorists like hobbes and locke, and enlightenment philosophers like kant. Rawls calls his approach justice as fairness, which aims the principles of justice at the institutional level of society so that they organize any further social cooperation. Rawls"s conception of society is defined by fairness: social institutions are to be fair to all cooperating members of society, regardless of their race, gender, religion, class of origin, reasonable conception of the good life, and so on. Since these features of persons are in this sense morally arbitrary, citizens are not at the deepest level entitled to more or less of the benefits of social cooperation because of them. For example the fact that a citizen was born rich, white, and male provides no reason in itself for this citizen to be either favored or disfavored by social institutions.
