Review of Justice as Fairness by John Rawls

https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/issue/articles/075_0301059.pdf 

right of ownership問題

https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/issue/articles/058_000321.pdf

原則優先問題/utilitarianism問題

The research paper of group 3 was on this topic: Justice as Fairness by John Rawls. It summarized the conception and principle of justice in an understandable way and provided some of the criticism from different philosophers. However, some argument was not fully deduced and some important elements of concept of Justice were not mentioned. Although some other criticism were provided, there was no further explanation whether the criticism was reasonable or not.

First, they criticized the objectives of first and second principle were “inconsistent”. The research paper mentioned that according to the first principle, they said it “aims to secure the equality of right to all citizens”. That means the society allows people have their own freedom to pursue their own interests. However, interests can be opposite and so freedom will bring “conflict of interests”. The second principle aims at equality. The “inconsistent” is that, as they mentioned, if the government wants to develp its social and economic growth (for equality), it will override the individual basic liberty. They try to use this example to elaborate Rawls’ theory is “inconsistent”. However, they misunderstood the importance of lexical order. The first principle always goes first. If the government violates the first principle, then it obviously is not a justice and the government is not following Rawl’s theory. If it is not doing so, we cannot say there is a “inconsistent” problem within the theory. Besides, we see Group 3 is trying to explain this theory is hard to apply in reality and it is easy to cause inconsistence. Then their argument will make sense. But on the theory itself, the logic of principles is that, when first principle brings conflict of interest, then we need the second principle to solve the problem. So we can say the principles are mutually helped.

Second, Group 3 did not explain why the priority of principle exist. To our further research, John Rawls assumed that everyone are free and equal rational person in original positions. They would rationally choose primary goods and value using maximin strategy. Thus, they would choose freedom and give up some of the economic benefit. He made further explanation in economic aspect that the first principle and its higher priority is not suitable for all society in the world, but only to those economically developed society. He found that historically the law of diminishing marginal utility would occur when the society is developed with a certain economic stability. And people would pursue freedom rather than the material. The explanation of John Rawls actually is not strong enough and he further modified that rational person have their life plan and the highest-order interest to ensure they can pursue other value, so freedom should be put first in order to cultivate the highest-order interest. Although this point maybe still arguable, Group 3 should also mention the reasons behind the priority of the principle.