Rawls and Non-rational Beneficiaries

What is a just society? How to distribute limited resources, opportunities, access, guarantees, and so forth, to members of a community who are of vastly different natural and acquired capacities? Perhaps the most promising approach to an answer is that suggested by John Rawls. Rawls’ famous thoughtexperiment, in A Theory of Justice – the invitation to take up the perspective of “the original position” and to pick some basic principles on which to base a just society -has the simplicity of genius. The particular constraint of having to make this choice from behind the “veil of ignorance,” and thus not know who one will be in the imagined society, will be long remembered as a key contribution of 20 century philosophy. Rawls simply asks us to pick (the rules for) a socio-political system – in a context materially and psychologically like our current world -while stripped of personal favoritisms? Not knowing one’s role in the imagined community to be organized around the chosen rules induces one to take the broad and impartial view. It induces one to consider how the basic rules would affect everyone in it.