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Rawls's theory of justice as fairness uses the original position (hypothetical state where people choose principles behind a veil of ignorance) to derive justice principles: equal basic liberties and the difference principle (inequalities permissible only if they benefit the least advantaged). This provides a modern social contract justifying liberal democracy.
Apply the original position to specific distributive questions. Compare Rawls's conclusions to utilitarian and libertarian alternatives.
You know the mechanics of the original position and the veil of ignorance from your prerequisites. This topic builds on that to ask: what do those procedures actually tell us about justice, and how does the resulting theory compare to rivals? The original position is Rawls's answer to a fundamental question: how can principles of justice be fair to everyone rather than biased toward whoever has power? By designing the situation so that no one knows their place in the resulting society — their class, talents, race, conception of the good — he strips away all the factors that normally bias our judgments about fairness.
Behind the veil, rational choosers cannot gamble on getting lucky — they might end up at the bottom. Rawls argues this uncertainty leads rational people to choose two principles, in strict priority order. The first principle is lexically prior: equal basic liberties for all (free speech, conscience, association, political participation) cannot be traded away for economic gains. The second principle governs social and economic inequalities: they must be attached to positions open to fair equality of opportunity, *and* they must benefit the least advantaged members of society — the difference principle.
The difference principle rewards you well. You might expect that rational self-interested people behind the veil would choose strict equality — safer than risking being worst-off. Rawls's argument is more subtle: if economic inequalities genuinely raise the floor (by creating incentives that grow the economy and improve even the worst position), then rational choosers should prefer that arrangement to strict equality that leaves everyone lower. The key word is *genuinely*: inequality is only justified when it makes the worst-off better off than they would be under equality. CEO pay is justified only insofar as the productive incentives it creates flow down to the least advantaged — a bar most real-world inequalities fail.
Contrast this with utilitarianism, which your prerequisites likely touched on: utilitarianism permits sacrificing the few for aggregate welfare. Rawls explicitly rejects this — the lexical priority of equal liberties means they cannot be traded even for great social gains. Contrast also with libertarianism (Nozick's view): Nozick holds that any distribution arising from free voluntary transactions is just, regardless of its effect on the worst-off. Rawls counters that fair distributive principles must be chosen from a position where no one can exploit advantages they did not earn. The original position is not a historical state of nature — it is a thought experiment designed to achieve impartiality, and its product is a theory of justice that takes seriously both liberty and the claims of those at society's bottom.
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