John Rawls’ Difference Principle, as set forth in Theory of Justice, attempts to bridge the opposing perspectives (of the Left and the Right) that inform socio-economic institutions in order to provide a just organisational mechanism for these institutions.[1] In this paper, I reconstruct Rawls’ Difference Principle (hereafter “DP”) to contend that DP succeeds as a creative conception of justice whose demands of a state’s institutional design tends to both the needs of efficiency, and the requirements of equality. However, its practicable power as an operational framework for policy-makers is somewhat undercut by its reliance on abstractions of economic justice to select appropriate arrangements for a society. To build this claim, I first establish Rawls’ concept of the basic structure and justice as fairness. Next, I state the two principles of justice, and briefly locate the priorities of the Left and the Right with regards to justice. Finally, I delve into the workings of DP and assess the charges levelled against it by its critics.

Rawls’ ‘Basic Structure’ and Justice as Fairness

Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness is embedded in the social: the primary institutions that frame an individual’s life chances and lifestyle such as the political edifice, the market, and the family constitute the “basic structure” of society.[2] It is these patterns of social organisation entrenched in concrete systems that confer rights and privileges onto individual actors, and enable or disable economic and political activity through the distribution of liberties, goods, and capital. Within the firmament of the basic structure, the society under examination is “closed and…isolated.”[3] In order to create a vision of what an ideal society would look like, Rawls explicates his theory under the assumption that a society’s individuals act rationally in accordance with whatever rules justice imposes on them. Social and economic justice is therefore characterised by the manner in which the basic structure of a society fosters co-operation for “mutual advantage” and reciprocity “so as to produce a greater sum of benefits and assigns to each certain recognised claims to a share in the proceeds” amongst its members.[4]

Rawls’ instantiation of reciprocity and co-operation as the cornerstones of justice emerges out of the basic premise that in a self-sustaining basic structure, each individual is equally deserving of office and opportunity, self-respect, liberty, and resources. Furthermore, justice as fairness asserts that there are collective interests involved in the project of society independent of membership to a particular group, and it is precisely the executors of the basic structure (judges, political representatives, analysts) who must articulate and authorise the realisation of these common goals of equality and growth. Consequently, the task at hand is to structure institutions that mitigate the privileges which are accidents of birth like sex, caste, or class. For instance, a man born into generational wealth should not receive more political freedom to express himself, nor should he have access to better employment. Congenital, ascribed traits of sex or race are not allocated to individuals on account of their deserving or hard work – they are “morally arbitrary,” and in a just society, should not have the power to restrict the realm of possibilities available to an individual.[5] Rawls’ two principles of justice seek to remedy any unfair benefits or potential impediments that might arise as a consequence of these inequalities.

Two Principles of Justice

Rawls’ first principle of justice states that each individual must “have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.”[6] This principle pertains to what he sees as the first dimension of the basic structure which in its broad sense, is what one might call the ‘political.’ Basic liberties refer to those usually upheld by the rule of law such as freedom of movement, speech, voting, contesting public office, private property, and freedom from assault or arbitrary detention. The second, and more contentious principle, pertains to the treatment of social and economic inequalities of the basic structure. The principle is further divided into two components: first, the Difference Principle stipulates that institutions ought to be arranged such that they provide “the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society”[7]; and second, that such social and economic arrangements are “attached to positions and offices open to all.”[8]

DP requires that while there may well be wealth disparity in society, this disparity is tenable only to the extent that the interests of the worst-off group in the basic structure are also maximised. Socioeconomic configurations and proposed policy changes are just if they result in the improvement of the least advantaged group (hereafter “LAG”), then the penultimate worst-off group, and so on. This upholds reciprocity and co-operation as integral to progress and justice, since DP precludes privileged persons from accumulating wealth at the cost of the most vulnerable groups in society. The second principle’s latter half safeguards equality of opportunity. For Rawls, equality of opportunity extends beyond a superficial prohibition of nepotistic hiring practices or blatant discrimination. It commands that the social fabric of the basic structure must be ironed out of its inequities by correcting all deficits that prevent the holistic development of the human potential. This includes, but is not limited to restrictive prejudices of class, caste or gender in the larger culture that manifest as entry barriers in some form or the other to education, mobility, self-respect, and general life aspirations.

Difference Principle and its Workings

At the outset, there are three aspects of DP germane to our discussion here: its serialised position as a principle of justice; the interconnected nature of a group’s expectations; and how DP allows for interpersonal comparison within the basic structure. First and foremost, Rawls’ principles of justice are deliberately serialised. The basic liberties of political action and existence cannot be sacrificed or impeded in the service of the second principle’s management of social and economic inequality.

Secondly, to effectively mechanise DP, it does not matter how an individual actor with liberties and wealth would choose to distribute their surpluses to the less advantaged. Rather, DP strives to produce an institutional framework that can allocate its primary goods of liberty, rights, income, and opportunities in a reliably just manner. A representative individual from the index of the groups comprising society have expectations of their opportunities and standard of living. Rawls asserts that “[e]xpectations are connected,” which is to say the perception of how the basic structure advantages or disadvantages a representative is a function of the relative treatment of other representatives under the same social conditions.[9] If one group’s expectations are enhanced through structural change or a wave of prosperity, each group’s expectations will accordingly be adjusted (either increased or decreased) because groups are inextricably chained to each other in a co-operative society whose sustenance necessitates exogamous intermingling on all fronts: political, social, and economic. Subsequently, although DP in its “lexical” iteration establishes individual, indexed groups as its stakeholders, in its application, DP’s impacts inform every group’s share of primary goods.[10]  

Third, these collective interests include profit-maximising growth as a desirable product of the basic structure. Executors of DP are incentivised to provide welfare for the LAG since their upliftment is the collective interest of everybody in the basic structure. In order to drive economic advancement, given that resources in a society are scarce, the efficiency of the instruments of a market or political system is critical in determining the magnitude of advancement said society is capable of. Rawlsian efficiency in distributing primary goods refers to a level of functioning wherein the structures of society cannot be re-ordered or amended to ameliorate one individual or group’s position without vitiating another’s. Whereas efficiency in demotic parlance is merely seen as a calculus of productivity or profit creation from the standpoint of economic agents participating in the market with a personal stake in profit, Rawls insists that efficiency must also adopt a reciprocal, egalitarian sensitivity.

Finally, and relatedly, DP “tries to establish objective grounds for inter-personal comparisons.” [11] It provides a distinct vantage point of the LAG from which assessments of just distribution can be made. Rawls concedes that some level of arbitrariness is inescapable when determining who the LAG is. However, once this position has been identified, DP requires only “ordinal judgments of well-being” that are not qualitative assessments of presumed “cardinal” outcomes for society.[12] Even in cases of efficiency-maximisation, individuals burdened by their subjective social positions would always weigh new policies from their frame of reference and what they stand to gain from particular institutional configurations. DP clears up these ambiguous and potentially self-serving biases by grounding its rationality in a simpler, objective baseline level of well-being as experienced by the LAG. Rawls’ endeavours to reconcile efficiency while mitigating inequality can be better understood with the context of what the Left and the Right prioritise in their models of justice.

The View From The Poles

The categories of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ as deployed in this paper are oversimplifications of centuries of differentiated, nuanced political theory that do not so neatly comport with dichotomous labels. Nevertheless, the rough distinction marks the two ends of the ideological spectrum Rawls is dedicated to conciliating. Additionally, the distinction pervades contemporary political discourse, and hence the Rawlsian mission to broker a justiciable middle ground continues to be germane to our present political predicament. Classical liberalism of the Right prioritises negative liberty as paramount.[13] Under this doctrine, a capitalist society is uniquely conducive to individual growth, human flourishing, and efficiency, because an individual’s gains are the consequence of their productivity and ability to generate profits in the unregulated free market. Rawls believes that in such a society “the initial distribution of assets for any period of time is strongly influenced by natural and social contingencies,” and pays heed to this deficit in DP.[14] 

The Left is much more cognisant of how natural inequalities are induced and exacerbated by social stratification in an unregulated market economy that is invariably susceptible to exploitation of the working class to maximise profits for avaricious capitalists. Collective ownership of all resources through revolution or radical redistribution are methods of attaining a perfectly just society. In this philosophy, the common good is more important than individual gain or Pareto-efficiency.

DP has been widely criticised for failing to deliver on either front – efficiency or equality. Critiques posit that DP does not supply a society with robust devices to genuinely reckon with inequality. I show that DP can be defended against the first critique through an analysis of the two separate methods in which it must be applied. However, it is also worth unpacking how DP’s edulcorating architecture that straddles these conflicting impulses is difficult to implement.

Inequality

Rawls declares that “[a]lthough in theory, the difference principle permits indefinitely large inequalities in return for small gains to the less favoured, the spread of income and wealth should not be excessive in practice, given the requisite background institutions.”[15] In and of itself, this acceptance of a vaguely-defined threshold of inequality elicits vituperative attacks on Rawls’ normative ideal of justice.[16] Invariably, since his theory is not situated in a communist utopia, social and political gradients of opportunity persist in a basic structure that allows individual choices to influence lifestyles and income. However, as he qualifies, the affliction of social and political inequality is restrained by the first principle of justice which sacralises basic liberties and the second principle’s desideratum of equal opportunity. As mentioned earlier, Rawls espouses a view of liberty more positive than his critics suggest. The ability to form and express an unadulterated political voice, enjoy the innovations of culture and technology, and uphold a life of self-respect and dignity which includes free reign to opt into any occupation is at the heart of these two extensive principles. The exact point where tenable inequality bleeds into injustice is heavily dependent on the local architectonics of the society in question.

The third frontier of inequality, economic inequality, is most convincingly confronted by DP when it is interpreted as Samuel Freeman does; he clarifies the operationalisation of DP as an egalitarian principle by bifurcating its application along two axes: narrow, and broad.[17] In its narrowest sense, DP can be seen as a maximal principle from which precise fiscal policy such as interest rates or taxation can be calculated such that they benefit the LAG. This axis is of import to smaller-scale legislative challenges about distributing justice fairly, and is the target of allegations of enabling inequality. Since these determinate policies must adhere to Rawls’ maximal formula, inequality that benefits everybody in a society, no matter how materially debilitating or socially schizophrenic, is on first glance, compliant with justice as fairness so long as no alternative arrangement could leaven the basic structure.

However, DP is not essentially a micro-economic maximal calculus whose purpose is the allocation of strictly tangible primary goods amongst a society. Instead, it is an “institutional principle” of reciprocity invested in formulating macroeconomic, top-down solutions to institutional inequalities.[18] Rawls does not take a class-reductionist position where blindly striving for economic growth is considered a panacea for the welfare of the LAG, for there are organisational and sociological frameworks whose alteration may better uplift the LAG. Along its broader axis, DP’s framework justifies structural re-organisation of economic and political apparatuses at a larger scale, and for the long run in order to remain faithful to the normative content of justice as fairness. That is to say, extending beyond decisions like apportioning direct wealth transfers to groups or assigning rates to goods and service taxes, DP mandates an institutional design compliant with optimising co-operation, the fulfilment of self-defined potentialities, and reciprocal relations for all its subjects.

Resultantly, Pareto-efficient transitions which worsen inequality while providing incremental advantages to the LAG are not compatible with DP not only because they would be in contravention with the equality of opportunity or the purveyance of basic rights, but also, and more significantly, because they actively impede the capacity for institutions to live up to the conception of justice as fairness in the long run. Alternatives such as utilitarianism submit to inequality so long as it benefits some. The classical liberal’s state rationalises inequality as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of a meritocratic, Pareto-efficient model of economic justice. Methodologically, DP differs. It compels its executors to maintain a theoretically sound understanding of how to optimise the systems of a basic structure that account for both narrow and broad stipulations of DP. Factoring in localised cultural nuances, relying on procedural knowledge about systems of authority and office, and longevity are central to realise a perfectly just Rawlsian society. As Freeman rightly points out, in accordance with DP, a “distribution affording less to the least advantaged quite often can be more just than alternatives affording more.”[19] For this reason, inequality, Pareto-efficiency, and the blindered pursuit of growth are adequately hedged by DP.

The Question of Feasibility and Salvaging Rawls’ Theoretical Ingenuity

The scission of DP’s application into narrow and broad is indispensable in the principle’s efforts to synthesise the opposing needs of immediate efficiency, and guarding against structural inequality. The faculty to inform institutional design is sanctioned by Rawls’ normative vision of a just society, and this faculty is apparently rescued from the injustice of efficiency and the indeterminateness of subjective vantage points through DP. The moving parts of DP are its primary goods, which of course includes measurable wealth and income, yet this also includes abstractions of self-respect, cultural development, and political consciousness. But these goods are not anatomically fungible in a practical sense. It is sensible to speak of redistributing wealth surpluses to the LAG, but how might a political edifice attempt to redistribute political freedom or self-respect? For instance, in 19^th century Europe, anti-Semitism infringed on the dignity and political capital of Jewish people despite their relative economic security.

Economic class and social and political capital are not perfectly correlated. Therefore, to propound a calculus for policy-makers to make more just institutions, how might one stack up self-respect against economic benefits? Rawls would say the question violates the serialised nature of the liberty principle. However, in practice, qualitative trade-offs between the realms of economic, political, and social (arbitrary as these distinctions are) are inescapable. Furthermore, the ‘extensive’ demands of the first principle of justice and the equality of opportunity that flatten out pre-existing educational, social, and attitudinal disparities of a society, cannot be easily realised in a society which has been brought to status quo because of enduring sociohistorical forces. A policy as innocuous subsided education for a backward caste is umbilically linked with financial and political variables; it falls on the executors of DP to make normative judgements about what constitutes ‘well-being,’ remaining sensitive to how groups opting into welfare schemes such as unemployment benefits are often degraded for it, and crystallising other formalist facets of justice in a pragmatically effectual way. This means that although the long-term actualisation of justice underpins Rawls’ theory, DP’s real-world apparatus of legitimising policy outcomes based on whether or not they benefit the LAG is difficult to implement without circling back to tricky, less cut-and-dry cost-benefit analyses that gave rise to the need for a simpler mechanism like DP.

The allegation of disengagement with ground reality appears particularly harmful for a theory whose thrust comes from its practicable character, in its being a calculus that can be replicated and reliably trusted where individual policy-makers may err. Therefore, more than metaphysical moral theories, DP must be held to greater standards of feasibility. Yet, there is much theoretical ingenuity that remains intact despite these troubles with operationalising DP. It is the closest approximation to what might be a formula or test for decision-making and social organisation in general. DP’s sheer creativity manages to theoretically coalesce different approaches to justice, and in these times of polarised politics and state-sponsored injustices inflicted on the most vulnerable members of society, Rawls’ pedestalisation of reciprocity and collective upliftment have never been more persuasive.

Works Cited

Rawls, John, 1921-2002 author. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts :The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Wenar, Leif. The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Wenar, Leif, “John Rawls”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/rawls/

---

[1] Rawls, Theory of Justice.

[2] Rawls, Theory of Justice, 6.

[3] Rawls, Theory of Justice, 7.

[4] Ibid, 7.

[5] Weinar, “John Rawls,” 4.   

[6] Rawls, Theory of Justice, 53

[7] Ibid, 72.  

[8] Ibid, 53.

 [9] Ibid, 56

[10] Ibid, 72

[11] Ibid, 79.

[12] Ibid, 79.

               [13] Gaus et al, Liberalism, (The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).

[14] Rawls, Theory of Justice, 62

[15] Ibid, 470.

[16] Wenar, The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, 8.  

[17] Wenar, The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy.  

[18] Rawls, Theory of Justice, 97.

[19] Wenar, The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, 19.