Name: Justice as Fairness
ISBN: 9780674005112

Justice as Fairness

This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s. In time the lectures became a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise Political Liberalism (1993). Rawls offers a broad overview of his main lines of thought and also explores specific issues never before addressed in any of his writings. He is well aware that since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, American society has moved farther away from the idea of justice as fairness. Yet his ideas retain their power and relevance to debates in a pluralistic society about the meaning and theoretical viability of liberalism. This book demonstrates that moral clarity can be achieved even when a collective commitment to justice is uncertain

What Hacker News says

ineedasernameJun 2020

I'm not sure how you read my comment as not wanting fair compensation. But there is a difference between fair compensation and everyone paid the same. Equal access to opportunities doesn't mean everyone makes 400k, it would mean everyone starts with the same opportunities to get there, and their choices determine where they go. That said, we're not an egalitarian society. We may aspire to it, we may be closer to it than we were 200 years ago, but we're not there yet.

In anycase, perfect egalitarianism is probably not possible. But for an excellent work on the subject, see John Rawls' work Justice as Fairness. As political philosophical texts go, it's fairly accessible to outsiders to the field, and it is comprehensive on the topic.

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ineedasernameApr 2019

There's a great book on pretty much this topic in political philosophy, called Justice as Fairness by John Rawls. [0]

In the vein of this conversation, he does not argue against inequality, and breaks out of the capitalism/communist spectrum. Instead he proposed the strictures under which inequality should be allowed to persist in what he calls the Difference Principle:

Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness:_A_Restate...

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bobwaycottAug 2014

If you still have a copy of A Theory of Justice, definitely pick it back up. If you'd like to work through his later-life work, then you'll want to grab Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, in which he revisits his original ideas, and brings together a full account of justice as fairness as he later understood it. Definitely recommend digging back into him.

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bmahmoodAug 2011

Majority of the comments seem to be discussing the merits / morality of taxation, rather than Buffet's central points.

Entertaining the discussion on the merits of taxation, I've found John Rawls' Justice as Fairness to be especially enlightening. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness) Essentially, a just society is one in which decisions are made to benefit the worst-off in society. Given a majority of the factors that contribute to individual success are outside our control (what family you were born into, what neighborhood you lived in, what school you went to, etc), a just society would in turn be one which compensates for such naturally-occurring inequalities. He provides a well-thought out argument for how progressive taxation is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) lever to do so.

Now in practice, it is true that our government has been terribly inefficient in managing tax revenue and creating public goods. But that shouldn't discount the role government can play. Realizing the potential reach and role of government, the goal shouldn't be to neuter it, but to make it more efficient.

On Buffet's central points, I find them hard to argue with. 1) Lower taxes on the rich in the last 10 years have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic growth or job creation, especially in light of the 20 years before that. 2) The front-end drivers for entrepreneurs, VCs, and angels have more to do with product creation, addressing a market need, and simply playing the game. Money is of course a big part in too, but tax cuts only play a back-end behavioral incentive- they affect the NPV of behavior that was already in play. 3) Just because the actual tax revenue on the rich may not put a huge dent on the deficit (as some comments seem to imply), the point is that the billions in tax revenue it would raise could still stave of cuts to programs that the poor and middle class depend on.

(And larger food for thought on the role of tax cuts, and how they've contributed to the deficit http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/the-char...)

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jwardenNov 2022

I am reading Rawls’ followup book, “Justice as Fairness”, which he describes as a kind of restatement or correction to Theory of Justice. I am not sure if it would have been better to read the original first.

The idea of the Veil of Ignorance for deriving fundamental principles of justice is now one of the most fundamental ideas in my own moral philosophy.

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da_big_gheyAug 2021

Rawls have a core problem that his "veil" theory, though it is good, is making an idea of "justice" more "fairness" than anything else. There exist principles I would advocate from behind these veil that would be in most likelihood disfavorable against me. Indeed, Rawls write his principles as "Justice as Fairness" for a reason.

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