ABSTRACT
John Rawls is generally regarded as the most significant and influential political philosopher of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. He is commended for subverting the pervasive influence of utilitarianism, the dominant mode of theorizing in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. More constructively, Rawls is acknowledged for revising the traditional social contract doctrine in political philosophy and innovatively reviving it to advocate and to justify an alternative systematic account of justice that would successfully counteract utilitarianism. In the monumental classic A Theory of Justice [TJ] (1971),1 Rawls first outlined the basic tenets of his ‘justice as fairness’ theory. Here he is chiefly concerned with principles by which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties, and determine fair divisions of advantages issuing from social cooperation. This implies that Rawls’s justice as fairness theory is primarily intended to apply to what he calls the ‘basic structure’ of society, the way that major institutions such as the political systems, legal structures, competitive markets and the family interact with each other in order to determine people’s life prospects. Later, in another seminal work Political Liberalism [PL] (1993), Rawls, without making major alterations to the original theory, refines it as a ‘political conception’ of a liberal constitutional democracy regulated by reasonable pluralism and public reason. In TJ, Rawls advances justice as fairness in refutation of utilitarianism, perfectionism or other general conceptions; he portrays it as a universal moral ideal to be aimed at by all societies. In PL, he is no longer anxious to defeat utilitarians
or any other moral theorists; he is directly concerned about the culture of a liberal constitutional democracy.
