"A Theory of Justice" byJohn Bordley Rawls,1971

John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy.
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He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard.
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His magnum opus A Theory of Justice (1971) is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy."

His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism,takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position."

Rawls employs a number of thought experiments—including the famous veil of ignorance
—to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice.

Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's thought "helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself."
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A Theory of Justice
is a widely-read book of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls.

It was originally published in 1971 and revised in both 1975 (for the translated editions) and 1999.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social contract.

The resultant theory is known as "Justice as Fairness", from which Rawls derives his two famous principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.
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Rawls argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality.

Central to this effort is :
an account of the circumstances of justice (inspired by David Hume),
and a fair choice situation (closer in spirit to Immanuel Kant) for parties facing such circumstances.

Principles of justice are sought to guide the conduct of the parties.
These parties face moderate scarcity, and they are neither naturally altruistic nor purely egoistic: they have ends which they seek to advance, but desire to advance them through cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms.

Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation (the original position with its veil of ignorance) within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice.

Under such constraints, Rawls believes that parties would find his favored principles of justice to be especially attractive, winning out over varied alternatives, including utilitarian and libertarian accounts.
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The First Principle of Justice

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.

The basic liberties of citizens are :
roughly speaking,
political liberty (i.e., to vote and run for office),
freedom of speech and assembly,
liberty of conscience,
freedom of personal property;
and freedom from arbitrary arrest.

However, he says:
liberties not on the list,
for example, the right to own certain kinds of property (e.g. means of production) and freedom of contract as understood by the doctrine of laissez-faire are not basic; and so they are not protected by the priority of the first principle.

The first principle is more or less absolute, and may not be violated, even for the sake of the second principle, above an unspecified but low level of economic development (i.e. the first principle is, under most conditions, lexically prior to the second principle).

However, because various basic liberties may conflict, it may be necessary to trade them off against each other for the sake of obtaining the largest possible system of rights.
There is thus some uncertainty as to exactly what is mandated by the principle, and it is possible that a plurality of sets of liberties satisfy its requirements.
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The Second Principle of Justice

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that :
a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).
b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

Rawls' claim in a is that departures from equality of a list of what he calls primary goods
– 'things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants' –
are justified only to the extent that they improve the lot of those who are worst
-off under that distribution in comparison with the previous, equal, distribution.

His position is at least in some sense egalitarian, with a proviso that equality is not to be achieved by worsening the position of the least advantaged.

An important consequence here, however, is that inequalities can actually be just on Rawls's view, as long as they are to the benefit of the least well off.

His argument for this position rests heavily on the claim that morally arbitrary factors (for example, the family we're born into) shouldn't determine our life chances or opportunities.

Rawls is also keying on an intuition that we do not deserve inborn talents,
thus we are not entitled to all the benefits we could possibly receive from them, meaning that at least one of the criteria which could provide an alternative to equality in assessing the justice of distributions is eliminated.

The stipulation in b is lexically prior to that in a.

"Fair equality of opportunity"
requires not merely that offices and positions are distributed on the basis of merit, but that all have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed.

It is often thought that this stipulation,
and even the first principle of justice,
may require greater equality than the difference principle,
because large social and economic inequalities,
even when they are to the advantage of the worst-off,
will tend to seriously undermine the value of the political liberties and any measures towards fair equality of opportunity.