POLITICAL SCIENCE

JUSTICE THEORY

Project Submitted Under the Supervision of

Mrs. Hemendra Prabhakar,

BM Law College

Submitted By:

Akansha Singh

BM Law College, Jodhpur

 Acknowledgement

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Dr. Raman Dave, Hon’ble

Director, and BM Law College for affording me the opportunity to undertake
this research. I take this opportunity to express my gratitude and indebtedness to
Mrs. Hemendra Prabhakar, Assistant Professor BM Law College, and teacher
for POLITICAL SCIENCE, for guiding me in the endeavour of writing this
project and also for his enlightening lectures on the subject. I would also like to
thank the College Library for the wealth of information therein. I would like to
thank the Library Staff for their co-operation.
AKANSHA SINGH

[Batch 2019-2024]
 CONTENT

1. Introduction
2. Justice
3. Features of justice
4. Types of justice
5. The principles of justice
6. John Rawls
i) Life and work
ii) Rawls’s Principles of Justice
iii) The main idea of the theory of justice
iv) Justice as Fairness: Justice within a Liberal Society
v) The basic structure of society
vi) Two Guiding Ideas of Justice as Fairness
vii) The Two Principles of Justice as Fairness
viii) Criticism of John Rawl’s theory
7. References
INTRODUCTION
Justice is the most important and most discussed objective of the State, and Society. It is the
basis of orderly human living. Justice demands the regulation of selfish actions of people for
securing a fair distribution, equal treatment of equals, and proportionate and just rewards for
all. It stands for harmony between individual interests and the interests of society.
JUSTICE
Justice is a complex concept and touches almost every aspect of human life. The word Justice
has been derived from the Latin word Jungere meaning ‘to bind or to tie together’. The word
‘Jus’ also means ‘Tie’ or ‘Bond’. In this way Justice can be defined as a system in which men
are tied or joined in a close relationship. Justice seeks to harmonise different values and to
organise upon it all human relations. As such, Justice means bonding or joining or organising
people together into a right or fair order of relationships.

Some popular definitions of Justice:

“Justice means to distribute the due share to everybody.” -Salmond

“Justice protects the rights of the individual as well as the order of society.” -Dr. Raphael

“Justice consists in a system of understandings and a procedure through which each is

accorded what is agreed upon as fair.”-C.E. Merriam

In other words, Justice means securing and protecting of rights of all in a fair way. It stands
for harmony among all the people, orderly living and securing of rights of all in a just and fair
way.

FEATURES OF JUSTICE
1. Justice is related to mutual relationships of persons living in society.

2. Justice is based on values and traditions of society.

3. Justice is related to all aspects of human behaviour in society. Laws are made and courts
are set up with this aim in view.

4. Aim of Justice is to provide equal rights, opportunities and facilities to all in a fair way.

5. The function of Justice is to harmonize individual interests with the interests of society.

6. Justices is a primary value and it is inseparably related to other values like Liberty,
Equality and Property.

7. Justice is the principle of balancing or reconciling human relations in society in such a way
as enables each one to get his due rights, towards and punishments.

8. Justice has several dimensions: Social Justice, Economic Justice, Political Justice and
Legal Justice.
TYPES OF JUSTICE 
There are four types of justice that people can seek when they have been wronged.
Distributive justice
Distributive justice, also known as economic justice, is about fairness in what people
receive, from goods to attention. Its roots are in social order and it is at the roots of
socialism, where equality is a fundamental principle.
If people do not think that they are getting their fair share of something, they will seek first
to gain what they believe they deserve. They may well also seek other forms of justice.
Procedural justice
The principle of fairness is also found in the idea of fair play (as opposed to the fair
share of distributive justice).
If people believe that a fair process was used in deciding what it to be distributed, then they
may well accept an imbalance in what they receive in comparison to others. If they see
both procedural and distributive injustice, they will likely seek restorative and/or
retributive justice.
Restorative justice
The first thing that the betrayed person may seek from the betrayer is some form of
restitution, putting things back as they should be.
The simplest form of restitution is a straightforward apology. Restoration means putting
things back as they were, so it may include some act of contrition to demonstrate one is
truly sorry. This may include action and even extra payment to the offended party.
Restorative justice is also known as corrective justice.
Retributive justice
Retributive justice works on the principle of punishment, although what constitutes fair and
proportional punishment is widely debated. While the intent may be to dissuade the
perpetrator or others from future wrong-doing, the re-offending rate of many criminals
indicates the limited success of this approach.
Punishment in practice is more about the satisfaction of victims and those who care about
them. This strays into the realm of revenge, which can be many times more severe than
reparation as the hurt party seeks to make the other person suffer in return. In such cases
'justice' is typically defined emotionally rather that with intent for fairness or prevention.

THE PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE

The three principles that our justice system seeks to reflect are: equality, fairness and access.

 Equality

Equality is defined in the dictionary as ‘the state of being equal, especially in status, rights,
or opportunities.’ When reflected in the law, this means that everyone who comes before the
courts is treated the same – regardless of sex, gender, race, religion or culture. Laws should
apply to everyone equally and not provide exceptions or discriminately affect people based
on their characteristics. Equality is distinct from fairness. Equality treats everybody the same
regardless of their circumstances. In contrast, fairness includes treating people differently
depending on their situation and characteristics. These two legal principles must therefore be
balanced against each other.

 Fairness

Fairness is defined in the dictionary as ‘impartial and just treatment or behavior without
favoritism or discrimination.’ When reflected in the law, this means that one party is not
allowed an unequal advantage over the other party. It means that severe penalties are given
for severe crimes, and lesser penalties for lesser crimes. It also means that everybody is
given an opportunity to present their case fairly and without discrimination, with strict
adherence to rules of evidence and procedure. Fairness holds that if people are treated
differently before the courts, such as receiving different sentences, it should be from the
application of laws and legal principles. Different treatment should not stem from personal
characteristics or attributes.

 Access

Access means that everyone in the legal system is able to use the resources, procedures and
institutions available throughout the legal system. For laws, this means that they are freely
known and people can access the laws themselves. Within the trial process, this means
people affected by the legal system can access help and advice related to their case and
circumstances.

JOHN RAWLS
John Rawls was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition. His theory
of justice as fairness describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and
cooperating within an egalitarian economic system. His theory of political
liberalism explores the legitimate use of political power in a democracy, and envisions how
civic unity might endure despite the diversity of worldviews that free institutions allow. His
writings on the law of peoples set out a liberal foreign policy that aims to create a
permanently peaceful and tolerant international order.
Life and Work
Rawls was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a prominent lawyer, his
mother was a chapter president of the League of Women Voters. Rawls studied at Princeton
and Cornell, where he was influenced by Wittgenstein’s student Norman Malcolm; and at
Oxford, where he worked with H. L. A. Hart, Isaiah Berlin, and Stuart Hampshire. His first
professorial appointments were at Cornell and MIT. In 1962 Rawls joined the faculty at
Harvard, where he taught for more than thirty years.
Rawls’s adult life was a scholarly one: its major events occurred within his writings. The
exceptions were two wars. As a college student, Rawls wrote an intensely religious senior
thesis (BI) and had considered studying for the priesthood. Yet Rawls lost his Christian faith
as an infantryman in World War II on seeing the capriciousness of death in combat and
learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. Then in the 1960s, Rawls spoke out against the draft
for the Vietnam war because it discriminated against black and poor Americans. The Vietnam
conflict impelled Rawls to analyze the defects in the American political system that led it to
prosecute so ruthlessly what he saw as an unjust war, and to consider how citizens could
conscientiously resist their government’s aggressive policies.
Rawls’s most discussed work is his theory of a just liberal society, called justice as fairness.
Rawls first set out justice as fairness in systematic detail in his 1971 book, A Theory of
Justice. Rawls continued to rework justice as fairness throughout his life, restating the theory
in Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999), and Justice as Fairness (2001).
Rawls’s Principles of Justice
Rawls thinks a just society will conform to rules that everyone would agree to in the original
position. Since they are deliberating behind the veil of ignorance, people don’t know their
personal circumstances, or even their view of the good life. This affects the kinds of
outcomes they will endorse: e.g., it would be irrational for deliberators to agree to a society
where only Christians have property rights since if, when the veil is ‘lifted,’ they turn out not
to be Christian, that will negatively affect their life prospects. Similarly, deliberators
presumably won’t choose a society with racist, sexist, or other unfairly discriminatory
practices, since beyond the veil, they might end up on the wrong side of these policies.[7]
This gives rise to Rawls’ first principle of justice:
all people have equal claims to as much freedom as is consistent with everyone else having
the same level of freedom.[8]
Rawls further claims that, because their ignorance includes an ignorance of probabilities,
deliberators would be extremely cautious, and apply what he calls a ‘maximin’ principle:
they will aim to ensure that the worst possible position they could end up in is as good as
possible in terms of primary goods.
If we imagine ourselves as deliberators, we might be tempted by the idea of total equality  in
primary goods. This ensures, at least, that nobody will be better off than you for arbitrary
reasons. However, some inequality might be useful: the possibility of earning more might
incentivize people to work harder, growing the economy and so increasing the total amount
of available wealth.
This isn’t a wholehearted endorsement of capitalism, as Rawls’ second principle, which
addresses social and economic inequalities, makes clear. The second principle has two parts:
First, people in the original position will tolerate inequalities only if the jobs that pay more
aren’t assigned unfairly. This gives us the ideal of fair equality of opportunity: inequalities
are allowed only if  they arise through jobs that equally talented people have equal
opportunity to get. This requires, for instance, that young people receive roughly equal
educational opportunities; otherwise, a talented individual might be held back by a lack of
basic knowledge, either about their own talents, or about the world.
Second, since their reasoning is governed by the ‘maximin’ principle, deliberators will only
tolerate inequalities that benefit the worst off:[9] since, as far as they know, they might be the
worst off, this maximizes the quality of their worst possible outcome. This is called
the difference principle.
These principles are ordered, which tells us what to do if they clash: equal liberty is most
important, then fair opportunity, and finally the difference principle. So, neither freedoms nor
opportunity are governed by the difference principle.[10]
The main idea of the theory of Justice

John Rawls in his book “The Theory of Justice” gave his views about the main idea i.e.,
“My aim is to present a conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level
of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau,
and Kant. In order to do this, we are not to think of the original contract as one to enter a
particular society or to set up a particular form of government. Rather, the guiding idea is
that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original
agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their
own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental
terms of their association. These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they
specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of government
that can be established. This way of regarding the principles of justice I shall call justice as
fairness.”

Justice as Fairness: Justice within a Liberal Society

Justice as fairness is Rawls’s theory of justice for a liberal society. As a member of the family
of liberal political conceptions of justice it provides a framework for the legitimate use of
political power. Yet legitimacy is only the minimal standard of moral acceptability; a political
order can be legitimate without being just. Justice sets the maximal standard: the arrangement
of social institutions that is morally best.
Rawls constructs justice as fairness around specific interpretations of the ideas that citizens
are free and equal, and that society should be fair. He sees it as resolving the tensions
between the ideas of freedom and equality, which have been highlighted both by the socialist
critique of liberal democracy and by the conservative critique of the modern welfare state.
Rawls also argues that justice as fairness is superior to the dominant tradition in modern
political thought: utilitarianism.
 The Basic Structure of Society
Justice as fairness aims to describe a just arrangement of the major political and social
institutions of a liberal society: the political constitution, the legal system, the economy, the
family, and so on. Rawls calls the arrangement of these institutions a society’s basic
structure. The basic structure is the location of justice because these institutions distribute the
main benefits and burdens of social life: who will receive social recognition, who will have
which basic rights, who will have opportunities to get what kind of work, what the
distribution of income and wealth will be, and so on.
In setting out justice as fairness, Rawls assumes that the liberal society in question is marked
by reasonable pluralism as described above, and also that it is under reasonably favorable
conditions: that there are enough resources for it to be possible for everyone’s basic needs to
be met. Rawls makes the simplifying assumption that the society is self-sufficient and closed,
so that citizens enter it only by birth and leave it only at death. He also confines his attention
mainly to ideal theory, putting aside non-ideal theory such as on criminal justice.
Two Guiding Ideas of Justice as Fairness
Social cooperation in some form is necessary for citizens to be able to lead decent lives. Yet
citizens are not indifferent to how the benefits and burdens of cooperation will be divided
amongst them. Rawls’s principles of justice as fairness articulate the central liberal ideas that
cooperation should be fair to all citizens regarded as free and as equals. The distinctive
interpretation that Rawls gives to these concepts can be seen as combining a negative and a
positive thesis.
Rawls’s negative thesis starts with the idea that citizens do not deserve to be born into a rich
or a poor family, to be born naturally more or less gifted than others, to be born female or
male, to be born a member of a particular racial group, and so on. Since these features of
persons are morally arbitrary in this sense, citizens are not entitled to more of the benefits of
social cooperation simply because of them. For example, the fact that a citizen was born rich,
white, and male provides no reason in itself for this citizen to be favored by social
institutions.
This negative thesis does not say how social goods should be distributed; it merely clears the
decks. Rawls’s positive distributive thesis is equality-based reciprocity. All social goods are
to be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution would be to everyone’s advantage.
The guiding idea is that since citizens are fundamentally equal, reasoning about justice should
begin from a presumption that cooperatively-produced goods should be equally divided.
Justice then requires that any inequalities must benefit all citizens, and particularly must
benefit those who will have the least. Equality sets the baseline; from there any inequalities
must improve everyone’s situation, and especially the situation of the worst-off. These strong
requirements of equality and reciprocal advantage are hallmarks of Rawls’s theory of justice.
The Two Principles of Justice as Fairness
These guiding ideas of justice as fairness are given institutional form by its two principles of
justice:
First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of
equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;
Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

a. They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair
equality of opportunity;
b. They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society
(the difference principle).
The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while
the second principle applies primarily to laws governing economic institutions. Fulfillment of
the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the
second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The
first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties:
liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person,
the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and
so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. Unequal
rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires
equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances.
Rawls’s first principle confirms widespread convictions about the importance of equal basic
rights and liberties. Two further features make this principle distinctive. First is its priority:
the basic rights and liberties must not be traded off against other social goods. The first
principle disallows, for instance, a policy that would give draft exemptions to college
students on the grounds that educated civilians will increase economic productivity. The draft
is a drastic infringement on basic liberties, and if a draft is implemented then all who are able
to serve must be equally subject to it, even if this means slower growth. Citizens’ equal
liberty must have priority over economic policy.
The second distinctive feature of Rawls’s first principle is that it requires fair value of the
political liberties. The political liberties are a subset of the basic liberties, concerned with the
right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For
these liberties, Rawls requires that citizens should be not only formally but also substantively
equal. That is, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar
opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor
they are. This requirement of the fair value of the political liberties has major implications for
how elections should be funded and run, as will be discussed below.
Rawls’s second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity,
requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same
educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor.
“In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement
for those similarly motivated and endowed”.

CRITICISM OF JOHN RAWL’S THEORY

Because there has been such extensive discussion of the Difference Principle in the last 30
years, there have been numerous criticisms of it from the perspective of all five other theories
of distributive justice. Briefly, the main criticisms are as follows.
1. Advocates of strict equality argue that inequalities permitted by the Difference Principle
are unacceptable even if they do benefit the least advantaged. The problem for these
advocates is to explain in a satisfactory way why the relative position of the least
advantaged is more important than their absolute position, and hence why society should
be prevented from materially benefiting the least advantaged when this is possible. The
most common explanation appeals to solidarity: that being materially equal is an
important expression of the equality of persons. Another common explanation appeals to
the power some may have over others, if they are better off materially. Rawls’ response to
this latter criticism appeals to the priority of his first principle: The inequalities consistent
with the Difference Principle are only permitted so long as they do not result in unequal
liberty. So, for instance, power differentials resulting from unequal income are not
permitted if they violate the first principle of equal liberty, even if they increase the
material position of the least advantaged group.
2. The Difference Principle is also criticized as a primary distributive principle on the
grounds that it mostly ignores claims that people deserve certain economic benefits in
light of their actions. Advocates of Desert-Based Principles argue that some may deserve
a higher level of material goods because of their hard work or contributions even if their
unequal rewards do not also function to improve the position of the least advantaged.
They also argue that the Difference Principle ignores the explanations of how people
 come to be in the more or less advantaged groups, when such explanations are relevant to
the fairness of these positions.
3. Some criticize it for being similar to Utilitarianism in as much as these two principles
could permit or demand inequalities and suffering in order to benefit the least well off.

REFERENCES

 http://content.victorialawfoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-
Principles-of-Justice-2020.pdf
 https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/a-theory-of-
justice/
 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc
 https://www.consiglio.regione.campania.it/cms/CM_PORTALE_CRC/servlet/
Docs?dir=docs_biblio&file=BiblioContenuto_3641.pdf
 https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/07/27/john-rawls-a-theory-of-justice/
 https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/speech/speech-on-justice-meaning-and-
types-of-justice/40361
 Book- POLITICAL SCIENCE by S.R. Myneni