← See the axis · Distributive justice
ArgumentThe natural lottery argument
No one deserves to be born gifted, wealthy, or healthy: a just society does not let that lottery alone decide each person's fate.
Supports
Rawls · · 1971
- Where each of us starts out in life, our family, our era, our talents, our health, comes down to a lottery we did not author: no one chooses to be born gifted rather than frail, well-off rather than destitute.
- Institutions that let these unchosen advantages convert directly into income and power therefore reward what no one has earned: they enshrine luck, not effort alone. For no one is the of the gifts that fell to them.
- A rule of distribution is fair if each could consent to it without knowing in advance which place they will occupy, rich or poor, gifted or not. This impartial standpoint can be pictured as a .
- Now, in that position, no one would gamble on a society that abandons them should they fall to the bottom: one would accept inequalities only if they also improve the lot of the least advantaged.
Therefore So a just society corrects the inequalities that flow from the natural lottery and tolerates only those that also benefit the worst off: neither authoritarian leveling nor the rule of the most gifted.
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Deepenings
Why protect the worst off first
- Behind the veil, I must reason as though I could be anyone, including the most disadvantaged person in the society I am designing.
- The point, then, is not to maximize an average in which I might get lost, but to make the worst possible place the least bad: I prefer the rule whose lowest rung is the highest.
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