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know that we will want to pursue our ends and be treated with respect. In case we turn out to be a member of an ethnic or religious minority, we don’t want to be oppressed, even if this gives pleasure to the majority. Once the veil of ignorance rises and real life begins, we don’t want to find ourselves as victims of religious persecution or racial discrimination. In order to protect against these dangers, we would reject utilitarianism and agree to a principle of equal basic liberties for all citizens, including the right to liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. And we would insist that this principle take priority over attempts to maximize the general welfare. We would not sacrifice our fundamental rights and liberties for social and economic benefits.

What principle would we choose to govern social and economic inequalities? To guard against the risk of finding ourselves in crushing poverty, we might at first thought favor an equal distribution of income and wealth. But then it would occur to us that we could do better, even for those on the bottom. Suppose that by permitting certain inequalities, such as higher pay for doctors than for bus drivers, we could improve the situation of those who have the least—by increasing access to health care for the poor. Allowing for this possibility, we would adopt what Rawls calls “the difference principle”: only those social and economic inequalities are permitted that work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

Exactly how egalitarian is the difference principle? It’s hard to say, because the effect of pay differences depends on social and economic circumstances. Suppose higher pay for doctors led to more and better medical care in impoverished rural areas. In that case, the wage difference could be consistent with Rawls’s principle. But suppose paying doctors more had no impact on health services in Appalachia, and simply produced more cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills. In that case, the wage difference would be hard to justify from Rawls’s point of view.

What about the big earnings of Michael Jordan or the vast fortune of Bill Gates? Could these inequalities be consistent with the difference principle? Of course, Rawls’s theory is not meant to assess the fairness of this or that person’s salary; it is concerned with the basic structure of society, and the way it allocates rights and duties, income and wealth, power and opportunities. For Rawls, the question to ask is whether Gates’s wealth arose as part of a system that, taken as a whole, works to the benefit of the least well off. For example, was it subject to a progressive tax system that taxed the rich to provide for the health, education, and welfare of the poor? If so, and if this system made the poor better off than they would have been under a more strictly equal arrangement, then such inequalities could be consistent with the difference principle.

Some people question whether the parties to the original position would choose the difference principle. How does Rawls know that, behind the veil of ignorance, people wouldn’t be gamblers, willing to take their chances on a highly unequal society in hopes of landing on top? Maybe some would even opt for a feudal society, willing to risk being a landless serf in the hopes of being a king.

Rawls doesn’t believe that people choosing principles to govern their fundamental life prospects would take such chances. Unless they knew themselves to be lovers of risk (a quality blocked from view by the veil of ignorance), people would not make risky bets at high stakes. But Rawls’s case for the difference principle doesn’t rest entirely on the assumption that people in the original position would be risk averse. Underlying the device of the veil of ignorance is a moral argument that can be presented independent of the thought experiment. Its main idea is that the distribution of income and opportunity should not be based on factors that are arbitrary from a moral point of view.

The Argument from Moral Arbitrariness

Rawls presents this argument by comparing