Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Books

Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler

Philip Badger critiques a Rawlsian idea of a good society.

Daniel Chandler, an economist and philosopher based at the London School of Economics, begins Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? (2023) by asking an intriguing question. How is it, he wonders, that the most influential political philosopher of the last century has had almost no practical impact on politics or policy? The philosopher in question is John Rawls, whose magnum opus was A Theory of Justice (1971).

Many readers of this magazine will be familiar with the central conceit of Rawls’ masterpiece. For those unfamiliar, it involves an audacious thought experiment in which we must imagine ourselves as being behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that separates us from any knowledge of our actual identity and associated social status. What kind of a society would we want to live in, Rawls asks, if we had no idea about which particular life we would have to live within it?

The simple answer, Rawls argues, is that we would want to live in a fair society.

…