Summary Of John Rawls's Liberal Contractarianism

As students in this course we were exposed to Peter Wenzs’ thoughts on many political and moral theories. These theories provided us with different ideas on how to best run a society both morally and effectively. The problem some of these theories come across is that while they sound very appealing, they can prove to be dysfunctional when actually applied. Wenz provides the readers with comparisons between the different theories so the reader can form their own opinion. I believe that Rawls’s liberal contractarianism is the theory which allows the greatest benefit to society with the least amount of flaws.

John Rawls’ view was culmination of concepts, assumptions and history of the social contract tradition. This tradition is founded on the …show more content…
Rawls believes, “Imagination is the key”. This I find is the most interesting part of his theory because it causes a person to re-evaluate their current system and think of possible improvements. Rawls wants everyone to view the world under a veil of ignorance in order to create a more just society. In this veil of ignorance, no one would have any information regarding the individual. The only things a person knows under the veil of ignorance is that they are there to decide the principles of justice should govern their state and basic concepts of politics and human nature. This original position is where Rawls would like a person to imagine themselves in. Since they know nothing about the individual they are, they cannot have any prejudice against another. This is important because it gets rid of the self-interest conflict of a state contract. No person in the original position is going to approve of laws that allow one party to take advantage of another party because they might be the one that gets taken advantage of. This forces the observers to really think about the society they would want to be born into. A society that has great schools that provide great education, great hospitals that are all equal, access to housing, an open political system, and so on would be the goal of the average person. This is not what society is actually like though. This veil of ignorance allows a …show more content…
He answers this question with his two principles of justice, which allows the rich only to get richer if it benefits the poor. This allows for a just society when people are put behind a veil of ignorance. John Rawls though experiment really made the individual look at what they would like in society for everyone if they could be everyone. From looking at main concepts of Rawls’s theory I can very firmly state that this was the most interesting theory to me as it addressed what I think is the most important issue of our time. I find that my only issue is the distinction of different inequalities. Rawl’s theory allows the greatest benefit to society by striving for justice and trying help the worse off to bring all of society