Key Arguments

• He recalls his initial definition: 'a well-ordered society as one designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles.'
• Justice as fairness is constructed to accord with this model: 'Now justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society. The persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chosen are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards.'
• The 'publicity condition' rules out conceptions that depend on being esoteric: 'Conceptions that might work out well enough if understood and followed by a few or even by all, so long as this fact were not widely known, are excluded by the publicity condition.'
• Justification must rest on true general beliefs about persons and society, not on external metaphysics: 'since principles are consented to in the light of true general beliefs about men and their place in society, the conception of justice adopted is acceptable on the basis of these facts. There is no necessity to invoke theological or metaphysical doctrines to support its principles, nor to imagine another world that compensates for and corrects the inequalities which the two principles permit in this one.'
• He makes this requirement explicit and exclusive: 'Conceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of our life as we know it or not at all.'

Source Quotes

At the beginning (§ 1) I characterized a well-ordered society as one designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles. Now justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society.

Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles. Now justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society. The persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chosen are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards (§23).

Now justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society. The persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chosen are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards (§23). Conceptions that might work out well enough if understood and followed by a few or even by all, so long as this fact were not widely known, are excluded by the publicity condition.

The persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chosen are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards (§23). Conceptions that might work out well enough if understood and followed by a few or even by all, so long as this fact were not widely known, are excluded by the publicity condition. We should also note that since principles are consented to in the light of true general beliefs about men and their place in society, the conception of justice adopted is acceptable on the basis of these facts.

There is no necessity to invoke theological or metaphysical doctrines to support its principles, nor to imagine another world that compensates for and corrects the inequalities which the two principles permit in this one. Conceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of our life as we know it or not at all. 251 Now a well-ordered society is also regulated by its public conception of justice.

Key Concepts

• a well-ordered society as one designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles.
• justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society.
• the persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chosen are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards (§23).
• Conceptions that might work out well enough if understood and followed by a few or even by all, so long as this fact were not widely known, are excluded by the publicity condition.
• Conceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of our life as we know it or not at all.

Context

Opening of §69, where Rawls restates and deepens his definition of a well‑ordered society and explains how justice as fairness is built to satisfy the publicity requirement and to be justified only by general facts about human life and society.