Rawls says “Imagine how you would design society, if you knew that your enemy was going to assign you your place in it.”The idea is that if you had an enemy and that enemy was assigning you a place, you would want to make the worst place in society as good as possible. If you’re looking at this in a completely impartial way, not knowing where you’ll end up in society, then you would design a just society.

To put it in the simplest terms, if you’re dividing a birthday cake among some children, you don’t want someone to be choosing the slice that they’ve cut, right? So if you get one child to cut the cake, and the other child to choose which slice they get, they’re going to cut them as equally as possible.

“Imagine how you would design society, if you knew that your enemy was going to assign you your place in it.”

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1921 - 2002) which has been called the most influential book in twentieth century political philosophy. It was first published in 1971. Rawls drew on his own experience in WW2 and saw the chance in its aftermath to build a new society, one founded on personal liberty and fair equality of opportunity. While in that just society there could be inequalities, Rawls’ radical idea was that those inequalities must be to the greatest advantage not to the richest but to the worst off.WithFabienne Peter Professor of Philosophy at the University of WarwickMartin O’Neill Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of YorkAndJonathan Wolff The Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson CollegeProducer: Simon TillotsonIn Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

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Rawls' Theory of Justice (Summer Repeat)

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