By fundamental economic goods (Rawls calls them something else), I mean the things that every reasonable person wants, no matter what else she wants. These include the biological necessities: clean air and water, adequate food and shelter, and health care. They also include the things that are necessary for self-determination and self-respect: some education, the means to practice a religion and perhaps have hobbies or a bit of fun. Which and how much of these things, beyond biological necessity, should count as fundamental I leave open. But obviously I am not talking about overt luxuries, such as yachts, private planes, or time-shares in the Hamptons.

Of the ways that we might distribute fundamental economic goods, the two most well-known are egalitarianism and libertarianism. According to egalitarianism, we should distribute them so as to meet everyone’s needs to an equal extent. According to libertarianism, we should not interfere (not even a little) with how a truly free market would distribute them.

I think that Rawls’s principle (the one I quote above) is more reasonable than either egalitarianism or libertarianism. It permits inequality, but only insofar as the inequality is in the interest of even the least well off. We often hear, and Rawls does not doubt, that capitalism makes us more productive than other economic systems do. Great. In that case let’s have as much economic capitalism, and therefore inequality, as we can justify to everyone, by using it to make even the least well off among us, in terms of fundamental economic goods, better off than she would be, otherwise.

In a nutshell, the main justification for Rawls’s principle is this: we would have unanimously chosen it, in the first place, if we had been completely without bias or bigotry.

Imagine us sitting down for the first time in order to debate principles of justice for a society in which we plan to live together, and imagine that we somehow manage to rid ourselves of all knowledge that might prejudice our vote: we temporarily do not know our races or ethnicities, our sexes, our health, our ages, our talents, our interests, our current wealth, our developed philosophies and religions. Yet we retain (or gain) our full rationality. Is there anything that we could unanimously agree to under these circumstances? A couple of things, Rawls thinks. One is that we should distribute fundamental economic goods so that those of us who will turn out to be least well off (which may be you and I, for all we know under these circumstances) will be better off than under any other system. We would not choose egalitarianism, since that might make us all worse off than any of us would be under an unequal system. We would not choose libertarianism because we might turn out to be unfit for free market competition, for reasons of bad health or lack of relevant talent, for instance.

Many libertarians will object that Rawls’s principle calls for redistribution, not distribution, of wealth. They will call it a Robin Hood principle, and say that it steals from the rich to give to the poor. But that begs the question (it begins by assuming that Rawls is wrong, which is the point at issue). Rawls’s principle is at the level of determining what really belongs to whom, in the first place. If we implement Rawls’s principle by having some of the money gained by winners in capitalist competition pass through their hands and, say by means of a graduated income tax, into the hands of the worst losers (or those who care for them), as determined by Rawls’s principle, then that is no more objectionable as a redistribution of wealth than when my money passes through the hands of my banker and into the pockets of people to whom I have written checks. In either case the money rightfully belongs to those who get it.

But there is no use pretending that all libertarians (or egalitarians) are stupid. Some are brilliant, like Rawls’s long-time Harvard colleague, Robert Nozick (1938 – 2002). Nozick argued forcefully that justice is about fair-play in distributive procedure, not about achieving a particular distributive outcome. I can’t take on Nozick, or any of Rawls’s other smart critics, in a blog (if at all). But I reject the libertarian picture of justice as a kind of race with deserving winners and losers (with it being fair for winners to become billionaires and losers to die for want of food, shelter, or health care), and I agree with Rawls that we could not justify such a system of distribution to every reasonable person, as we could do with Rawls’s principle, or something very like it. Real justice for a political society is not only for the sports fans in that society. It must be something that everyone in that society has a reason to care about.