Back to: Philosophy: Justice & Ethics
Social contract theory, from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, grounds morality and political authority in agreement: the rules that bind us are the ones free, rational people would consent to for mutual benefit. It’s the idea behind ‘government by consent of the governed,’ and behind the everyday intuition that fairness means rules nobody was forced into.
John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), gave the contract tradition its most famous modern engine: the veil of ignorance. Imagine choosing your society’s basic rules without knowing who you’ll be in it: rich or poor, healthy or ill, which race, gender, or talents. Whatever principles you’d choose from behind that veil are, Rawls argues, fair by construction, since self-interest can’t bias them. He predicted people would choose equal basic liberties for all, plus his ‘difference principle’: inequalities are acceptable only if they work to the benefit of the least advantaged.
You don’t need to accept Rawls’s specific conclusions to use his tool constantly. Designing anything with rules and stakes, a company policy, a chore split, a group project, an estate plan? Ask: would I endorse this arrangement if I didn’t know which position I’d occupy in it? It is the adult, general-purpose version of ‘one cuts, the other chooses,’ and it exposes self-serving design faster than almost any other test.