The original-position setup and argument for Rawls’s two principles are the focus of this chapter. Economic inequality is inevitable because the parties accept economic inequalities that benefit all classes. The equal basic liberties can be of unequal worth to persons, under the difference principle. But the political liberties (and they alone) are guaranteed to be of “fair value,” that is, individuals equally motivated and adept are to have roughly equal political influence. Universal adult suffrage is an inadequate measure to prevent money distorting political results. The difference principle in its “general form” could endorse Mill’s plural voting scheme, and would be indifferent to substantive political inequality if, on balance, the least advantaged realized a greater worth of their basket of primary goods. Robert Nozick’s objection to Rawls’s attention to patterns of wealth distribution is taken up, and Rawls’s ambition to render unequal distributions as acceptable as a matter of “pure procedural justice” is explained. John Harsanyi and Kenneth Arrow objected to the difference principle as applied to wealth and income. Rawls’s answer depends on establishing the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties, the argument for which was made toward the end of Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice.

Rawls’s primary aim was to show that his two principles are superior to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism does not take individuals seriously, treating them as mere “container persons” in the “calculus of social interests.” Rawls emphasized that the original position was one of uncertainty, not mere risk. Harsanyi had earlier derived the utilitarian principle from an original position much like Rawls’s. The difference was that Rawls applied the maximin principle of choice under uncertainty, which picks the option having the least bad worst outcome. Harsanyi instead assumed the equiprobability of all outcomes and maximized expected utility. Rawls recognized that maximin is not a good choice strategy in general use, but argued that special features of the original position favored it over the equiprobability assumption. Chief among these are those that he argued establish the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties. In the 1999 revision of A Theory of Justice, Rawls recast the argument by appealing to two moral powers – a capacity to share a sense of justice and a capacity to choose and revise one’s life plan – and a highest-order interest in setting one’s own aims and in shaping the social world in which they must be pursued.

In the twentieth century, secular philosophers explicitly defended rule-utilitarian theories as alternatives to act-utilitarian theories that, they believed, led to implausible moral conclusions. This approach was powerfully criticized by people like David Lyons and J. J. C. Smart who thought rule-consequentialism was paradoxical because it awarded rules a weight that could not be justified on consequentialist grounds. In the mid- to late twentieth century there were philosophers who attempted to challenge the boundaries of utilitarian orthodoxy by expressly using nonconsequentialist moral premises to justify the shift to a legislative rather than situated perspective. The focus on the failure of rule-utilitarianism in terms of strict utilitarian orthodoxy has obscured the importance of hybrid theories that draw on both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist premises. A number of thinkers who are classified as rule-utilitarians (and sometimes criticized for betraying utilitarian orthodoxy) in fact expressly acknowledged nonutilitarian aspects to their theories (including R. M. Hare and John Harsanyi). The chapter ends with a summary of the main historical claims of Part I.