Rawls' Theory Of Justice Research And Critical Thinking

On the stage of contemporary western social sciences, Rawls is no doubt a political and moral philosopher with a special thought character. Since the beginning of 70's of last century he published"A Theory of Justice", Rawls acts the leading role in Harvard and American and even the whole western politics philosophy and social ethics."A Theory of Justice"deals with the basic structure of the society, takes"the fair justice"as the purpose and advances two justice principles which are for the purpose of providing a kind of basic moral principle to guide the basic structure of society for the modern western democratic society.The core of the whole book is two justice principles: the first one is equal free principle, and the second one is the combining of fair equality of opportunity and difference principle. The two principles essential meanings are to distribute all kinds of basic right and duty equally, and to assign the benefit and burden produced by social cooperation fairly, even if there is unequal assignment it would consider the least blessed people first. This manifests a kind of egalitarianism tendency. Most of the book discusses the two justice principles. On a base of contract theory, it presupposes"original position"and"veil of ignorance"to make people choose fairly to enter into a contract without any special information of individual and society. Through verification Rawls insisted that people would choose the two justice principles under this presupposition."A Theory of Justice"has attracted great attention of many kinds of divergent western schools of thought since it was published. And it also received various veto. As a representative of Communitarianism, Sander carried on a powerful critique on"A Theory of Justice". From the environment of justice, he questioned the priority of justice. He maintained the argument that"justice has priority over good"or"justice is independent of good"is impossible to realize in the public society, because any individual in the public life cannot exist without a certain social community and individual recognition and attributes are prescribed by the society around him. In addition he contested the contract theory and maintained that in"original position"and after"veil of ignorance"people would lose the multiplicity, and choosing and entering into contact would finally become one certain cognition.To examine the thought in"A Theory of Justice", Marx's point of view is different from Rawls' firstly in methodology. Marx regards the social questions based on concrete and realistic material production activity, including justice problem. But Rawls' theory based on presupposing contract theory and abstracting human nature. In the justice of assignment, Marx saw that the root cause of assignment justice is the assignment of production means and the assignment is fair or not depends on it. So it is one-sidedness that Rawls discussed assignment apart from production. What's more, seeing from the means of social production and the profit of stage, Marx saw the unjust aspect of...