Comparison Of Marx And Rawls’s Justice Theory

The word "justice" has been used for a long time, which was used by Aristotle inpeople’s behavior. Among modern western thinkers, the concept of "justice" is moreand more specially used for the evaluation of the social system as a kind of moralstandards, and regarded as the first virtue of social system. The theory of justice isneeded by any complete moral and social theory system, which could provide us withlegitimate political authority and moral foundation of obligations. In this paper, webriefly summarized the main points of Marx and the Rawls’ theory of justice. Marx’sconcept of justice is to overthrow the existing social system as a precondition which isalso revolutionary. In his point of view, people are divided by class, the relationshipbetween workers and capitalists is class-consciousness and exploitative. Theirrationality of the capitalist system is caused by the contradiction betweenproductivity and productive relation. Rawls proved his theory of justice by assumingthe "original position".The theory assumes that any rational person who had a freeand rational choice will spontaneously choose his two principles of justice to build thebasic structure of society in this environment which makes Rawls’ concept of justicehas been proved. In accordance with Marx’s idea, the existing capitalist system shouldbe overthrow to establish a communist society where no class differences existed.Rawls did not require to changing the existing social system and eliminating theprivate ownership. It is possible to build a just society to limit conflicts betweenpeople with the reasonable principles of justice to adjust the legal and economicsystems. Although there are great differences among their theory of justice, but theyare deeply sympathetic to the bottom of the society as the starting point to discussequal, and at the same time to criticize the injustice. As the fast development of themodernization of society, the problem of justice drain is becoming more and moreserious. If the problem of social justice could not be correctly dealt with and solved,the process of social development will be affected and finally leading to socially regressive. In this paper, we compared Marx with Rawls’ theory of justice in relatedwith the reality of Chinese society. Moreover, some Rawls’ theory of justice isadopted to remedy the defection of the Marx’s view of justice to search a practicalview of justice.