Can John Rawls help Christians understand justice?

Theologians care about justice. So do philosophers. But they don’t talk to each other about it very much. Harvard professors Eric Nelson and Katrina Forrester offer pathways to bridge this gap—each in conversation with a philosopher who changed the course of political theory, John Rawls (1921–2002).

Rawls’s landmark 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, introduced a fundamentally new set of questions to political theory. Try to imagine, he suggested, building the basic framework for laws and policies behind a “veil of ignorance” about our own individual circumstances—financier or farmer, teacher or trashman, specialist in law or in laundry. Unable to seek personal advantage, we would want to know the worst that might happen to us. Would the policies we set benefit the worst-off people or just trade some people’s gains for others’ losses? Should we give up personal and political liberties for other things we want? How could our institutions reward hard work while protecting the most vulnerable?

In these imaginary circumstances, Rawls argued, we would agree on two principles of justice. First, basic liberties are inviolable, never to be traded off for other benefits. Second, inequality of wealth must be constrained in order to maximize the welfare of those who are at the bottom of the heap. Ignorant of where each of us would end up, this is what we would choose. Therefore this is what justice requires.