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Reflection On Justice And Rawls

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Reflection Paper Three: Justice and Rawls 2) Rawls’s second principle also holds that social and economic inequality can be justified only if it works to the advantage of the least advantaged members of society. Not even superior effort makes a person deserving of special rewards. After all, argues Rawls, your ability to make a good effort is partly dependent on how good your childhood was, whether your parents loved you and provided encouragement, or whether you were neglected and abandoned. These are all factors over which you had no control. Therefore, if you are now able to make a good effort, you can’t really claim credit for it. Do you agree? Is it true that you can 't really claim credit for your upbringing? Surely, your habits and temperaments today are partly a result of your upbringing. Does this mean that you don 't really deserve what you get from making an effort? “… [Some] inequality is permissible… provided that the end result is everyone in society benefits from that inequality (and not just the majority, as in utilitarianism)” (Rosenstand, 2018, p. 344). Known as the distributive justice principle, Rawls notes that allowing for inequality is moral, so long as that additional advantage may be shared amongst those least able. Unlike utilitarianism, which, “… makes the mistake of all its rights of forgetting, or at least not taking seriously, the distinction between persons” (Sandel, 2018, 3:32-3:43), Rawls offers a solution which enables people to continue to

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