Imagine that you have been asked to design a new society.
You can decide its laws, political institutions, economic arrangements and basic rights.
There is just one condition.
You do not know who you will be when you enter it.
You might be rich or poor.
Healthy or disabled.
Highly talented in abilities the society rewards, or talented in things it does not.
You do not know your sex, ethnicity, religion or family background.
You do not even know what ambitions you will have.
What kind of society would you create?
Would you allow enormous inequalities if everyone had the opportunity to become wealthy?
Would you guarantee everyone a minimum standard of living?
How much freedom would individuals have?
And what would count as fair?
These questions belong to political philosophy, which asks how people should live together and how society’s rights, opportunities, responsibilities and resources should be arranged.
At the centre of them lies one of philosophy’s oldest questions:
What makes a society just?
Why Do We Need Society at All?
Human beings rarely live entirely alone.
We cooperate.
We trade.
We build roads, schools and hospitals. We create laws, currencies, governments and institutions. We depend upon strangers for almost everything from food and electricity to medicine and information.
Living together produces enormous benefits.
It also creates conflicts.
Who owns what?
Who makes the rules?
Who pays for shared services?
What happens when people disagree?
How much power should governments possess?
How should society treat people who break its rules?
And how should the benefits and burdens of cooperation be shared?
Justice begins when we ask not simply how society works, but whether the arrangements under which people live are fair.
Why Should Anyone Obey the Rules?
One influential approach begins with the idea of a social contract.
Imagine human beings without government or shared political authority.
Why would they agree to create one?
The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that without a powerful authority capable of enforcing peace, human life could become dangerously insecure.
People therefore have reason to accept government because order and security benefit everyone.
John Locke placed greater emphasis on individual rights. Government exists to protect rights such as life, liberty and property, and its authority ultimately depends upon the people it governs.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked how people could live together under common laws while remaining genuinely free.
These philosophers disagreed profoundly, but they shared an important question:
What gives one person or institution the right to exercise power over another?
Simply possessing power does not make its use just.
Political authority requires justification.
Freedom – But How Much?
Most people value freedom.
But freedom immediately creates difficult questions.
Should people be free to say whatever they want?
Spend their money however they choose?
Refuse medical treatment?
Take risks?
Practise any religion — or none?
Freedom seems essential to a good society because people have different beliefs, ambitions and ideas about how they want to live.
But freedoms can conflict.
Your freedom to play loud music at three in the morning interferes with your neighbour’s ability to sleep.
A company’s freedom to conduct business as it chooses may conflict with protections for workers or consumers.
Freedom therefore cannot simply mean:
Everyone may do anything they want.
The difficult question is where one person’s freedom should end when it begins to affect other people.
John Stuart Mill and the Harm Principle
The nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill offered one influential answer.
He argued that individuals should generally be free to live as they choose unless their actions cause harm to others.
This idea is often called the harm principle.
Mill strongly defended freedom of thought and discussion.
Even mistaken opinions, he argued, can be valuable because challenging them forces us to examine why we believe what we believe.
A society in which everyone is compelled to think alike may appear orderly, but it loses an important mechanism for discovering error.
Yet the harm principle raises another question:
What counts as harm?
Physical injury seems straightforward.
Economic harm, psychological harm, misinformation, environmental damage and risks imposed upon others can be much harder to define.
Freedom is an appealing principle.
Applying it is complicated.
Is Equality Necessary for Justice?
Suppose two people earn very different amounts of money.
Is that automatically unjust?
Not necessarily.
Perhaps one works longer hours, possesses a rare skill, takes greater risks or creates something many people value.
But now suppose one person is born into wealth, receives an excellent education and inherits valuable property, while another is born into poverty with far fewer opportunities.
Neither chose their starting position.
Is the resulting inequality fair?
This reveals an important distinction between different kinds of equality.
A society could give everyone equal legal rights while people possess dramatically unequal wealth.
It could offer formally equal opportunities while some children begin life with enormous advantages over others.
Or it could attempt to make economic outcomes more equal.
These are not the same thing.
Political disagreement often concerns which forms of equality matter, and how they should be balanced against other values such as freedom, responsibility and economic incentives.
Equality of Opportunity
One attractive principle is equality of opportunity.
People need not end up in the same position, but everyone should have a fair chance to succeed.
Imagine a race.
It may seem fair if everyone follows the same rules.
But what if some runners begin fifty metres ahead?
Society is obviously far more complicated than a race, yet the analogy captures the problem.
People begin life with different families, abilities, health, wealth, education and social connections.
Some inequalities are unavoidable.
Others result from institutions and decisions that societies can change.
The philosophical question is not merely whether everyone is allowed to compete.
It is whether their opportunities are fair enough for the competition itself to be considered just.
Rawls and the Veil of Ignorance
The twentieth-century philosopher John Rawls developed one of the most influential thought experiments in modern political philosophy.
Return to the society we imagined at the beginning.
You must choose its basic principles without knowing what position you will occupy within it.
Rawls called this the veil of ignorance.
You do not know whether you will be wealthy or poor, healthy or disabled, naturally gifted or disadvantaged.
Because you cannot design the rules to benefit the person you already know yourself to be, Rawls believed you would be pushed towards fairer principles.
You would want important basic liberties protected because you might find yourself belonging to an unpopular minority.
You would want genuine opportunities because you do not know what social position you will occupy.
And you might be cautious about creating a society in which those at the bottom live extremely badly – because you might turn out to be one of them.
Rawls did not argue that everyone must possess exactly the same wealth.
He allowed social and economic inequalities under conditions including fair equality of opportunity and the requirement that inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.
He called his approach justice as fairness.
Whether we accept Rawls’s conclusions or not, the thought experiment asks a powerful question:
Would you still consider society’s rules fair if you did not know which side of them you would be on?
Do People Deserve What They Have?
The veil of ignorance exposes another difficult problem.
How much of our success do we actually deserve?
Effort clearly matters.
Someone who spends years developing a skill has done something that someone who made no effort has not.
But effort does not occur in isolation.
We do not choose our genes.
We do not choose our childhood.
We do not choose the natural abilities with which we begin life.
And we do not choose which abilities our society happens to reward.
A brilliant footballer can become extremely wealthy in a society fascinated by football.
The same physical abilities might have produced very different rewards in another place or historical period.
This does not mean achievement is meaningless.
It asks us to recognise how effort, opportunity, talent, circumstances and luck interact.
A just society must somehow decide how much each should matter.
What About Property?
Property creates another fundamental tension.
If you create something, earn money or exchange your labour for possessions, it seems reasonable to say that those things belong to you.
Property rights also provide independence and allow people to plan their lives.
But property can accumulate across generations.
Wealth creates opportunities to acquire more wealth, while poverty can restrict opportunities to escape poverty.
Governments also require resources to provide courts, infrastructure, defence, education and other shared institutions.
So how strong should property rights be?
How much taxation is legitimate?
What responsibilities, if any, accompany great wealth?
Different political philosophies give very different answers.
Some place strong emphasis on individual ownership and voluntary exchange.
Others argue that wealth is partly made possible by social institutions – laws, infrastructure, educated workers, stable currencies and markets – and therefore carries broader obligations.
The disagreement reflects a deeper question:
How much of what we possess is entirely ours, and how much depends upon the society around us?
Should Society Aim for the Greatest Happiness?
Utilitarianism offers another possible approach.
Instead of beginning with rights or equality, we could design society to produce the greatest overall wellbeing.
Policies could then be judged by their consequences.
Does this law improve people’s lives?
Does it reduce suffering?
Does it produce more benefit than harm?
This can be a powerful way of thinking about public decisions.
But it also creates a danger.
Suppose making a small minority miserable produced greater happiness for everyone else.
Would that be just?
Many people think not.
Individual rights appear to place limits on what society may do even when violating them would increase total welfare.
Once again, justice involves values that can pull in different directions.
What Does Society Owe the Least Fortunate?
Imagine someone who cannot work because of severe disability.
Should their ability to live a decent life depend entirely upon charity?
What about a child born into extreme poverty?
Someone who loses everything through circumstances outside their control?
Questions like these force societies to consider whether membership itself creates obligations between citizens.
One view emphasises personal responsibility: people should generally bear the consequences of their own choices.
Another emphasises social responsibility: nobody chooses many of the circumstances that determine their opportunities.
Most real societies combine elements of both.
The philosophical disagreement concerns where responsibility should lie when choice, luck and circumstance become entangled.
Democracy and Majority Rule
Perhaps justice requires democracy.
Allowing citizens to participate in choosing their government seems more just than allowing a ruler to govern without their consent.
But democracy creates its own problem.
What happens when the majority wants something unjust?
Imagine that 60 per cent of citizens vote to remove the religious freedom of the remaining 40 per cent.
The decision is democratic in one sense.
But is it just?
This is why modern democracies often combine elections with constitutions, independent courts and protected rights.
Majority rule alone does not necessarily guarantee justice.
A just political system may also need to protect individuals and minorities from the majority itself.
Justice Between Generations
Justice does not only concern people alive today.
Our decisions affect people who do not yet exist.
Governments borrow money.
Societies consume natural resources.
Infrastructure is built or neglected.
Scientific discoveries create opportunities and risks.
Environmental changes may continue for generations.
Future people cannot vote in today’s elections or negotiate with us.
Yet they will inherit the consequences of our decisions.
Do we therefore have obligations towards them?
If so, how much should present generations sacrifice for people who may live decades or centuries from now?
The question becomes particularly important when decisions create long-lasting or irreversible effects.
A society may need to be judged not only by how fairly it treats its current members, but also by what kind of world it leaves behind.
Can a Society Ever Be Completely Just?
Perhaps perfect justice is impossible.
Values conflict.
Increasing one person’s freedom can sometimes reduce another’s security.
Greater economic equality may require restrictions that some regard as unfair.
Rewarding achievement may produce inequality.
Protecting future generations may require sacrifices from people alive today.
And people disagree profoundly about what constitutes a good life.
A society containing millions of individuals with different values cannot maximise everything simultaneously.
Political philosophy therefore often concerns trade-offs between genuine goods, not simply choosing good over evil.
That makes disagreement unavoidable.
But disagreement does not make thinking about justice pointless.
It makes careful reasoning more important.
A Simple Test of Fairness
Rawls’s thought experiment provides a useful habit even for people who reject his wider theory.
When considering a rule, institution or social arrangement, imagine that you do not yet know where you will stand within it.
You might be powerful.
You might be vulnerable.
You might belong to the majority.
You might belong to a small minority.
You might benefit from the rule.
You might bear its greatest cost.
Would you still regard the arrangement as reasonable?
This does not automatically tell us what justice requires.
But it helps expose an extremely common human tendency:
rules often look fairer when they favour us.
So What Makes a Just Society?
There is no single model accepted by everyone.
A just society may need to protect freedom while recognising that one person’s freedom can affect another.
It may need to respect equality while deciding which inequalities are acceptable.
It may protect property while asking what people owe to the society that makes ownership possible.
It may reward effort and responsibility while recognising the enormous influence of luck and circumstances.
It may use democracy while protecting minorities from majority power.
And it may pursue prosperity while considering people who receive the fewest benefits from it — including generations not yet born.
Different political philosophies place these values in different orders.
Perhaps the deepest disagreement is not over whether freedom, fairness, opportunity and security matter.
It is over what each requires and what should happen when they conflict.
Where the Question Leads
Justice takes the questions we have already encountered and places them within society.
Ask whether people deserve praise or punishment and we return to free will.
Ask what governments ought to do and we return to what makes something right or wrong.
Ask what opportunities people need in order to flourish and we return to the good life.
Ask whether human rights have some foundation beyond law and culture and questions about morality, human nature and religion appear.
But another question now remains.
Suppose we created a remarkably just society.
Its citizens were free. Their rights were protected. Opportunities were fair. Nobody lived in desperate poverty.
Would that tell them what their lives were for?
Probably not.
A just society can create conditions in which people are better able to live lives they value.
It cannot necessarily tell them what makes those lives meaningful.
And that takes us to the final Great Question:
Perhaps justice is partly about creating a world in which people are free to search for their own answers – while recognising that everyone else is trying to live a life of their own as well.