Rawls is well known for his prominent role in reviving social contract theory in the United States in the late 20th century. His work followed—and helped displace—nearly a century of political thought, which included, prominently, both utilitarian and Marxist views.

Rawls argues that a society is just when its basic structure is regulated by principles that would be selected through a thought experiment. He imagines people in an “original position,” tasked with choosing between different principles of justice. Their choice is constrained by the “veil of ignorance,” which denies them information that could bias their selection of principles in ways that we would normally regard as inappropriate, such as drawing on one’s race or class. The principles of justice selected will form the rules for distributing what Rawls calls “primary goods” or goods that any person with a rational plan of life would want, such as rights, liberties, income, and wealth. These goods include (a) basic rights and liberties, (b) freedom of movement and free choice among a wide range of occupations, (c) the powers of offices and positions of responsibility, and (d) income and wealth. More elusively, Rawls includes among primary goods (e) the social bases of self‐​respect, which he understands as “the recognition by social institutions that gives citizens a sense of self‐​worth and the confidence to carry out their plans.” 2

Critically, Rawls’s veil of ignorance prohibits people from choosing conceptions of justice based on deep features of their identities that do not ordinarily seem inappropriate bases for determining what justice requires. For instance, Rawls denies that persons could appeal to their conceptions of the good, such as one’s worldview or religion, in selecting principles of justice.

More radical still, Rawls denied that people in a just society could appeal to their natural talents, such as a person’s mathematical or musical ability, to claim a greater share of primary goods. For instance, Jane may not claim a larger share of primary goods even if she produced a surplus of goods by using her natural talents. Imagine that Jane invents a computer program that substantially reduces her firm’s costs, and that invention leads to her securing a higher income from her job. In Rawls’s view, although a society’s particular constitution or laws may allow her to keep her income, she has no basic right to it in virtue of using her natural talents. The reason is that natural talents are undeserved. Rawls claims that the distribution of natural talents is arbitrary from a moral point of view, meaning that natural talents are distributed by nature at random, and so not in accord with justice or equity. This latter claim has raised libertarian hackles, and rightly so, but the two versions of Rawls‐​inspired classical liberalism show that the Rawlsian framework can progress even if Rawls’s position on natural talents is mistaken.

Central to Rawls’s theory is that the parties in the original position are not real‐​world persons. Instead, their choice is a model of the process of reflective equilibrium, where persons theorize together in order to harmonize their considered judgments about the requirements of morality and justice. What the parties choose is therefore the best way, or one of the best ways, to identify the conception of justice to which real‐​world persons are rationally committed. Rawls’s is not a hypothetical consent theory of politics, where the justification of political order is rooted in what persons would agree to under certain conditions but that they have not in fact agreed upon. For Rawls, no important normative claim is made true by the consent of hypothetical persons. Instead, hypothetical consent is a heuristic for identifying principles of justice that render the broadest, most coherent explanation of the moral and political judgments we share.

When parties choose, their choice is both rational and reasonable in the sense that their choice both follows the canons of rational choice and is suitably impartial or unbiased. Also note that the parties do not choose for us. Instead, they choose principles to govern a well‐​ordered society, which models persons like us living under favorable conditions. Once the parties select principles of justice, Rawls argues that the principles must be tested against a psychologically and sociologically realistic model of society to see whether the rules can self‐​stabilize among persons disposed to be just.

Rawls wants to ensure that normally functioning persons can come to comply with the principles of justice because they will recognize doing so as good for them. Only then will principles of justice comport with our pretheoretical expectation that the true principles of justice be ones that can survive public scrutiny. Just institutions, that is, need not hide their normative basis. People should be able to access the foundations of their institutions and abide by them on the basis of approving those foundations, given their conception of justice and the good.

The basic idea is that the correct principles of justice should promote social stability in a public fashion, in contrast to views, like utilitarianism, that may require that governments hide their utilitarian principles so as not to discourage citizens from complying with governmental dictates. So again, Rawls’s construction does not involve parties choosing principles for us. Instead, the construction attempts to locate principles of justice that satisfy our considered judgments about justice, both our substantive judgments about what is and is not just, and our procedural judgments about the nature of justice, such as whether institutionalizing justice will be stable for normally functioning human beings.

Libertarians sometimes mistakenly construe Rawls as a hypothetical consent theorist. This has led to much confusion. As we can see, Rawls’s real view is different, richer, and more plausible.

Rawls then argues that parties will choose two principles of justice, known together as “justice as fairness”: