expectancy of those with grave medical conditions, and so on. Some of us are
very ineYcient transformers of resources into an enhanced quality of life. The
hard issue of how much priority to accord to the achievement of gains for the
worse oVmust be faced.
The diVerence principle lies at the extreme end of a continuum of views that
accord variously greater weight for achieving a gain of a given size for a
person, depending on how badly oVin absolute terms the person would be,
absent receipt of this gain. At the other end lies utilitarianism, which accords
no extra weight at all to achieving a gain for a person depending on the prior
goodness or badness of her condition. The entire range between these end
points corresponds to the prioritarian family of principles, according to
which, the worse a person’s lifetime condition, the morally more valuable it
is to achieve a gain or avoid a loss for her. The distinction between valuing
priority and valuing equality has been clariWed in work by Derek ParWt( 2000 ).
Counterintuitive or not, the diVerence principle and the broader maximin
conception might be derivable by iron logic from undeniable premises. Rawls
gestures at provision of this sort of support in his original position argument,
but in the area in which Rawls is pointing I submit that no good argument is to
be found (see the critical discussions cited in footnote 2 ). SuYce it to say that
the innovation of the original position has not resonated in recent political
philosophy in anything like the way that Rawls’s powerful but controversial
vision of justice as social democratic liberalism continues to shape the agenda
of political philosophy for both proponents and opponents. In my view the
underlying reason for the relative neglect of original position arguments is
that the basic hunch that motivates the project is wrong. Recall that the idea of
the original position is that the principles of justice are whatever would
emerge from an ideally fair choice procedure for selecting principles of justice.
The presupposition is that we have pretheoretic intuitions, which can be
reWned, concerning what are the fairest conditions for choosing basic moral
principles. But why think this? Perhaps one should say that the fair set-up of a
procedure for choosing principles of justice is whatever arrangement happens
to produce the substantially best principles. We have commonsense beliefs
about the conditions under which contracts and private deals are fairly
negotiated, but there is no intuitive content to the idea of a fair procedure
for choosing basic principles of social regulation. (If we knew that a particular
person, Smith, was very wise and knew a lot about principles of justice and
had thought more deeply about these matters than the rest of us, perhaps the
‘‘fairest’’ choice procedure would be, ‘‘Let Smith decide.’’)
justice after rawls 55