Rawls’s Justification Model for Ethics: What Exactly Does It Justify?

This article is a critique of the ethical justification model that John Rawls employs in his defense of a liberal conception of justice. Rawls is famous for two things: his attempt to ground morality in rationality and his conception of justice as fairness. His work has been resounding on both fronts, the first constituting the justificatory framework for the second. Yet from the beginning, the outcome has been more doctrinaire than the method should have allowed with design details promising objectivity. This article goes to that beginning, or to a reasonable proxy for it anyway, in the “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics” (1951), with the aim of exposing and examining the discrepancy where it originates. The goal is not to prey on the earliest version of an initiative later undergoing revision but to identify and investigate the inception of a systematic bias that is retained rather than revised in subsequent iterations. The conclusion is that the decision procedure comes across as too objective to favor a liberal conception of justice over competing alternatives and too universal to identify, produce, or support specific moral principles informing a normative ethical system.