CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF STUDY
In the history of philosophy, the issue of justice has always been a serious debate. The debate is all about what the concept ‘justice’ means and how it can be attained in a society. Thrasymachus, an ancient Greek philosopher, equated justice with ‘‘might is right’’. According to Christopher Stolleri, ‘’Justice is a concept that is balanced between law and morality’’1. Morality has to do with the rightness or wrongness of an action. Laws are laid down principles that guide a society and they can be used for the good or bad of a nation’s citizens. For Joseph Omoregbe, ‘’the foundation of Justice is the fundamental equality of all men’’2. Justice is applied in a society so that there will be peace and harmony in the society. A society is an aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
From this, various philosophers gave their various theories of how justice can be attained in the society.
Socrates, a Greek philosopher, felt that justice can be attained in a society when wisdom is employed. For Plato, it is when philosophers are kings in the society. According to Karl Marx, a just society is a classless society which he referred to as communism. John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham are of the view that we arrive at a just society when the society acts to provide ‘’the greatest good for the greatest number’.
John Rawls provided his own theory of justice by criticizing the utilitarian view of justice because it can be abused, leading to the ‘’tyranny of the majority’’ (Nazi Germany’s mistreatment of the Jews and the United States mistreatment of African Americans)3. Rawls’ approach guards against this common source of injustice.
Principles of justice are the principles that rational and free persons that are concerned to further their interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining fundamentals of the term of their association.4 In his book, ‘A Theory of Justice’, like Plato, Rawls imagines a political society structured on principles of justice, a just society where nobody complains of injustice, a society governed by principles of justice.
From the above, John Rawls came up with his own idea of a just society by providing two principles that can guide a society to attain the state of a just society. He did this by giving a theory of the people in the original position wearing a veil of ignorance that they would not be partial. One of John Rawls’ primary aim was to set forth the appropriate moral conception that was better suited to interpreting the democratic values of freedom and equality than the reigning utilitarian tradition.
It is in the light of this background that my research intends to critically analyze the principles that John Rawls gave to guide us to a just society. In order to achieve this, I shall consider the following: the people of the original position, the veil of ignorance and the principles accepted, mainly focusing on his second principle of justice.