Principle of Justice and Moral Judgement

This research paper is focusing on the Rawl's idea of the 'veil of ignorance and his assumption about rational and equal contactors which present strong advantages from the moral point of view as conditions for the derivation of principles of justice. It is an attempt, to imagine a situation in which our views on justice are not clouded by our actual real interests determined by our place in a distribution. The veil of ignorance prevents us from shaping our moral view to accord with our own particular attachments and interests. But it is one thing to apply the test of the veil or ignorance to particular individual persons to detect their views on justice; and quite another to claim, as Rawls does, that in a society the adoption of this perspective by all would lead to unanimous agreement about the principles of justice. In order to prove this second point Rawls would have to prove two important assertions. He would have to prove, first, that the conditions of his original position represent only the pure model of a rational choice situation and do not presuppose any substantial moral judgements (otherwise the argument would be circular). Secondly, he would have to prove that the same conditions of the original position cannot lead to the derivation of any other set of principles. Now, as a vast number of Rawl's critics have argued, both these propositions are untenable; the common strategy for refuting them is to show that it is necessary to appeal to intuition both in order to construct the original position and in order to derive principles of justice, and that this appeal to intuition conceptually precedes the derivation of principles of justice.