A theory of Justice: Revised Edition

parties. I do not claim that these conditions follow from the concept of
right, much less from the meaning of morality. I avoid an appeal to the
analysis of concepts at crucial points of this kind. There are many con-
straints that can reasonably be associated with the concept of right, and
different selections can be made from these and counted as definitive
within a particular theory. The merit of any definition depends upon the
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The Original Position

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soundness of the theory that results; by itself, a definition cannot settle
any fundamental question.
5
The propriety of these formal conditions is derived from the task of
principles of right in adjusting the claims that persons make on their
institutions and one another. If the principles of justice are to play their
role, that of assigning basic rights and duties and determining the division
of advantages, these requirements are natural enough. Each of them is
suitably weak and I assume that they are satisfied by the traditional
conceptions of justice. These conditions do, however, exclude the various
forms of egoism, as I note below, which shows that they are not without
moral force. This makes it all the more necessary that the conditions not
be justified by definition or the analysis of concepts, but only by the
reasonableness of the theory of which they are a part. I arrange them
under five familiar headings.
First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to
formulate them without the use of what would be intuitively recognized
as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions. Thus the predicates used
in their statement should express general properties and relations. Unfor-
tunately deep philosophical difficulties seem to bar the way to a satisfac-
tory account of these matters.
6
I shall not try to deal with them here. In
presenting a theory of justice one is entitled to avoid the problem of
defining general properties and relations and to be guided by what seems
reasonable. Further, since the parties have no specific information about
themselves or their situation, they cannot identify themselves anyway.
Even if a person could get others to agree, he does not know how to tailor
principles to his advantage. The parties are effectively forced to stick to
general principles, understanding the notion here in an intuitive fashion.
The naturalness of this condition lies in part in the fact that first
5. Various interpretations of the concept of morality are discussed by W. K. Frankena, “Recent
Conceptions of Morality,” in 
Morality and the Language of Conduct,
ed. H. N. Castañeda and George
Nakhnikian (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1965), and “The Concept of Morality,” 
Journal
of Philosophy,
vol. 63 (1966). The first of these essays contains numerous references. The account in
the text is perhaps closest to that of Kurt Baier in 
The Moral Point of View
(Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell
University Press, 1958), ch. VIII. I follow Baier in emphasizing the conditions of publicity (he does
not use this term, but it is implied by his stipulation of universal teachability, pp. 195f), ordering,
finality, and material content (although on the contract view the last condition follows as a conse-
quence, see §25 and note 16 below). For other discussions, see R. M. Hare, 
The Language of Morals
(Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1952), W. D. Falk, “Morality, Self, and Others,” also in 
Morality and
the Language of Conduct,
and P. F. Strawson, “Social Morality and Individual Ideal,” 
Philosophy,
vol. 36 (1961).
6. See, for example, W. V. Quine,