In philosophical circles, Rawls’s approach is described as asserting the “priority of the right over the good.” On this view, our rights define a framework within which we can each pursue our beliefs about how to live; in contrast to the alternative, where we start with a particular conception of the good, and design rights in order to promote it.

Rawls explicitly stated that “welfare state capitalism” could never fully achieve his principles of justice.[71] Rather, we need to reimagine our economic model in a more fundamental way—embracing a more universal approach to meeting basic needs, developing a comprehensive agenda to increase earnings and share society’s wealth, and putting

If we want greater civility in our public life, then we also need to redouble our efforts to secure basic freedoms for everyone, and to transform our democratic structures.

In order to be fair, these decisions must also be made in a context where men and women have genuinely equal opportunities: there is nothing fair about a situation in which women “choose” to take on the bulk of unpaid care work because they face discrimination at work or in education, as has so often been the case.

Any concept of justice that hopes to win broad support in the real world has to be political in these three ways: to be narrow in scope; to be free-standing of any comprehensive moral doctrine; and to be grounded in widely shared ideas drawn from the public political culture. The original position ensures that Rawls’s principles possess these

But both economic theory and historical experience suggest that a perfectly equal society would be much poorer than the societies that we live in today. In other words, by allowing for a degree of inequality, we can make everyone better off.

To use the “pie” analogy much loved by economists, the difference principle calls on us not to maximize the overall size of the economic pie, nor to rigidly insist that everyone should have a perfectly equal slice—but to make the size of the slice that goes to the least well off as big as possible.

The malaise sweeping across today’s liberal democracies is about more than money—it reflects a more profound crisis of dignity and meaning which is closely tied to changes in the nature of work over recent decades, from the decline in industrial jobs and communities to the rise of automation and the gig economy.

At the heart of this approach is a commitment to resolving our disagreements by appealing to public reasons (political values that our fellow citizens can share) rather than to our personal moral or religious beliefs.