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.

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.

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.

we should follow a different decision-making strategy, known as “the maximin rule.” To be precise, rather than choosing the option that is best on average (maximizing expected utility), we should compare the worst outcome under each option, and then choose the option where the worst outcome is as good as possible

Rawls also endorsed a separate “basic needs principle”—the idea that, as a society, we have a fundamental obligation to make sure that everyone has access to the minimum level of resources they need not simply in order to survive but in order to exercise their basic freedoms and to participate in the life of society.

For Rawls, a just society is one in which we can “face one another openly,” in the sense that we can offer a justification to one another for the way society is organized, including to the least well off.

Rawls’s Two Principles of Justice First principle: Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

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.

The “veil of ignorance” encapsulates the intuitive idea that just because something is good for us individually doesn’t mean it is fair.