Rawls, the Basic structure and communism

Abstract

In his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls says that the basic structure is the primary subject of justice and, thus, personal decisions are excluded from the purview of the first principles. This tenet undergoes an unexpected twist in Rawls’s account of communist justice. In his three lectures on Marx, Rawls holds a doublefold view: on the one and, he thinks that communism is just due to its egalitarian distribution; on the other, he remarks that the absence of a sense of justice and moral obligations in everyday life makes of this society one that is beyond justice. Justice no longer depends only on the outcomes of the operation of the first principles in the basic structure but also on personal attitudes.